Condillac Essay

Edited by Geoff Boucher and Henry Martyn Lloyd, Rethinking the Enlightenment makes the case for connecting new work in intellectual history with fresh understandings of ‘Continental’ philosophy and political theory.

This book examines the importance of the animal in modern art theory, using classic texts of modern aesthetics and texts written by modern artists to explore the influence of the human-animal relationship on nineteenth and twentieth century artists and art theorists.

The book is unique due to its focus on the concept of the animal, rather than on images of animals, and it aims towards a theoretical account of the connections between the notions of art and animality in the modern age.

Much of the difficulty is owed to a general failure among scholars to consider how history, philosophy, and politics work together.

Rethinking the Enlightenment bridges these disciplinary divides.

The first, published in 1746, was an Condillac asked his readers to imagine a naïve thinker—a statue of a human being—and how that thinker might learn if a sensory avenue, say smell, was developed in isolation of the other senses.

His aim in this thought-experiment was to show how a person could know all that he knows from sensory experience. Regarding language, Condillac’s depicted it as a vehicle for transforming the senses into mental objects. He believed that language was structured in the same way as thought. Condillac is best known for two of his philosophical works, both on the role of sensation and experience in the development of cognition. He followed in the tradition of philosophical scholars of his time, building especially upon the empirical tradition of John Locke (1632-1704).While Locke differentiated two sources of ideas, sensation and reflection, Condillac forwarded only one, sensation.This work, first published in 1746 and offered here in a new translation, is a highly influential work in the history of philosophy of mind and language, and anticipates Wittgenstein's views on language and its relation to mind and thought.One of the most persistent, troubling, and divisive of the ideological divisions within modernity is the struggle over the Enlightenment and its legacy.Recent work by historians has now called into question many of the clichés that still dominate scholarly understandings of the Enlightenment’s literary, philosophical, and political culture.Yet this work has so far had little impact on the reception of the Enlightenment, its key players, debates, and ideas in the disciplines that most rely on its legacy, namely, philosophy and political science.(Psyc INFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).The Trespass of the Sign offers a clear and thorough account of the relations between deconstruction and theology.