[BRUNET (Jean)]

Lot 83
Go to lot
Estimation :
800 - 1000 EUR
[BRUNET (Jean)]
Supplement to the volume of the Journals of Medicine for the year 1686. Or Nouvelles conjectures sur les Organes des sens, où l'on propose un Nouveau Sistême d'optique, avec une théorie particulière du mouvement. Paris, Daniel Horthemels, 1687. In-12, brown calf, spine decorated, red speckled edges (Binding of the time). Extremely rare memoir of metaphysics, by an obscure writer, supposedly a member of the Parisian sect of the Égoïstes. Decorated with 3 copper-engraved plates, 2 of which are on the same sheet at the end of the volume. The author, a certain Jean Brunet (and not Claude as it has sometimes been read), a doctor by profession, exposes here for the first time his philosophical ideas on the mind as the place of both consciousness and the ideas of the understanding and the imagination. Here already, a quarter of a century before Berkeley and a century before the German idealist philosophers, Brunet, while teaching the principles of modern idealism with perfect clearness, comes close to solipsism. [...] Brunet went further than Berkeley; and not only in the direction of solipsism, but in that of idealism as well. For, in vigorously proclaiming the autonomy of thought, the creative power of the self, in attempting to deduce the knowable from the knowing, he comes much nearer to a Fichte than to the Bishop of Cloyne [Berkeley] (Lewis Robinson, "Un solipsiste au XVIIIe siècle" in L'Année philosophique, 1913, pp. 15-30). The work is a supplement to the Journal de médecine, a short-lived journal edited by Brunet and published from April to October 1686 (in fact it is the fourth and last issue, published in April or May 1687 and gathering the texts of August, September and October 1686; see Sgard, n°671, online). It includes an astonishing article, entitled Théorie particulière du mouvement, where one can read: Considering that no thing can leave itself and go out of itself, one recognizes enough that our mind does not imagine anything of the substances which differ from it, if they are not inspired in it. [...] It was necessary to have a sovereign Being as the organizer and mover of the creatures that make up the world of which we feel a part. [...] each one must seek in his own depth the reason and the cause of the appearances of the imaginary world where he alone presides. On Brunet see also Sébastien Charles, "Du "Je pense, je suis" au "Je pense, seul je suis" : crise du cartésianisme et revers des Lumières" in Revue philosophique de Louvain, 2004, 102-4, pp. 565-582. Copy with some handwritten corrections at the end of the volume. Marginal and angular smudging of a few leaves.
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue