Filozofija i drustvo 2012 Volume 23, Issue 3, Pages: 199-217
https://doi.org/10.2298/FID1203199R
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Self-portrait of the philosopher in the context of the enlightement
Radaković Vanja
In the history of philosophy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is mainly considered as
an atypical philosopher of the Enlightenment, as a pioneer of the
revolutionary idea of a free civilian state and natural law; in literary
history, he is considered the forerunner of Romanticism, the writer who
perfected the form of an epistolary novel, as well as a sentimentalist.
However, this paper focuses on the biographical approach, which was mostly
excluded in observation of those works revealing Rousseau as the originator
of the autobiographical novelistic genre. The subject of this paper is the
issue of credibility of self-portraits, and through this problem it
highlights the facts from the author’s life. This paper relies on a
biographical approach, not in the positivistic sense but in the
phenomenological key. This paper is mainly inspired by the works of the
Geneva School theorists - Starobinski, Poulet and Rousset.
Keywords: enlightenment, Progress, Naturalism, autobiography, confession, sentimentalism, introspection, empiricism, solipsism, exile