French 218: Rousseau and Diderot in the Enlightenment and Today

Instructor: Malina Stefanovska

Certain questions asked by 18th century thinkers still sound as pertinent today: what is natural versus      societally formed in a human? How did society and the state take shape? What is the right education to create an Enlightened individual? How do we manage our relationships to the society around us? How do we explore and express our selfhood? All these questions have constituted the constant preoccupation of two major Eighteenth century authors, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, who have provided serious, playful and controversial answers to each of them.  We will take their writings as a guide for our own explorations.