Doubt the Experts

I came across  this article  by Michel Houellebecq and decided to comment on it in order to take a short break from Jean-Jacques Rousseau; I...

In 1762, after fleeing Montmorency, and having just turned fifty, Rousseau arrived in Yverdon, Switzerland, part of the Bernese republic, wh...

The remainder of the book covers the publication of Émile and The Social Contract , followed by Rousseau's sudden departure from France....

The process of publishing  Julie  continued to be a fiasco for quite some time. The first edition from Amsterdam took so long to arrive in F...

I'm now up to 1761 and am becoming a little tired of Cranston's slow pace. Rousseau moved back to Petit Montlouis in late 1759, and...

As it happened, one of Rousseau's neighbors in Montmorency was Charles-François-Frédéric de Montmorency-Luxembourg, Duc de Luxembourg an...

As far as I've read, Rousseau is forty-seven and has spent two years in the rundown cottage in Montmorency, which was known as Petit Mon...

1757 turned out to be an excessively melodramatic year for Rousseau, who was then forty-five. A sister-in-law of Mme. d'Épinay, Comtesse...

This second volume in Maurice Cranston's series starts where the first leaves off, in 1754. After returning to Paris from Geneva, Rousse...

The Rousseau biography is quite long – over 900 pages in small print – but I am finding it worthwhile and think it deserves a close reading....

A second competition was announced by the Academy of Dijon in 1753. The question this time was "What is the origin of inequality among ...

During the late 1740's and early 1750's in Paris, the new breed of young intellectuals who had contributed to Diderot's Encyclop...

Initially, life in Paris was good when Rousseau returned from Venice. A new friend whom he had met in Venice, the Spanish nobleman Ignatio A...

Rousseau arrived in Paris relatively well-prepared at the age of thirty, especially if you compare him to another writer, Stendhal, who arri...

Mme. de Warens was living in an apartment in Chambéry with Claude Anet when Rousseau arrived. Anet was a few years older than Rousseau and h...

I am slowly plugging away at the book and will probably pick up my reading over the next few days. I hope that I won't bore my readers t...

I've barely started this first in a series of three volumes by Maurice Cranston (1920-1993) and am already enjoying it, because Cranston...

I haven't been reading much lately or had much to report. Pretty soon I'll start on the biography of Rousseau that I mentioned earli...

Approximately the first half of the book discusses Plomin's research with adopted children and twins, which he uses to identify the heri...

Robert Plomin, the behavioral geneticist, has written this book to sum up several decades of his research for general readers. So far, I...

I was dragged into a household distraction regarding the midterm elections, and now that they're over it will be easier for me to think ...