The concept of ‘world visions’, first elaborated in the early work of Georg Lukàcs, is used here as a tool whereby the similarities between Pascal’s Pensées and Kant’s critical philosophy are contrasted with the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume. For Lucien Goldmann, a leading exponent of the most fruitful method of applying Marxist ideas to literary and philosophical problems, the ‘tragic vision’ marked an important phase in the development of European thought from rationalism and empiricism to the (...) dialectical philosophy of Hegel, Marx and Lukàcs. The book is not a collection of isolated essays on Kant, Pascal, Racine, the status of the legal nobility in seventeenth-century France and the exact nature of the religious movement known as Jansenism, but an attempt to formulate, by an examination of these different topics, a general approach to the problems of philosophy, of literary criticism, and of the relationship between thought and action in human society. (shrink)

En proposant une étude de la méthode en sciences humaines, l'auteur met en lumière le problème des idéologies, problème au centre de toute étude sociologique qui s'efforce de saisir les aspects essentiels de la vie. Le second écrit offre une brève analyse sur l'oeuvre littéraire située à la jonction du structuralisme et de l'idéologie marxiste.

In this reissue, originally published in English in 1973, French philosopher Lucien Goldmann turns his attention to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the great age of liberalism and individualism and analyses the ‘mental structures’ of the outlook of the _philosophes, _who showed that the _ancien regime _and the privileges of the Church were irrational anachronisms. In assessing the strengths and limitations of individualism, Goldmann considers the achievements and limitations of the Enlightenment. He discusses the views of Hegel and Marx (...) and examines the relation between liberal scepticism and traditional Christianity to point the way to the possible reconciliation of the two seemingly incompatible ‘world visions’ of East and West today. (shrink)

Pascal und Port-Royal.--Bemerkungen über den Jansenismus: Tragische Weltsicht und Amtsadel.--Ist die Wette "für den Freigeist" geschrieben?--Phaidra.