The moving spotlight account (MS) is a view that combines an eternalist ontology and an A-theoretic metaphysics. The intuition underlying MS is that the present time is somehow privileged and experientially vivid, as if it were illuminated by a moving spotlight. According to MS-theorists, a key reason to prefer MS to B-theoretic eternalism is that our experience of time supports it. We argue that this is false. To this end, we formulate a new family of positions in the philosophy of (...) time, which differ from MS in that, intuitively, they admit a plurality of moving spotlights. We argue that these ‘deviant’ variants of MS cannot be dismissed as conceptually incoherent, and that they are as well-supported by our experience as is MS. One of these variants, however, is consistent with the B-theory. Thus, if our experience of time supports MS, then it supports the B-theory as well. (shrink)

In this Introduction we lay out the context of a ‘Continental philosophy of biology’ and suggest why Georges Canguilhem’s place in such a philosophy is important. There is not one single program for Continental philosophy of biology, but Canguilhem’s vision, which he referred to at one stage as ‘biological philosophy’, is a significant one, located in between the classic holism-reductionism tensions, significantly overlapping with philosophy of medicine, philosophy of technology and other themes moving away from the more common existential and (...) phenomenological motifs of post-war European thought. Chapters examine (among other themes) his relation to Lebensphilosophie, to authors such as Kant, Nietzsche and Marjorie Grene, and to current theoretical biology. (shrink)

This paper explores taste fragmentalism, a novel approach to matters of taste and faultless disagreement. The view is inspired by Kit Fine’s fragmentalism about time, according to which the temporal dimension can be constituted—in an absolute manner—by states that are pairwise incompatible, provided that they do not obtain together. In the present paper, we will apply this metaphysical framework to taste states. In our proposal, two incompatible taste states (such as the state of rhubarb’s being tasty and the state of (...) rhubarb’s being distasteful) can both constitute reality in an absolute manner, although no agent can have joint access to both states. We will then develop a formalised version of our view by means of an exact truthmaker semantics for taste assertions. Within this framework—we argue—our linguistic and inferential practices concerning cases of faultless disagreement are elegantly vindicated, thus suggesting that taste fragmentalism is worth of further consideration. (shrink)

The paper considers sentences in which “now” occurs in initial position and shows that the meaning they convey differs from the meaning of sentences that are otherwise identical except for “now” occurring in final position. We argue that the occurrence of “now” in initial position triggers a particular kind of modal reading for the sentence to which the adverb is prefixed. A general notion of modal forcing is proposed to provide a uniform account of this kind of reading. Armed with (...) this account, we offer a solution to two tense-modal puzzles, which have to do with fatalism and the possibility of a changing past. (shrink)

Central figures in the phenomenological tradition, such as Aron Gurwitsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, drew extensively on gestalt psychology in their writings. The dialogue between phenomenology and psychology they began continues today in the field of embodied cognitive science. We take up this conversation starting from Aron Gurwitsch’s rich phenomenological analysis of the perception of the cultural world. Gurwitsch’s phenomenological descriptions of the perception of the cultural world bear a striking resemblance to work in embodied cognitive science that takes (...) its inspiration from Gibson’s ecological psychology. Gibson coined the term “affordance” to refer to the possibilities for action that can be directly perceived by persons [Gibson 1979]. However, Gibson from his earliest writings made a distinction between a universal, strictly individual and nonsocial form of perception and a perception of the world that was subject to social and cultural influences. We use Gurwitsch to argue against Gibson’s individualist understanding of direct perception. Each affordance that can be selected as an object of perception refers to a wider sociocultural context, which Gurwitsch called an “order of existence”. We end our paper by taking up the question of the relation of phenomenological description of the perceptual world and explanations of perceptual experience provided by embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

In one of his last writings, Life: Experience and Science, Michel Foucault argued that twentieth-century French philosophy could be read as dividing itself into two divergent lines: on the one hand, we have a philosophical stream which takes individual experience as its point of departure, conceiving it as irreducible to science. On the other hand, we have an analysis of knowledge which takes into account the concrete productions of the mind, as are found in science and human practices. In order (...) to account for this division, Foucault opposed epistemologists such as Cavaillès and Canguilhem to phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre but, also, and more particularly, he opposed Poincaré to Bergson. The latter was presented by Foucault as being the key-figure of the ?philosophy of experience? at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fifteen years later, in his Deleuze and in the Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou again uses this dual structure in his interpretation of the past hundred years of French thought. He employs a series of oppositional couples: himself and Deleuze, Lautmann and Sartre, and, finally, Brunschvicg and Bergson. On the one hand a ?mathematical Platonism? and on the other a ?philosophy of vital interiority.? This Manichean reading of philosophy, and the strategic use of the figure of Bergson has, itself, a long tradition. It was also proposed by Althusser who, following Bachelard, opposed his standpoint to any form of ?empiricism.? Althusser developed his thought from a tradition of Marxist thinkers and ideologists, which included Politzer's and Nizan's critique of bourgeois philosophy and, even before that, neo-Kantians such as the philosophers of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. The aim of this essay is to deconstruct and to put into its precise context of production this series of genealogies which entails the mobilization of Bergsonism and of the name ?Bergson.? By doing so, I hope to weight the importance of Bergsonism in twentieth-century French philosophy, in both its ?positive? and its ?negative? aspect. The essay will proceed regressively, taking into account figures such as Althusser, Badiou, Deleuze, Foucault, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, but also Polizer, Brunschvicg and Alain. The conclusion of the essay is an attempt at reading the ?Bergson renaissance? in the light of new discoveries in genetics and the cognitive sciences and to tie it to the renewal of studies in the history of French philosophy. (shrink)

In his classic introduction to the subject, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders, Aaron Beck observes that “the philosophical underpinnings” of cognitive therapy’s (CT) approach to the emotional disorders “go back thousands of years, certainly to the time of the Stoics, who considered man’s conceptions (or misconceptions) of events rather than the events themselves as the key to his emotional upsets” (Beck 1976, 3). But beyond acknowledging that the stoics anticipated the central insight of CT, Beck has very little to (...) say about the philosophical underpinnings of CT, content it would seem for it to be an empirically grounded system of psychological principles and therapeutic methods. Yet even this little .. (shrink)

Célèbre traducteur et commentateur de Hegel, historien de la philosophie contemporaine, passeur de textes et de concepts, professeur et directeur de travaux universitaires, Jean Hyppolite (1906 - 1968) fut un vrai " protecteur de la nouveauté " et, partant, une figure essentielle au développement de la philosophie française du XXe siècle. Ce livre rassemble, avec les contributions de certains de ses anciens élèves les plus éminents (Badiou, Balibar, Macherey) et de chercheurs étrangers, nombre de ses écrits - dont son premier (...) et son dernier essai - restés inédits ou devenus indisponibles. Un entretien de 1965 entre Jean Hyppolite et Alain Badiou complète le livre. (shrink)

Per non aver cercato nel cristianesimo il suo essere reale, ma una ristretta ideologia, si è tutto compromesso; si è imprigionato il dogma vivente nelle bende che lo fanno assomigliare a un morto, riducendo i teologi a guardiani di museo, e gli storici simili ad archeologi alla ricerca del più antico reperto. Si è condannata, così, la storia a diventare un'allegoria; e a un chiodo dipinto sul muro si appenderà sempre una catena dipinta». Siamo nel 1904, dalle parole di Maurice (...) Blondel emerge la preoccupazione per le forti tensioni che dividono il cattolicesimo. Per i più le bende della dottrina mummificata non devono essere sciolte, ma al massimo impegnarsi a ristrutturare il sepolcro. Egli cercherà una soluzione tra esegesi e teologia, per conciliare storia e dogma, che nella loro divaricazione riflettono la ricorrente tentazione di strappare il Verbo dalla carne. Dopo una severa analisi critica delle due principali teorie antagoniste, storicismo ed estrinsecismo, che in diverso modo convergono nel separare natura e soprannatura, indicherà una sintesi, una mediazione, attraverso il principio della Tradizione, proposto non come collegamento solo teorico alle radici, non «una catena dipinta», ma come fonte di progresso, pulsante vita. Il cristianesimo, allora, potrà manifestarsi «come metafisica in atto, tensione unitiva tra Dio e l'umanità, e non come religione di pergamene e scribi». Un testo che pur venendo dal passato, guadagna nel presente la sua evidente attualità. (shrink)

Este estudio analiza el problema de la relación entre metafísica e historia en la filosofía viquiana, y cómo ésta es capaz de reconducir el certum al verum. Plantea el autor cómo Vico mantiene unidos los modelos racionales, posibilitando un universalismo ético que permite conjugar la normatividad del juicio universal y la diferencia histórico-cultural de lo individual.PALABRAS CLAVE: Vico, ética, universalismo ético, identidad, diferencia, historicidad.The problematic relationship between metaphysics and history in Vichian philosophy is here analysed –and the way it transforms (...) certum into verum. The author considers Vico’s attempts to keep rational models together, allowing the appearance of an ethical universalism that combines universal judgment normativity and historical-cultural difference of the individual.Keywords: Vico, ethics, ethical universalism, identity, difference, historicity. (shrink)

Contrary to the fairly standard view of Aquinas on temperance according to which this virtue habituates the concupiscible appetite to move in ways that accord with reason spontaneously, that is, independently of any immediate command from reason, the author of this paper argues that temperance is a virtue which "(1) disposes the concupiscible appetite to remain more or less still in the absence of any command from reason to move, thus preventing vehement, spontaneous passions of any sort, ordinate or inordinate, (...) from arising in the concupiscible appetite prior to reason's immediate command; and (2) also disposes the concupiscible appetite to obey reason's command so that a person may incite, increase, decrease, or curb a passion as needed." The paper ends by noting a lacuna in Aquinas's teaching on temperance. (shrink)

" Presents a series of fifteen essays by professional philosophers that elaborate and extend Jacques Maritain's philosophy of nature"--Provided by publisher.

This dissertation examines Aquinas's teaching on the acts specific to temperance. According to a widespread interpretation of this teaching , the proper act of temperance is spontaneous, ordinate passion. Temperance thus not only causes someone to experience the right passions towards the right objects but does so antecedent to reason's command. Indeed, temperance is thought to have little if anything to do with reason's control of the passions. In an introductory chapter, I show that this understanding of temperance faces a (...) number of serious objections. In the next four chapters, I develop the thesis that the proper act of temperance is ordinate, consequent passion alone; the only relation temperance has to antecedent passion is simply to prevent it from ever being vehement, affecting only its intensity, not its ordination. ;I develop my thesis by examining Aquinas's teaching on the passions, which can only be consistently ordinate if commanded by reason ; reason's control of the passions, which can be consistent only if the sense appetite is habituated to obey reason alone, thus preventing it from being moved by any of the external or internal sense powers when they move antecedent to reason's command ; habit, which is not a principle of spontaneous action or passion, but is rather something we use only when we will . Temperance is thus a habit that gives reason nearly complete control of the passions, a moral virtue that is used only when we will and thus is exclusively a cause of ordinate, consequent passion . ;In the final chapter, observing that Aquinas is silent on the consistency with which the temperate person experiences spontaneous, ordinate passions, I attempt to fill this lacuna by developing the notions of "semi-virtue" and "semi-virtuous passion," building on Aquinas's teaching on the internal sense powers, especially the cogitative power. (shrink)

This paper analyzes Zubirian concept of historical reality and it is focused on “traditive transmission” and on History refluence on human reality. It also hints at a comparison between Zubiri and Dilthey on the concept of life and it tries to show a proximity started from the role played by the concept of unreal and figuration. At the end, it deals with the figure of Ellacuria and the way in which he has developed Zubirian reflection on History in the terms (...) of Philosophy of liberation. The ethical dimension of Zubiri’s philosophy is one of the characteristics of a Metaphysics compatible with pluralism and for this reason worthy of the times. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Antihumanism of the Young Deleuze:Sartre, Catholicism, and the Perspective of the Inhuman, 1945–48Giuseppe BiancoGilles Deleuze, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and to a lesser extent Jean-François Lyotard, is considered an avatar of post-structuralism, and often associated with the critique of the concepts of identity and subjectivity. In this essay, I seek to identify the early sources of Deleuze's rejection of the notions of ego and person. In (...) the decade following 1944, one buzzword linked these two notions: humanism. Inspired by the evidential paradigm,1 and by using archival documents and little-known writings, I suggest why Deleuze's position, and the context in which it developed, can illuminate his mature work, especially his use of the concepts of immanence and univocity.Deleuze's engagement with anti-humanism—or, to be precise, with "inhumanism" and "impersonalism," the expressions Deleuze and his friends [End Page 795] used during the 1940s—is rooted in his radicalization of Jean-Paul Sartre's atheistic philosophy, which he read and discussed between 1943 and 1948. During this period, Deleuze was involved in gatherings organized by Catholic historians of medieval philosophy, including his mentor Maurice de Gandillac and Marie-Madeleine Davy. Gandillac, Davy, and their circles were interested in the existentialist and phenomenological movements, which they occasionally read within a theological framework. By radicalizing the positions detailed in works such as Being and Nothingness (1943) and "Transcendence of the Ego" (1936), Deleuze and his friend Michel Tournier confronted the mutation of Sartre's philosophy that began with his lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism" (given in 1945 and published as a book the following year). They considered this turn to be incoherent with the core of his philosophy and to have conservative political consequences. This radical stance distinguished them from an older generation of scholars.Stefanos Geroulanos has shown that opposition to humanism, broadly conceived, emerged in French thought during the 1930s.2 To him, the idea that humanism had to be rejected and especially that anthropological questions had to be overcome began in the middle of that decade and reemerged in the later 1940s, with atheist and secular rejections of liberal humanism shadowing Catholic and, to a lesser degree, communist ones. However, I would argue that this ideological transformation in fact slowed somewhat in the decade following 1944. During this period, as Edward Baring has also claimed, most French intellectuals utilized "humanism" to oppose totalitarian and "anti-human" ideologies and to promote doctrines underlining the uniqueness of man as compared to other beings, the centrality of freedom, and the importance of defending human rights.3 Critiques of humanism took a final turn during the 1950s, after the publication of Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" (1947).4 From the late 1950s, and even [End Page 796] more so during the 1960s, the question of Being and the analysis of unconscious structures became common among scholars born during the interwar years as ways to overcome humanism and its limitations. During the 1960s, far more than during the 1930s, opposition to humanism and to the centrality of the notion of human subjectivity became radical and explicit; in this period, the term "anti-humanism" took hold, whereas, prior to the 1960s, it was rare and used as a pejorative. Deleuze used "inhumanism" far earlier than other authors of his cohort, already in 1945–48: by comparison, in the early 1950s, both Foucault and Derrida were still relying on different forms of humanism—in the case of the former, Marxist/existentialist; in the case of the latter, existential/spiritualist.5 Their turn toward anti-humanism during the mid-1950s was the result of the influence of Heidegger, Jean Hyppolite, Jules Vuillemin, and linguistic structuralism, through Lévi-Strauss.6 Not only did Deleuze reach antihumanist positions earlier, before even some of his professors, but he got there along a different way. Sartre's works were a defining theoretical influence at the beginning of Deleuze's intellectual trajectory, and they gave it a peculiar theoretical direction. During the 1940s, authors such as Bergson, Spinoza, and Nietzsche were not yet dear to Deleuze, and they did not occupy the important role that they... (shrink)