Details

Subject(s)

• Diderot, Denis 1713-1784 [Browse]
• Aesthetics [Browse]

Series

• SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought [More in this series]
• SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought.

Summary note

Dramatic Experiments offers a comprehensive study of Denis Diderot, one of the key figures of European modernity. Diderot was a French Enlightenment philosopher, dramatist, art critic, and editor of the first major modern encyclopedia. He is known for having made lasting contributions to a number of fields, but his body of work is considered too dispersed and multiform to be unified. Eyal Peretz locates the unity of Diderot's thinking in his complication of two concepts in modern philosophy: drama and the image. Diderot's philosophical theater challenged the work of Plato and Aristotle, inaugurating a line of drama theorists that culminated in the twentieth century with Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. His interest in the artistic image turned him into the first great modern theorist of painting and perhaps the most influential art critic of modernity. With these innovations, Diderot provokes a rethinking of major philosophical problems relating to life, the senses, history, and appearance and reality, and more broadly a rethinking of the relation between philosophy and the arts. Peretz shows Diderot to be a radical thinker well ahead of his time, whose philosophical effort bears comparison to projects such as Gilles Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology, Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis.

Notes

Description based upon print version of record.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Source of description

Description based on print version record.

Language note

English

Contents

• part I. Diderot and the problem of metaphysics : D'Alembert's dream
• part II. Three short experiments.

ISBN

• 1-4619-4544-5
• 1-4384-4804-X

OCLC

• 861536780
• 861692836

Statement on language in description

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