Philosophical Solitude

David Hume versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4495014
AutoresBarbara Taylor (0000-0002-2971-2779, Queen Mary University of London, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen89
Páginas1-21
Fecha de publicación2020-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHistory Workshop Journal (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/hwj/dbz048
OpenAlexW3002077087
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas6

The philosopher meditating alone in his study is a cliché of western culture. But behind the hackneyed image lies a long history of controversy. Was solitude the 'palace of learning' that many learned people, religious and secular, perceived it, or a debilitating state of solipsistic misery and intellectual degeneracy, as its enemies described it? In the mid eighteenth century the debate became fiercely personal during a public quarrel between two philosophical luminaries: David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the 1760s Rousseau faced persecution from state and church authorities in France and Switzerland. Hume gave him refuge in England. The relationship rapidly turned toxic as the convivial Hume sought to manage his notoriously reclusive charge. Solitude became a casus belli in a war of words that fascinated intellectual Europe. But the fracas was more complex than it appeared. Who are we with, when we are alone? For Hume, no less than Rousseau, the question proved inescapable, in both his personal career and his philosophy. A closer look at two thinkers who, on the surface, were a study in opposites, reveals much about the vicissitudes of solitude in the life of the creative mind

Art · Literature · Persecution · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Solitude · State (computer science) · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies · Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought