Rousseau's Discours sur l'inégalité - General structure and language notes
- Created by: CaraPW
- Created on: 03-05-21 21:15
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- Rousseau's discours sur l'inégalité - general notes
- Is the discours a polemic?
- Some thought he just wanted to be polemical after first discours, supported through use quarrels
- More complex than just a polemic, he extends his his arguments from his first discours
- Controversy gets Rousseau a readership, but he always sticks to the principles he sets out and extends them in his novels
- It is a polemic if by polemic we mean a declaration of war against the conventional interests of 18th Century philosophers
- Is particular in that he challenges readers' viewpoints, and is generally politically in line with his arguments
- Imagination and hypothesis
- Rousseau is very open about his discours being just a hypothesis, a possibility
- In the exordium he says he wants to put facts to one side - but thinks is hypothesis is a logically likely possibility, and that other hypotheses would bring similar results
- Deceptiveness
- Uses deceptive language to make readers believe his history is factual - highly persuasive
- Use of Voir usually conveys sense of empirical evidence
- Uses voir metaphorically to mean imagine - deceptive legitimisation
- Is there any hope?
- There is hope for individuals to redeem themselves - developed in Émile - idea of removing an educating a child apart from society
- Amour de soi still exists in a lesser form
- It's not human nature that's the problem, it's social structures
- Is the discours a polemic?
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