Jean-Marie Guyau poet from France was born on October 28, 1854, had 33 years and died on March 31, 1888. Poems were written mainly in French language. Dominant movement is moralism.
Biography
Jean-Marie Guyau was a French philosopher and poet.
Guyau was inspired by the philosophies of Epicurus, Epictetus, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Fouillée, and the poetry/literature of Pierre Corneille, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset.
Guyau was first exposed to Plato and Kant, as well as the history of religions and philosophy in his youth through his stepfather, the noted French philosopher Alfred Fouillée. With this background, he was able to attain his Bachelor of Arts at only 17 years of age, and at this time, translated the Handbook of Epictetus. At 19, he published his 1300-page "Mémoire" that, a year later in 1874, won a prize from the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and helped to earn him a philosophy lectureship at the Lycée Condorcet. However, this was short-lived, as he soon began to suffer from pulmonary disease. Following the first attacks of his disease, he went to southern France where he wrote philosophical works and poetry. He remained there until his early death at 33 years of age.
His mother, Augustine Tuillerie (who married Fouillée after Guyau's birth), published Le Tour de France par deux enfants in 1877 under the pseudonym G. Bruno.
Guyau's wife published short novels for young people under the pseudonym of Pierre Ulric.
Guyau's works are primarily directed towards critically analyzing modern philosophy, especially moral philosophy. Largely seen as an Epicurean, he viewed English utilitarianism as a modern version of Epicureanism. Although an enthusiastic admirer of the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, he did not spare them a careful scrutiny of their approach to morality.
In his Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction, probably his most important work on moral theory, he begins from Fouillée, maintaining that utilitarian and positivist schools, despite admitting the presence of an unknowable in moral theory, wrongly expel individual hypotheses directed towards this unknowable. He states that any valid theory of ethics must consider the moral sphere as consisting not merely of moral facts (the utilitarian approach) but also, and more importantly, of moral ideas. On the other hand, in contrast to Fouillée, he does not see this unknowable itself as able to contribute a "principle practically limiting and restricting conduct," i.e. of "mere justice" which, he states, comes too close to Kantian notions of duty; for this, in turn, would bring us back to a theory of moral obligation, which, as the title suggests, he wishes to free moral theory from. Much of his treatise is dedicated to arguing what moral theory can be based upon that relieves moral theorists from relying on e.g. duty, sanctions, and obligations. For example,
The only admissible "equivalents" or "substitutes" of duty, to use the same language as the author of "La Liberté et le Déterminisme" appear to us to be:
