-
The "System" as a Reading Technology: Pedagogy and Philosophical Criticism in Condillac's Traité des systêmes
- Journal of the History of Ideas
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 71, Number 3, July 2010
- pp. 387-409
- 10.1353/jhi.0.0086
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
This article reexamines Condillac's Traité des systêmes (1749) and the broader Enlightenment controversy over "systems." Historians have often read this work as an epistemological treatise: an expression of the empiricist rejection of seventeenth-century rationalism. Yet a different picture emerges when we consider its pedagogical aims. Condillac sought not only to refute his opponents, but also to train readers how to evaluate philosophical arguments on their own, promoting a streamlined critical technique that involved parsing texts for a reductive logical structure. In the process, he helped construct an enduring stereotype of the seventeenth-century philosophers as rigidly systematic thinkers.