La Mothe Le Vayer’s Dialogues in the nineteenth century: The paradoxes of a moralizing criticism
Roche, Bruno
La Mothe Le Vayer’s Dialogues in the nineteenth century: The paradoxes of a moralizing criticism - 2019.
85
During the century in which the heritage of classicism was produced, Le Vayer was presented as a compiler of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus, without any original thought of his own. Most critics refused to acknowledge the devastating power of his arguments against Christianity. They saw these as the irrelevant products of a philosophy of the “honnête homme,” which used skepticism as a propaedeutic for faith. At the same time that this anodyne representation of Le Vayer’s philosophical discourse was being established, another more heterodox vision emerged, in the uneasy reflections of the first historiographers of libertinism (Étienne, Kerviler) and of their immediate successors (Denis, Perrens).
La Mothe Le Vayer’s Dialogues in the nineteenth century: The paradoxes of a moralizing criticism - 2019.
85
During the century in which the heritage of classicism was produced, Le Vayer was presented as a compiler of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus, without any original thought of his own. Most critics refused to acknowledge the devastating power of his arguments against Christianity. They saw these as the irrelevant products of a philosophy of the “honnête homme,” which used skepticism as a propaedeutic for faith. At the same time that this anodyne representation of Le Vayer’s philosophical discourse was being established, another more heterodox vision emerged, in the uneasy reflections of the first historiographers of libertinism (Étienne, Kerviler) and of their immediate successors (Denis, Perrens).
Réseaux sociaux