The first English translation of some of Victor Cousin's most important philosophical writings for over 150 years, accompanied by extensive contextual and analytic resources from a team of internationally recognized Cousin scholars. Victor Cousin was a towering philosophical figure of the nineteenth century: no French philosopher since has fully escaped his shadow. This edition of Philosophical Fragments brings together a series of Cousin's most accessible and significant texts to introduce English-language readers to his thought, along with commentaries on his relationship to Cartesianism, his role in the invention of the historiography of philosophy, as well as his lasting institutional legacy. The edition includes many of Cousin's most significant shorter pieces, such as his 1826 Preface to Philosophical Fragments, the 'manifesto' by means of which he relaunched the French spiritualist project and set out his own eclectic project in the history of philosophy; his 1833 Preface to Philosophical Fragments, in which he responds to mounting criticism of his version of spiritualism by setting out definitively his relations to Descartes, eighteenth-century sensualism, German Idealism, and Catholic theology; and a selection of the Fragments themselves, charting the genesis of his philosophy from the 1810s to the 1840s.
Delphine Antoine-Mahut and Daniel Whistler: Editors' Preface: Victor Cousin, Eclectic Philosophy and its Legacies Note on Editions, Abbreviations, and Translations Part One: Introductions 1: Delphine Antoine-Mahut: Cousin and French Philosophy 2: Félix Barancy and Sarah Bernard-Granger: Cousin and the Politics of Philosophy 3: Pierre-François Moreau: Cousin and the History of Philosophy 4: Lucie Rey: Cousin and the Eighteenth Century 5: Daniel Whistler: Cousin and the Problem of Metaphysics Part Two: Texts The Three Prefaces 6: Preface to the 1826 Edition of Philosophical Fragments 7: Preface to the 1833 Edition of Philosophical Fragments 8: Prefatory Note to the 1838 Edition of Philosophical Fragments 1816-1818 9: On the Moral Law and Freedom 10: On the True Meaning of the cogito, ergo sum 11: Attempt at a Classification of Philosophical Questions and Schools 12: On the Fact of Consciousness 13: On the Clear and the Obscure in Knowledge, or On Spontaneity and Reflection 14: On Real Beauty and Ideal Beauty 1826-1830 15: The True Beginning of the History of Philosophy 16: Plato: Language of the Theory of Ideas 17: Plato 18: Prefatory Note to New Philosophical Fragments 19: Preface to the Translation of Tennemann's Manual of the History of Philosophy 20: From Review of Reiffenberg's On Eclecticism After 1833 21: Introduction to the Posthumous Works of Maine de Biran 22: From Abelard 23: From Foreword to On Pascal's Pensées 24: Foreword to Fragments of Cartesian Philosophy Appendix: Two Edicts Issued by the Royal Council of Public Education
Since 2014, Delphine Antoine-Mahut has been Professor of History of Modern Philosophy at ENS de Lyon, having previously held positions as Assistant Professor in History of Modern Philosophy in the same Institution and as an upper-secondary school teacher (agrégée) in the Paris suburbs and French regions. Daniel Whistler is Professor of Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, having previously held positions as Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, Humboldt Fellow at the Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität, Münster, and EURIAS Fellow at the École normale supérieure de Lyon.
