Abstract
Beginning this part’s focuses on key philosophical features of Sade’s context, this chapter reconstructs the ontology and epistemology of the eighteenth-century’s body of sensibility. It shows the importance for the period’s philosophical anthropology of the médecins philosophes of Montpellier Vitalism including Henri Fouquet and Antoine Le Camus. Under the single power of sensibility this ontology brought together the passive power of the body to sense with the active power of the body to respond including with the passions and with reason. The chapter examines the implications of this for the period’s philosophical particularism and for the period’s epistemology more broadly: the key figures discussed here include Jean Senebier and Ménuret de Chambaud.
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Lloyd, H.M. (2018). Sensibility, Vitalist Medicine, and Embodied Epistemology. In: Sade’s Philosophical System in its Enlightenment Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97196-4_3
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