Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Proust and Phenomenology

Excerpt from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

In the 1930s phenomenology migrated from Austrian and then German philosophy into French philosophy. The way had been paved in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, in which the narrator recounts in close detail his vivid recollections of past experiences, including his famous associations with the smell of freshly baked madeleines. This sensibility to experience traces to Descartes' work, and French phenomenology has been an effort to preserve the central thrust of Descartes' insights while rejecting mind-body dualism. The experience of one's own body, or one's lived or living body, has been an important motif in many French philosophers of the 20th century. [Emphasis mine]

I'm very happy to hear that one can try to be a non-dualistic Cartesian. Of course, this isn't possible.

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