Here we are witness to the great cultural event of the West, the emergence of a Latin philosophical language translated from the Greek. Once again, it would be necessary to make a systematic study of the formation of this technical vocabulary that, thanks to Cicero, Seneca, Tertullian, Victorinus, Calcidius, Augustine, and Boethius, would leave its mark, by way of the Middle Ages, on the birth of modern thought. Can it be hoped that one day, with current technical means, it will (...) be possible to compile a complete lexicon of the correspondences of philosophical terminology in Greek and Latin? Furthermore, lengthy commentaries would be needed, for the most interesting task would be to analyze the shifts in meaning that take place in the movement from one language to another. In the case of the ontological vocabulary the translation of ousia by substantia, for example, is justly famous and has again recently inspired some remarkable studies. This brings us once more to a phenomenon we discretely alluded to earlier with the word philosophia, and which we will encounter throughout the present discussion: the misunderstandings, shifts or losses in meaning, the reinterpretations, sometimes even to the point of misreading, that arise once tradition, translation, and exegesis coexist. So our history of the Hellenistic and Roman thought will consist above all of recognizing and analyzing the evolution of meanings and significance. Pierre Hadot holds the chair of the History of Hellenistic and Roman Thought at the Collège de France. He is the author of many books and articles on the history of ancient philosophy and theology. Among his works are Plotin et la simplicité du regard, Porphyre et Vitctorinus, Marius Victorinus: Recherches sur sa vie et ses oeuvres, and Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, is associate professor of philosophy and a member of the Committees on the Conceptual Foundations of Science and General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He introduced and edited the “Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism” . He is currently working on the history of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations. Paula Wissing, a free-lance translator and editor, has recently translated Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks . She also contributed translations of articles by Maurice Blanchot, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas for the “Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism.”. (shrink)

The rubric “The Late Derrida,” with all puns and ambiguities cheerfully intended, points to the late work of Jacques Derrida, the vast outpouring of new writing by and about him in the period roughly from 1994 to 2004. In this period Derrida published more than he had produced during his entire career up to that point. At the same time, this volume deconstructs the whole question of lateness and the usefulness of periodization. It calls into question the “fact” of his (...) turn to politics, law, and ethics and highlights continuities throughout his oeuvre. The scholars included here write of their understandings of Derrida’s newest work and how it impacts their earlier understandings of such classic texts as Glas and Of Grammatology . Some have been closely associated with Derrida since the beginning—both in France and in the United States—but none are Derrideans. That is, this volume is a work of critique and a deep and continued engagement with the thought of one of the most significant philosophers of our time. It represents a recognition that Derrida’s work has yet to be addressed—and perhaps can never be addressed—in its totality. (shrink)

Pierre Hadot, whose inaugural lecture to the chair of the History of Hellenistic and Roman Through at the Collège de France we are publishing here, is one of the most significant and wide-ranging historians of ancient philosophy writing today. His work, hardly known in the English-reading world except among specialists, exhibits that rare combination of prodigious historical scholarship and rigorous philosophical argumentation that upsets any preconceived distinction between the history of philosophy and philosophy proper. In addition to being the (...) translator and author of monographs on Plotinus, Vitorinus, Porphyry, and many others, Hadot’s most important general philosophical work is entitled Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique.1 Combined with detailed studies of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, this work presents a history of spiritual exercises from Socrates to early Christianity, an account of their decline in modern philosophy, and a discussion of the different conceptions of philosophy that have companied the trajectory and fate of the theory and practice of spiritual exercises. Hadot’s “Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy” provides an overview of his major themes and preoccupations, and gives some indication of the historical scope of his work. This lecture also illuminates the methodological problems one faces in studying the history of thought, especially problems concerning the evolution, reinterpretation, and even misunderstanding of the meaning and significance of philosophical terminology. In this brief introduction, I can do no more than attempt to provide a context for Hadot’s inaugural lecture, by way of summary of his major work, and, more specifically for reader’s of Critical Inquiry, to sketch the profound importance that Hadot’s writings had for the last works of Michel Foucault. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, is associate professor of philosophy and a member of the Committees on the Conceptual Foundations of Science and General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He introduced and edited the “Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism” . He is currently working on the history of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations. (shrink)

Imitators of God: Leibniz on Human Freedom JACK DAVIDSON QUESTIONS CONCERNING DIVINE AND HUMAN FREEDOM mattered to Leibniz. He found the problems surrounding these issues important and difficult to solve, at one point writing: "There are two labyrinths of the human mind: one concerns the composition of the continuum, and the other the nature of freedom" : Although there is no unanimity among scholars about the details to his solution to the labyrinth of freedom, most have thought that Leibniz (...) is a compatibilist: Lately, however, some commentators have charged that, appearances to the contrary, Leibniz is actually an incom- patibilist about freedom.3 This new reading is exciting and important because ' All works of Leibniz are cited by page number unless otherwise indicated. The first citation is to a source in the original language. Where they exist, the English translation of the same passage is cited next. I want to thank Robert Sleigh for making available original-language sources not available in libraries, and for his generosity in sharing translations. In this paper I follow his translation of the Confessio Philosophi and of ~Du Franc Arbitre" . I quote more than is customary in a scholarly work because some of the texts are relatively inaccessi- ble and many are not translated into English. 9 I understand causal determinism to be the view that every event has a set of events causally sufficient to.. (shrink)

The legacy of Husserlian phenomenology in France, as Paul Ricœur observes, has inspired a series of “Husserlian heresies.” This paper seeks to shedlight on the Husserl heretics through a study of two influential thinkers who introduced Husserl’s to French readers: Levinas and Ricoeur. Their introductionsgave rise to the “standard picture” of Husserl as an Idealist. Their criticism of Husserl’s Idealism then provides the springboard into their own originalthought. What ultimately emerges from this, however, are two different visions of how (...) phenomenology should relate to its own limits. (shrink)

A la fin du XIXe siècle, l'image de la femme criminelle est devenue une obsession nationale en France. Partout on vendait des pamphlets et des gravures relatant ces crimes en détail. Même les journaux en parlaient à loisir. Tout en analysant la criminalité féminine de fin-de-siècle à Paris, Ann-Louise Shapiro raconte des histoires remplies de détails fascinants sur la vie quotidienne, le système judiciaire et la place des femmes dans la société. L'auteur explore plusieurs perspectives ..

This volume of new essays by an international group of scholars examines the response of Hans-Georg Gadamer to Plato, especially to the Philebus. The book studies Gadamer's interpretative approach to the dialogues and unwritten doctrines of Plato. It also shows how, for Gadamer, reading Plato was intimately interconnected with formulating his own philosophical views. The volume also brings out how Gadamer influenced Donald Davidson in his reading of Plato and his philosophical thought. The volume thus explores a fascinating case-study (...) of the creative reception of Plato by two major twentieth-century philosophers, Gadamer and Davidson, while also clarifying Gadamer's relationship to Heidegger. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Plato, especially on the Philebus, and also to scholars of twentieth-century thought. (shrink)

Ce livre ambitieux, basé sur des recherches impressionnantes et poussées, représente une contribution importante à l’histoire des femmes et du travail en France. Les objectifs de l’auteur – démontrer les liens entre les évolutions dans le monde de travail, la division sexuelle du travail, et des différentes représentations du travail (p. 15) – sont certainement légitimes. Néanmoins, cet ouvrage est soit trop ambitieux soit ne l’est pas assez, car en choisissant une durée qui va du dix-huitièm...

Dans un article paru en 2005, « Making society ‘legible’ : people watching in Paris after the Revolution », Denise Davidson, historienne américaine de la France du premier XIXe siècle à la Georgia State University, étudiait le phénomène de brouillage identitaire qui agitait la société parisienne postrévolutionnaire. Par le biais d’une étude de la presse et des rapports de police, elle montrait alors comment Parisiens et Parisiennes s’observaient mutuellement et se donnaient à voir afin de r...

Il n’est pas facile de voir quel est l’objectif de ce livre. Au chapitreI, Rivenc annonce que ce qui l’intéresse est le lien chez Davidson entre le format d’une théorie de la signification pour les langues naturelles et le thème de l’interprétation radicale qui serait à l’œuvre dans tout échange linguistique. En fait, Rivenc ne dit à peu près rien sur ce lien. Son livre consiste plutôt en une suite de critiques disparates du programme de Davidson, qu’il emprunte (...) à différents commentateurs de celui-ci. L’auteur omet de présenter les réponses à ces critiques qu’ont données les sympathisants de l’approche davidsonienne, et n’essaie pas de tirer des leçons plus générales de ces critiques concernant la sémantique des langues naturelles. (shrink)

Truth, Language, and History is the much-anticipated final volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical writings. In four groups of essays, Davidson continues to explore the themes that occupied him for more than fifty years: the relations between language and the world; speaker intention and linguistic meaning; language and mind; mind and body; mind and world; mind and other minds. He asks: what is the role of the concept of truth in these explorations? And, can a scientific world view make (...) room for human thought without reducing it to something material and mechanistic? Including a new introduction by his widow, Marcia Cavell, this volume completes Donald Davidson's colossal intellectual legacy. (shrink)

Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973-1974. Ed. Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham Burchell, intro. Arnold I. Davidson,. Extract from Chapter One, 7 November 1973.

Someone may intend to build a squirrel house without having decided to do it, deliberated about it, formed an intention to do it, or reasoned about it. And despite his intention, he may never build a squirrel house, try to build one, or do anything whatever with the intention of getting a squirrel house built. Pure intending of this kind, intending that may occur without practical reasoning, action, or consequence, poses a problem if we want to give an account of (...) the concept of intention that does not invoke unanalysed episodes or attitudes like willing, mysterious acts of the will, or kinds of causation foreign to science. (shrink)

A theory of radical interpretation gives the meanings of all sentences of a language, and can be verified by evidence available to someone who does not understand the language. Such evidence cannot include detailed information concerning the beliefs and intentions of speakers, and therefore the theory must simultaneously interpret the utterances of speakers and specify (some of) his beliefs. Analogies and connections with decision theory suggest the kind of theory that will serve for radical interpretation, and how permissible evidence can (...) support it. (shrink)

Paul Ricœur made a lot to introduce analytic philosophy in France during the 70s and 80s, and he engaged in a dialogue with a number of authors from this tradition, such as Austin, Strawson, Davidson or Parfit. This dialogue, though, was one-sided, since there was no discussion of his views by analytic philosophers. Moreover, Ricœur often misunderstood or misprepresented the analytic views that he was discussing. So in many ways the Ricœur’s encounter with analytic philosophy was unsuccessful, which (...) does not mean that Ricœur’s discussions where unfruitful for his own work. Résumé Paul Ricœur a fait beaucoup pour introduire la philosophie analytique en France pendant les années 1970 et 1980, et il a entrepris un dialogue avec les auteurs de cette tradition, comme Austin, Strawson, Davidson ou Parfit. Mais ce dialogue est cependant resté unilatéral, car il n’y a pas eu de discussion des thèses de Ricœur au sein de la tradition analytique. De plus Ricœur a souvent mécompris les vues analytiques qu’il discutait. En ce sens il n’y a pas eu de rencontre entre Ricœur et les philosophes analytiques, ce qui ne veut pas dire que les discussions par Ricœur des philosophes anaytiques n’aient pas été fructueuses pour son œuvre propre. (shrink)

At the end of the 19th century, the vocabulary of sexuality - perversion - became one of the primary means by which people began to articulate and think about their individuality, their sense of self. Joining authors like Ian Hacking and Arnold Davidson, I suggest the importance of a ‘style of reasoning’ to the creation of sexual kinds at the end of the 19th century, a kind of reasoning that might be styled as historical. For the invert to become (...) possible as a human kind, the conceptual space for an understanding of inverts as specific kinds needed to be cleared. In France, this was accomplished by conceiving individuals as elaborated historically, as the product of prior generations, and by differentiating them from other kinds of people via notions of heredity and degeneration. The invert was plotted within the meta-récit of French progress (and national degeneration). This logic of ‘historicization’ also entailed the scrutiny of the patient’s past in order to reveal his or her ‘nature’ as pathological. Understanding the conceptualization of inversion as including, in part, a ‘pursuit of memory’ provides a window onto the vexing question of how people come to take up their classifications; that is, how discourses interact with the subjects they purport to describe. Through the ‘pursuit of memory’, persons were encouraged to (re)describe their pasts in terms of the present diagnosis. An essential attribute of the literature on ‘inversion’ was precisely such an historically formed understanding of pathological individuals; an understanding that ushered in the transformation from acts to natures, from individuals to kinds, from sodomites to homosexuals. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers interested in value theory appear to be largely concerned with questions of the following sort:What is value?What is the meaning of the word ‘good’?Does the attribution of value to an object have a cognitive, or merely an emotive, significance?The first question is metaphysical; to ask it is analogous to asking in physics:What is matter?What is electricity?The others are generally treated as semantical questions; to ask them is analogous to asking in statistics:What is the meaning of the word ‘probable’?Does (...) an attribution of probability express an objective fact, or merely a subjective attitude? (shrink)

Containing the debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky on epistemology and politics, this book also features the most significant essays by the most important French thinkers who influenced and were influenced by Foucault. Foucault's teachers, colleagues, and collaborators take up his major claims, from his first to final works, and provide us with the authoritative context in which to understand Foucault's writings. This volume also includes several important works by Foucault previously unpublished in English. The other contributors are Georges (...) Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Hadot, Michel Serres, and Paul Veyne. Here for the first time is the French Foucault. This volume offers lucid and important texts that will appeal to students and professors at every level of study. It is essential reading for all scholars of twentieth-century philosophy and critical theory. (shrink)

We see the world through language; but how should we understand this metaphor? Is language a medium that simply reproduces for the mind, or accurately records, what is out there? Or is it so dense there is no telling what the world is really like? Perhaps language is somewhere in between, a translucent material, so that the world bears the tint and focus of the particular language we speak.

"Publié en 1994, traduit chez Vrin en 2007, L'esprit et le monde de John McDowell n'a cessé de susciter des débats dans le monde philosophique anglo-saxon, sur l'esprit, la connaissance, le langage et la nature, contribuant à définir de nouvelles questions. Pour la première fois, cette oeuvre, qui emprunte aussi bien à Wittgenstein, Strawson et Davidson qu'à Kant et Hegel, et tente de dépasser l'opposition traditionnelle entre la philosophie dite "continentale" et la philosophie dite "analytique", fait l'objet d'une lecture (...) critique en France. Les contributions ici rassemblées, ainsi que les réponses de John McDowell, font suite à une "première vague" de commentaires critiques qui lui furent adressés et qui le conduisirent à s'expliquer sur ses thèses et à en modifier légèrement quelques-unes (comme la thèse du contenu conceptuel de la perception). On trouvera ici, dans les différentes contributions, un éclairage sur les raisons et les portées de cette critique, et, dans les réponses, des formulations pour la plupart tout à fait inédites de McDowell."--Page 4 de la couverture. (shrink)

Sometimes form-meaning mappings in language are not arbitrary, but iconic: they depict what they represent. Incorporating iconic elements of language into a compositional semantics faces a number of challenges in formal frameworks as evidenced by the lengthy literature in linguistics and philosophy on quotation/direct speech, which iconically portrays the words of another in the form that they were used. This paper compares the well-studied type of iconicity found with verbs of quotation with another form of iconicity common in sign languages: (...) classifier predicates. I argue that these two types of verbal iconicity can, and should, incorporate their iconic elements in the same way using event modification via the notion of a context dependent demonstration. This unified formal account of quotation and classifier predicates predicts that a language might use the same strategy for conveying both, and I argue that this is the case with role shift in American Sign Language. Role shift is used to report others’ language and thoughts as well as their actions, and recently has been argued to provide evidence in favor of Kaplanian “monstrous” indexical expressions. By reimagining role shift as involving either quotation for language demonstrations or “body classifier” predicates for action demonstrations, the proposed account eliminates one major argument for these monsters coming from sign languages. Throughout this paper, sign languages provide a fruitful perspective for studying quotation and other forms of iconicity in natural language due to their lack of a commonly used writing system which is otherwise often mistaken as primary data instead of speech, the rich existing literature on iconicity within sign language linguistics, and the ability of role shift to overtly mark the scope of a language report. In this view, written language is merely a special case of a more general phenomenon of sign and speech demonstration, which accounts more accurately for natural language data by permitting more strict or loose verbatim interpretations of demonstrations through the context dependent pragmatics. (shrink)

Works out the implications of the claims of Ch. 5. Concepts used to explain actions of thinking creatures are irreducibly causal: the explanatory causal vocabulary that we call upon to interpret the semantics of a thinking object or creature is normative, relying on the interpreter's own standards of rationality. Sciences like physics, on the other hand, seek explanations and laws in which causal concepts no longer figure. Neither knowledge of the syntactical program of a computer nor knowledge of the neurophysiology (...) of an organism warrant our attributing to the object or creature a holistic normative network of concepts, acquired through its interactions with the surrounding world. Consequently, information, ends, or strategies can be represented in such a system, but the system cannot be interpreted as having the information, ends, or strategies. Generally, then, the difference between mind and body is not an ontological difference between types of entities, but a difference between schemes of classificatory concepts. (shrink)

The author believes the attitude of the interpreter plays a crucial role in the theory of meaning. ‘Expressing Evaluation’ extends this strategy to evaluative judgements: just as the questions of belief and meaning are entwined, so are belief, meaning, and evaluation, where evaluating includes attitudes such as desires. This does not conflict with Davidson's claim that interpretation is a holistic act, in the sense that an interpreter weighs the attitudes of a subject against each other so as to render (...) them intelligible or rational by the interpreter's standards. Justifies the thesis that desire is the most basic attitude in this interpretive process and that understanding presumes a shared body of evaluations as well as desires. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Notes.