The Authority of Experience

All our ideas come to us through the senses: that was the conviction of Condillac, Bonnet and Helvétius, the French Enlightenment thinkers who took up Locke's empiricism and pressed it further. John C. O'Neal's study, the first major general account in English of eighteenth-century French sensationism, sets out their ideas and follows where they led. If knowledge begins with seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, then the experience of one's own body becomes firm ground from which to question the arbitrary authority of institutions and the powerful.

From there O'Neal builds a theory of sensationist aesthetics that ties the period's philosophy to its novels, then traces the doctrine through educational theory, materialism and idéologie, closing with its bearing on present concerns. A rewarding study for anyone drawn to the Enlightenment, the French novel or the history of ideas.