d'Alembert

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani reads d'Alembert almost solely through the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie. He first sees it as the best summary of the Enlightenment. What he takes from this text is the division of knowledge into simple and compound, in which he sees the dream of a pure origin1. Later, he calls it the manifesto of a mechanistic empiricism and links this breaking down into simple elements to the atomism of civil society2. He stresses the distinction between direct knowledge, received passively through the senses, and reflective knowledge, which is made up of it. In his view, it is a text that leads from science to scientism3. He finds in it a "zero degree" of the subject: it is the object that acts, and the subject must abstract itself from itself4. In 2026, he presents this empiricist thesis as the one Kant refutes5. He also mentions d'Alembert as the person to whom Rousseau addressed his letter on the theatre6.

1. 1#3.5 D'Ulysse à Dédale1 Aug 2017 · 1:01:21
2. 2Musicosophie 3. Qu'appelle-t-on une musique moderne?3 Dec 2020 · 1:22:56
3. 39 #17 La métaphore géopolitique • Planck • Descartes • Clouscard • Dominique Pagani17 Mar 2021 · 55:37
4. 49 #17 La métaphore géopolitique • Planck • Descartes • Clouscard • Dominique Pagani17 Mar 2021 · 1:07:33
5. 5De Copernic à Lénine: Révolution !28 Aug 2026 · 32:51
6. 6Saint Jean30 Jun 2019 · 41:43

Summary produced automatically from 6 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.