Wahrend Ludwig Wittgenstein in der philosophischen Diskussion zunehmend Interesse findet, ist die systematisch-padagogische Bedeutung insbesondere seiner Fruhphilosophie bisher nicht beachtet worden: Wittgenstein gilt weithin als Sprachphilosoph, nicht aber als Ethiker oder gar als Grundlegungstheoretiker der Padagogik. Demgegenuber wird in dieser Arbeit aufgewiesen, dass der Argumentationsgang des Tractates stringent auf eine indirekte ethisch-padagogische Mitteilung zielt, und es werden die in ihm enthaltene philosophische Grundlegung einer Padagogik sowie einige ihrer Grundzuge entwickelt.".

Michel Foucault entwickelt sich gegenwartig zweifellos zu einer der neuen Bezugsgrossen des padagogischen Diskurses: Nach einer langen Phase grosser Widerstande innerhalb der deutschsprachigen Erziehungswissenschaft werden jetzt die ...

To question power means also to ask what makes us governable and enables us to govern. This paper addresses this issue by rephrasing the question ‘what is power?’ into the question: ‘to what problem can power be seen as a response?’. This transformation allows us to keep the ‘power of power’ in sight. It then elucidates the ‘how’ of power through some conceptual explorations and theoretical clarifications as well as through an explicitly anthropological problematisation of power, as the way in (...) which power is understood depends always also on the way in which people understand themselves. Reassessing Foucault's rejection of anthropological reflections, the paper sketches a structural matrix of human self‐conceptions through which power and also critique can be reconstructed systematically. (shrink)

Plato's Republic lurks in cybernetics, a word popularly attributed to US American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964). In his accounts of how he came up with it, however, Wiener never mentions Plato, though he does note it was formed from the ancient Greek word kubernētēs (navigator). Among the earliest popular books about the cybernetics craze are three published in France, and their authors show a special interest in the origin of cybernetics. In something like learned rebukes to Wiener, all three (...) books credit Plato with significant use of kubernē-based terms. This article presents evidence, one, that Wiener knows well he has chosen a word with a Platonic history and, two, that Wiener deems the technical and social climate of ancient Athens (and of the Republic) instructive only as an anti-model for the mid-20th-century United States and so does not feel compelled to associate cybernetics with Plato. Instead, Wiener focuses on the challenges cybernetics and automation pose for his own engineering-oriented, capitalist, multiracial, democratic republic. Wiener's decisions not to use Plato as an authorizing force and not to put ancient Athens on a pedestal merit recognition, since subsequent writers link ancient Athens with cybernation via a presumption that cybernation will enable and fully democratize the sort of leisure activities, including thinking and participation in public life, deemed by some to be emblematic of ancient Athens. (shrink)

Norbert Elias (1897-1990) is now widely regarded as one of the greatest sociologists of the 20th century. The challenge and profundity of his work are still being assimilated. Some have suggested that in time, he will be regarded as the Copernicus or Darwin of sociology, the man who set the subject on its scientific course. These four volumes provide a comprehensive and penetrating survey of Elias's life and work. They pinpoint the main fields of research which Elias and his (...) followers have explored: the civilizing process; state-formation; knowledge, religion and science; informalization; power; established-outsider figurations in fields such as class, gender and race; the sociology of the body; the sociology of the emotions; the sociology of leisure, sport and the arts; the sociology of the professions; medicine and psychoanalysis; crime and punishment; drug use and abuse. The collection also explores the various critiques of Elias's `figurational' or `process' sociology and counter-critiques by Elias's followers. The volumes successfully locate the work of Elias and his followers in the context of modern sociology, especially in relation to writers such as Mannheim, Adorno, Parsons, Goffman, Foucault and Bourdieu. In the penetrating, original and informative Introduction, Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell elucidate Elias's sociological contributions and the bearing his life experiences had on his work. The collection is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the sociological contribution of Norbert Elias. The collection is organized in the following 4 volumes: Volume 1 Focuses on Elias's work in the context of his life and career, and reviews his place in the contemporary social sciences, especially in relation to such figures as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Also discussed in this volume are Elias's pathbreaking contributions to such issues as: the 'agency-structure' dilemma; habitus; power; involvement and detachment; knowledge and the sciences; time; and the relations between history and sociology. Volume 2 Addresses Elias's major empiricallybased contributions to sociological theory, especially the theories of the civilizing process, state formation and established-outsider figurations. Also discussed are informalization and de-civilizing processes, and the applications of the established-outsider theory to such fields as race, gender and sexuality. Volume 3 Examines figurational contributions to special areas of sociology such as: the sociology of the body; the sociology of the emotions; the sociology of everyday life, sport, leisure, lifestyles, taste, music and the arts; deviance and crime; the sociology of health and illness; psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychology; death and dying; and drugs and tobacco use. Volume 4 Focuses on criticisms of Elias's work and the responses of Elias and his sociological followers. Key themes are: civilization and the Holocaust; sports violence, especially soccer hooliganism; the meanings and value of concepts like 'development', 'evolution' and 'change'; and the relative merits of long-term and short-term approaches. The end of the volume returns to the issue of Elias's place in contemporary sociology and the growing worldwide recognition of the significance of his contribution. Eric Dunning is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leicester; Stephen Mennell is Professor of Sociology, University College Dublin. (shrink)

4e de couv.: Les écrits de Michel Foucault sont stratifiés, hiérarchisés, entre les livres, les entretiens et les cours au Collège de France, mais ils sont surtout disséminés dans leurs usages. Désormais, et en plus de l'histoire des sciences et de la philosophie, les "effets" Foucault sont palpables sur la théorie de la littérature et du cinéma, l'histoire culturelle et sociale, les théories du genre, la pensée politique, les sciences de gestion, etc. C'est dans ce chantier ouvert que se (...) situe cet ouvrage. Il s'agit pour Jérôme Lamy, Jean-François Bert et leur équipe de spécialistes de resituer et d'analyser une pensée empruntant des questionnements à d'autres champs, de la psychologie à l'économie, de la science politique à la géographie, tout en ne se réclamant pas de ces sciences humaines et sociales. Pour comprendre la position de Foucault, les grands axes méthodologiques qu'il a parcourus sont retracés, telle l'archéologie, l'épistémè, la problématisation. Les concepts, des ouvrages maintenant classiques aux cours et à l'histoire de la sexualité, sont également revisités. Cette lecture critique des écrits et des usages de Foucault permet de le confronter aux analyses les plus récentes en sciences sociales, comme les postcolonial studies, ou de suivre les dialogues engagés (parfois à distance) avec des auteurs comme Norbert Elias, Michel de Certeau et Pierre Bourdieu. Un inventaire aussi rigoureux qu'éclairant. (shrink)

“What characterizes the act of justice is not resort to a court and to judges; it is not the intervention of magistrates. What characterizes the juridical act, the process or the procedure in the broad sense, is the regulated development of a dispute. And the intervention of judges, their opinion or decision, is only ever an episode in this development. What defines the juridical order is the way in which one confronts one another, the way in which one struggles. The (...) rule and the struggle, the rule in the struggle, this is the juridical.” - Michel Foucault Penal Theories and Institutions is the title Michel Foucault gave to the lectures he delivered at the Collège de France from November 1971 to March 1972. In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first time his approach to the question of power that will be the focus of his research up to the writing of Discipline and Punish and beyond. His analysis starts with a detailed account of Richelieu’s repression of the Nu-pieds revolt and then goes on to show how the apparatus of power developed by the monarchy on this occasion breaks with the system of juridical and judicial institutions of the Middle Ages and opens out onto a “judicial State apparatus”, a “repressive system”, whose function is focused on the confinement of those who challenge its order. Michel Foucault systemizes the approach of a history of truth on the basis of the study of “juridico-political matrices” that he had begun in the previous year’s lectures and which is at the heart of the notion of “knowledge-power”. In these lectures Foucault develops his theory of justice and penal law. The appearance of this volume marks the end of the publication of the series Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION THE SEEMING CONTINGENCY OF THE QUESTION CONCERNING THE BODY AND THE NECESSITY FOR AN ONTOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE BODY When we disclose and..

It is commonly thought that authors can make anything whatsoever true in their fictions by artistic fiat. Harry Deutsch originally called this position the Principle of Poetic License. If true, PPL sets an important constraint on accounts of fictional truth: they must be such as to allow that, for any x, one can write a story in which it is true that x. I argue that PPL is far too strong: it requires us to abandon the law of non-contradiction and (...) entails a radical revision of otherwise ordinary commitments about truth in fiction. (shrink)

There is a striking difference between the methodology of the young Einstein and that of the old. I argue that Einstein’s switch in the late 1910s from a moderate empiricism to an extreme rationalism should at least in part be understood against the background of his crushing personal and political experiences during the war years in Berlin. As a result of these experiences, Einstein started to put into practice what, drawing on Schopenhauer, he had preached for years, namely to use (...) science as his means of escaping from “the merely personal.” Whatever the exact sources of Einstein’s about-face, the older man has left us with a highly misleading picture of how the younger man achieved the successes that we still celebrate today. This has had a harmful influence on theoretical physics. If the young Einstein’s successes are any guide as to how successful theoretical physics is done, close adherence to general features of the empirical data is much more and mathematical elegance is much less important than the old Einstein wanted us to believe. (shrink)

Readers of this volume will notice that it contains only a few papers on general relativity. This is because most papers documenting the genesis and early development of general relativity were not published in Annalen der Physik . After Einstein took up his new prestigious position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1914, the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin academy almost by default became the main outlet for his scientific production. Two of the more important papers on (...) general relativity, however, did find their way into the pages of the Annalen [35,41]. Although I shall discuss both papers in this essay, the main focus will be on [35], the first systematic exposition of general relativity, submitted in March 1916 and published in May of that year. (shrink)

This book’s basic argument is that the Freudian unconscious, far from constituting a radical break with the philosophy of consciousness, is merely the latest exemplar in a heritage of philosophical misunderstanding of the Cartesian cogito that interprets “I think, therefore I am” as “I represent myself, therefore I am” (in the classic interpretation of Heidegger, one of the targets of the book).

Most discussions frame the Liar Paradox as a formal logical-linguistic puzzle. Attempts to resolve the paradox have focused very little so far on aspects of cognitive psychology and processing, because semantic and cognitive-psychological issues are generally assumed to be disjunct. I provide a motivation and carry out a cognitive-computational treatment of the liar paradox based on a cognitive-computational model of language and conceptual knowledge within the Predictive Processing framework. I suggest that the paradox arises as a failure of synchronization between (...) two ways of generating the liar situation in two different PP sub-models, one corresponding to language processing and the other to the processing of meaning and world-knowledge. In this way, I put forward the claim that the liar sentence is meaningless but has an air of meaningfulness. I address the possible objection that the proposal violates the Principle of Unrestricted Compositionality, which purportedly regulates the conceptual competence of thinkers. (shrink)

Contemporary or postmodern thought is based on the lack of foundation. The impossibility of having a principle for philosophy has become a position of principle. As a result, rhetoric has taken over. Content has given way to the priority of form. Michel Meyer's book aims at showing that philosophy as foundational is possible and necessary, and that rhetoric can flourish alongside, but the conception of reason must be changed. Questioning rather than answering must be considered as the guiding principle. (...) What the author calls "problematology" is not only the study of questioning but also the analysis of the reasons why it has been repressed throughout the history of philosophy. Since Socrates, philosophers and scientists have reasoned by asking questions and by trying to solve them. Questioning has been the unthematized foundation of philosophy and thought at large. Philosophers, however, have preferred another norm, granting privilege to the answers and thereby repressing the questions into the realm of the preliminary and unessential. They have not considered their discursive practice as being based upon some question-answer complex, but exclusively on the results they call propositions. Meyer argues that propositions ensue from corresponding questions, and not the other way around. Anthropology, ontology, reasoning, and language thus receive a new interpretation in the problematological conception of philosophy, a conception in which questions and problems are thematized afresh. The theory of language in everyday use, in argumentation, or in literary analysis receives a full and decisive treatment here, making Meyer's question-view one of the leading theories in contemporary thought, alongside his rhetoric for which he is already well known. (shrink)

Introduction -- The classical theories -- Emile Durkheim -- Talcott Parsons and structural functionalism -- Karl Marx and marxism -- Max Weber -- The successors -- Norbert Elias -- Critical theory, the Frankfurt school and Jurgen Habermas -- Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionism -- Michel Foucault -- Pierre Bourdieu -- The present -- The latest modern age -- Modernisation theory -- Conclusions.

La véritable esthétique de la Mort n'est pas d'en répartir le domaine en catégories, mais d'examiner le fait de l'Art tut entier sous l'hypothèse de sa présence prépondérante au sein même des démarches créatrices (...). Une esthétique de la Mort. Dans une nouvelle dialectique, Mort ne recouvre pas une idée vague, mais si le mot Vie me sollicite à la reconnaissance de tous les éléments fondamentaux d'une présence intérieure à moi-même, devenant Moi par la pensée que je lui accorde, Mort (...) implique une prise de conscience analogue et antagoniste (...). L'art dit s'examiner préférentiellement dans ses liens avec la Mort, et non dans l'arbitraire liaison avec la vie, dont toute prépondérance dans l'œuvre est la véritable perturbation affectant les rapports pré-établis, valorisants, de l'œuvre et de la Mort. Michel Guiomar. (shrink)

More or less explicitly inspired by the Aristotelian classification of arguments, a wide tradition makes a sharp distinction between argument and proof. Ch. Perelman and R. Johnson, among others, share this view based on the principle that the conclusion of an argument is uncertain while the conclusion of a proof is certain. Producing proof is certainly a major part of mathematical activity. Yet, in practice, mathematicians, expert or beginner, argue about mathematical proofs. This happens during the search for a proof, (...) then when the proof is presented and discussed by experts, and finally when it is taught or used in didactical contexts. (shrink)

Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy was widely regarded as the pre-eminent art theorist of his day and exerted tremendous influence over the development of the arts in nineteenth-century France, publishing over twenty books over his career. Translated into English for the first time by Michel-Antoine Xhignesse, this 1837 treatise on imitation in the arts represents one of his major theoretical works. Quatremère de Quincy argues, against the prevailing opinion of the day, that artistic imitation aims at communicating the essence of (...) the thing represented (ideal imitation), rather than merely faithfully reproducing its life appearance (real imitation). In order to communicate the essence, he argues, the artist must prioritize the contributions of her imagination over the choice and appearance of her model. This represented a significant departure from other accounts of ideal imitation, such as Batteux’s or Winckelmann’s, which instead advocated combining the best features of several different models. (shrink)

La visée de cette étude se résume en peu de mots : abandonné à lui-même, le système économico-politico-social actuel est condamné et son trépas sera douloureux, à moins qu’une réforme profonde ne survienne. Les pistes de réflexion qu’il rassemble dans cette étude trouvent leur origine dans deux systèmes de pensée complémentaires : la philosophie organique du dernier Whitehead et le matérialisme dialectique de Marx. Poliment mis entre parenthèses comme une double aberration historique, leurs travaux ont pourtant déterminé les balises conceptuelles (...) de tous les problèmes contemporains : les racines et les enjeux de la technoscience, du matérialisme, du capitalisme et de l’existence démocratique dans une biosphère en faillite, au propre comme au figuré... De plus, ce balisage s’alimente d’une pensée processuelle et pragmatique qui est tout à fait à l’ordre du jour. Ainsi, à la lumière des travaux de ces deux penseurs, Michel Weber aborde la thèse simple suivante : la civilisation occidentale mondialisée a atteint un point de rupture qui ne tardera plus à se manifester sous une forme insurrectionnelle, à moins que des réformes radicales soient promptement mises en oeuvre. Il en propose principalement trois : déprofessionnaliser la politique, recentrer la société sur les communautés et restaurer le droit régalien de battre monnaie. En somme, il s’agit ici de dessiner une réponse politique à une crise globale systémique qui est radicalement politique. (shrink)

These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delivered at the Collège de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society. Praise for Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France Series “Ideas spark off nearly every page...The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s], but (...) they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday.”—Bookforum “Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are...[He] is carrying out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture.”—The Nation “[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual coded and ask new questions...[He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture.”—The New York Review of Books. (shrink)

English summary: This commentary of Plato's Euthydemus demonstrates its place as the clearest text for understanding the relationship between Platonism and Sophism. French description: De tous les dialogues de Platon, l'Euthydeme est peut-etre le plus exclusivement consacre a l'elucidation de la relation du platonisme avec la sophistique. Ce qu'on a pris pour indigence de son contenu, c'est l'acuite avec laquelle la forme y est consideree. Formalisme moral de Socrate, formalisme eristique des sophistes: dans la lecon d'eristique donnee a Socrate apparait, (...) plus clairement peut-etre que dans aucun texte antique, la logique propre au discours sophistique, celle-la meme a laquelle a affaire dans sa totalite le texte platonicien. La sophistique, et Platon avec elle, relevent d'un regime de discours pre-aristotelicien, et c'est dans la pratique de ce discours que demande a etre reinscrite la tant galvaudee ironie socratique. (shrink)

With this profound final work, completed in the days leading up to his death, Michel Serres presents a vivid picture of his thinking about religion—a constant preoccupation since childhood—thereby completing Le Grand Récit, the comprehensive explanation of the world and of humanity to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life. Themes from Serres's earlier writings—energy and information, the role of the media in modern society, the anthropological function of sacrifice, the role of scientific knowledge, the problem (...) of evil—are reinterpreted here in the light of the Old Testament accounts of Isaac and Jonah and a variety of Gospel episodes, including the Three Wise Men of the Epiphany, the Transfiguration, Peter's denying Christ, the Crucifixion, Emmaus, and the Pentecost. Monotheistic religion, Serres argues, resembles mathematical abstraction in its dazzling power to bring together the real and the virtual, the natural and the transcendent; but only in its Christian embodiment is it capable of binding together human beings in such a way that partisan attachments are dissolved and a new era of history, free for once of the lethal repetition of collective violence, can be entered into. (shrink)