Rupture and continuity: research on the relations between nature and history since the great rationalism of the seventeenth Century

• Grant number: 07/56080-1
• Support Opportunities: Research Projects - Thematic Grants
• Start date: April 01, 2008
• End date: March 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Marilena de Souza Chauí
• Grantee: Marilena de Souza Chauí
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Pesquisadores principais: Franklin Leopoldo e Silva ; Maria das Graças de Souza ; Olgária Chain Féres Matos
• Associated research grant(s): 09/11301-6 - Barbarous Rousseau: from First Discours to Dialogues, AV.EXT
• Associated scholarship(s): 12/24410-0 - Algernon Sidney and republican liberty, BE.PQ; 12/18964-3 - Necessity and contingency in the Hobbes-Bramhall controversy, BP.PD; 09/15615-5 - Spinoza's ontology in the tension between eternity and history, BP.PD; + associated scholarships 09/09779-5 - The question of possible in Spinoza and its implications for Antonio Negri, BE.PQ; 09/11613-8 - For an aesthetics of immanence - The Spinosist nuance for a politics of the sensible in the historicity of the work of art, BP.DR; 09/14363-2 - Language and politics in Rousseau, BE.PQ; 08/04202-9 - Transcendental empiricism as discovery of multiplicities and thought-creating activity in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy, BP.PD; 08/05596-0 - Physics and Metaphysics: the principle of suficient reason by Leibniz, BP.DR - associated scholarships

Abstract

The project deals with the elaboration of the relations between nature and history in seventeenth-century philosophy, seeking not only the concepts of the period but also their renaissance sources, as well as the critiques and reformulations of the concepts in later philosophy, particularly in the French enlightenment and German idealism, and in such contemporary philosophers as Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Foucault. The starting point will be the renaissance formulations of the florentines and French jurists, their presence and modifications in the works of Bacon, Spinoza, Pascal and Leibniz. The first rupture comes with Vico, whose works foreshadow the French enlightenment. From the renaissance to the Enlightenment, the relations between nature and history are far from tense: not only is history inserted in nature, but the latter, considered as artefact and artisan, is embedded in history; moreover, the idea of human nature provides the necessary mediation between them. Everything changes and the rupture becomes patent in the works of German idealism, that is, with the distinction between nature and culture, despite the effort of romanticism to reestablish their inseparability, thanks to a new philosophy of nature. Taking as a reference Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the great rationalism, his criticisms of "the failure of dialectic philosophies" and his hypothesis concerning the possibility of nature as a foundation of history, some of the research will examine the role of the concepts of diviner and event in the philosophies of Nietzsche and Deleuze, the emphasis on the idea of temporal discontinuity in Foucault's early works, and the return of the natural determination of history in his later works, dedicated to the concept of biopower. (AU)