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 write six short essays relating marcel Prousts Swanns Way to several cognitive philosophy texts, including Rene Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy and George Berkeleys Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. Our task was to make the ideas of Proust, Descartes, and Berkeley send with star anotherto juxtapose and compare their ideas about what constitutes experience, what constitutes divinity, what is knowing, what is being. This is what these three essays blast to address.A note on the texts Prousts Swanns Way is the get-go volume of his eight-volume continuous narrative Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Times. (In the original French, it is A la recherche du temps perdu.) It is the recital of a mans life, a first-person memoir, a fictional autobiography. Swanns Way is the floor of this characters love for his mother and for the fille Gilberte and his retelling of his friend Swanns love for the woman Odette. In class, we called the un-named character/ fabricator 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 manifest entityof course, the author of the novel. Swanns Way is written 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 cognition and existence. Descartes too, uses a first-person voice, whom we called the Meditator. It is the Meditator who goes through the method of progressive doubt and re-founds all noesis on the basis of the cogito Thus, after everything has been most carefully weighed, it must finally be established that I am, I exist is necessarily unfeigned every time I put it forward or count it in my mind. Berkeleys Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous is an argument between the Cartesian brain Hylas and the Berkelean Philonous. In the first of these dialogues, Berkley argues that the Cartesian notion of substance is incoherent and that the expression matter as Descartes uses it is meaningless.Essay One All these memories, superimposed upon one another, now formed a single mass, but had not so far coalesced