Dans l’un de ses cahiers, en 1935, Simone Weil note pour elle-même : « Tu ne pourrais pas être née à une meilleure époque que celle-ci où on a tout perdu. » ( OC VI 1, p. 118 1 ). Une telle phrase indique une attitude : s’inscrire exactement dans le monde moderne, et s’en relever. Car il ne s’agit pas de revenir en arrière : celle qui met sa pensée et sa vie au service de ceux qui sont (...) écrasés par la force, en bas de l’échelle sociale, qui diagnostique le présent et fustige « la civilisation moderne » et « ses poisons » n’est ni traditionaliste, ni réactionnaire. Estelle antimoderne? S’inscrit-elle dans une telle filiation? Cette catégorie peut-elle fournir un principe d’intelligibilité pour son œuvre? Cette question fournit l’occasion d’examiner le rapport de S. Weil à la modernité. (shrink)

There was no dialogue between Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas. In many regards, however, their philosophies have much in common. Both defend a conception of human rights as rights of others and as an obligation for the self. Both understand this obligation as an obligation of attention and action for others, based on their needs and their vulnerability. Both find the source of this obligation in the transcendence of the other, and both connect it with a radical passivity of (...) the self, who is subjected to this obligation in spite of itself. At the same time, this proximity between the two philosophers entails and reveals profound differences between them, partially due to the difference between Weil’s metaphysics of light and Levinas’s metaphysics of language. These differences concern the status of subjectivity and of its duty toward the other, as well as the idea of an acceptation of sufferance, especially of the sufferance of others. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce qui oriente la philosophie? Depuis Platon, le philosophe est celui qui tourne son regard vers le Bien et qui adopte une manière de vivre en accord avec sa pensée. Qu'est devenue cette manière de vivre comme exigence philosophique, pour un philosophe qui se laisse inspirer par la révélation chrétienne? Faut-il la nommer "sainteté"? Cet ouvrage présente six philosophes du XXe siècle qui ont cherché à accorder leur pensée et leur manière de vivre : Maurice Blondel, Erich Przywara, Simone (...) class='Hi'>Weil, Aimé Forest, Michel Henry, Edith Stein. Des philosophes à l'écoute d'une inspiration qui oriente leur existence. La philosophie comme un acte de résistance spirituelle. Il y a là beaucoup à apprendre. (shrink)

Cet article compare deux interprétations de l’amour chez Antigone, celle de Martha Nussbaum, d’un côté, et celle de Simone Weil, de l’autre. Nussbaum considère qu’Antigone est froide, fermée et excessive, tandis que Weil observe chez Antigone une très rare et exigeante forme d’amour. Alors que Nussbaum défend une vision émotive et presque romantique de l’amour, Weil évoque un amour « impersonnel », dont l’ancrage n’est pas émotif. Ce type d’amour décentre de soi-même et a un effet extatique (...) : il sort l’individu de lui-même. À l’instar d’Antigone qui résiste au pouvoir, cet amour ouvre à de nouvelles configurations éthiques et politiques. (shrink)

The thesis that mental content is normative is ambiguous and has many forms. This article deals only with the thesis that normativity is connected to our mental attitudes rather than with the content of the attitudes, and more specifically with the view that it is connected to belief. A number of writers have proposed various versions of a ‘norm of truth’ attached to belief. I examine various versions of this claim, and defend it against recent criticisms according to which this (...) norm lacks normative force, that it violates the principle that ‘ought implies can,’ and that it is viciously circular. I defend the view that we should distinguish the statement of the objective norm and the way it is regulated, and that this distinction can answer most of the criticisms of the norm of truth for belief. (shrink)

Since its origin, bioethics has attracted the collaboration of few social scientists, and social scientific methods of gathering empirical data have remained unfamiliar to ethicists. Recently, however, the clouded relations between the empirical and normative perspectives on bioethics appear to be changing. Three reasons explain why there was no easy and consistent input of empirical evidence into bioethics. Firstly, interdisciplinary dialogue runs the risk of communication problems and divergent objectives. Secondly, the social sciences were absent partners since the beginning of (...) bioethics. Thirdly, the meta‐ethical distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ created a ‘natural’ border between the disciplines. Now, bioethics tends to accommodate more empirical research. Three hypotheses explain this emergence. Firstly, dissatisfaction with a foundationalist interpretation of applied ethics created a stimulus to incorporate empirical research in bioethics. Secondly, clinical ethicists became engaged in empirical research due to their strong integration in the medical setting. Thirdly, the rise of the evidence‐based paradigm had an influence on the practice of bioethics. However, a problematic relationship cannot simply and easily evolve into a perfect interaction. A new and positive climate for empirical approaches has arisen, but the original difficulties have not disappeared. (shrink)

"I know of no religious writer more pertinent to our time."—T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Pensees Intended to prove that religion is not contrary to reason, Pascal's Pensees rank among the liveliest and most eloquent defenses of Christianity. Motivated by the seventeenth-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623–1662) had intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity in which he argued the inability of reason to address metaphysical problems. His untimely death prevented the work's completion, (...) but the fragments published posthumously in 1670 as Pensees remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. W. F. Trotter translation. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. (shrink)

Belief is not a unified phenomenon. In this paper I argue, as a number of other riters argue, that one should distinguish a variety of belief-like attitudes: believing proper - a dispositional state which can have degrees - holding true - which can occur without understanding what one believes - and accepting - a practical and contextual attitude that has a role in deliberation and in practical reasoning. Acceptance itself is not a unified attitude. I explore the various relationships and (...) differences between these doxastic attitudes, and claim that although acceptance is distinct from belief, it rests upon it, and is therefore a species of belief. (shrink)

This article identifies power, subjectivity, and practices of freedom as neglected but significant elements for understanding the ethics of social entrepreneurship. While the ethics of social entrepreneurship is typically conceptualized in conjunction with innate properties or moral commitments of the individual, we problematize this view based on its presupposition of an essentialist conception of the authentic subject. We offer, based on Foucault’s ethical oeuvre, a practice-based alternative which sees ethics as being exercised through a critical and creative dealing with the (...) limits imposed by power, notably as they pertain to the conditioning of the neoliberal subject. To this end, we first draw on prior research which looks at how practitioners of social enterprises engage with government policies that demand that they should act and think more like prototypical entrepreneurs. Instead of simply endorsing the kind of entrepreneurial subjectivity implied in prevailing policies, our results indicate that practitioners are mostly reluctant to identify themselves with the invocation of governmental power, often rejecting the subjectivity offered to them by discourse. Conceiving these acts of resistance as emblematic of how social entrepreneurs practice ethics by retaining a skeptical attitude toward attempts that seek to determine who they should be and how they should live, we introduce three vignettes that illustrate how practices of freedom relate to critique, the care for others, and reflected choice. We conclude that a practice-based approach of ethics can advance our understanding of how social entrepreneurs actively produce conditions of freedom for themselves as well as for others without supposing a ‘true self’ or a utopian space of liberty beyond power. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce que la conscience? Un chemin pour se connaître. La question de la conscience est sans doute la plus importante de la philosophie, mais aussi la plus essentielle dans nos vies : sans la conscience, il n'y a pas de philosophie et nous n'existons plus! Dans cet ouvrage magistral, Serge Carfantan pose la question de la conscience en s'appuyant sur les philosophes orientaux et occidentaux. Des auteurs classiques sont convoqués : Pascal, Hegel, Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Bergson, Sartre, Maine de (...) Biran, Freud, Simone Weil mais aussi des maîtres indiens, des enseignants spirituels ou des poètes : Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Swami Prajnanpad, Krisnamurti, René Daumal, Jean Klein, Steve Jourdain... L'auteur distingue les différents états de conscience, donne la signification de l'éveil spirituel, de la conscience pure, et propose un véritable chemin de connaissance de soi. (shrink)

Bering argues that belief in posthumous intentional agency may confer added fitness via the inhibition of opportunistic behavior. This is true only if these agents are interested parties in our moral choices, a feature which does not result from Bering's imaginative constraint hypothesis and extends to supernatural agents other than dead people's souls. A by-product model might handle this better.

Religions “in the wild” are the varied set of religious activities that occurred before the emergence of organized religions with doctrines, or that persist at the margins of those organized traditions. These religious activities mostly focus on misfortune; on how to remedy specific cases of illness, accidents, failures; and on how to prevent them. I present a general model to account for the cross-cultural recurrence of these particular themes. The model is based on features of human psychology—namely, epistemic vigilance, the (...) set of systems whereby we evaluate the quality of information and of sources of information, and threat-detection psychology, the set of evolved systems geared at detecting potential danger in the environment. Given these two sets of systems, the dynamics of communication will favor particular types of messages about misfortune. This makes it possible to predict recurrent features of religious systems, such as the focus on nonphysical agents, the focus on particular cases rather than general aspects of misfortune, and the emergence of specialists. The model could illuminate not just why such representations are culturally successful, but also why people are motivated to formulate them in the first place. (shrink)

What is truth? What value should we see in or attribute to it? The war over the meaning and utility of truth is at the center of contemporary philosophical debate, and its arguments have rocked the foundations of philosophical practice. In this book, the American pragmatist Richard Rorty and the French analytic philosopher Pascal Engel present their radically different perspectives on truth and its correspondence to reality. Rorty doubts that the notion of truth can be of any practical use (...) and points to the preconceptions that lie behind truth in both the intellectual and social spheres. Engel prefers a realist conception, defending the relevance and value of truth as a norm of belief and inquiry in both science and the public domain. Rorty finds more danger in using the notion of truth than in getting rid of it. Engel thinks it is important to hold on to the idea that truth is an accurate representation of reality. In Rorty's view, epistemology is an artificial construct meant to restore a function to philosophy usurped by the success of empirical science. Epistemology and ontology are false problems, and with their demise goes the Cartesian dualism of subject and object and the ancient problematic of appearance and reality. Conventional "philosophical problems," Rorty asserts, are just symptoms of the professionalism that has disfigured the discipline since the time of Kant. Engel, however, is by no means as complacent as Rorty in heralding the "end of truth," and he wages a fierce campaign against the "veriphobes" who deny its value. _What's the Use of Truth?_ is a rare opportunity to experience each side of this impassioned debate clearly and concisely. It is a subject that has profound implications not only for philosophical inquiry but also for the future study of all aspects of our culture. (shrink)

Cognitive developmental evidence is sometimes conscripted to support ''naturalized epistemology'' arguments to the effect that a general epistemic stance leads children to build theory-like accounts of underlying properties of kinds. A review of the evidence suggests that what prompts conceptual acquisition is not a general epistemic stance but a series of category-specific intuitive principles that constitute an evolved ''natural metaphysics''. This consists in a system of categories and category-specific inferential processes founded on definite biases in prototype formation. Evidence for this (...) system provides a better understanding of the limited ''plasticity'' of ontological commitments as well as a computationally plausible account of their initial state, avoiding ambiguities about innateness. This may provide a starting point for a ''naturalized epistemology'' that takes into account evolved properties of human conceptual structures. (shrink)

Plutôt que de rouvrir l'éternel débat entre tenants d'une histoire analytique de la philosophie et tenants d'une approche « authentiquement historique », il vaut mieux se demander si les premiers sont réellement condamnés à la trahison historique, et les seconds à la myopie historique. La démarche consistant à aborder le passé de la philosophie d'aval en amont est compatible avec une fidélité historique dès lors qu'on est prêt à reconnaître que ce ne sont pas seulement des textes qui se transmettent (...) à l'intérieur d'une tradition, mais des arguments, et que ceux-ci peuvent passer d'une tradition à l'autre. Instead of reopening the eternal debate between the partisans of an « analytical » approach to the history of philosophy and the partisans of an « genuinely historical » approach, let us rather ask ourselves whether the former are necessarily condemned to betray history and the latter condemned to historical myopia. Approaching the past of philosophy from downstream to upstream is compatible with a fidelity to history once we acknowledge the fact that not only texts, but also arguments are passed on within a tradition and outside it. (shrink)

La contribution de Schelling à l’esthétique aura d’abord consisté à en récuser l’appellation et le projet, expressément rattachés à la science du beau fondée par Baumgarten, parce que l’art n’est pas essentiellement axé, à ses yeux, sur le sensible, mais sur une beauté élevée au-dessus de toute sensibilité. La philosophie de l’art a pour tâche de présenter la philosophie universelle sous la puissance de l’art, de construire l’univers sous la forme de l’art. La généalogie de l’art à partir de l’Absolu, (...) en laquelle consiste une telle construction, en est aussi la reconstitution, dans l’horizon marqué d’historicité d’une théogonie (ou histoire des dieux) où l’apparition des dieux signale l’avènement de la forme. Dans quelle mesure la philosophie de l’art de Schelling demeure-t-elle comme une écharde dans la chair de l’esthétique? Est-on fondé à parler d’une réception à son propos? On posera ici quelques jalons. (shrink)

"I know of no religious writer more pertinent to our time."—T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Pensees Intended to prove that religion is not contrary to reason, Pascal's Pensees rank among the liveliest and most eloquent defenses of Christianity. Motivated by the seventeenth-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623–1662) had intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity in which he argued the inability of reason to address metaphysical problems. His untimely death prevented the work's completion, (...) but the fragments published posthumously in 1670 as Pensees remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. W. F. Trotter translation. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. (shrink)

Le sceptique nous demande " Comment sais-tu que tu as deux mains? Peut-être rêves-tu, ou es-tu trompé par quelque Malin Génie? Peut-on même définir ce que c'est que la connaissance? Va savoir! " Lui rétorquer, comme le faisaient G.E. Moore et la tradition de la philosophie du sens commun : " Mais je sais bien que j'ai deux mains! " semble à la fois une pétition de principe et une bien mauvaise réponse. Le mieux, depuis que nous avons perdu le (...) souci de fonder nos croyance sur des raisons ultimes, serait, tout simplement, de ne pas se soucier des questions du sceptique. Ce que l'on sait dépend, nous dit-on, des circonstances, et toutes nos connaissances sont faillibles. N'y a-t-il pas plutôt des savoirs, dont l'histoire nous montre combien leurs modes de validations sont variés? Ce livre entend refuser ce type de réponse contextualiste et relativiste. Il propose de revenir à la réponse de sens commun de Moore, à partir des reformulations contemporaines des raisonnements sceptiques issues de la philosophie analytique de la connaissance. Personne ne peut nous envoyer savoir quelque chose que nous ne pourrions pas savoir. De fait, nous savons, mais notre savoir n'est pas transparent : nous n'avons pas besoin de savoir que nous savons. Pour parvenir à cette réponse, il faut replacer la notion de connaissance, plutôt que celle de croyance justifiée ou rationnelle, au centre de l'épistémologie, et reformuler des questions traditionnelles comme celles de la nature de la perception, du témoignage, et de la connaissance a priori. On peut aussi reprendre le vieux projet d'une enquête sur la nature de la connaissance en général. (shrink)

The doxastic zoo contains many animals: belief, acceptance, belief in, belief that, certainty, conjecture, guess, conviction, denial, disbelief in, disbelief that, judgment, commitment, etc. It also contains belief’s “strange bedfellows”: credences, partial beliefs, tacit beliefs, subdoxastic states, creedal feelings, feelings of knowing, in-between believings, pathological beliefs, phobias, aliefs, delusions, biases, besires. How to order the zoo? I propose to distinguish doxastic attitudes from non-doxastic epistemic attitudes. The criterion is the existence of correctness conditions. Most bedfellows do not have such normative (...) conditions. So they should not be allowed in the Doxastic Club. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between morality and reasoning in a general sense. Following a broadly Aristotelian framework, it is shown that reasoning well about morality requires good character and a grounding in virtue and experience. Topic neutral ‘critical thinking’ on its own is not enough and may even be detrimental to morality. This has important consequences both for philosophy and for education. While morality is objective and universal, it should not be seen purely in terms of the intellectual grasp (...) of true propositions. As Simone Weil shows, it emerges from very basic aspects of our nature. As well as reasoning in an abstract sense we need what Pascal calls esprit de finesse based in our humanity as a whole, in sens, raison et coeur. The paper concludes with some reflections on our propensity to fail morally and on the relationship between virtue and happiness. (shrink)

Sosa takes epistemic normativity to be kind of performance normativity: a belief is correct because a believer sets a positive value to truth as an aim and performs aptly and adroitly. I object to this teleological picture that beliefs are not performances, and that epistemic reasons or beliefs cannot be balanced against practical reasons. Although the picture fits the nature of inquiry, it does not fit the normative nature of believing, which has to be conceived along distinct lines.

La logique occupe dans la pensée contemporaine une place privilégiée : elle est, pour certains, une méthode universelle et, pour d'autres, l'accomplissement d'une rationalité arrogante.Pascal Engel montre combien les questions philosophiques que soulève la logique sont, au-delà de leur apparente technicité, des plus classiques. La logique, en effet, circonscrit le domaine du vrai : quelle est la nature des vérités logiques? En quoi se distinguent-elles des autres vérités et sont-elles «nécessaires» ou «a priori»? Décrivent-elles les lois d'un univers immuable (...) ou sont-elles des règles et des conventions linguistiques que nous pourrions changer à notre guise? Les inférences dont traite la logique et que l'on dit souvent triviales peuvent-elles être fécondes, comme le soutenait Leibniz, par la seule «force de la forme»? Et qu'est-ce qu'une forme logique?Faire une philosophie de la logique, ce n'est pas seulement inventorier des formes, c'est surtout analyser leurs conditions d'application au langage, à la pensée et à la réalité. Ainsi la logique retrouve-t-elle sa place : celle d'une théorie des conditions normatives de la rationalité, d'une norme du vrai. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine a neglected debate between Francisco Suárez and Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza about the unity of composite substances. There was a consensus among the Jesuits on the fact that the per se unity of composite substances requires something in addition to matter and form. Like most Jesuits, Suárez and Hurtado further agree on the fact that this additional ingredient is not a full-blown thing, but a “mode of union.” However, while Suárez claims that the union is (...) achieved through a single mode, Hurtado maintains that it is necessary to postulate two distinct modes of union, one modifying form and another modifying matter. I argue that this disagreement actually reflects an important ontological debate about the nature of the items that serve as the cement of things and that it eventually leads later Jesuits like Rodrigo de Arriaga to conceive of union as a polyadic or “straddling” mode. (shrink)

In the last few decades, great progress has been made in both genetic and genomic research. The development of the Human Genome Project has increased our knowledge of the genetic basis of diseases and has given a tremendous momentum to the development of new technologies that make widespread genetic testing possible and has increased the availability of previously inaccessible genetic information. Two examples of this exponential evolution are the increasing implementation of next-generation sequencing technologies in the clinical context and the (...) expanding commercial offer of genetic tests directly-to-consumers.Firstly, the rapid development of next generation sequencing technologies has substantially reduced both the cost and the time required to sequence an entire human genome. These technologies are increasingly being used in the clinical setting with the goal of diagnosing conditions of presumed genetic origin that cannot be explained by targeted sequencing approaches. (shrink)

This paper considers the UN efforts to introduce a legally binding Treaty on corporate accountability for human rights impacts in the context of other proposed legislation at country level, on the one hand, and existing voluntary initiatives like the UN Guiding Principles (2011), on the other. What we are interested in is whether the proposed Treaty signals a transition from voluntary initiatives (based on moral commitments) to law (that is, a focus on compliance), and the extent to which it might (...) stimulate or hinder links between judicial and non-judicial initiatives. The scholars who have explicitly addressed these two divides are – Michael Sandel, on theory v. practice; and Amartya Sen, on law v. morality. We engage with their views, in sections II and III respectively, seeking to build an integrated approach to help us overcome these dualisms. We further consider John Ruggie’s “principled pragmatism”, a strategy that he uses to build the Protect, Respect and Remedy (henceforth, PRR) Framework; and we invoke arguments from casuistry as well as a practice-focused deontology (Thomas Donaldson’s) in favour of an ethics ‘beyond cognition’, which we consider better suited than either utilitarian or principle-based theories to guide the debate on human rights. This is because it allows us to take non-rational factors into account (such as emotions and personal affiliations), when judging the kind of common good we consider worth pursuing. In the last section of the paper, we investigate whether and how might the Treaty illustrate the two divides, trying to (a) distinguish between purely legal elements and those of a wider nature, to do with morality; and (b) understand what might help bridge the gap between theoretical commitments to the universality of human rights and various practical challenges. Our aim is not to evaluate the Treaty, from a legal viewpoint, or suggest improvements to it (lawyers are better placed to do that); rather, we seek to investigate the way in which the proposed Treaty – which is the first attempt to address the challenge of transnational business and human rights in international law – combines moral and legal aspects, and what this tells us about the world we live in. (shrink)

In a fine essay on agricultureAgriculturein Flaubert’sFlaubert, GustaveBouvard et Pécuchet, Jean Gayon shows how much knowledge of the biology and agronomy of his time FlaubertFlaubert, Gustave is able to display. He also suggests that Flaubert’sFlaubert, Gustaveinterest in Pouchet’sPouchet, Félix-Archimède views on spontaneous generationSpontaneous generation is connected to romantic theories of life and matter, and to his lifelong interest in the nature of stupidity.

Can there be a unified theory of irony? The pretense theory advanced by Gregory Currie is certainly one of the best candidates, although it is not without difficulties, as one can see from various examples from Swift. It is argued that Swift gives not only an excellent illustration of the various dimensions of the pretence theory of irony, but also of an anti-post-modern conception of the values of the ironist.

Analytic epistemology is thriving. Many people, however, think that it has gone wrong. They judge that it has become a new scholastics, narrow-minded, obsessed by a small set of problems, most of them examined through repetitive examples, thought experiments and paradoxes, such as the Gettier cases, stories about fake barns, bank cases, brains in vats and evil demons, or the lottery paradox. Philip Kitcher is one of these critics. In an article called “Epistemology without history is blind” published in Erkenntnis (...) in 2011, he takes his stand from William James, “There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere” and judges severely the production of contemporary epistemologists. I disagree. Kitcher’s judgment is hasty, and analytic epistemology is not guilty of the sins that he denounces. (shrink)

Analyse critique de deux ouvrages récents dans lesquels Vincent Descombes critique les conceptions cartésiennes et matérialistes contemporaines de l'esprit, d'un point de vue néo-wittgensteinien. Contrairement à ce qu'il croit ni le holisme ni l'externalisme qu'il avance ne sont incompatibles avec une conception causaliste du mental et une forme plus complexe de naturalisme. A critical analysis of two recent books by Vincent Descombes, where he criticizes contemporary Cartesian and materialistic theories of the mind from a neo-Wittgensteinian standpoint. Contrary to what he (...) claims, neither holism nor externalism can be incompatible with a causalist view of the mental and a more sophisticated form of naturalism. (shrink)