Zijn filosofen gek? Zo ja, waarom? En ligt dat dan aan de filosoof, aan de filosofie of aan de diagnostiek? Dat zijn de vragen die in 'Diagnose van de moderne filosoof' centraal staan. Nicole des Bouvrie neemt aan de hand van het diagnostische handboek van psychiaters en psychologen (de DSM-V) de situatie van de hedendaagse denker onder de loep. Autisme, psychoses, anorexia en andere aandoeningen passeren de revue, om aan de hand van een grondige anamnese van hedendaagse denkbeelden uit (...) de westerse filosofie een diagnose te stellen. ''Des Bouvrie laat als geen ander zien hoe filosofie en waanzin zich in elkaar kunnen verstrikken, maar ook hoe ze bij elkaar een zone van vrijheid vinden.'' Filosoof Wouter Kusters, winnaar Socratesbeker 2015. (shrink)

Review of Anne Dufourmantelle's In Praise of Risk, trans. with an introduction by Steven Miller.

Philosophy ultimately searches for what lies beyond the possible. This question is what makes us human. We ask about the limits of language, the framing of the world, and how by breaking with what always already is we invite a madness that makes further understanding impossible. -/- This book presents a call to withstand the normalcy that presents itself as continual variations of the ‘new’. To face the illusions that clutter reality and to engage in asking the final question that (...) is left for us to answer, to un-answer, to suffer again and again. The question of the necessity of the impossible. (shrink)

Being-at-home in a particular, determined, world is dangerous for thinking. For thinking to be thinking/becoming, one should not get too comfortable. For thinking is to not arrive back home, in the same place one begins. But how to escape the world that has created who you are, gave you purpose and a past? How to make sure the future is not a repetition of the Same? How to break away from something that you need? In this article, my aim is (...) not to give one more solution to this fundamental problem that is in essence an ethical problem. For providing a refuge, a new theory, a new methodology, would be providing a new island for those who realise that a flood is endangering their own island. My aim is to exercise the craft of exilic thinking as a way to deal with the contradiction already pointed out by Heraclitus and Parmenides – “We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.” Exilic thinking as a craft of fragilising the self establishes a matrixial borderspace through which the impossible becomes possible. (shrink)

Le mythe comme force de mobilisation dans une société guerrière. L’article se concentre sur le rôle mobilisateur des symboles et en particulier sur le fonctionnement du théâtre mythique. Le théâtre attique est compris comme une performance symbolique dans laquelle le genre comique et tragique représentaient des processus de ‘sur-distanciation’ et de ‘sous-distanciation’ respectivement. Au lieu de concevoir la tragédie seulement comme un medium esthétique ou critique, le genre tragique est vu comme une part d’un processus culturel etsocial complexe qui sert (...) de une force mobilisatrice autour des valeurs fondamentales de la polis, e.g. du guerrier et son hèbè. Quelques pratiques cultuelles sont discutées pour démontrer l’importance du symbolisme guerrier dans la société attique. En plus l’argument présenté est que la performance tragique ne présente pas une image positive et idéale, mais une violation de l’ordre social . Les enfants d’Héraklès et d’autres tragédies sont analysées pour illustrer cette manière de penser.This paper focuses on the mobilizing role of symbols and specifically on the workings of mythical theatre. Attic theatre is understood as a symbolic performance in which the comic and the tragic genres represented processes of ‘over-distancing’ and ‘under-distancing’, respectively. Instead of conceiving of tragedy as just an aesthetic or critical medium, the tragic genre is viewed as part of a complex cultural and social process that serves as a mobilizing force around the fundamental values of the polis, e.g. the warrior and his hebe. A number of cult practices are discussed in order to demonstrate the importance of warrior symbolism in Attic society. Furthermore, it is argued that the tragic performance does not present a positive and ideal image, but a violation of the social order . The Children of Herakles and other tragedies are analysed in order to illustrate the argument. (shrink)

On counselling, psychology, and psychotherapy.

This essay explores Suárez’s commitment to the important causal principle of propinquity or spatial contiguity. Like many, Suárez accepted the principle of no action at a distance. It is argued that this commitment can be retained even though Suárez fundamentally altered the conception of efficient causality because this principle is independent of causality’s nature. Central to understanding Suárez’s commitment to the principle of propinquity is his account of the medium. Furthermore, the contrast between Suárez’s and René Descartes’ accounts of the (...) causal medium are historically significant for understanding the rise of mechanical philosophy during the seventeenth century. (shrink)

Des recherches récentes dans la chôra thasienne ont apporté une éclatante confirmation du texte d'Hérodote (VI, 46-47) évoquant les ressources minières de Thasos. Sur la côte orientale, entre Potamia et Kinyra, ont été repérées de nombreuses mines réparties en trois secteurs sur le versant de la montagne. L'or est le seul métal contenu en quantité suffisante pour être exploitable dans les prélèvements de minerai. Les autres mines évoquées allusivement par Hérodote sont des mines d'or (Limenas), ou de plomb argentifère, de (...) cuivre et de fer (côté occidental de l'île). (shrink)

Aristotle was usually thought to have given two definitions of the soul in the second book of De Anima. The second of these calls it “that by which we live, feel, and think”.1 Of the soul’s three par ts, the vegetative is that by which we live, the sensitive that by which we feel, the rational that by which we think. Human souls have all three parts; animals the vegetative and sensitive; plants only the vegetative.

In the history of philosophy, Jacques Rohault and Pierre-Sylvain Régis bear a twofold burden. They are professed followers, epigones. Worse yet, the natural philosophy they teach has been consigned to the Tartarus of fable: not a theory that failed, but something that failed even to be a theory. In the years in which they were turning Cartesianism into a system, Newton and Huygens were preparing its demise. Its empirical claims were refuted, its mathematics was rendered obsolete by the calculus, its (...) vortices and channelled magnetic particles met with the same rough justice Descartes meted out to Scholastic forms and qualities. Canonical history has little use for such figures. It prefers originals. Yet if ideas and arguments are not to seem to pass magically from one great mind to the next, we must have some account of the channels through which what was once novel and unique sediments into cliché and common ground. Those channels are not without bias and noise. Inevitably, currents from different streams meet and mix more or less coherently in the works of secondary figures, especially in the competitive intellectual world of the later seventeenth century, with its sometimes ferocious polemics fuelled by religious and political opposition. Cartesianism became a movement and—to use Leibniz’s word—a sect, divided within by disputes over the legacy of its founder, and facing opposition without from steadfast Aristotelians, pious theologians, and the avant garde of the new science. In Régis and Rohault Descartes’ legacy took the outward form of “system”. They present themselves as reworking Cartesian concepts and arguments into something coherent and comprehensive. Rohault, the more modest of the two, aims to reform the teaching of physics, still weighed down by the dead hand of Aristotle. He retains for the old philosophy only what is true and conjoin it with the new physics of Descartes, in whom France is no less fortunate than Greece once was in Aristotle (Rohault 1718, “Præfatio”).. (shrink)

It is difficult now to imagine an intellectual landscape so thoroughly dominated by one figure as was that of the Schools by Aristotle. Except on certain well-known questions, the presumption was that Aristotle, suitably interpreted, was right. Nevertheless Aristotelianism was no frozen monolith. During the four centuries of its predominance, it continued to change, and admitted on all but fundamental points or those on which ecclesiastical authorities had pronounced, a great latitude—within, as in all such frameworks, the limits of its (...) thinkable. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that one of the primary tasks of natural science is to discover the laws of nature. Those who don’t think that nature has laws will of course disagree; but of those who do, most will be in accord with Armstrong when he writes that natural science, having discovered the kinds and properties of things, should “state the laws” which those things “obey” (Armstrong What is a law 3). No Scholastic philosopher would have included the discovery of (...) the laws of nature among the aims of natural philosophy. Regularities there may be in an Aristotelian world, but the focus of inquiry is elsewhere —on natural kinds, powers, qualities, temperaments. There must have been a change of view at some point. The obvious period in which to look for that change is that period in which the notion of law came to the fore in natural philosophy: the seventeenth century. Though there has been occasional dissension, that notion has been with us ever since. Scientists are quite happy to talk about all sorts of laws, from the basic laws of conservation to “phenomenological” and statistical laws. Philosophers, on the other hand, have found them puzzling. The character attributed to laws seems to be in need of explanation, and yet no convincing explanation is at hand; indeed, as I have mentioned, some philosophers think that natural science has no laws, or at least that it doesn’t need to appeal to them to accomplish its ends. My suggestion will be that the configuration of features characteristic.. (shrink)

The science of the soul exceeds all other parts of philosophy not only in “dignity and exactness”, but also in “usefulness, necessity, charm, and, above all, in difficulty”.1 As the body is the subject of health and disease, so too the soul is the subject of virtue and vice; and just as the physician must devote great effort to knowing the body, anyone who treats morals “must take care to have a clear understanding of things pertaining to the scientia de (...) anima”.2 To be mistaken about the soul, in the way of materialists or the impious Averroes, is to leave “the good without reward, and evil without punishment”, and thus to “uproot all good morals, all laws and Republics”.3 The study of the soul is inescapably a prolegomenon to moral philosophy and to theology. But because it studies what is common to all living things, the science of the soul also prepares the way for the study of particular plants and animals, just as physics precedes the study of elements and mixtures.4 The natural philosopher deals with six kinds of bodies: the simple incorruptible bodies of the heavens, the simple but corruptible terrestrial elements, imperfect mixtures (ice, comets), perfect inanimate mixtures (metals and pre-. (shrink)

My title, of course, is an exaggeration. The world no more became mathematical in the seventeenth century than it became ironic in the nineteenth. Either it was mathematical all along, and seventeenth-century philosophers discovered it was, or, if it wasn’t, it could not have been made so by a few books. What became mathematical was physics, and whether that has any bearing on the furniture of the universe is one topic of this paper. Garber says, and I agree, that for (...) Descartes bodies are the things of geometry made real ( Ref). That is a claim about the world: what God created, and what we know in physics, is nothing other than res extensa and its modes. Others, including Marion, hold that in modern science, here represented at its origins by Descartes, representation displaces beings: the knower no longer confronts Being or beings but rather a system of signs, a “code” as Marion calls it, to which the knower stands in the relation of subject to object. The Meditations, or perhaps even the Regulæ, are the first step toward the transcendental idealism of Kant. Most of this paper will be devoted to a more concrete question. Physics in the seventeenth century increasingly became a matter of applying mathematical knowledge to the solution of physical problems. The “mixed sciences” of astronomy, optics, and music, sciences then distinct from physics, became models of understanding for all of natural philosophy. My interest here is in one aspect of that development: how particular physical situations are transformed into mathematical. I will look at the work of Descartes and Isaac Beeckman, contrasting their visions of “physico-mathematics”. (shrink)