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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Diderot's Chaotic Order: Approach to Synthesis

Diderot's Chaotic Order: Approach to Synthesis

Crocker, Lester G.

Hardcover

Series: Princeton Legacy Library, Book 1277

Philosophy

ISBN10: 0691645523
ISBN13: 9780691645520
Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
Published: Apr 19 2016
Pages: 200
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Because of its fragmentary, evolving, exploratory, and dialectical character, Diderot's thought has continuously resisted overall synthesis. In the ideas of order and disorder, ideas important in all of eighteenth-century thought, Lester G. Crocker finds the key to an outline of a structure that leads to a genuine synthesis of Diderot's writings on philosophy, morality, politics, and aesthetics.

The tensions in Diderot's thought, Professor Crocker shows, reflect his understanding of reality itself--paradoxically, an anarchic order, a dynamic universe governed by laws but always changing in a chaotic way.

The book examines Diderot's approach to aesthetics as a human ordering response to the world, and his approach to morals and politics as practical ways of dealing with the problems of order and disorder in the context of life in society. In light of the concepts of order and disorder, the inextricable associations of all of these realms of thought in Diderot's work become clear, and a unity is perceived.

Since the problem of order and disorder was fundamental to an age faced with the dissolution of the Christian view of cosmic order, this novel approach to Diderot's work suggests new ways of understanding the Enlightenment as a whole.

Originally published in 1974.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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