ABSTRACT
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s gives some acknowledgement to E. B. Condillac in Emile, but elsewhere in that work it is evident that he borrows heavily from Condillac’s metaphysics without reference to him. The sentimental after all is ultimately not a physical phenomenon or a phenomenon of the body, but rather an idea, or an ideal. P. Burgelin comments that Rousseau thus understands himself as man of nature, but the opposition of thought and sensuality takes us back from the adult state to that of childhood. This is true in Rousseau’s notion it is the child who is deformed from a sensual being into a reflexive being by the ills of his education, upbringing, and society. Condillac imposes a sensorial organisation upon the body in order to introduce his conceptual notion of the subject. Condillac’s innovation was to give prominence to the sensibility of the body.
