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The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
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This article is about the book. For the historical events, see History of the Roman Empire and Fall of the Western Roman Empire. For the historiography spawned by Gibbon's theories, see Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. For publication details and chapter listings, see Outline of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Author
Edward Gibbon
Country
England
Language
English
Subject
History of the Roman Empire
Publisher
Strahan & Cadell, London
Publication date
1776–1789
Media type
Print
LC Class
DG311
Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire[a] is a six-volume work by the English historian Edward Gibbon. It traces Western civilization (as well as the Islamic and Mongolian conquests) from the height of the Roman Empire to the fall of Byzantium. Volume I was published in 1776 and went through six printings.[1] Volumes II and III were published in 1781;[2][3] volumes IV, V, and VI in 1788–1789.[4][5][6][b]
The six volumes cover the history, from 98 to 1590, of the Roman Empire, the history of early Christianity and then of the Roman State Church, and the history of Europe, and discusses the decline of the Roman Empire in the East and West. Because of its heavy use of primary sources, unusual at the time, its methodology became a model for later historians.[7] This led to Gibbon’s being called the first "modern historian of ancient Rome".[8]
Contents
1 Thesis
2 Style
2.1 Citations and footnotes
3 Criticism
4 Gibbon's views on religion
4.1 Criticism of Quran and Muhammad
4.2 Views on Judaism and Jews
4.3 Number of Christian martyrs
4.4 Christianity as a contributor to the fall and to stability: chapters XV, XVI
4.5 Tolerant paganism
5 Misinterpretation of Byzantium
6 Gibbon's reflections
7 Editions
8 Legacy
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links
Thesis[edit]
Gibbon offers an explanation for the fall of the Roman Empire, a task made difficult by a lack of comprehensive written sources, though he was not the only historian to attempt it.[c]
According to Gibbon, the Roman Empire succumbed to barbarian invasions in large part due to the gradual loss of civic virtue among its citizens.[9]
He began an ongoing controversy about the role of Christianity, but he gave great weight to other causes of internal decline and to attacks from outside the Empire.
The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.
—  Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 38 "General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West"
Like other Enlightenment thinkers and British citizens of the age steeped in institutional anti-Catholicism, Gibbon held in contempt the Middle Ages as a priest-ridden, superstitious Dark Age. It was not until his own era, the "Age of Reason", with its emphasis on rational thought, it was believed, that human history could resume its progress.[10]
Style[edit]
Gibbon's tone was detached, dispassionate, and yet critical. He can lapse into moralisation and aphorism:[11]
[A]s long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.
—  Gibbon, Edward (1872). The decline and fall of the Roman Empire. 1 (Chandos ed.). London: Frederick Warne & Co. p. 21. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people.
—  Gibbon, Edward (1872). The decline and fall of the Roman Empire. 1 (Chandos ed.). London: Frederick Warne & Co. p. 59. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
[H]istory […] is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
—  Gibbon, Edward (1872). The decline and fall of the Roman Empire. 1 (Chandos ed.). London: Frederick Warne & Co. p. 72. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery [of gunpowder] with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.
—  Gibbon, Edward (1890). The decline and fall of the Roman Empire. 3 (Chandos ed.). London: Frederick Warne & Co. p. 649. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
Citations and footnotes[edit]
Gibbon provides the reader with a glimpse of his thought process with extensive notes along the body of the text, a precursor to the modern use of footnotes. Gibbon's footnotes are famous for their idiosyncratic and often humorous style, and have been called "Gibbon's table talk."[12] They provide an entertaining moral commentary on both ancient Rome and 18th century Great Britain. This technique enabled Gibbon to compare ancient Rome to his own contemporary world. Gibbon's work advocates a rationalist and progressive view of history.
Gibbon's citations provide in-depth detail regarding his use of sources for his work, which included documents dating back to ancient Rome. The detail within his asides and his care in noting the importance of each document is a precursor to modern-day historical footnoting methodology.
The work is notable for its erratic but exhaustively documented notes and research. John Bury, following him 113 years later with his own History of the Later Roman Empire, commended the depth and accuracy of Gibbon's work. Unusually for 18th century historians, Gibbon was not content with second-hand accounts when primary sources were accessible. "I have always endeavoured", Gibbon wrote, "to draw from the fountain-head; that my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals; and that, if they have sometimes eluded my search, I have carefully marked the secondary evidence, on whose faith a passage or a fact were reduced to depend."[13] The Decline and Fall is a literary monument and a massive step forward in historical method.[d]
Criticism[edit]
Numerous tracts were published criticising his work. In response, Gibbon defended his work with the 1779 publication of, A Vindication ... of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.[15] His remarks on Christianity aroused particularly vigorous attacks, but in the mid-twentieth century, at least one author claimed that "church historians allow the substantial justness of [Gibbon's] main positions."[16]
Gibbon's views on religion[edit]
Criticism of Quran and Muhammad[edit]
Gibbon's comments on the Quran and Muhammad reflected his view of the secular, rather than divine, origin of the text. He outlined in chapter 33 the widespread tale, possibly Jewish in origin, of the Seven Sleepers,[17] and remarked "This popular tale, which Mahomet might learn when he drove his camels to the fairs of Syria, is introduced, as a divine revelation, into the Quran." His presentation of Muhammad's life again reflected his secular approach: "in his private conduct, Mahomet indulged the appetites of a man, and abused the claims of a prophet. A special revelation dispensed him from the laws which he had imposed on his nation: the female sex, without reserve, was abandoned to his desires; and this singular prerogative excited the envy, rather than the scandal, the veneration, rather than the envy, of the devout Mussulmans."[18]
Views on Judaism and Jews[edit]
Gibbon described the Jews as "a race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but also of humankind".[19]
Number of Christian martyrs[edit]
Gibbon challenged Church history by estimating far smaller numbers of Christian martyrs than had been traditionally accepted. The Church's version of its early history had rarely been questioned before. Gibbon, however, knew that modern Church writings were secondary sources, and he shunned them in favor of primary sources.
Christianity as a contributor to the fall and to stability: chapters XV, XVI[edit]
Historian S.P. Foster says that Gibbon:
blamed the otherworldly preoccupations of Christianity for the decline of the Roman empire, heaped scorn and abuse on the church, and sneered at the entirety of monasticism as a dreary, superstition-ridden enterprise. The Decline and Fall compares Christianity invidiously with both the pagan religions of Rome and the religion of Islam.[20]
Volume I was originally published in sections, as was common for large works at the time. The first two were well received and widely praised. The last quarto in Volume I, especially Chapters XV and XVI, was highly controversial, and Gibbon was attacked as a "paganist". Gibbon thought that Christianity had hastened the Fall, but also ameliorated the results:
As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity. Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more earthly passions of malice and ambition, kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country. Yet party-spirit, however pernicious or absurd, is a principle of union as well as of dissension. The bishops, from eighteen hundred pulpits, inculcated the duty of passive obedience to a lawful and orthodox sovereign; their frequent assemblies and perpetual correspondence maintained the communion of distant churches; and the benevolent temper of the Gospel was strengthened, though confirmed, by the spiritual alliance of the Catholics. The sacred indolence of the monks was devoutly embraced by a servile and effeminate age; but if superstition had not afforded a decent retreat, the same vices would have tempted the unworthy Romans to desert, from baser motives, the standard of the republic. Religious precepts are easily obeyed which indulge and sanctify the natural inclinations of their votaries; but the pure and genuine influence of Christianity may be traced in its beneficial, though imperfect, effects on the barbarian proselytes of the North. If the decline of the Roman empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors (chap. 38).[21]
Voltaire was deemed to have influenced Gibbon's claim that Christianity was a contributor to the fall of the Roman Empire. As one pro-Christian commenter put it in 1840:
As Christianity advances, disasters befall the [Roman] empire—arts, science, literature, decay—barbarism and all its revolting concomitants are made to seem the consequences of its decisive triumph—and the unwary reader is conducted, with matchless dexterity, to the desired conclusion—the abominable Manicheism of Candide, and, in fact, of all the productions of Voltaire's historic school—viz., "that instead of being a merciful, ameliorating, and benignant visitation, the religion of Christians would rather seem to be a scourge sent on man by the author of all evil."[22]
Tolerant paganism[edit]
Gibbon wrote:
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.
He has been criticized for his portrayal of Paganism as tolerant and Christianity as intolerant. In an article that appeared in 1996 in the journal Past & Present, H.A. Drake challenges an understanding of religious persecution in ancient Rome, which he considers to be the "conceptual scheme" that was used by historians to deal with the topic for the last 200 years, and whose most eminent representative is Gibbon. Drake counters:
With such deft strokes, Gibbon enters into a conspiracy with his readers: unlike the credulous masses, he and we are cosmopolitans who know the uses of religion as an instrument of social control. So doing, Gibbon skirts a serious problem: for three centuries prior to Constantine, the tolerant pagans who people the Decline and Fall were the authors of several major persecutions, in which Christians were the victims. ... Gibbon covered this embarrassing hole in his argument with an elegant demur. Rather than deny the obvious, he adroitly masked the question by transforming his Roman magistrates into models of Enlightenment rulers—reluctant persecutors, too sophisticated to be themselves religious zealots.
Misinterpretation of Byzantium[edit]
Others such as John Julius Norwich, despite their admiration for his furthering of historical methodology, consider Gibbon's hostile views on the Byzantine Empire flawed and blame him somewhat for the lack of interest shown in the subject throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.[23] This view might well be admitted by Gibbon himself: "But it is not my intention to expatiate with the same minuteness on the whole series of the Byzantine history."[24] However the Russian historian George Ostrogorsky writes, "Gibbon and Lebeau were genuine historians—and Gibbon a very great one—and their works, in spite of factual inadequacy, rank high for their presentation of their material."[25]
Gibbon's reflections[edit]
Gibbon's initial plan was to write a history "of the decline and fall of the city of Rome", and only later expanded his scope to the whole Roman Empire:
If I prosecute this History, I shall not be unmindful of the decline and fall of the city of Rome; an interesting object, to which my plan was originally confined.[26]
Although he published other books, Gibbon devoted much of his life to this one work (1772–1789). His autobiography Memoirs of My Life and Writings is devoted largely to his reflections on how the book virtually became his life. He compared the publication of each succeeding volume to a newborn child.[27]
Editions[edit]
Gibbon continued to revise and change his work even after publication. The complexities of the problem are addressed in Womersley's introduction and appendices to his complete edition.
In-print complete editions
J.B. Bury, ed., 7 volumes (London: Methuen, 1909–1914), currently reprinted (New York: AMS Press, 1974). ISBN 0-404-02820-9.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed., 6 volumes (New York: Everyman's Library, 1993–1994). The text, including Gibbon's notes, is from Bury but without his notes. ISBN 0-679-42308-7 (vols. 1–3); ISBN 0-679-43593-X (vols. 4–6).
David Womersley, ed., 3 volumes. hardback-(London: Allen Lane, 1994); paperback (New York: Penguin Books, 2005; 1994). Includes the original index, and the Vindication (1779), which Gibbon wrote in response to attacks on his caustic portrayal of Christianity. The 2005 print includes minor revisions and a new chronology. ISBN 0-7139-9124-0 (3360 p.); ISBN 0-14-043393-7 (v. 1, 1232 p.); ISBN 0-14-043394-5 (v. 2, 1024 p.); ISBN 0-14-043395-3 (v. 3, 1360 p.)
In-print abridgements
David Womersley, ed., 1 volume (New York: Penguin Books, 2000). Includes all footnotes and seventeen of the original seventy-one chapters. ISBN 0-14-043764-9 (848 p.)
Hans-Friedrich Mueller, ed., one volume abridgment (New York: Random House, 2003). Includes excerpts from all seventy-one chapters. It eliminates footnotes, geographic surveys, details of battle formations, long narratives of military campaigns, ethnographies and genealogies. Based on the Rev. H.H. [Dean] Milman edition of 1845 (see also Gutenberg etext edition). ISBN 0-375-75811-9, (trade paper, 1312 p.); ISBN 0-345-47884-3 (mass market paper, 1536 p.)
Legacy[edit]
This article lacks ISBNs for the books listed in it. Please make it easier to conduct research by listing ISBNs. If the {{Cite book}} or {{citation}} templates are in use, you may add ISBNs automatically, or discuss this issue on the talk page. (October 2018)
Many writers have used variations on the series title (including using "Rise and Fall" in place of "Decline and Fall"), especially when dealing with large nations or empires. Piers Brendon notes that Gibbon's work, "became the essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory. They found the key to understanding the British Empire in the ruins of Rome."[28]
Playfair, William (1805). An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. Designed To Shew How The Prosperity Of The British Empire May Be Prolonged.
The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1868), Jefferson Davis
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), by the satirist Will Cuppy
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959), William Shirer
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs
The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire (1970), John Toland (author)
The Decline and Fall of Science (1976), Celia Green
The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (1977), Lord Kinross
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church (1983), Malachi Martin
Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1986), Hans Eysenck
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), Paul Kennedy
History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872), Henry Wilson
The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990), David Cannadine
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (1998), Lawrence James
The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain (2000), Neil Faulkner
Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2002), Niall Ferguson
The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America (2003), David Carlin
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (2007), Piers Brendon
Three victories and a defeat: the rise and fall of the first British Empire (2008), Brendan Simms
Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire (2008), Parvaneh Pourshariati
Decline and Fall of the American Republic (2010), Bruce Ackerman
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire: Mercantilism, Diplomacy and the Colonies (2015), Phillip J. Smith
and in film:
The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)
The Decline of Western Civilization (1981), Penelope Spheeris
The Decline of the American Empire (1986), Denys Arcand
and in television:
Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2006)
The title and author are also cited in Noël Coward's comedic poem "I Went to a Marvellous Party".[e] And in the poem "The Foundation of Science Fiction Success", Isaac Asimov acknowledged that his Foundation series – an epic tale of the fall and rebuilding of a galactic empire – was written "with a tiny bit of cribbin' / from the works of Edward Gibbon".[30]
In 1995, an established journal of classical scholarship, Classics Ireland, published punk musician's Iggy Pop's reflections on the applicability of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to the modern world in a short article, Caesar Lives, (vol. 2, 1995) in which he noted
America is Rome. Of course, why shouldn't it be? We are all Roman children, for better or worse ... I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins – military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial – are all there to be scrutinised in their infancy. I have gained perspective.[31]
See also[edit]
Decline of the Roman Empire
Outline of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Notes[edit]
Jump up ^ sometimes shortened to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Jump up ^ The original volumes were published in quarto sections, a common publishing practice of the time.
Jump up ^ See for example Henri Pirenne's (1862–1935) famous thesis published in the early 20th century. As for sources more recent than the ancients, Gibbon certainly drew on Montesquieu's short essay, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, and on previous work published by Bossuet (1627–1704) in his Histoire universelle à Monseigneur le dauphin (1763). see Pocock, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764. for Bousset, pp. 65, 145; for Montesquieu, pp. 85–88, 114, 223.
Jump up ^ In the early 20th century, biographer Sir Leslie Stephen summarized The History's reputation as a work of unmatched erudition, a degree of professional esteem which remains as strong today as it was then:
The criticisms upon his book ... are nearly unanimous. In accuracy, thoroughness, lucidity, and comprehensive grasp of a vast subject, the History is unsurpassable. It is the one English history which may be regarded as definitive. ... Whatever its shortcomings, the book is artistically imposing as well as historically unimpeachable as a vast panorama of a great period. [14]
Jump up ^ Link to notes on the poem here.[29] Excerpt:
"If you have any mind at all,
Gibbon's divine Decline and Fall,
Seems pretty flimsy,
No more than a whimsy ... ."
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Gibbon, Edward (1776). The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I. W. Strahan and T. Cadell.
Jump up ^ Gibbon, Edward (1781). The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. II.
Jump up ^ Gibbon, Edward (1781). The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. III.
Jump up ^ Gibbon, Edward (1788). The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. IV. Strahan and Cadell.
Jump up ^ Gibbon, Edward (1788). The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. V. W. Strahan and T. Cadell.
Jump up ^ Edward Gibbon (1788). The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. VI.
Jump up ^ Roberts, Charlotte (2014). Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History. Oxford University Press. p. 137. ISBN 9780191014901.
Jump up ^ Potter, David S. (22 May 2006). A Companion to the Roman Empire. Wiley. p. 100. ISBN 978-0-631-22644-4.
Jump up ^ J.G.A. Pocock, "Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian," Daedalus 105:3 (1976), 153–169; and in Further reading: Pocock, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764, 303–304; The First Decline and Fall, 304–306.
Jump up ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (1976). "Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian". Daedalus. 105 (3): 153–169. ; and in Further reading: Pocock, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764, 303–304; The First Decline and Fall, 304–306.
Jump up ^ Foster (2013). Melancholy Duty. p. 63. ISBN 9789401722353.
Jump up ^ Saunders, Dero A., ed. (1952). Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. New York: Penguin. page 23 (Introduction).
Jump up ^ Womersley, David, ed. (1994). Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 2. New York, NY: Penguin Books. page 520, Preface to Gibbon's Volume the Fourth.
Jump up ^ Stephen, Sir Leslie (1921). "Gibbon, Edward (1737–1794)". Dictionary of National Biography. 7. Oxford. p. 1134.
Jump up ^ Edward Gibbon (1779). A vindication of some passages in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: By the author. Printed for W. Strahan; and T. Cadell, in the Strand.
Jump up ^ The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. IV, eds. S.M. Jackson, et al. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1952), 483–484. online.
Jump up ^ Rashid Iqbal, (2017). “A New Theory on Aṣḥāb al-kahf (The Sleepers of the Cave) Based on Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS)”. Al-Bayān – Journal of Qurʾān and ḤadĪth Studies 15 (2017). doi:10.1163/22321969-12340044. pp. 20–47. Retrieved from http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/22321969-12340044#
Jump up ^ CCEL.org
Jump up ^ Gibbon, Edward. "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", page 521 in the first volume.
Jump up ^ S.P. Foster (2013). Melancholy Duty: The Hume-Gibbon Attack on Christianity. Springer. p. 16. ISBN 9789401722353.
Jump up ^ General Observations On The Fall Of The Roman Empire In The West. Fall In The West – The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. At Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Calvin College Computer Science. http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume1/chap39.htm
Jump up ^ Dublin review: a quarterly and critical journal. Burns, Oates and Washbourne. 1840. pp. 208–. p. 208 image at Google Books
Jump up ^ John Julius Norwich, Byzantium (New York: Knopf, 1989); Byzantium: the apogee (London and New York: Viking Press, 1991).
Jump up ^ Preface of 1782 online.
Jump up ^ Georgije Ostrogorski History of the Byzantine State (1986) p. 5 online
Jump up ^ Gibbon, Edward (1781). The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 3. chapter 36, footnote 43.
Jump up ^ Craddock, Patricia B. (1989). Edward Gibbon, Luminous Historian. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. pp. 249–266.
Jump up ^ Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 (2008) p. xv.
Jump up ^ http://www.noelcoward.net/ncmiindex/i1.html#iwtamp
Jump up ^ Asimov, Isaac (October 1954). "The Foundation of S. F. Success". The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. p. 69.
Jump up ^ Pop, Iggy (1995). "Caesar lives". Classics Ireland. 2: 94–96. JSTOR 25528281.
Further reading[edit]
Brownley, Martine W. "Appearance and Reality in Gibbon's History," Journal of the History of Ideas 38:4 (1977), 651–666.
Brownley, Martine W. "Gibbon's Artistic and Historical Scope in the Decline and Fall," Journal of the History of Ideas 42:4 (1981), 629–642.
Cosgrove, Peter. Impartial Stranger: History and Intertextuality in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Newark: Associated University Presses, 1999) ISBN 0-87413-658-X.
Craddock, Patricia. "Historical Discovery and Literary Invention in Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall'," Modern Philology 85:4 (May 1988), 569–587.
Drake, H.A., "Lambs into Lions: explaining early Christian intolerance," Past and Present 153 (1996), 3–36. Oxford Journals
Furet, Francois. "Civilization and Barbarism in Gibbon's History," Daedalus 105:3 (1976), 209–216.
Gay, Peter. Style in History (New York: Basic Books, 1974) ISBN 0-465-08304-8.
Ghosh, Peter R. "Gibbon's Dark Ages: Some Remarks on the Genesis of the Decline and Fall," Journal of Roman Studies 73 (1983), 1–23.
Homer-Dixon, Thomas "The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization", 2007 ISBN 978-0-676-97723-3, Chapter 3 pp. 57–60
Kelly, Christopher. "A Grand Tour: Reading Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall'," Greece & Rome 2nd ser., 44:1 (Apr. 1997), 39–58.
Momigliano, Arnaldo. "Eighteenth-Century Prelude to Mr. Gibbon," in Pierre Ducrey et al., eds., Gibbon et Rome à la lumière de l'historiographie moderne (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1977).
Momigliano, Arnaldo. "Gibbon from an Italian Point of View," in G.W. Bowersock et al., eds., Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977).
Momigliano, Arnaldo. "Declines and Falls," American Scholar 49 (Winter 1979), 37–51.
Momigliano, Arnaldo. "After Gibbon's Decline and Fall," in Kurt Weitzmann, ed. Age of Spirituality : a symposium (Princeton: 1980); ISBN 0-89142-039-8.
Pocock, J.G.A. Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols. Cambridge Univ. Press.
vol. 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764, 1999 [hb: ISBN 0-521-63345-1];
vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government, 1999 [hb: ISBN 0-521-64002-4];
vol. 3, The First Decline and Fall, 2003 [pb: ISBN 0-521-82445-1].
vol. 4, Barbarians, Savages and Empires, 2005 [hb: ISBN 0-521-85625-6].
The Work of J.G.A. Pocock: Edward Gibbon section.
Roberts, Charlotte. Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History. 2014 Oxford University Press ISBN 978-0198704836
Trevor-Roper, H.R. "Gibbon and the Publication of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776–1976," Journal of Law and Economics 19:3 (Oct. 1976), 489–505.
Womersley, David. The Transformation of 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' (Cambridge: 1988).
Womersley, David, ed. Religious Scepticism: Contemporary Responses to Gibbon (Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1997).
Wootton, David. "Narrative, Irony, and Faith in Gibbon's Decline and Fall," History and Theory 33:4 (Dec. 1994), 77–105.
External links[edit]
Wikiquote has quotations related to: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
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The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire author record at Project Gutenberg. Based on the Rev. H.H. Milman edition of 1845.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from the Online Library of Liberty. The J. B. Bury edition, in 12 volumes.
Memoirs of My Life and Writings at Project Gutenberg
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Google Book Search (pdf version)
DeclineandFallResources.com: Maps, Translations, Illustrations
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Audiobook from the Internet Archive.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire public domain audiobook at LibriVox
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LCCN: n80005339
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French philosophy
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French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism and Postmodernism.
Contents
[hide]
1 Medieval period
1.1 Peter Abelard
2 16th century
3 17th century
3.1 René Descartes
3.2 Nicolas Malebranche
4 18th century
5 19th century
5.1 Auguste Comte
5.2 Ferdinand de Saussure
5.3 Henri Bergson
6 20th century
6.1 Philosophy of science
6.2 Phenomenology
6.3 Existentialism
6.4 Structuralism
6.5 Poststructuralism and postmodernism
7 See also
8 References
9 External links
Medieval period[edit]
Peter Abelard[edit]
Main article: Peter Abelard
Abelard with Héloïse
Peter Abelard (1079 – April 21, 1142) was a scholastic philosopher, theologian and logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary. The Chambers Biographical Dictionary describes him as "the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th Century".[1]
The general importance of Abelard lies in his having fixed more decisively than anyone before him the scholastic manner of philosophizing, with the object of giving a formally rational expression to received ecclesiastical doctrine. However his own particular interpretations may have been condemned, they were conceived in essentially the same spirit as the general scheme of thought afterwards elaborated in the 13th century with approval from the heads of the Church.
He helped to establish the ascendancy of the philosophical authority of Aristotle which became firmly established in the half-century after his death. It was at this time that the completed Organon, and gradually all the other works of the Greek thinker, first came to be available in the schools. Before his time Plato's authority was the basis for the prevailing Realism. As regards his so-called Conceptualism and his attitude to the question of Universals, see Scholasticism.
Outside of his dialectic, it was in ethics that Abelard showed greatest activity of philosophical thought. He laid particular stress upon the subjective intention as determining, if not the moral character, at least the moral value, of human action. His thought in this direction, anticipating something of modern speculation, is the more remarkable because his scholastic successors accomplished least in the field of morals, hardly venturing to bring the principles and rules of conduct under pure philosophical discussion, even after the great ethical inquiries of Aristotle became fully known to them.
Pope Innocent III accepted Abelard's Doctrine of Limbo, which amended Augustine of Hippo's Doctrine of Original Sin. The Vatican accepted the view that unbaptized babies did not, as at first believed, go straight to Hell but to a special area of limbo, "limbus infantium". They would therefore feel no pain but no supernatural happiness either (only natural) because, it was held, they would not be able to see the deity that created them.[2]
16th century[edit]
Montaigne became the father of the anti-conformist French spirit.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) may have been Catholic, but his anti-dogmatic stances made him the father of the anti-conformist French spirit. His work consists of little trials for his beliefs, filled with autobiographical and casual anecdotes. His intention with these papers was to leave something by which family could remember him. He was the first person to use the word essays, and his writings came to be highly influential upon Shakespeare, Rousseau and Nietzsche. His radical scepticism, summed up in the phrase Que sais-je?, served as one of the catalysts for René Descartes' oeuvre.
17th century[edit]
René Descartes is considered as the founder of modern philosophy.
Modern philosophy began in France with the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). His Meditations on First Philosophy changed the primary object of philosophical thought from ontology to epistemology and overcame the Aristotelian dogmatism inherited in philosophy from Scholasticism, the dominant form of thought in preceding centuries, while simultaneously raising some of the most fundamental problems for future generations of philosophers.
René Descartes[edit]
Main article: René Descartes
René Descartes was concerned with the uncertainty in the sciences and the radical scepticism which spread across Europe when publications of Sextus Empiricus became available. Descartes desired to find indubitable ground on which all the sciences could be placed and progressively built. Thus he rejected anything which appeared uncertain and decided to only accept apodeictic knowledge as truth.
After invoking the possibility of an omnipotent deceiver to reject the external world, the information given to him from his senses, mathematics and logic, Descartes discovered at least one thing could be known apodictically. If he himself was doubting, then he had to exist. Thus Cogito Ergo Sum - I think, therefore I am - became the first principle of Cartesianism.
Descartes then claimed that because he discovered the Cogito through perceiving it clearly and distinctly, anything he can perceive clearly and distinctly must be true. Then he argues that he can conceive of an infinite being, but finite beings cannot produce infinite ideas and hence an infinite being must have put the idea into his mind. He uses this argument, commonly known as an ontological argument, to invoke the existence of an omni-benevolent God as the indubitable foundation that makes all sciences possible. Many people admired Descartes intentions, but were unsatisfied with this solution. Some accused him of circularity, proclaiming his ontological argument uses his definition of truth as a premise, while his proof of his definition of truth uses his ontological argument as a premise. Hence the problems of solipsism, truth and the existence of the external world came to dominate 17th century western thought.
Another famous problem arises from Descartes’ substance dualism. For Descartes, a substance is that which can be conceived independent of everything else and exist independent of anything else. Since Descartes conceived of the mind independent of everything else when doubting everything uncertain, and because if he wanted to God could produce a world in which only the mind existed, he came to define the mind as a different substance from that of body. For Descartes, the mind is defined as an unextended substance and the body as an extended substance. This raised the fundamental question of how it is possible that mind and body interact with one another.[3]
Nicolas Malebranche[edit]
Main article: Nicolas Malebranche
One solution to the mind–body problem came from Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). Malebranche maintained that created substances of a different kind cannot interact with one another. In fact, he believed substances of the same kind could not interact either because no necessary causation could be perceived. He proposes then that it is God, an uncreated substance, who brings it about that each time one perceives a 'cause', one also perceives an 'effect'. Hence the doctrine is named occasionalism.
Malebranche was well-known and celebrated in his own time, but has since become somewhat of an obscure figure in the history of western philosophy. His philosophy had a profound effect on it, however, through its influence upon Spinoza and Hume, whose problem of causation was influenced by Malebranche’s occasionalism. It’s possible that Malebranche also influenced George Berkeley, although he rejects any association with Malebranche beyond superficial similarities.
18th century[edit]
Voltaire came to embody the Enlightenment.
French philosophy in the 18th century was deeply political. It was heavily imbued with Enlightenment principles and many of its philosophers became critics of church and state and promoters of rationality and progress. These philosophers would come to have a deep influence on the politics and ideologies of France and America.
Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) was a social commentator and political philosopher. His theories deeply influenced the American Founders. His belief that the state powers be separated into legislative, executive, and judicial branches formed the basis for separation of powers under the United States Constitution. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu outlined the view that man and societies are influenced by climate. He believed that hotter climates create hot-tempered people and colder climates aloof people, whereas the mild climate of France is ideal for political systems. This theory may possibly have been influenced by similar sentiment expressed in Germania, an ethnographic writing by Tacitus, a writer frequently studied by Montesquieu.
Voltaire (1694–1778) came to embody the Enlightenment with his criticisms of Church dogma and French institutions, his defence of civil liberties and his support of social reform. The civil liberties for which he fought were those of the right to a free trial and freedom of religion. He is best remembered for his aphorisms and his satire of Leibniz known as Candide, which tells the tale of a young believer in Leibnizian optimism who becomes disillusioned after a series of hardships.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) distinguished himself from the progressive scientism of the Enlightenment with his proclamation in Discourse on the Arts and Sciences that art and science are corruptors of human morality. Furthermore, he caused controversy with his theory that man is good by nature but corrupted by society, which is a direct contradiction of the Christian doctrine of original sin. Some of his theories continue to be controversial, such as his idea called the general will, which has been both accused of fascism and praised for its socialist ideals. Rousseau’s thought highly influenced the French Revolution, his critique of private property has been seen as a forebear to Marxist ideology, and his picture was the only one to grace the home of Immanuel Kant. He was so highly praised by the French revolutionists, that in 1794 his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) was a key collaborator in the creation of the Encyclopédia. A systematic collection of all the information of the arts and sciences, the Encyclopédia caused great controversy. Diderot was harassed repeatedly by the police, and was even arrested. The ecclesiastical party disliked the Encyclopédia, which was a threat to the aristocracy because it asserted that the state should take care of the people and not itself, religious freedom, freedom of thought and the value of science and industry. In the end, the bookseller began removing all articles he deemed controversial in fear of punishment. The Encyclopédia that Diderot had worked on for twenty years was ruined beyond repair.
19th century[edit]
Auguste Comte[edit]
Auguste Comte was the founder of sociology and positivism.
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was a philosopher born in Montpellier. He was the founder of the discipline of sociology and the doctrine of positivism, and may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.[4]
Strongly influenced by the Utopian socialist, Henri de Saint-Simon, Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French revolution, calling for a new social paradigm based on the sciences. Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to a general 'law of three stages'. Comte's stages were (1) the theological, (2) the metaphysical, and (3) the positive.[5]
Comte attempted to introduce a cohesive "religion of humanity" which, though largely unsuccessful, was influential in the development of various Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century. He also created and defined the term "altruism".[6]
Comte was of considerable influence in 19th century thought, impacting the work of thinkers such as Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill.[7]
Ferdinand de Saussure[edit]
Ferdinand de Saussure founded linguistics, semiotics and structuralism.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a Swiss linguist who taught for many years in Paris. He was concerned with distinguishing linguistics from philology by moving from the study of the history of individual words and comparisons of languages to the study of the essential underlying structures of language. His small output of work, most of which was published posthumously, became the foundations of linguistics, semiotics and structuralism, the school of philosophy concerned with the underlying structures which form, limit and affect society, language and the human mind.
Saussure divided language into two parts: the langue, which is the system of signs and rules owned by a community, and parole, the individual acts of speech within the given community. This was likened by Saussure to chess and a game of chess, for before anyone can play, they have to know the rules and structure of the game.
For Saussure, the essential unit of any language is the word, or sign. Like language, he divides the word into two inseparable parts: the signifier, which is the sound image, and the signified, which is the concept associated with the signifier. Saussure stressed the arbitrariness of this association, maintaining that any signifier can refer to any signified. How a sign obtains its meaning is by what it is not within the langue, not what it is. For example, the word ‘dog’ means dog simply because it does not mean cat, bird or cornflakes.
It can already be seen clearly that language is highly dualistic for Saussure. Indeed, he maintained that man thought essentially in dichotomies. For Saussure, the way language can be studied is dualistic too. It can be studied synchronically, i.e. as a complete system within a frozen moment of time, or it can be studied diachronically, which is the examination of its historical development. It can be said that structuralists focussed on the synchronic aspects of culture, while poststructuralists, as a reaction toward the highly dualistic and deterministic characteristics, focussed on the diachronic aspects of culture in an attempt to invoke a grey area.[8]
Henri Bergson[edit]
Henri Bergson would play a major part in shaping 20th century thought.
While Ferdinand de Saussure was a relatively obscure thinker in his time, it may be said that Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was somewhat of a celebrity. His philosophy appealed both to academics and the general public from its first inception in 1889 to Bergson’s death in the early 20th century. Although a major influence on William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the novelist Marcel Proust, interest in his work greatly decreased after WW2. However, in the late 20th century, through the works of self-proclaimed Bergsonian Gilles Deleuze came a revitalization of interest in Henri Bergson’s oeuvre.[9]
All of Henri Bergson’s works were concerned with his theory of real time as it is experienced by consciousness. He came by the idea while trying to improve on the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and has likened it to the rolling and unrolling of thread to represent man’s sense of mortality and the continual gain of new memory; a spectrum of a thousand shades with a current of feeling running through them, collecting and retaining them, to represent how all the moments are heterogeneous; and a piece of elastic contracted to a point and then drawn out indefinitely, producing a line which will progressively grow longer and longer, to represent pure, indivisible mobility. However, these images are insufficient and can only show the idea indirectly. The first is too homogeneous, the second is juxtaposed and complete whereas time is in a constant state of becoming, and the third forgets the heterogeneous nature of the idea. In fact, Bergson maintains that the case is the same for any other image of the idea one can produce.[10]
Bergson calls this idea Duration and defines it as being qualitative, not quantitative, unextended, not extended, a multiplicity yet a unity, mobile and continuously interpenetrating itself. However, it should be warned that Bergson believes Duration cannot be represented by concepts either. Bergson calls the creation of concepts analysis and believes it can never represent the absolute. He likens it to constructing a model of a city out of a collection of photographs taken from every angle and a poem being translated and having commentary piled upon commentary: the model of the city can never replicate the feeling of being in the city itself and the translation and commentaries can never give the simple dimensional value of walking in the city itself. Indeed, symbols always distort the part of an object they represent through generalization to include it and every other objects’ part they represent.[10]
The Duration can only be grasped through intuition, the sympathy by which one is transported into an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it. Intuition is a complete philosophical method that involves placing oneself within the Duration, and expanding it into a continuous heterogeneity, differentiating the extremities within it to create a dualism, before showing them to in fact be one.[10] An example of this is Duration itself, which is neither a multiplicity or a unity. But depending on which point of view one recreates it from, one will either reconstruct it as a unity or a multiplicity. Hence substance pluralism and substance monism are in fact two representations of the same phenomenon.
20th century[edit]
Main article: Twentieth-century French philosophy
French philosophy in the 20th century saw the rise of many schools of thought. The philosophy of science with Poincaré, Bachelard, Cavaillès and Vuillemin. The phenomenology, presented in a Cartesian format and influenced by German thought, particularly the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. Phenomenology was consistently noticeable throughout the 20th century, whereas existentialism spread throughout the west and gained fame, only to die out somewhat with the advent of structuralism, which came to be seen as merely a necessary means of access to post-structuralism, while postmodern thought came to dominate the late 20th century.
Philosophy of science[edit]
Jules Vuillemin would play a major part in philosophy of science and philosophy of knowledge.
Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods,[11] and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science. In France, philosophy of science (also known as French historical epistemology[12][13] or French epistemology[14]) was a prominent school of thought with Poincaré, Bachelard, Cavaillès and Vuillemin.
Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) had philosophical views opposite to those of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, who believed that mathematics was a branch of logic. Poincaré strongly disagreed, claiming that intuition was the life of mathematics; he gives an interesting point of view in his book Science and Hypothesis.[15]
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break (obstacle épistémologique and rupture épistémologique).
Jean Cavaillès (1903–1944), was specialized in philosophy of science concerned with the axiomatic method, formalism, set theory and mathematical logic.
Jules Vuillemin (1920–2001) introduced the concept of the philosophy of algebra and was specialized in philosophy of knowledge.
Phenomenology[edit]
Phenomenology can be defined as a way of philosophizing which involves descriptive explanations of phenomena as it is given to consciousness and how it is given to consciousness, which attempts to avoid imposed explanations. In France, phenomenology was seen as a radical Cartesianism which rejected substance dualism to better understand transcendental consciousness. It played a major role in existentialism and many postmodern philosophers' thought, such as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, who actually began his career with a deep, critical study of Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology is still an important area of research in France today.[16]
Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995) was one of the first to introduce phenomenology to France, through his translation of Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. Lévinas considered ethics primary in philosophy and once proclaimed that it precedes metaphysics and should be considered the first philosophy. He developed a moral philosophy based around notions of the other and the face which introduced ethics into phenomenology, which had been missing since the demise of Max Scheler.[16]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was concerned with the foundations of perception. His theory of the subject-body was produced as an alternative to René Descartes' Cogito and substance dualism. In contrast to the clear distinction between the mind and the external world, where the latter is but an extension of the former, the subject-body is an existential account of the pre-reflective subject, the subject's perception and the world as intricately intertwined.
Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) was one of the first to introduce phenomenology to France. He was best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. He was awarded the Kyoto prize in arts and philosophy for having "revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory.
Existentialism[edit]
Existentialism was a prominent school of thought in the first half of the 20th century. Traditionally, existentialism is concerned with the human condition, exploring such topics as purpose, freedom and the experience of the other. It can trace its roots back to philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, as well as Lebensphilosophie, but bloomed with the thought of French phenomenologist Jean-Paul Sartre.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) defined his existentialism as drawing all the conclusions from a consistent line of atheism. His major thesis is that existence precedes essence. With an immaterial object, such as a knife, an artisan devises an essence, such as that of slicing bread, and then produces an object whose purpose it is to fulfil its essence. However, without God, there is no artisan who developed the essence of man in a teleological sense. So first man is born free, thrown into the world where sole responsibility for his actions rests on his shoulders, then through his actions he defines the essence of not only himself, but of what he believes man ought to be. The denial of this responsibility through excuses is what Sartre termed bad faith. Jean-Paul Sartre was a spokesman for a generation, but his influence waned with the advent of structuralism.[17]
Albert Camus (1913–1960) rejected being labelled an existentialist, preferring to be called an absurdist.[18] In the opening pages of The Myth of Sisyphus, he states what he considers to be the fundamental question of philosophy: is suicide the correct response to an absurd world? Likening a Godless life to the story of Sisyphus, where he is doomed forever to push a rock up a hill only for it to roll down again, Camus’ answer is “No. It requires revolt. […] The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."[19]
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was an existential feminist. Beauvoir believed that through surrounding women in a false aura of mystery, man had turned her into "the other". Furthermore, she proclaimed women were stereotyped by this aura and that it was used by man as an excuse for not understanding them and dominating them. "The other" is always the underclass. But Beauvoir maintains that Sartre’s thesis (that is, existence precedes essence) applies to women as much as it does to men and that through their choices and actions, women can transcend this aura and reject being the underclass.[citation needed]
Structuralism[edit]
As previously mentioned, French Structuralism is primarily concerned with the underlying structures which form, limit and affect society, language and the human mind. It finds its roots in the thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, who was concerned with linguistics. But soon structuralism began to be applied to anthropology, social sciences and psychology. Structuralism played a major role in intellectual thought after World War Two, where it rejected existential concepts of freedom for the idea of man as determined by structures in the thought of such thinkers as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan. However, by the end of the century it became perceived as important not for itself, but for the schools of thought it produced, such as poststructuralism and deconstruction.
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) applied Saussure’s structuralism to anthropology, perhaps most famously to the dreams of tribes.
Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was a literary critic and semiologist who applied Saussure’s thought to literary theory. In Mythologies, Barthes explored articles, advertisements, movies, etc. to demonstrate the deep-seated bourgeois propaganda found within. He described these myths as second-order signs. A certain form of green bottles signify red wine. The bourgeois then assign a second signifier to this signifier, that of relaxing, healthy, strong wine, be it to sell products or uphold the status quo.
Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) was a psychoanalyst who sought to explain the mind in terms of structures both in order to correct perceived errors in Freud’s thought as well as errors in the subsequent interpretation of Freud through the theories of Saussure, Strauss and Barthes. Lacan was also influenced by German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger through Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
Poststructuralism and postmodernism[edit]
Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives. Photograph by Bracha L. Ettinger, 1995.
The second half of the 20th century saw the rise of so-called postmodern thought. This rise was especially noticeable in France. However, the term is fairly hard to define. In fact, some people maintain that it is nothing but a slur applied to a group of disparate philosophers wrongly grouped together. However, it can also be seen as a critique of traditional western thought, particularly dichotomies and the belief in progress, influenced heavily by structuralism, phenomenology and existentialism.
Louis Althusser (1918–1990) and his colleagues, prominently including Étienne Balibar, reworked Marxism using insights from structuralism, against the so-called "humanist" trend in Sartrean and Western Marxisms. Althusser offered an influential new reading of Marx's work, describing an "epistemological break" between the young, Hegelian Marx and the late Marx of Das Kapital. With his focus on the economic level and theory, Althusser came into conflict with social historians, such as E. P. Thompson.
Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) defined postmodernism as scepticism toward metanarratives. A metanarrative is a kind of grand arching story that encompasses - and claims to predict - everything. An example is Marxism, which explains the communist as the inevitable historical synthesis of the proletariat and capitalist of modern capitalist class division. Lyotard considered the metanarrative an essential feature of modernity. Hence the postmodern condition is the replacement of metanarratives with a multiplicity of micro-narratives, or to call them the appellation Lyotard gave them, language games. Lyotard maintained that these language games lack any all-embracing structure but were brought about by technological developments in such fields as communication and mass media making metanarratives indefensible.[20]
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) maintained a similar scepticism about absolutes, such as right and wrong, sane and insane, and human nature. His method was not to deny such notions, but to historicize them, examining what in the supposedly necessary may be contingent, and demonstrating the relationships between knowledge and politics, power and knowledge. His main fields of investigation were psychiatry, medicine and disciplinary institutions. Foucault was anti-Hegelian and anti-teleological in his historical excavations. Through his examinations of psychiatry in Madness and Civilization, he showed that the development of psychiatry was not an obvious improvement on previous treatments of the insane, and that furthermore, the apparent scientific neutrality of psychiatric treatments hides the fact that they are a form of controlling defiance of bourgeois society.[21]
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) developed deconstruction as a response to structuralism. Deconstruction takes a text, examines binary oppositions within it from several different interpreting standpoints, and then attempts to show them to be dependent upon one another, unstable, ambiguous and historically and culturally defined. Through showing the fluidity of the dichotomies, deconstruction shows the fluidity of the text. Derrida maintained that no meaning is stable, not even the dichotomies classical philosophers took for granted. Through an internal logic, the text deconstructs itself and hence allows highly original interpretations.
Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was concerned with the concealment of the fact that there are no truths in a given field. He termed this concealment simulacra. An example he gives is the Borges story of an Empire that creates a map which was so accurate that it laid over and covered the entire city it mapped. The map grew when the Empire grew, and decayed when the empire decayed. When the empire was destroyed, the only object left was the map. For Baudrillard, people live in the map and hence reality crumbles because of misuse.[22] Eventually, the difference between reality and illusion becomes indistinguishable for the consciousness. Baudrillard called this Hyperreality. An example of this is reality television, which is dependent on the watcher embracing it to create the illusion that it mirrors reality.
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) developed a philosophy of difference which valued the simulacrum higher than the idea and its copy, which is an inversion of Plato’s method, which held the idea and its copy in high esteem and neglected the simulacrum. He saw difference as prior to identity and reason as not all-encompassing, but a little haven built in the duration of difference-in-itself. He likened it to Christianity, where if you accept original sin and immaculate conception, then it all makes sense. Deleuze also developed a constructivist view of philosophy as the job of developing concepts, just like it is the poet’s job to produce poems and the painter’s job to paint paintings. For these reasons, Deleuze developed an idiosyncratic way of reading philosophers which he once referred to as buggery. He would use them as stepping stones for creating new concepts which appear to belong to the philosopher he’s reading, but are utterly different. An example is that of Spinoza, whom Deleuze read as an empiricist.[23]
See also[edit]
List of French philosophers
Non-philosophy
Speculative realism
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Chambers Biographical Dictionary, 2011, ISBN 0-550-18022-2, page 3
Jump up ^ International Theological Commission, the Vatican. "The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised". Archived from the original on 2008-12-22. Retrieved 2008-12-07.
Jump up ^ This section of the article references René Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy.
Jump up ^ Michel Bourdeau – Auguste Comte
Jump up ^ Anthony Giddens, "Positivism and Sociology".
Jump up ^ Oxford English Dictionary: altruism. 2nd ed. 1989.
Jump up ^ Lecture 25: The Age of Ideologies (3): The World of Auguste Comte The History Guide (2000)
Jump up ^ This section of the article references the Roy Harris translation of the book.
Jump up ^ Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
^ Jump up to: a b c Henri Bergson (1946), The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, pages 159 to 200.
Jump up ^ Gargani Julien (2011), Voyage aux marges du savoir : ethno-sociologie de la connaissance, L’Harmattan, p. 168
Jump up ^ José Lopez, Society and Its Metaphors: Language, Social Theory and Social Structure, Bloomsbury Academic, 2003, p. 117.
Jump up ^ E. Reck (ed.), The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy, Springer, 2016: ch. 2.1.
Jump up ^ Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres Interviewed by Bruno Latour, University of Michigan Press, 1995, p. 8.
Jump up ^ Gargani Julien (2012), Poincaré, le hasard et l’étude des systèmes complexes, L’Harmattan, p. 124
^ Jump up to: a b Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology.
Jump up ^ Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism.
Jump up ^ Les Nouvelles littéraires, November 15, 1945.
Jump up ^ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
Jump up ^ Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.
Jump up ^ Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
Jump up ^ Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.
Jump up ^ Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) – The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
External links[edit]
The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy – the online home of the Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française
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