The primacy of pity

For Rousseau, there are only three things he does not reason away apart from reason itself: self-interest, the good and, at least until Emile, pity. This paper argues that it is Rousseau’s original formulation of pity in the Second Discourse that is able to provide the extra-rational conception of ethics that his political and educational philosophy lacks when limited to a reading of the Social Contract and Emile. This paper will also show how the reconceptualisation of these existential predicates is usefully aligned with a reading of Derrida’s conceptions of immunity and autoimmunity. By reconceiving Rousseau’s educational and political thinking in terms of the primacy of pity rather than reason, this paper will present a kind of philosophical prototype for beginning to rethink contemporary educational and political logic in terms of the primacy of pity more generally

Epistemology · Existentialism · Higher education · Linguistics · Modern philosophy · Philosophy of education · Pity · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Social contract · Sociology · French Literature and Criticism · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought · Social Psychology

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