Si l’on ramène la dialectique à son point de départ socratique, c’est-à-dire à une méthode purement interrogative, on est amené parallèlement à concevoir l’aporie en un sens radical : loin d’être due à des facteurs subjectifs tels que l’ignorance de la réponse, l’aporie, à proprement parler est une question objectivement indécidable, ce qui revient à dire, paradoxalement, qu’on ne peut la trancher que par une décision. On montre que la question du sens de l’être, au fondement de la métaphysique depuis (...) Aristote, offre ce caractère de la manière peut-être la plus exemplaire. (shrink)

Michael Brodrick’s book, The Ethics of Detachment in Santayana’s Philosophy, constitutes a much-needed contribution to the field of American philosophy. Although it is common for contemporary authors to claim that their preferred philosopher has been misunderstood, few can do so with as much conviction as Broderick has done for George Santayana, “a great and unjustly neglected philosopher”.The overarching goal of Brodrick’s investigation is the presentation of a conceptual framework for an “ethics of detachment” fundamentally mediated by human finitude. Setting his (...) work in opposition to the contemporary ethical conceit of an “attachment” to life, progress, and perfection, Brodrick seeks to demonstrate “how... (shrink)

Faire valoir un réalisme minimal c'est faire tenir ensemble deux exigences : celle d'un réalisme qui cherche à montrer que les relations exprimées par le langage n'existent pas seulement dans le langage, ni seulement dans l'esprit, mais qu'elles nous font connaître quelque chose du monde ; celle d'un nominalisme qui applique le rasoir d'Occam avec vigilance et refuse, non seulement de poser l'existence d'universels qui seraient des essences ou des propriétés, mais même de concevoir les relations elles-mêmes comme des réalités (...) existant dans un autre monde que celui des individus liés par elles. (shrink)

Some may consider the title outdated. It's a conscious choice, even if blasphemy no longer has the same relevance in modern societies, where religion is confined mainly to the private sphere. The study of blasphemy in various religious traditions teaches us that it is not simply a matter of uttering insults in the absence of the concerned person, namely the divine. It is a sin of the tongue, with social and even political dimensions. Secularization and the often uneasy coexistence of (...) religions have led to an epistemic shift from blasphemy to hate speech against the adherents of a given tradition. Not insulting others because of their convictions becomes an instrument of social cohesion and bolstering political power. The correct use of speech is not just a matter of etiquette or decency but also of the moral obligation to respect the equal dignity of all human beings. As early as the Christian Middle Ages, several theologians articulated ethical principles revolving around the proper guard of the tongue. This ethics of speech immerses us in a universe that goes beyond the frontiers of blasphemy. Their insights and the classification of the sins of the tongue they present can be used to highlight the standards by which hate speech and the culture of banishment should be judged. -/- . (shrink)

La conception fodorienne de la psychologie scientifique soulève les trois problèmes suivants qui peuvent, je crois, être résolus. La condition de formalité est-elle compatible avec l'existence de lois psychologiques intentionnelles ? L'atomisme sémantique est-il compatible avec le fonctionnalisme? L'atomisme sémantique est-il compatible avec la systématicité des pensées humaines? Dans les trois premières sections du présent article, j'essaie de résorber ces tensions. Dans la quatrième et dernière section, j'examine la conception des attributions de croyance développée par Fodor dans « Substitution Arguments (...) and the Individuation of Beliefs » selon laquelle la relation de croyance est une relation à quatre places entre une personne, un symbole , un rôle fonctionnel et un contenu propositionnel. Je fais valoir que Fodor est confronté à un dilemme : soit le rôle fonctionnel est un déterminant du contenu propositionnel, et Fodor doit rejeter l'atomisme sémantique; soit le rôle fonctionnel est un déterminant de l'efficacité causale d'un symbole, et il doit amender la condition de formalité.Fodor's views about scientific psychology raise three puzzles : Is the Formality Condition compatible with there being intentional psychological laws ? Is Content Atomism consistent with Fonctionalism? Can Content Atomism be reconciled with the claim that human thoughts are systematic? In the first three sections of this paper, I try and show how to solve the three puzzles. Finally, in the fourth section, I examine Fodor's recent view of belief-ascriptions in "Substitution Arguments and the Individuation of Beliefs" according to which the belief relation is a four place relation between a believer, a symbol token , a functional role and a propositional content. I argue that Fodor faces a dilemma : either the functional role is a determinant of content, in which case Fodor must reject Content Atomism; or it is a determinant of the causal efficacy of the vehicle, in which case he must amend his Formality Condition. (shrink)

Abstract This paper compares Heidegger's conception of time with more prevalent physical and broadly psychological analyses of time. The ?vulgar? notion of time, as Heidegger understands it, is based on the assumption that time, regardless of whether it is identified with tense or not, is something that is essentially measurable by clocks. Heidegger maintains that the vulgar notion of time is a distortion of his own preferred conception of temporality. I show how temporality may be understood as the non?sequential tensed (...) structure underlying tensed discourse. I argue against any straightforward reduction of this tensed structure and the direction of time to physical occurrences. Nevertheless I argue that temporality can be distinguished from purely psychological analyses of temporal experience and from traditional conceptions of time as tensed experience. The selectiveness of demonstrative discourse provides the basis for Heidegger's critique and reconstruction of time understood as tensed discourse about things. Heidegger's scepticism about the interpretation of time as a sequence of nows that underlies the dominant interpretation of tense is due to his appropriation of the relativity of simultaneity from special relativity. But his interpretation of physical theory leads him to the thesis that time is pre?supposed but not completely analysed in physical theory. The meta?language of physical theory makes covert use of temporal notions, for entities can themselves only be understood in covertly temporal ways. I show how this claim may be understood and defended in the light of current physical theory. Heidegger's analysis gives us some basis for thinking that his own notion of temporality is built into an understanding of temporal experience. But I argue that Heidegger fails to make the case that physical time is ontologically dependent on human existence. (shrink)

(2005). Natural Science and the Experience of Nature. Angelaki: Vol. 10, continental philosophy and the sciences the german traditionissue editor: damian veal, pp. 187-199.

“All that we require, and which can only be given us by the present advance of the single sciences, is a chemistry of the moral, religious, aesthetic ideas and sentiments, as well as of those impulses which we experience in ourselves both in the great and in the small phases of cultural and societal intercourse, and even in solitude.” In this passage from the opening paragraph of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche prepares the ground for the transvaluation of modern culture (...) by means of a call for a renewed and enlarged understanding of chemical science. The need is a response to the dulling of modern culture: whereas the classical world-view attempted in vain to overcome such opposites as truth and error, or life and death, by seeing them from the perspective of an immutable standpoint, the more recent historical method has merely tended to dilute them in some supposedly fundamental element. Why does chemistry provide the model for the forthcoming transvaluation? (shrink)

The studies gathered in this book attempt to fill a gap in the history of logic by stressing the importance of the works devoted to the question of logic in the tradition of thought inherited from...

Gaz de schiste, OGM, énergie nucléaire, cellules souches, changement climatique, efficacité des médicaments... La science, plus que jamais, suscite la méfiance, voire la défiance, des citoyens. Pour une large part, cela vient d'une incompréhension de ce qu'est la démarche scientifique. «A l'occasion du colloque de rentrée du Collège de France organisé à l'automne 2013, des scientifiques, des historiens, des juristes et des politiques se sont attachés à analyser et à clarifier les enjeux technologiques et scientifiques, en s'appuyant sur des exemples (...) concrets au coeur des débats les plus actuels : comment aborder dans une société démocratique le problème du renouvellement des énergies et du remplacement des énergies fossiles par des formes d'énergie moins polluantes, ou celui qui lui est lié du réchauffement climatique, ou encore celui des thérapies géniques, en utilisant de la façon la plus rationnelle possible ce que la science nous apprend, pour optimiser la réponse de la société aux défis qui lui sont posés?» S. H. (shrink)

Kant's philosophy must be understood nonnaturalistically and anti-psychologistically. Self-consciousness must be interpreted as preceding the distinction between different persons. Kant departs from the traditional idea that I thoughts are always mediated by a certain specific I sense or conceptualization of oneself. At the same time the so-called paradoxes of self-consciousness are resolved. The possibility of a pre-personal self-consciousness is what links the way all objects are given to finite beings to the way they are conceptualized by those beings. It serves (...) as the unifying basis for intuitions and concepts. Intuitions and concepts of objects are connected by their relation to a numerically identical self. ;The subject construed impersonally provides the frame for any possible experience and is one in the same in all possible experience. As such it can never be experienced as a distinct entity. It is the condition under which it is possible to have a point of view at all. One must be in a position to become conscious of the numerical identity of this logical subject of all representation if is to be possible to communicate indeed to compare and contrast representational contents at all. ;Self-consciousness is inherently empty and yet also necessarily in relation to contents of consciousness. This means that its numerical identity can only be sustained if all potential contents of consciousness present themselves to the self in such a way that they sustain the possibility of consciousness of the self as having a discrete empirical identity. Kant's argument in the First Analogy and the Refutation of Idealism fulfills this demand for a correlate to the numerical identity of pre-personal consciousness in the data presented to self-consciousness spatio-temporally. We must view self-construction and construction of objects existing outside of us as part of a single process which presupposes an impersonal self-consciousness. (shrink)

Based on the author's thesis, Universitae de Paris IV, 1976, submitted under title: Esquisse d'une philosophie du pratique.