Brill's Series in Philosophical Historiographies – serie

Au cours du XIXe siècle, l’histoire de la philosophie s’est imposée comme une discipline centrale dans l’institution philosophique française. Ce processus reposait sur l’influence intellectuelle et politique exercée par Victor Cousin (1792-1867); il a coïncidé avec l’élaboration d’un schéma interprétatif conférant à la Renaissance, en tant qu’époque philosophique, un statut controversé, caractérisé par l'infériorité conceptuelle. L'ouvrage éclaire les enjeux idéologiques des débats sur la Renaissance dans la France du XIXe siècle. Il propose une approche globale des reconstructions érudites et des utilisations polémiques de la Renaissance centrée sur une relecture politique de la pratique historiographique, ainsi que sur ses réseaux personnels, académiques et transnationaux.During the nineteenth century, the history of philosophy established itself in France as a central discipline within the academic institutions. This process, which rested on the intellectual and political influence of Victor Cousin (1792-1867), coincided with the development of an interpretative scheme that gave the Renaissance as philosophical epoch a controversial status characterized by conceptual inferiority. This volume sheds light on the ideological implications of the debates on the Renaissance in nineteenth-century France. It offers a comprehensive approach to the scholarly reconstructions and polemical uses of the Renaissance by developing a political and transnational rereading of the nineteenth-century French practices of the history of philosophy.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ethnologists, linguists, historians, and especially historians of philosophy identified other “cultures,” which they distinguished from the West in order to subject them to empirical study. Consequently, Europe was conceived as the unique territory of philosophy, analytical rationality, and reflexive thinking. This book offers an interdisciplinary history of the history of philosophy and investigates how the scientific imagination was constructed in the West. It contributes to debates on the ideological assumptions and political aims of the European social sciences and humanities.

This volume is the first systematic study of the style of reasoning specific to the field of philosophy in nineteenth-century France. The chapters analyze the often dispersed responses to the fundamental question of the division of the sciences based on the reciprocal relationships of inclusion or exclusion, of adversity or sorority, between metaphysics and the positive sciences. In line with the arrhythmic progress of the different forms of knowledge, these responses renew the Condillacian criticisms of the Cartesian order of the relationships between metaphysics and physics. Between a pronounced divorce and a successful marriage, this volume traces the philosophical history of the various attempts at divorce or union, which, as the century progressed, resulted in original hybridizations that aspired to define a new and ever-problematic “French philosophy.”