Condillac and His Reception: On the Origin and Nature of Human Abilities

This volume explores the philosophy of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. It presents, for the first time, English-language essays on Condillac’s philosophy, making the complexity and sophistication of his arguments and their influence on early modern philosophy accessible to a wider readership.

Condillac’s reflections on the origin and nature of human abilities, such as the ability to reason, reflect and use language, took philosophy in distinctly new directions. This volume showcases the diversity of themes and methods inspired by Condillac’s work. The chapters are divided into four thematic sections. Part 1 traces connections between Condillac and his contemporaries to understand the context in which themes and discussions central to Condillac’s own philosophical thinking evolved. Part 2 focuses on the different ways in which Condillac’s philosophy was taken up, challenged, and further developed in nineteenth-century France, before moving in Part 3 to the discussion of thinkers outside of France. Finally, Part 4 looks at the contemporary applications of Condillac’s philosophy in a variety of different fields, such as phenomenology, psychology, and psychopathology.

Condillac and His Reception will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on early modern philosophy, history of science and intellectual history.

Delphine Antoine-Mahut is Professor of Philosophy at the ENS de Lyon. She has widely published on Cartesianism, its historiography and its various receptions. Among other collective works, she co-directed The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism with Steven Nadler and Tad Schmaltz (2019). Her last book was L’autorité d’un canon philosophique. Le cas Descartes (2021).

Anik Waldow is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and specialises in early modern philosophy. She is the author of Hume and the Problem of Other Minds (2009) and Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in Nature (2020).