Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Available in English for the first time, Imperfect Garden is both an approachable intellectual history and a bracing treatise on how we should understand and experience our lives. In it, one of France's most prominent intellectuals explores the foundations, limits, and possibilities of humanist thinking. Through his critical but sympathetic excavation of humanism, Tzvetan Todorov seeks an answer to modernity's fundamental challenge: how to maintain our hard-won liberty without paying too dearly in social ties, common values, and a coherent and responsible sense of self. Todorov reads afresh the works of major humanists--primarily Montaigne, Rousseau, and Constant, but also Descartes, Montesquieu, and Toqueville. Each chapter considers humanism's approach to one major theme of human existence: liberty, social life, love, self, morality, and expression. Discussing humanism in dialogue with other systems, Todorov finds a response to the predicament of modernity that is far more instructive than any offered by conservatism, scientific determinism, existential individualism, or humanism's other contemporary competitors. Humanism suggests that we are members of an intelligent and sociable species who can act according to our will while connecting the well-being of other members with our own. It is through this understanding of free will, Todorov argues, that we can use humanism to rescue universality and reconcile human liberty with solidarity and personal integrity. Placing the history of ideas at the service of a quest for moral and political wisdom, Todorov's compelling and no doubt controversial rethinking of humanist ideas testifies to the enduring capacity of those ideas to meditate on--and, if we are fortunate, cultivate--the imperfect garden in which we live.

Humanism --- Individualism --- Social values --- Philosophy, French. --- History. --- French philosophy --- Values --- Economics --- Equality --- Political science --- Self-interest --- Sociology --- Libertarianism --- Personalism --- Persons --- Philosophy --- Classical education --- Classical philology --- Philosophical anthropology --- Renaissance

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

The past fifteen years in France have seen a remarkable flourishing of new work in political philosophy. This anthology brings into English for the first time essays by some of the best young French political thinkers writing today, including Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, Luc Ferry, and Alain Renaut. The central theme of these essays is liberal democracy: its nature, its development, its problems, its fundamental legitimacy. Although these themes are familiar to American and British readers, the French approach to them--which is profoundly historical and rooted in the tradition of continental philosophy--is quite different from our customary one.Included in this collection is a series of reconsiderations of French critics of liberal society (Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Bourdieu) and of classical European liberals (Kant, Constant, Tocqueville). The continuing controversies over the nature of the modern era and the place of religion within it play a central role throughout the collection. The book includes a debate on the foundations of human rights and on the nature of a liberal political order. The concluding section presents some of the new sociological writing on modern individualism, its pleasures and its discontents. An introduction by Mark Lilla provides the historical background to the revival of French political thought about liberalism, and offers an analysis of what American and English readers might learn from it.Originally published in 1994.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

321.01 <44> --- Algemene staatsleer. Politieke filosofie. Staatsleer. Staatstheorie--Frankrijk --- 321.01 <44> Algemene staatsleer. Politieke filosofie. Staatsleer. Staatstheorie--Frankrijk --- Democracy --- Liberalism --- Political science --- Administration --- Civil government --- Commonwealth, The --- Government --- Political theory --- Political thought --- Politics --- Science, Political --- Social sciences --- State, The --- Philosophy --- Philosophy. --- PHILOSOPHY / Political.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Essays in Semiotics /Essais de sémiotique Approaches to Semiotics [AS]

Semantics. --- General semantics. --- Non-Aristotelian philosophy --- Semantics, General --- Education --- Semantics (Philosophy) --- Formal semantics --- Semasiology --- Semiology (Semantics) --- Comparative linguistics --- Information theory --- Language and languages --- Lexicology --- Meaning (Psychology)