Relativism-Relativity: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on a Modern Concept

Relativism-Relativity: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on a Modern Concept is a revisionary and historicist approach to an issue which cuts across the disciplinary borders of science, philosophy, ethics and art. Sceptical of stereotypes, including those of the totalising fictions of the Enlightenment, supposedly steeped in absolutism and substantialism, the authors endeavour to bring to light an alternative mode of cognitive mapping which runs from the seventeenth century to the age of complexity. Current notions of fractal geometry, rhizomatic linking of open structures, hypertextuality, the superposition of symbolic systems and nonlinear reality, of chance and determinism, are traced back to the work of Leibniz, Laurence Sterne and D'Alembert. Similarly to Helene Vedrine, who documented the "dark side of the Renaissance" in Les Philosophies de la Renaissance (1971), the essayists here see the issue of the absolutism/relativism polarity as the focal point in the construction of a new eighteenth century, whose ground-breaking ideas, first launched in the tentative form of the essay, acquired a quasi-canonical status in the French Encyclopaedia, and referenced other disciplinary fields (psychology, ethics, social science), entering into fertile negotiations with discursive and formal innovations in literature.