Wiredu’s call for democracy by consensus is illustrated by his description of traditional African consensual rationality. This description contains the attribution of immanence to African consensual rationality. This paper objects to this doctrine of immanence. More importantly, the doctrine of immanence has led to the attribution of pure rationality to traditional African consensual practices. With reference to Aristotle’s three components of persuasion, I object to deliberation as purely rational and impervious to extraneous factors. I further argue that it is because (...) deliberation is not always perfectly rational that the process of consensus can suffer three forms of social conformity: conformity to dominant players, to numerical opinion majority, and to group-centrism. These forms of conformity mean that a consensus task order could lead to decisions of more inclusive value, but not necessarily decisions of more epistemic value. The concept of agonistic inquiry is employed to tackle what I see as the dangers of conformity and complacency in the project of inclusivity, and this is to strike a crucial balance between too-consensual and purely adversarial forms of deliberation. (shrink)

Dans le "Manifeste au Service du Personnalisme" d'Emmanuel Mounier, le philosophe français expose les principes fondamentaux du personnalisme. L'ouvrage défend la primauté de la personne humaine dans la société et explore comment le personnalisme peut influencer la politique, l'économie et la culture. Mounier appelle à une réflexion approfondie sur la dignité et la responsabilité individuelles, cherchant à promouvoir une société où chaque personne est reconnue et respectée dans sa singularité. Ce manifeste offre une vision philosophique engagée en faveur de (...) la place centrale de l'individu au sein de la communauté. (shrink)

In The Experience of Injustice, the French philosopher Emmanuel Renault opens an important new chapter in critical theory. He brings together political theory, critical social science, and a keen sense of the power of popular movements to offer a forceful vision of social justice. Questioning normative political philosophy’s conception of justice, Renault gives an account of injustice as the denial of recognition, placing the experience of social suffering at the heart of contemporary critical theory. Inspired by Axel Honneth, Renault (...) argues that a radicalized version of Honneth’s ethics of recognition can provide a systematic alternative to the liberal-democratic projects of such thinkers as Rawls and Habermas. Renault reformulates Honneth’s theory as a framework founded on experiences of injustice. He develops a complex, psychoanalytically rich account of suffering, disaffiliation, and identity loss to explain these experiences as denials of recognition, linking everyday injustice to a robust defense of the politicization of identity in social struggles. Engaging contemporary French and German critical theory alongside interdisciplinary tools from sociology, psychoanalysis, socialist political theory, social-movement theory, and philosophy, Renault articulates the importance of a theory of recognition for the resurgence of social critique. (shrink)

Olsson and his collaborators have proposed an extension of Belief Revision Theory where an epistemic state is modeled as a triple S=⟨K_,E,A_⟩ , where A_ is a research agenda, i.e. a set of research questions. Contraction and expansion apply to states, and affect the agenda. We propose an alternative characterization of the problem of agenda updating, where research questions are viewed as blueprints for research strategies. We offer a unified solution to this problem, and prove it equivalent to Olsson’s own. (...) We conclude arguing that: (i) our solution makes the idea of ‘minimal change’ in questions and agendas clearer; (ii) can be extended in ways the original theory was not, and may help better realize the aims this theory was proposed for; (iii) unveils some limitations of the initial approach, yet opening a way to overcome them. (shrink)

This paper contrasts the Hegelianism of contemporary neo-pragmatism and the Hegelianism of classical pragmatism as it has been reassessed in contemporary Deweyan scholarship. Drawing on Dewey’s interpretation of Hegel, this paper argues that Hegel’s theory of the spirit is in many aspects more akin to Dewey’s pragmatism than Brandom’s. The first part compares Dewey’s pragmatism with Hegel’s conceptions of experience and the theory/practice relation. The second part compares Dewey’s naturalism with Hegel’s theory of the relation between nature and spirit.

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 2, Page 263-265, June 2022.

The 'nations' of the title are the 'seventy nations': in the Talmudic idiom, the whole of humanity surrounding Israel. In this major collection of essays, Levinas considers Judaism's uncertain relationship to European culture since the Enlightenment, problems of distance and integration. It also includes five Talmudic readings from between 1981 and 1986, essays on Franz Rosenzweig and Moses Mendelssohn, and a discussion with Francoise Armengaud which raises questions of central importance to Jewish philosophy in the context of general philosophy. This (...) work brings to the fore the vital encounter between philosophy and Judaism, a hallmark of Levinas's thought.". (shrink)

In this essay, I will argue that the discourse over the existence of the Devil/Satan has no place among the religious cultures in sub-Saharan Africa. This may be contrasted with the numerous efforts in the dominant philosophy of religion tradition in the Anglo-American sphere, where efforts toward the establishing grounds for the existence of God have occupied and commanded so much attention. On the other hand, it seems to have been taken for granted that Devil, the One who is antagonistic (...) of God, among the Abrahamic monotheisms, is assumed to exist and does not require serious intellectual elaboration. For my aim, I explore the traditional Yorùbá and Igbo religious cultures to foreground that God. In the traditional belief system of these two religious cultures, there is no place to entertain the idea of a necessarily antagonistic entity, popularly called the Devil.Whereas I recognise previous scholarships that have served to show that Èṣù and Ekwensu in each of these religious cultures are not synonymous with Devil in the Abrahamic monotheisms, I move beyond these to establishing the ontological framework which endorses the absence of a Devil, even when evil lingers in the world. If the argument that there is no Devil/Satan in these religious cultures is proved valid, then it is pertinent to tender the origin and persistence of evil in the world. For this task, I explore the process-relational character of Yorùbá and Igbo theology to reinforce my conviction concerning the peoples’ belief in the existence of God in Chukwu and Olódùmarè, the presence of evil in the world, without encountering the philosophical problem of evil. (shrink)

Pour resituer l’analogie théologique dans sa constellation propre, cette étude explore les divers arguments dans lesquels Thomas d’Aquin recourt à Rm 1, 19-20a et/ou à Sg 13, 5. Le passage du visible aux invisibilia Dei est un moment (rationnel) qui a un ressort noétique interne, un fondement externe dans l’expressivité du créé, des vertus et des limites au sein d’une économie de la manifestation de Dieu par le sensible. La connaissance de Dieu par les sages des nations est orientée vers (...) une pédagogie salvifique de la foi, avec ses secours propres : la Loi, l’Incarnation et l’Évangile. L’exégèse et les usages de Rm 1, 19-20 demeurent toujours soumis à la thèse de Rm 1, 16 au sujet de « la puissance de la grâce évangélique ». La connaissance naturelle de Dieu, altérée par une faute envers Dieu, ne diminue en rien la nécessité de la grâce pour être sauvé. (shrink)

Strongly grounded in scientific knowledge, the instrument known as occupational exposure limits or threshold limit values has changed government modalities of exposure to hazardous chemicals in workplaces, transforming both the substance of the problem at hand and the power dynamics between the actors involved. Some of the characteristics of this instrument favor the interests of industries at the expense of employees, their representatives, and the authorities in charge of regulating these risks. First, this instrument can be analyzed as a boundary (...) object that has very different uses in space and time. In particular, it is increasingly masking its industrial origins to appear as an instrument that is almost exclusively based on scientific rationale. In the case of asbestos and its substitutes, the use of an instrument relying on scientific expertise generates a specific temporality of implementation that allows manufacturers to take advantage of periods during which regulations are either nonexistent or very loose. Finally, the choice of a technoscientific definition of the issues contributes to shifting the negotiations to a field where companies are in a position of strength and their opponents are weakened. (shrink)

The question of whether “genetic information” is a merely causal factor in development or can be made sense of semantically, in a way analogous to a language or other type of representation, has generated a long debate in the philosophy of biology. It is intimately connected with another intense debate, concerning the limits of genetic determinism. In this paper I argue that widespread attempts to draw analogies between genetic information and information contained in books, blueprints or computer programs, are fundamentally (...) inadequate. In development, gene exons are the central part of an intricate and densely ramified semantic Genetic Informational Network. DNA in the entire genome is in a state of continuous positive and negative feedback with itself and with its ‘environment’, and is ‘read’ and acted upon by the cell in various alternative and complementary ways. The linear combinatorial coding relation between codons and amino acids is but one aspect of semantic genetic information, which is, when considered in its entirety, a far wider and richer concept. (shrink)

" Le besoin d'évasion écrit Emmanuel Lévinas, nous conduit au cœur de la philosophie. Il nous permet de renouveler l'antique problème de l'être en tant qu'être... " C'est dore que, dans ce texte, il choisit - à la faveur d'un thème fortement heideggerien - d'aller à la rencontre des questions qui, toujours, ont guidé sa quête : le besoin d'évasion n'est-il pas le propre d'un être fini? N'aspire-t-il pas à franchir les limites de l'être plutôt qu'à le fuir? Et (...) pourquoi l'être aurait-il besoin de sortir de soi? Sur tous ces points, la méditation d'Emmanuel Lévinas s'affirme ici souveraine et féconde. A s'y engager, tout lecteur se rapprochera de la vérité de son destin au cœur d'une modernité tragique et opaque. (shrink)

La pensée d'Emmanuel Lévinas a d'emblée été connue des philosophes et des universitaires, dès son premier ouvrage, La théorie de l'intuition chez Husserl, en 1930. Avec " Totalité et Infini " (en l963), il fut reconnu comme un innovateur puissant et originel pour son développement de la phénoménologie. Pourtant, plus récemment, l'immense intérêt du public pour Lévinas s'est déplacé, plutôt, vers les conséquences ou les marges de son projet initial. Ce déplacement a sa légitimité, prouvant au moins la pertinence (...) politique et religieuse de la parole la plus conceptuelle. Mais il nous a semblé aussi légitime, voire urgent, de restituer l'enjeu original de l'initiative de Lévinas : poursuivre la phénoménologie de Husserl, non pas en la déployant vers la question de l'être (comme le fit Heidegger), mais en lui assignant l'éthique comme philosophie enfin première. Bref, Lévinas fut d'abord un phénoménologue et apparaît aujourd'hui de plus en plus comme tel. Cinq textes inédits ou difficiles d'accès de Lévinas et treize études de phénoménologues ou d'historiens de la philosophie moderne permettent, ici, d'évaluer quel apport intime unit Lévinas au nouveau commencement que Husserl entreprit de donner à la philosophie. J.- L. M. (shrink)

Les soixante-dix nations : tel était le thème choisi par le 27e colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française. Quel sens prenait pour le judaïsme, conscient de procéder de l'Histoire sainte, sa présence à l'Histoire universelle, auprès des nations et parmi elles? Ce thème avait déjà été approché au cours de quatre rencontres précédentes. Le présent ouvrage reproduit les cinq " lectures talmudiques " qu'Emmanuel Levinas donna devant cet auditoire de 1981 à 1986. S'y ajoutent des textes consacrés à (...) l'exégèse rabbinique touchant l'amour du prochain et de l'étranger, au concept de " kénose ", mais aussi aux problèmes de l'intégration et de la distance que pose au judaïsme l'Europe issue du siècle des Lumières. Un débat réunissant en Hollande des penseurs juifs et chrétiens permet de souligner la féconde originalité, sur ce plan, de la pensée de Franz Rosenzweig. Et un entretien avec Françoise Armengaud aborde quelques thèmes essentiels de la philosophie juive dans le cadre de la philosophie générale. (shrink)

Der Körper hat Konjunktur. Als ausgestellter, verfüg- und verführbarer begegnet er uns täglichim Übermaß. Es war nur eine Frage der Zeit, bis im Spiel der sich in den Wissenschafteneinander ablösenden turns auch ein corporeal (oder body) turn ausgerufen würde. Dabeibleibt im genannten turn der Gegenstand der Untersuchung nicht selten reduziert auf das, wasman im deutschen Sprachgebrauch »Körper« nennt: ein physisches Substrat, das wie ein Dingunter Dingen beschreibbar ist. Gegen diese Verkürzung stellt der Begri des »Leibes«,spätestens seit Edmund Husserl, eine präzise (...) theoretische Intervention in die wissenschaftlicheund philosophische Diskussion um Körper und Körperlichkeit dar: Dem objektiv beobachtbaren Körper, den wir haben, wird der lebendige Leib, der wir sind, gegenübergestellt. Diesem »Leib«, seiner Geschichte, seinen Varianten und seinem Versprechen gehen dieAutoren der vorliegenden Beiträge nach. Inhaltsübersicht Emmanuel Alloa/Thomas Bedorf/Christian Grüny/Tobias Nikolaus Klass: Einleitung I. Der Leibbegriff in der Phänomenologie Emmanuel Alloa / Natalie Depraz: Edmund Husserl – „Ein merkwürdig unvollkommenkonstituiertes Ding“ – Stefan Kristensen: Maurice Merleau-Ponty I – Körperschema undleibliche Subjektivität – Emmanuel Alloa: Maurice Merleau-Ponty II – Fleisch und Dierenz – David Espinet: Martin Heidegger – Der leibliche Sinn von Sein – Thomas Bedorf: EmmanuelLevinas – Der Leib des Anderen – Karel Novotný: Körper, Leib, Aektivität in Jan Pato č kasPhänomenologie der natürlichen Welt – Julia Scheidegger: Michel Henry – TranszendentaleLeiblichkeit – Jörg Sternagel: Bernhard Waldenfels – Responsivität des Leibes – Kerstin Andermann: Hermann Schmitz – Leiblichkeit als kommunikatives Selbst- und Weltverhältnis II. Zur Geschichte des Leibbegris Emmanuel Alloa: Archaische Leiblichkeit. Die griechische Antike und die Entdeckung desKörpers – Theresia Heimerl: Der Leib Christi und der Körper des Christen: Körper und Leib alszentrale Problemzonen des Christentums – Marc Rölli: Philosophische Anthropologie im 19. Jahrhundert – Zwischen Leib und Körper – Tobias Nikolaus Klass: Friedrich Nietzsche – Denkenam „Leitfaden des Leibes“ – Andreas Cremonini: Sigmund Freud – Der gelebte vs. derphantasmatische Leib – Uta Noppeney: Kurt Goldstein und Frederik Buytendijk – Der Leib-Begri in der organismischen Biologie – Volker Schürmann: Max Scheler und Helmuth Plessner– Leiblichkeit in der Philosophischen Anthropologie – Marion Lauschke: Ernst Cassirer und AbyWarburg – Kulturanthropologie III. Grenzen und Kritik des Leibbegris Christian Grüny: Theodor W. Adorno – Soma und Sensorium – Ulrich Johannes Schneider: Michel Foucault – Der Körper und die Körper – Burkhard Liebsch: Paul Ricoeur – Das leiblicheSelbst begegnet dem Widerstand des Anderen – Mirjam Schaub: Gilles Deleuze – Was weiß ein„Körper ohne Organe“ vom Leib? – Kathrin Busch: Jean-Luc Nancy – Exposition und Berührung– Shaun Gallagher: Embodiment: Leiblichkeit in den Kognitionswissenschaften – Marie-Luise Angerer: Gender und Performance – Ist leibliche Identität ein Konstrukt? – Thomas Bedorf/Selin Gerlek: Praxistheorien – Leibkörperliche Praktiken im Vollzug. (shrink)

One way in which bioethicists can benefit the medical community is by clarifying the concept of disorder. Since insurance companies refer to the DSM for whether a patient should receive assistance, one must consider the consequences of one’s concept of disorder for who should be provided with care. I offer a refinement of Jerome Wakefield’s hybrid concept of disorder, the harmful dysfunction analysis. I criticize both the factual component and the value component of Wakefield’s account and suggest how they might (...) be improved. I propose that the factual component should be statistical variation analyzed in multilevel and chronological compilations of physiological data. I propose that the value component should prioritize the individual’s authority regarding the experience of suffering from a physiological condition. My account preserves the insight of using a factual and a value component while avoiding the problems that Wakefield’s original account faces. (shrink)

** This piece was originally titled "Beyond Borders: Exploring Ubuntu as a Lived Philosophy" but was later retitled "African thought can rescue Western philosophy" by the publisher. ** -/- Western philosophy is often abstract and disconnected from the real ethical problems we face today. Emmanuel Chiwetalu Ossai and Lloyd Strickland argue that the African philosophy of ubuntu, with its emphasis on community, interconnectedness, and practical application of ethical principles, offers a compelling alternative.

Certain questions have recurred throughout the history of philosophy. They are the big questions-about happiness and the good life, the limits of knowledge, the ultimate structure of reality, the nature of consciousness, the relation between causality and free will, the pervasiveness of suffering, and the conditions for a just and flourishing society-that thinkers in different cultures across the ages have formulated in their own terms in an attempt to make sense of their lives and the world around them. The essays (...) in this book turn to the major figures and texts of the Buddhist tradition in order to expand and enrich our thinking on these enduring questions. Examining them from a comparative and cross-cultural perspective demonstrates the value of alternative ways of addressing philosophical problems, showing how different approaches can produce new and unexpected kinds of questions and answers. Engaging with the Buddhist tradition, this book shows, helps return philosophy to its practical as well as theoretical aim: not only understanding the world but also knowing how to live in it. Featuring striking and generative comparisons of Buddhist and Western thought, Philosophy's Big Questions challenges our thinking in fundamental ways and offers readers new conceptual tools, methods, and insights for the pursuit of a good and happy life. (shrink)

Prevailing literature argues that arguing is the only appropriate mode of deliberation. The literature acknowledges bargaining, story telling, and other forms of communication, but is unwilling to describe these as deliberation, properly speaking. The claim is that describing them as such would amount to concept stretching. In this article I argue that arguing exhausts neither the legitimate modes of deliberation nor the modes for effective deliberation. To do this I delineate two basic categories of issues we normally deliberate upon, and (...) demonstrate that arguing is more appropriate for one category, not so appropriate for the other. (shrink)

This article examines the controversy that has arisen in the last decade about Michel Foucault’s supposed “fascination” with neoliberalism, especially around the contributions of Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent. Their theses are contrasted with Foucauldian writings and reconsidered from a different approach to the historical, political and intellectual context of the French 1970s, which, in our opinion, shows a lack of complexity in the studies of those authors. Thus, this paper tries to establish that the limitations of Michel Foucault’s (...) approach to neoliberalism do not respond to any sort of neoliberal “sympathies”, but to another kind of problems-mainly analytical-. (shrink)

This article takes its inspiration from Jacques Derrida to consider how deconstructionism can be done inadvertently. This possibility is underscored when one considers how a very significant phrase in Ifá texts— “A díá fún...” has been construed away from its transliteration as “Ifá divination was performed for...” by each of Oluwole and Karenga. Oluwole justifies her “deconstruction” on the grounds that such transliteration does not capture the philosophic cogs gravid within Ifá verses. Karenga, through his Kawaida methodology, “improvises” to suit (...) the ethical inferences he seeks to deduce out of the corpus. On this showing, this research infers that each of these scholars have engaged in a reflective activity that passes, on Derrida’s reading, as deconstruction, unbeknownst to them. Would they admit that their intellectual drudgeries amount to postmodern philosophy? This is the primary research question that this disquisition interrogates. (shrink)

L'oeuvre du philosophe Paul Gilbert, jésuite belge professeur de métaphysique depuis vingt-cinq ans à l'Université Grégorienne, est considérable et mérite d'être mieux connue. Après avoir étudié les écrits de saint Anselme (Dire l'ineffable, 1984), Paul Gilbert a questionné la métaphysique classique, sous l'influence de la philosophie réflexive (La Simplicité du principe, 1994). Il a ensuite souligné les chances offertes à la réflexion fondamentale par l'analogie, thème classique mais oublié (La Patience d'être, 1996, et Sapere e sperare, 2003). Plus récemment, il (...) a abordé la question de la violence, ce mal- être si commun (Violence et compassion, 2009). En 1997 déjà, son travail a été récompensé du prix Cardinal Mercier de l'U.C.Louvain-la-Neuve. Durant de nombreuses années, Paul Gilbert a été professeur invité à l'Institut catholique de Paris. A l'occasion de son éméritat dans cette institution, un colloque y a été organisé. Dans leurs communications, S. Bonanni, Ph. Capelle-Dumont, S. D'Agostino, E. Gabellieri, J. de Gramont, 1. Malaguti, R. Repole et E. Tourpe reprennent et développent l'élaboration de la pensée de Paul Gilbert. Ce dernier fait écho à chacune d'elles et, dans un exposé final, retrace son propre itinéraire intellectuel. (shrink)

Procedural approaches to political legitimacy have become increasingly popular amongst liberals. According to such an approach, the legitimacy of a state decision is primarily derived from the processes followed in order to make that decision and not from the quality of the decision itself. The processes that liberals have in mind are typically those found within a system of democratic institutions. These electoral and legislative procedures are supposed to allow the state’s constitutive members to reach legitimately binding agreements on how (...) the state should exercise its power. In response to this trend in liberalism, this dissertation has two goals. The first is to argue that formal results in the social decision sciences seriously question the viability of these procedural approaches. The second goal, however, is to argue that these results do not necessitate complete abandonment of procedural approaches but require liberals to more carefully specify the sorts of agreements that legitimacy requires and what procedures may reliably produce such agreements. I ultimately agree that procedures are important for liberalism but they require more careful understanding and defense. In order to carry this project out, this dissertation is divided into five chapters. In the first two chapters, I outline a fairly standard account of liberalism while arguing that it contains a serious tension that liberal democratic institutions are supposed to resolve. The second chapter in particular seeks to explain the various ways in which the procedural aspects of democracy are particularly appealing in this respect. In the third chapter, I then present Arrow’s famous impossibility result along with other formal result from social choice theory suggesting that in certain situations there simply is no correct procedure for legitimate outcomes that the liberal state may employ. The fourth chapter responds to this concern by maintaining that there exists a symmetry between how an individual person and the liberal state make decisions, and that insights into individual decision making sheds light on how it may be done by a group of people in a liberal democracy. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I move in this direction by presenting an account of the sort of agreements between individuals that legitimacy ought to be grounded upon. Ultimately, procedures like voting remain an important aspect of liberal democracy for authorizing state action, though not necessarily for the reasons that many liberal democrats endorse. (shrink)

There have been two parallel views regarding the role of voting in deliberation. The first is that deliberation before the fabrication of balloting was completely devoid of voting. The second is that voting is, not just part of deliberation, but is standard to deliberation. I argue in this article that neither of these views is correct. Implicit voting has always existed across time and space but only as a last resort in the event of a failure of natural unanimity. What (...) is relatively modern is the establishment of what I call explicit voting, namely, balloting, outside deliberation and often without deliberation. I also distinguish between natural and artificial unanimities, and clarify that artificial unanimities are products of implicit voting. I demonstrate these clarifications with some examples of deliberation. I deploy these clarifications to rid a certain debate of confusion regarding the precise role of voting in consensual deliberation. (shrink)

In By Way of Obstacles, Emmanuel Falque revisits the major themes of his work--finitude, the body, and the call for philosophers and theologians to "cross the Rubicon" by entering into dialogue--in light of objections that have been offered. In so doing, he offers a pathway through a work that will offer valuable insights both to newcomers to his thought and to those who are already familiar with it. For it is only after one has carved out one's pathway that (...) one may see more clearly where one has been and where one might be going. Here readers will discover the profound relation between Falque's emphasis on the human experience of the world and his desire for philosophy and Christian theology to enter into conversation. For only by speaking within the human horizon of finitude can Christianity be credible for human beings, and it is because Christian theology teaches that God entered into our finitude that it can also teach us something of what it is to be human. Contemporary phenomenology, Falque warns, over-privileges an encounter with the infinite that cannot be originary. Calling us back to finitude, he calls us to a deeper understanding of our humanity. (shrink)

Ce livre-d'art s'articule autour de 30 citations du philosophe Emmanuel Levinas illustrées par le peintre Martin Tom Dieck.

This introductory chapter gives an overview of the emergent field of Critical Transparency Studies. Moreover, it traces some genealogical lines of how, from the eighteenth century onwards, what was known in Antiquity as an optical and aesthetic phenomenon—diaphaneity—came to stand for central concerns in self-knowledge, morality and politics. Such an analysis of the historical semantics of transparency highlights the irreducible plurality of the phenomenon. Against tendencies of seeing transparency as a means of achieving self-coincidence, unicity and self-stability, the chapter sketches (...) an alternative understanding of transparency as diaphaneity and fleshes out the dynamic, transversal and often conflictual nature of sense, making way for a more comprehensive understanding of the contradictions of social existence. (shrink)

"Dieu existe-t-il?", question religieuse par excellence, est sans doute également la première question fondamentale de la métaphysique. Peut-on savoir si Dieu existe au moyen de notre intelligence? Le monde existe, mais peut-on convenir qu'il a pour cause un infini? Et quelle est alors la voie de passage du fini à l'infini? Le sens est la figure de l'Etre : c'est là le fait primaire et fondamental du réel.

L'être se présente comme une valeur fondamentale du réel et de la connaissance. Quant à l'unité, elle est évidemment relation à l'être. Pas d'être sans unité, pas d'unité sans être. D'où cette conséquence majeure que rien n'est intelligible, ontologiquement parlant, sans l'unité. L'exigence de la vérité, moteur de la recherche, demeure, mais c'est l'unité qui s'érige, par sa certitude et son universalité, en principe inconditionné.

English summary: Nietzsche's work does not fit into readily defined categories or disciplinary fields. Rejecting definitive truths and assumptions, he nourished his philosophical explorations with constant experimentation, reading widely on texts as varied as Greek philosophy, Darwinian evolution, thermodynamic cosmology, and the history of religion. Through this multiplication of perspectives, Nietzsche developed a philosophy of culture that sought to raise mankind up beyond the possibilities of Judeo-Christian values. Although his philosophy would later be misappropriated for National Socialism, other much nobler (...) readers, such as Heidegger and Foucault, would find value in his works. French description: L'oeuvre de Nietzsche ne se presente pas comme un systeme qui permettrait une categorisation simple dans un champ disciplinaire existant. Professeur de philologie classique a l'Universite de Bale, Nietzsche a renonce a sa chaire universitaire pour devenir un philosophe itinerant et un esprit libre. C'est l'epoque ou il rompt avec ses anciens mentors: Arthur Schopenhauer, son maitre en philosophie, et Richard Wagner, ce mystagogue dans les secrets de l'art et de la vie dont il avait salue le projet culturel dans La Naissance de la tragedie (1872). Nietzsche se mefiera dorenavant de toutes les convictions et de toutes les verites definitives. Sa philosophie sera une constante experimentation, nourrie d'innombrables lectures qui forment quasiment un panorama de l'histoire de la culture humaine: des Grecs a la theorie de l'evolution darwinienne, de la cosmologie thermodynamique a l'anthropologie evolutionniste, en passant par l'histoire du christianisme et des religions extra europeennes. On assiste chez Nietzsche a une multiplication indefinie des perspectives, au fil d'ecrits aphoristiques qui ne livrent jamais leur dernier mot. Une problematique essentielle se dessine cependant a travers ces multiples experimentations: c'est celle d'une philosophie de la culture, qui aspire a elever l'homme - tant au sens d'un elevage zoologique que d'une elevation de valeur - pour en faire un etre plus epanoui et plus puissant qu'il ne l'a ete jusqu'a present sous l'emprise des valeurs judeo chretiennes. Nietzsche propose ainsi une veritable transvaluation de toutes les valeurs, qui se veut tout autre chose qu'un retour a la barbarie des origines. L'auteur d'Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra a conscience, ce faisant, de s'affirmer comme un philosophe dangereux. Mais il pense que la creation est fondamentalement indissociable de la destruction, voyant dans cette idee le secret du dionysiaque et donc de la tragedie grecque. Les posterites de l'oeuvre de Nietzsche confirment son caractere a la fois dangereux et fecond. On ne saurait passer sous silence l'appropriation nazie, qui oblige a s'interroger sur ce qui, chez Nietzsche, pouvait preter le flanc a un tel detournement. Mais pour autant, il serait injuste de reduire Nietzsche a cette tragique caricature, alors qu'il a trouve en Heidegger, Deleuze ou encore Foucault des lecteurs bien plus dignes de lui. (shrink)

Cette contribution apporte des éclaircissements sur le rôle du médecin et psychanalyste Heinrich Meng dans les réseaux de l’Institut de recherche sociale, en particulier sur sa perspective hygiéniste en santé mentale. Directeur adjoint de l’Institut de psychanalyse de Francfort au côté de Karl Landauer, Meng fut le porteur d’un programme de réformes sociales et de prévention appelé Psychohygiene, une conception de l’hygiène mentale adossée à la psychanalyse. Ce cadre de référence explique pourquoi et comment Meng a surtout été force de (...) propositions en prophylaxie plutôt qu’en théorie, à l’unisson avec les pédagogues et les associations engagées dans la prévention en santé mentale. Même si Meng fut l’éditeur de nombreux ouvrages de psychanalyse appliquée aux institutions sociales, il est resté en marge de la Théorie critique, à la fois à l’écart des sciences sociales et en dehors des premiers cercles de l’institut en exil. (shrink)

The moral debate about open borders needs to go beyond focusing on the interests of the migrant versus the interests of the hosting state and its original citizens to focusing more on the interests of the countries that migrants are leaving. I hint at the long-term insufficiency of so-called economic remittances to the development of migrant-sending states when compared to domiciled skilled labor. But most importantly, I identify the irrelevance of current empirical research on brain drain to an open borders (...) scenario. I hint at the potential scale of brain drain in such a scenario, and I raise a moral question about the propriety of proposing open borders with a focus on the wellbeing of the individual migrant if such a focus is determined to be at the expense of the wellbeing of the migrant’s home country. I add that a preamble to opening borders would be to significantly address gross global economic disparities, world poverty, and political injustices. (shrink)

La crise sanitaire et sociale provoquée par la Covid-19 a été surmontée par des dispositions qui relèvent autant d’une logique de précaution que de prévention. En effet, la certitude liée à l’existence de ce virus n’a pas suffi à lever toutes les zones d’ombre sur son traitement. Au moins au début de la crise, c’est l’existence même d’un risque qui pouvait être discutée. En conséquence, les dispositions adoptées, sous la menace de sanctions pénales, relèvent en partie d’une logique de précaution (...) dont l’analyse appelle des commentaires mitigés. Il en va a fortiori de même pour l’usage des qualifications de droit commun qui s’avèrent inadaptées. (shrink)