Depuis une vingtaine d'années, l'oeuvre de C. E. Shannon semble être l'objet d'un relatif oubli dans l'ensemble disciplinaire nommé en France « Sciences de l'information et de la communication ». Cet article essaie d'en saisir les raisons, après en avoir rappelé le succès. Il plaide pour une relecture épistémologique du fameux schéma de la mesure d'information de Shannon. C'est ainsi que le « nombre de bits », terme à peu près incompréhensible du côté des sciences humaines, peut se voir donner (...) un sens et être appréhendé comme le nombre de questions pour identifier un objet. Ceci permet alors de considérer que l'élaboration shannonienne pourrait constituer un matériau fondamental pour la cyberculture, entendue comme réflexion sur notre rapport informationnel au monde physique et social.For twenty years, the work of CE Shannon seems to be the subject of a relatively neglected in all disciplinary named in France "Information Science and Communication." This article tries to understand the reasons, after having recalled the success. He argues for a reinterpretation of the famous epistemological schema information measure of Shannon. Thus the "number of bits", a term almost incomprehensible side humanities, can be given a meaning and be understood as the number of questions to identify an object. This then allows to consider the development shannonienne could be a fundamental material for cyberculture, understood as a reflection of our informational report to physical and social world. (shrink)

Content externalism, as defended by Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge and several others, is the thesis that the content of our thoughts at a given moment is not uniquely determined by our internal states at that moment. In its causalist version, it has often been presented as a deep revolution in philosophy of mind. Yet a number of medievalists (e.g. Peter King, Calvin Normore, Gyula Klima, and myself) have recently stressed the presence of significant externalist tendencies in late-medieval nominalism, especially in (...) William of Ockham. Now this interpretation has been cleverly challenged in the case of Ockham by Susan Brower-Toland in 2007, with arguments focusing upon Ockham’s theory of intuitive cognition (precisely where the externalist reading had seemed to be the most secured). The present paper is a reply to this challenge. I first summarize the case for seeing Ockham’s theory of intuitive cognition as a causal and externalist approach, and then critically review Brower-Toland’s arguments against it. The whole discussion, as it turns out, sheds new light upon Ockham’s conception of causality and natural order. (shrink)

It is puzzling to notice that in his 1784 essay on Enlightenment, Kant addresses every human being with his watchword « Have the courage to use your own understanding! », while at the same time he seems to restrict the access to the public discussion of matters of common interest to the learned persons. This begs the question: Is the participation in the public debate part and parcel of Kant’s conception of Aufklärung? A positive answer to this question is given (...) by Katerina Deligiorgi in her Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment. A critical assessment of this book will lead us however to consider that Kant has a differentiated approach to enlightenment depending on whether someone is educated or uneducated. Following Rousseau, Kant has come to recognize as a matter of fact this inequality toward the products of culture. Now the two-level conception of enlightenment entailed by this inequality becomes explicit in the 1790s, especially in the very last work Kant has published: The Conflict of the Faculties. (shrink)

What is at stake, philosophically, in the disagreement between Ockham and Buridan is whether there is simple supposition in the mental language or not. The key difference is that Ockham’s theory allows for the possibility of use/mention ambiguities within mental language, while Buridan’s approach, whatever it is exactly, does not.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Historiography of Philosophy by Michael FredeClaude PanaccioMichael Frede. The Historiography of Philosophy. Edited by Katerina Ierodiakonou, with a postface by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 256. Hardback, $80.00.From the 1970s until his tragic death in 2007, Michael Frede was one of the most prominent scholars in ancient Greek philosophy, with landmark contributions to the study of Aristotle and of Hellenistic thought in particular. This (...) volume contains his theoretical reflections on the work of historians of philosophy. The main part of the book reproduces with minor corrections the previously unpublished text of the Nellie Wallace Lectures that Frede gave in 1989–90 in Oxford (1–135). Then come three papers that he published on pretty much the same topic between 1987 and 1992 (137–88). Jonathan Barnes's postface, finally, launches an exciting discussion of Frede's proposals by raising a number of questions and critical remarks about them (189–230).Frede's main claim throughout the book is that there is, and should be, a distinctively historical approach to the history of philosophy that has not yet been sufficiently recognized as such in the academic world. This is not to say that he considers more philosophical approaches to be illegitimate. His point is that we have to be clear about the distinction and what it involves in terms of requirements and methods. What Frede calls the "historical history of philosophy" is thus contrasted by him with two varieties of philosophical approaches. One of them he identifies as the "philosophical history of philosophy." It consists in retrospectively studying the past of philosophy as a kind of maturation toward some more recent doctrinal stage, as Aristotle or Hegel saliently did with their respective predecessors. Frede takes this to be "a perfectly intelligible and legitimate, though perhaps not particularly interesting or fruitful, enterprise" (41). Most of the time, he thinks, it would be led by its own philosophical presuppositions to be too selective and to provide a badly distorted picture of past philosophy.Frede is much more sympathetic to the other philosophical approach to the history of philosophy he acknowledges, the one he calls "doxography." This is the study of past philosophers with the aim of finding something of interest in them for ongoing philosophical discussions—a familiar practice, indeed, in the philosophical discipline as we know it. There is an inevitable amount of anachronism in such endeavors, according to Frede, insofar as the commentators will have to reformulate the old views in contemporary terms to a certain extent and to look at them in connection with the questions that are currently debated in the field. But Frede deems this kind of anachronism acceptable as long as sufficient care is taken to correctly identify the views of the past we are interested in and to report them in the best available way. He strongly insists, however, that there are inherent risks of distortion in this approach. This might not be a problem if we are prepared to deal, as philosophers, with views that were not exactly those of the past; but we then run the risk of leaving out something of great philosophical interest, even to us, since "as a rule the philosopher subjected to doxographical treatment was a much better philosopher than the doxographer" (34). If we turn to the past for philosophical inspiration, we should also do it seriously, and this presupposes a historical study of past authors that is pursued for its own sake. [End Page 317]The latter is what Frede is really interested in, and he wants this historical approach to be "as independent as possible from philosophy and not just an ancilla to philosophy" (60). Its practitioners must have a strong philosophical training, of course, in order to understand the views they study and the arguments that were adduced in support of them, but Frede insists that they nevertheless are historians first and foremost: they strive to provide a correct account of "the actual, historical evolution of these views and positions" (14) and of how new doctrines actually grew out of previous ones given the historical context. Insofar as this is what they are doing, historians of... (shrink)

Utilisant surtout le traité De Sacramento Altaris, l'auteur essaie de montrer que, bien que l'opposition langage ordinaire/langage philosophique soit effectivement présente chez Guillaume d'Occam, sa critique logique du discours abstrait n'a cependant rien à voir, quoi qu'en pensent certains commentateurs, avec la philosophie contemporaine du langage ordinaire, puisqu'elle trouve son critère et sa norme dans un discours mental, naturel, universel et prélinguistique. De façon plus générale, l'article vise à mettre au jour certains présupposés épistémologiques qui doivent être dépassés pour qu'une (...) « philosophie du langage ordinaire » devienne historiquement possible.This paper, mostly based upon the tract De Sacramento Altaris, tries to show that, although the contrast between ordinary language and philosophical language can be found in Ockham's writings, his logical criticism of abstract discourse has nothing to do with contemporary philosophy of ordinary language and that it has been misinterpretated by some commentators. On the contrary, the criteria of Ockham's criticism lies in a natural, universal, and prelinguistic mental discourse. In a more general way, the author holds that some epistemological postulates which underlie all of medieval philosophy had to be abandoned, so that ordinary language philosophy could become historically possible. (shrink)

On est porté à sous-estimer le rôle authentiquement productif de la raison dans la Dialectique transcendantale de la Critique de la raison pure. Cet article propose une illustration de ce rôle à l'occasion des Paralogismes de la raison pure, qui ne sont rendus possibles que sur la base d'une fiction négative opérée à partir du sens interne. Cette illustration s'inscrit dans la perspective plus large d'une interprétation de la Dialectique transcendantale en vertu d'une théorie du schématisme, laissée au second plan (...) par Kant en raison de la prépondérance des motivations critiques.We tend to underestimate the authentically productive role of reason in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason. This paper suggests an illustration of this role as it can be traced in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, which themselves became possible on the basis of a negative fiction exerted toward the inner sense. This illustration is part of a larger perspective aiming at an interpretation of the Transcendental Dialectic on the ground of a theory of schematism, which is somehow overshadowed by Kant's critical intentions. (shrink)

When we reconstruct Fichte's philosophy of nature of the Jena period, we notice striking similarities between the conception of organism in theDoctrine of Scienceand Schelling's corresponding developments in his earlyNaturphilosophie.Even though both thinkers agree to consider organic nature within the framework of transcendental idealism, it is nevertheless possible at this stage to discover slight differences in their interpretation which announce their future disagreement on the status of a philosophy of nature. If, for instance, organism for both Fichte and Schelling can (...) be considered as ananalogonof the absolute, much depends on whether they conceive this analogy from a practical or theoretical point of view. (shrink)

Medieval philosophy is often presented as the outcome of a large scale encounter between the Christian tradition and the Greek philosophical one. This picture, however, inappropriately tends to leave out the active role played by the medieval authors themselves and their institutional contexts. The theme of the mental language provides us with an interesting case study in such matters. The paper first introduces a few technical notions—'theme', 'tradition', 'textual chain' and 'textual borrowing'—, and then focuses on precise passages about mental (...) language from Anselm of Canterbury, Albert the Great and William of Ockham. All three authors in effect identify some relevant Augustinian idea (that of 'mental word', most saliently) with some traditional philosophical one (such as that of 'concept' or that of 'logos endiathetos'). But the gist of the operation widely varies along the line and the tradition encounter is staged in each case with specific goals and interests in view. The use of ancient authoritative texts with respect to mental language is thus shown to be radically transformed from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. (shrink)

Guilherme de Ockham e a perplexidade dos platônicos.

L’examen des conditions d’adéquation du discours indirect est nécessaire à la compréhension du travail historique en philosophie, la notion centrale ici étant celle d’« équivalence sémantique ». On montre, à partir de là, pourquoi une pluralité de reformulations bien différentes est en principe admissible pour une même doctrine selon le contexte et les intérêts de l’historien.

Buridan’s theory of sentences with epistemic verbs (‘to know’, ‘to believe’, etc.) has received much attention in recent scholarship. Its originality with respect to Ockham’s approach, however, has been importantly overestimated. The present paper argues that both doctrines share crucial features and basically belong to the same family. This is done by comparing Buridan’s notion of the ‘appellation of reason’ with Ockham’s application to epistemic sentences of the general principle that a predicate always ‘appellates its form’.

This paper is about the turn that occurred in philosophy in Quebec in the years 1973-1977. I claim that there was then a changing of the guard in the philosophical milieu as well as a significant increase in the number of publications. Three subjects especially stand out in these publications : religion, social relevance of philosophy, and language. I also show how analytical philosophy was introduced in Quebec during this period. Finally, these various points are exemplified by looking at the (...) collective book Culture et langage (1973), which is especially representative of the turn in question. (shrink)

Ce document propose une sélection de textes autour de l'idée du nominalisme, théorie selon laquelle les entités abstraites n'existent que par le langage et l'esprit, mais qu'elles n'existent pas dans la réalité. Cette notion se retrouve chez les philosophes au Moyen Âge, à l'époque moderne, ainsi que dans la philosophie analytique contemporaine.--[Memento].

Dans son article de 1944, « The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics », Alfred Tarski réfère en propres termes à la notion médiévale de « suppositio materialis ». L’interprétation qu’il en suggère, cependant, est historiquement trompeuse et l’inexactitude historique se double, en l’occurrence, de ce que l’on peut tenir pour une malencontreuse erreur philosophique. Dans « “la neige est blanche” est vraie », Tarski voit l’expression « la neige est blanche » comme le nom d’une certaine (...) phrase, alors que les médiévaux y auraient vu plutôt une occurrence de cette phrase elle-même prise dans un usage spécial, la suppositio materialis. L’article montre en quoi les deux approches diffèrent et soutient que la théorie médiévale est philosophiquement préférable, en ce que : 1) elle est descriptivement plus adéquate en ce qui concerne le fonctionnement réel des langues naturelles ; 2) elle est plus appropriée même pour les langages construits qu’elle rend plus fonctionnels et plus intelligibles ; 3) elle repose sur l’identification d’un phénomène important dont la généralité échappe aux sémantiques d’inspiration tarskienne, celui de la dualité de principe entre l’extension d’un terme pris en lui-même et celle qu’il reçoit dans un contexte propositionnel donné.In his 1944 paper “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics”, Alfred Tarski refers in so many words to the medieval idea of “suppositio materialis”. The interpretation he suggests for it, however, is historically misleading, and this historical inaccuracy yields in this case what can be taken to be an unfortunate philosophical mistake. In “ ‘snow is white’ is true ”, Tarski sees the phrase “snow is white” as the name of a certain sentence, while the medieval philosophers would have seen it rather as an occurrence of that very sentence, but taken in a special use, the suppositio materialis . The paper shows how these two approaches differ exactly and argues that the medieval theory is philosophically preferable in that it is descriptively more adequate with respect to natural languages, it is more appropriate even for artificial languages, which it renders both more effective and more intelligible, and it rests upon the identification of an important phenomenon, the generality of which is missed by the Tarskian type semantics, namely the duality of principle between the extension of a term in itself and the extension it receives within a given propositional context. (shrink)

Le présent article se propose de montrer en quoi l'argument transcendantal (Strawson) peut modifier notre compréhension de certains débats en économie. Pour donner corps à cette hypothèse, l'article recense tout d'abord les principaux écueils épistémologiques auxquels se heurte l'économiste ; il propose ensuite une nouvelle version de l'argument transcendantal ; il montre, enfin, en quoi cet argument transcendantal permet à la fois de dépasser certaines apones rencontrées et d'ouvrir des perspectives sur la question de la rationalité des agents.

« Nous devons tous agir de la même manière. » Cette phrase percutante, pour ne pas dire provocante, intervient dans un passage du § 18 du Système de l’éthique où Fichte expose le principe de la morale. C’est dire que cette affirmation à propos de l’« uniformité de l’agir » traduit à sa manière la teneur de la conception fichtéenne de la loi morale. La question qui se pose alors est la suivante : comment faut-il comprendre cette exigence d’uniformisation de (...) l’agir de la part de Fichte? Pour y répondre, il convient selon nous de porter attention à la manière dont ce dernier se démarque de Kant en ce qui a trait à l’interprétation de la loi morale. (shrink)

A l'heure de la dissolution des grands récits idéologiques, l'éthique wébérienne de la politique nous rappelle que la « conviction » constitue un élément tout aussi essentiel de la conduite humaine que le « sentiment de la responsabilité ». A cet égard la philosophie néo-kantienne des valeurs, son formalisme mis à part, non seulement fournit à Weber un instrument théorique qu'il sait mettre à profit pour sa sociologie, mais elle confirme à ses yeux la place de l'utopie dans la dynamique (...) historique. While the great ideological narratives are crumbling, Max Weber's ethics of politics reminds us that the power of conviction is as essential a component of human conduct as the sense of responsibility. In this regard the neo-Kantian philosophy of values, notwithstanding its formalism, not only provides Weber with a theoretical framework which proves fruitful for his sociology, but it also confirms in his eyes the role of an utopian dimension in history. (shrink)