|
|
| Program > Science, Litterature and Popularization |
| Programme > La science dans la littérature et la vulgarisation |
|
Eric Palmer (Allegheny
College) Pangloss Identified |
|
Scholars have associated the character of Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide variously with the ideas of Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Pope, and Christian Wolff. With them he is associated, but on whom is he modeled? Pangloss is the image of a French popularizer of science celebrated in his day but little noticed in ours: Noël Antoine Pluche (1688-1761), the author of a highly popular work, Le Spectacle de la Nature (1732). Pluche, almost as much as Pangloss, presents a caricature of more thorough contemporary reasoning about the character and plausible extent of scientific and metaphysical knowledge. That reasoning, the distortion presented by Pluche, and the magnified distortion of Pangloss will each be considered in this presentation. What was fantastically popular was at least as important to the public philosophe as what was most carefully and systematically reasoned. A regard for cultural context and for the historical era of composition of Candide is of value if we are to gain a measured grasp of the breadth and the focus of Voltaire's criticism, as well as a sense of the spread of philosophical ideas in European culture.
Philosophy,
Allegheny College
|
|
|
