Three Essays on Proust :: Essays Papers

Three Essays on ProustIntroduction In Candace Voglers Philosophical Perspectives on the Humanities class last winter, we were asked to compose six short essays relating Marcel Prousts Swanns Way to several(prenominal) cognitive philosophy texts, including Rene Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy and George Berkeleys Dialogues amongst Hylas and Philonous. Our task was to make the ideas of Proust, Descartes, and Berkeley communicate with one anotherto juxtapose and study their ideas about what constitutes experience, what constitutes divinity, what is knowing, what is being. This is what these three essays attempt to address.A note on the texts Prousts Swanns Way is the first volume of his eight-volume continuous narrative medical record of Things Past or In Search of Lost Times. (In the original French, it is A la recherche du temps perdu.) It is the story of a mans life, a first-person memoir, a fictional autobiography. Swanns Way is the story of this characters love f or his mother and for the girl Gilberte and his retelling of his friend Swanns love for the womanhood Odette. In class, we called the un-named character/narrator Marcelold Marcel when he is the grown-up man recounting the story of his childhood and young Marcel when he is the child. Marcel Proust is a distinct entityof course, the author of the novel. Swanns Way is create verbally in four books, the Overture, Combray, Swann in Love, and Place-Names The Name, all of which are mentioned in the essays. Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy questions and defines knowledge and existence. Descartes too, uses a first-person voice, whom we called the Meditator. It is the Meditator who goes through the method of liberalist doubt and re-founds all knowledge on the basis of the cogito Thus, after everything has been intimately carefully weighed, it must finally be established that I am, I exist is necessarily true every time I seat it forward or conceive it in my mind. Berkel eys Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous is an tune between the Cartesian thinker Hylas and the Berkelean Philonous. In the first of these dialogues, Berkley argues that the Cartesian tone of substance is incoherent and that the word matter as Descartes uses it is meaningless.Essay oneness All these memories, superimposed upon one another, now formed a whiz mass, but had not so far coalesced