Changing Minds: The Shifting Perception of Culture in Eighteenth-century France

In this study of the epistemological underpinnnigs of cultural changes in the French enlightenement, the author shows how many of the cultural changes brought about by Eighteenth century French thinkers arose from the different forms of knowledge and experiences they pursued. The various chapters illustrate the rich interdisciplinarity of the period's thinking, which is unified by a central concern with the mind, and discuss important Enlightenment developments in aesthetics, historiography, metaphysics, anthropology, langugage and literature, political theory and medicine.