Matteo Marcheschi

In mid-eighteenth-century France, a series of debates revolved around reflections on origins and their epistemological status, elaborating models of historical temporality to frame the present. The origins of the arts, sciences, human inequality, human knowledge, fables or religions reveal a certain relationship between man (individuals and civilisations) and time, articulating forms of past permanence and future anticipation in the present. Within this framework, this article seeks to shed light on the peculiar temporal status of Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger’s reflection on origins. In a close comparison with Rousseau’s ‘atrabilious philosophy’ (philosophie atrabilaire), Boulanger identifies catastrophe as a temporal model for conceptualising the origin of a human history that has always already begun: origin appears not as that which stands at the beginning of time, but rather as a historical form of the relationship between humanity and time – an emotional and cognitive tone – that constitutes the background and precondition of human action.

In Diderot’s philosophy, the nature of the eighteenth-century, Isis veiled, is constituted of the same substance as the metaphor, the analogy and the hieroglyph. To show that, this article takes into consideration the naturalistic inquiry on Trembley’s Hydra. This animal, which is at the heart of the philosophical interest of the period, seems to shape itself starting from the mythological imagination, but at the same time it becomes the model that, for Diderot, defines the faculty of thinking and its features. The reversibility between word and image, nature and culture, representation and the represented thing provides the observation point on a philosophy – Diderot’s philosophy – that develops itself along with the human physiology and imagination, its own faculty

The author argues that in Mably's thought indignation is the theoretical pivot for understanding politics both as the government of the passions and as a prudential art rooted in natural law. Within a Platonic framework that reduces politics to morals, Mably distinguishes bodily passions from thymotic ones. Among the latter, indignation is the impulse that drives the individual beyond the private sphere, opens onto the public dimension, and can act as a "virtue by instinct". Its temporality is decisive: instantaneous in its onset, yet capable of being held, guided, and transformed into duration by reason and by love of glory, the meta-­virtue that channels its thrust toward the common good. Fear and private interests neutralize indignation;; history, by contrast, prolongs its energy over time, converting the impulse into habits through exemplarity. Thus, indignation becomes both a temporal and a political device. It stabilizes steadfastness and courage, prepares the practice of republican virtues, and, in moments of crisis, preserves an operative residue of morality where reason falters.

Starting from the first occurrences in French of ‘esprit de corps’ (Saint-Simon, Voltaire), this article investigates this phrase’s philosophical and metaphorical presuppositions of eighteenth-century uses. After analysing Voltaire’s attempt to define the concept of esprit de corps in the ‘ESPRIT’ article of the Encyclopédie, I will examine a passage from Diderot’s Rêve de D’Alembert, in which esprit de corps is traced back to its metaphorical origin: esprit de corps here appears as esprit du corps, which shows how the political use of this category implies a certain preunderstanding of what the physiological body is and how it forms. As a background to his enquiry into the esprit de corps, Diderot puts forward a model of the organism marked by the rhythms and dynamics of epigenesis: the human body, like the political body, is permanently on the verge of completion, engaged in redefining its boundaries with the world and the relationships between its constituent organs at every moment, according to the principle of pleasure.From this perspective, between d’Holbach’s La morale universelle and Helvétius’s De l’esprit, esprit de corps becomes the expression of the eighteenth-century attempt to question the relationships between individuals, groups, and societies, outlining a stratified political reality crossed by non-univocal rhythms of functioning, recognising passions – particularly esteem – and interest as the constitutive and dissolutive forces of societies.

My article aims to interrogate the tension between space and time in Diderot’s philosophy starting from the tableau of the imagination and its specific functioning. By examining the category of ragoût – a culinary preparation that, during the 18th century, became an expression of an aesthetic of the relationship and harmony between the parts and the whole – I will show how it plays, between the Lettres sur les souds et muets, the Essais sur la peinture, the Salons and the Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre, its central role in defining an idea of dynamic spatiality, within which reality and representation coexist in relationships of mutual tension and correspondence. In fact, the ragoût reveals a conception of convenience which, by interweaving space and time, recalls the processes of human reason and interrogates them in pictorial and real space, making it habitable and comprehensible: if a detail always reveals a totality, activating a process of orientation in reality, when the relationship between the parts and the whole breaks down, the world itself falls apart. It is the law of convenience and ragoût that regulates the world: to change one’s dressing gown is to redefine one's life entirely. If this does not happen, if the relationship between the fragment and the whole is broken, as in La Grenée painting exhibited at the Salon 1767, Penelope appears more suited to a beer hall than to the majestic but sober palace of Ithaca.