Description
Book SynopsisThe Life of Wisdom in Rousseau''s Reveries of the Solitary Walker is the first complete exegesis and interpretation of Rousseau''s final and culminating work, showing its full philosophic and moral teaching. The Reveries has been celebrated as a work of literature that is an acknowledged acme of French prose writing. Thomas L. Pangle argues that this aesthetic appreciation necessitates an in-depth interpretation of the writing''s complex and multileveled intended teaching about the normatively best way of lifeand how essential this is for a work that was initially bewildering.
Rousseau stands out among modern political philosophers in that he restored, to political philosophy, what Socrates and his students (from Plato and Xenophon through Aristotle and the Stoics and Cicero) had made centraland that the previous modern, Enlightenment philosophers had eclipsed: the study of the life and soul of the exemplary, independent sage, as possessor of human
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. "First Walk"—Rousseau's Introduction
2. "Second Walk"—Nature, Mortality, God
3. "Third Walk"—A Spiritual-Religious Autobiography
4. "Fourth Walk"—The Virtue of Truthfulness
5. "Fifth Walk"—Happiness
6. "Sixth Walk"—Goodness versus Virtue
7. "Seventh Walk"—Botany as Consuming "Amusement"
8. "8"—Renewed Self-exploration
9. "9" and "10"—The Solitary Walker's "Truly Loving Heart"
