Victor Cousin Philosophical Fragments

The first English translation of some of Victor Cousin's most important philosophical writings for over 150 years, accompanied by extensive contextual and analytic resources from a team of internationally recognized Cousin scholars. Victor Cousin was a towering philosophical figure of the nineteenth century: no French philosopher since has fully escaped his shadow. This edition of Philosophical Fragments brings together a series of Cousin's most accessible and significant texts to introduce English-language readers to his thought, along with commentaries on his relationship to Cartesianism, his role in the invention of the historiography of philosophy, as well as his lasting institutional legacy. The edition includes many of Cousin's most significant shorter pieces, such as his 1826 Preface to Philosophical Fragments, the 'manifesto' by means of which he relaunched the French spiritualist project and set out his own eclectic project in the history of philosophy; his 1833 Preface to Philosophical Fragments, in which he responds to mounting criticism of his version of spiritualism by setting out definitively his relations to Descartes, eighteenth-century sensualism, German Idealism, and Catholic theology; and a selection of the Fragments themselves, charting the genesis of his philosophy from the 1810s to the 1840s.

1 - Cousin and French Philosophy
2 - Cousin and the Politics of Philosophy
3 - Cousin and the History of Philosophy
4 - Cousin and the Eighteenth Century
5 - Cousin and the Problem of Metaphysics
6 - Preface to the 1826 Edition of Philosophical Fragments
7 - Preface to the 1833 Edition of Philosophical Fragments
8 - Prefatory Note to the 1838 Edition of Philosophical Fragments
9 - On the Moral Law and Freedom
10 - On the True Meaning of the cogito, ergo sum
11 - Attempt at a Classification of Philosophical Questions and Schools
12 - On the Fact of Consciousness
13 - On the Clear and the Obscure in Knowledge, or On Spontaneity and Reflection
14 - On Real Beauty and Ideal Beauty
15 - The True Beginning of the History of Philosophy
16 - Plato: Language of the Theory of Ideas
17 - Plato
18 - Prefatory Note to New Philosophical Fragments
19 - Preface to the Translation of Tennemann's Manual of the History of Philosophy
20 - From Review of Reiffenberg's On Eclecticism
21 - Introduction to the Posthumous Works of Maine de Biran
22 - From Abelard
23 - From Foreword to On Pascal's Pensées
24 - Foreword to Fragments of Cartesian Philosophy

Since 2014, Delphine Antoine-Mahut has been Professor of History of Modern Philosophy at ENS de Lyon, having previously held positions as Assistant Professor in History of Modern Philosophy in the same Institution and as an upper-secondary school teacher (agrégée) in the Paris suburbs and French regions. Daniel Whistler is Professor of Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, having previously held positions as Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, Humboldt Fellow at the Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität, Münster, and EURIAS Fellow at the École normale supérieure de Lyon.