Description
This major new publication is the most comprehensive reference source ever on seventeenth-century French authors who have contributed to the invention, spreading or discussion of philosophical ideas and issues. Featuring authors having published at least a book, or written a manuscript, between 1601 and 1700, the period beginning with Pierre Charron and ending with Fontenelle, the Dictionary uses the word 'philosophical' in a wide, seventeenth-century sense. It includes many scholastic figures, having taught metaphysics, logic and theology in Parisian colleges, in the Sorbonne and in the provinces, but also authors who have been involved in the many intellectual debates of the time, for or against Cartesianism, Jansenism, Free-thinking and the new science, many of whom were not philosophers. This wide approach to philosophy explains why the Dictionary includes not only metaphysics and logic, but science, ethics, aesthetics, education, politics, rhetoric, medicine, chemistry, alchemy and theology, and why many of the authors may more usually be called divines, scientists, mathematicians, or even alchemists, cabbalists and playwrights. In addition to short, but well documented, biographies of the writers, there are detailed expositions and analyses of their doctrines and ideas, bibliographies of their writings (including sometimes manuscripts) and suggestions for further reading. All the major seventeenth-century French philosophers are featured, but the most valuable characteristic of the Dictionary is its representation of a huge range of less well-known – and sometimes completely unknown – writers. In many cases the Dictionary offers the first scholarly treatment of the life and work of authors. This book will be an indispensable reference work for scholars working on almost any aspect of seventeenth-century French studies.
Table of Contents
Volume 1
Introduction
Acknowledgements
How to use the Dictionary
General bibliography
List of contributors
Biographical entries A–J
Volume 2
Biographical entries K–Z
Name
Index
Author(s)
Luc Foisneau,
Luc Foisneau is a Director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), presently associated to the Centre Raymond Aron (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), in Paris. He has been Visiting research associate at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, between 2003 and 2006. He has been awarded, in 2001, a Prize by the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris for his Hobbes et la toute-puissance de Dieu (Paris, 2000) and has co-edited, among other volumes, Leviathan after 350 years (Oxford University Press, 2003). His research develops in the field of the history of political thought in 17th Century and 20th Century with a particular interest in the theories of sovereignty and their critiques.
Reviews
"Can you name a 17th-century French philosopher besides Descartes? The aim of this source is to make sure that the reader can….To that end, approximately 600 thinkers who published at least one work between 1601 and 1700 are included. An impressive 140 scholars from seven countries contributed the entries….This volume is most useful for obscure figures. SUMMING UP: Recommended." - Choice
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"…The editors cast a wide and finely meshed net, one that snares sardines as well as swordfish. They avoid the assumptions inherent in periodization by defining “the seventeenth century” in its most precise, yet arbitrary sense, 1601–1700. To be included, an individual must have published at least one work during those years. The result is two thick volumes of nearly 1400 pages with articles on nearly 600 hundred philosophers; each article includes a biography and a bibliography, which includes suggestions for further reading and, if relevant, manuscript materials and additional contemporary works. By including intellectual careers that began before 1601 or extended beyond 1700, the Dictionary also organically links the sixteenth with the seventeenth century, the seventeenth with the eighteenth.
As an intellectual historian who has engaged with the pleasures (and challenges) of writing on a seventeenth-century polymath, I find the editors' objectives and methods laudable, welcome, and consistent with recent scholarly trends…
The audience for a publication like the Dictionary is inevitably more limited than the other reference works mentioned in this review, though its interdisciplinary character makes it appealing to more than philosophers. Colleagues of mine frequently complain about the decline in seventeenth-century studies. A single reference work cannot revive a field, of course. Nevertheless, one in English that makes the intrinsic interest of its subject so apparent deserves more readers than specialists fortunate enough to live near a major research library." - April G. Shelford, H-France Review Volume 10 (2010)
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