Based on the thesis of R. Muller (doctoral)--Universite de Paris IV.

As is well-known, the formal system in which Frege works in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik is formally inconsistent, Russell's Paradox being derivable in it. This system is, except for minor differences, full second-order logic, augmented by a single non-logical axiom, Frege's Axiom V. It has been known for some time now that the first-order fragment of the theory is consistent. The present paper establishes that both the simple and the ramified predicative second-order fragments are consistent, and that Robinson arithmetic, (...) Q, is relatively interpretable in the simple predicative fragment. The philosophical significance of the result is discussed. (shrink)

Richard Janko's acclaimed translation of Aristotle's _Poetics_ is accompanied by the most comprehensive commentary available in English that does not presume knowledge of the original Greek. Two other unique features are Janko's translations with notes of both the _Tractatus Coislinianus_, which is argued to be a summary of the lost second book of the Poetics, and fragments of Aristotle’s dialogue On Poets, including recently discovered texts about catharsis, which appear in English for the first time.

This book provides a text, translation, and commentary on the forty-five fragments attributed to the ancient Greek poet and philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon. Part 1 contains almost all of the fragments credited to Xenophanes in the edition by Diels and Kranz. Part 2 consists of four interpretive commentaries on the fragments grouped by subject matter: On Men and Morals, On the Divine, On Nature, and on Human Understanding. Part 3 provides English translations of the collection of ancient (...) testimonia and imitations included in Diels-Kranz. Also included are listings of ancient sources and authorities and three indexes. The aim of this work is to provide the basic information needed in order to assess Xenophanes' achievements as a philosopher. The author defends the view that Xenophanes was a central figure in the intellectual revolution which marks the beginning of Western philosophy and science. (shrink)

After launching his career with the 1947 publication of his dissertation, _Occidental Eschatology_, Jacob Taubes spent the early years of his career as a fellow and then professor at various American institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. During his American years, he also gathered together a number of prominent thinkers at his weekly seminars on Jewish intellectual history. In the mid-60s, Taubes joined the faculty of the Free University in West Berlin, initially as the city's first Jewish Studies professor of (...) the postwar period. But his work and interest expanded beyond the boundaries of the field of Jewish Studies to broader philosophical questions, particularly in the philosophy of religion. A charismatic speaker and a great polemicist, Taubes had a phenomenal ability to create interdisciplinary conversations in the humanities, engaging scholars from philosophy, literature, theology, and intellectual history. The essays presented here represent the fruit of conversations, conferences, and workshops that he organized over the course of his career. (shrink)

Les mathématiques peuvent-elles s'appliquer avec succès en philosophie et dans les sciences humaines? Sont-elles, au contraire, réservées au physicien? Loin de se laisser abuser par les discours qui ne voient dans les mathématiques qu'un moyen de sélection et de contrôle, ou un simple langage au service de l'interrogation de la nature, le texte suggère que la véritable puissance de la discipline est à chercher dans son pouvoir d'exprimer la cohérence du monde, grâce à des modèles qui résument les situations et (...) en révèlent l'essence. En ce sens, les mathématiques intéressent le philosophe - non comme objet épistémologique, mais comme outil systématique. Le mathématicien, quant à lui, trouvera ici réunies un ensemble d'informations inédites sur l'origine philosophique des structures qu'il utilise quotidiennement. (shrink)

In Philosophical Fragments the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus explored the question: What is required in order to go beyond Socratic recollection of eternal ideas already possessed by the learner? Written as an afterword to this work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript is on one level a philosophical jest, yet on another it is Climacus's characterization of the subjective thinker's relation to the truth of Christianity. At once ironic, humorous, and polemical, this work takes on the "unscientific" form of a mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation (...) of ideas. Whereas the movement in the earlier pseudonymous writings is away from the aesthetic, the movement in Postscript is away from speculative thought. Kierkegaard intended Postscript to be his concluding work as an author. The subsequent "second authorship" after The Corsair Affair made Postscript the turning point in the entire authorship. Part One of the text volume examines the truth of Christianity as an objective issue, Part Two the subjective issue of what is involved for the individual in becoming a Christian, and the volume ends with an addendum in which Kierkegaard acknowledges and explains his relation to the pseudonymous authors and their writings. The second volume contains the scholarly apparatus, including a key to references and selected entries from Kierkegaard's journals and papers. (shrink)

In the paper, we apply Kooi and Tamminga’s correspondence analysis to some conventional and functionally incomplete fragments of classical propositional logic. In particular, the paper deals with the implication, disjunction, and negation fragments. Additionally, we consider an application of correspondence analysis to some connectiveless fragment with certain basic properties of the logical consequence relation only. As a result of the application, one obtains a sound and complete natural deduction system for any binary extension of each fragment in question. (...) With the focus on exclusive disjunction we comparatively study the proposed systems. Finally, we discuss Segerberg’s systems for connectiveless and negation fragments and compare them with our systems. (shrink)

The book creates a framework for a cohesive discourse, for a "new human ecology".

Faith and sin prior to the Fragments -- Sin and salvation in the Philosophical fragments -- Anxiety and beyond -- Sin and salvation from the Three discourses -- To the three stages -- Sin and salvation in the Concluding unscientific postscript -- Sin, society, and the individual in the Two ages.

Étienne Souriau (1892-1979) demeure un philosophe et esthécien français du xx e siècle encore largement méconnu. Cette première biographie coécrite par Filippo Domenicali et Fabien Le Tinnier – regroupant leurs recherches respectives sur l’œuvre d’Étienne Souriau, pour l’un sur ses années lyonnaises, l’autre sur ses années parisiennes –, cherche à restaurer la place qu’occupait l’œuvre du philosophe au sein de l’histoire de la philosophie française contemporaine. Fondée sur l’étude de nombreuses archives pour la première fois mises au jour, cette biographie (...) retrace le cursus honorem du professeur Souriau durant plus soixante ans. En resituant ainsi la trajectoire intellectuelle de Souriau, l’évolution de sa carrière, la toile de ses amitiés philosophes ainsi que ses réseaux collégiaux parmi les lieux qu’il a fréquenté, cette biographie vise encore à éclairer son travail à la lumière des livres, idées et événements qui ont chacun participé à façonner son abondante œuvre philosophique que depuis quelques années de nombreux chercheurs et universitaires français, belges et italiens redécouvrent. Depuis ses années parisiennes de formation passées à l’École Normale Supérieure jusqu’au faste de ces années passée à l’université de Paris occupant la chaire d’esthétique à partir de juillet 1946, Souriau fait rayonner la philosophie française par-delà les frontières françaises comme en témoignent ses nombreuses publications étrangères et déplacements professionnels. Figure majeure de la philosophie universitaire, Souriau et son œuvre parcourent ainsi le monde philosophique du milieu du xx e siècle. (shrink)

In Philosophical Fragments the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus explored the question: What is required in order to go beyond Socratic recollection of eternal ideas already possessed by the learner? Written as an afterword to this work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript is on one level a philosophical jest, yet on another it is Climacus's characterization of the subjective thinker's relation to the truth of Christianity. At once ironic, humorous, and polemical, this work takes on the "unscientific" form of a mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation (...) of ideas. Whereas the movement in the earlier pseudonymous writings is away from the aesthetic, the movement in Postscript is away from speculative thought. Kierkegaard intended Postscript to be his concluding work as an author. The subsequent "second authorship" after The Corsair Affair made Postscript the turning point in the entire authorship. Part One of the text volume examines the truth of Christianity as an objective issue, Part Two the subjective issue of what is involved for the individual in becoming a Christian, and the volume ends with an addendum in which Kierkegaard acknowledges and explains his relation to the pseudonymous authors and their writings. The second volume contains the scholarly apparatus, including a key to references and selected entries from Kierkegaard's journals and papers. (shrink)

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of (...) contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory. (shrink)

An autobiographical sketch by one of the great social thinkers of our time.

This celebrated work is the keystone of the thought of the Frankfurt School. It is a wide-ranging philosophical and psychological critique of the Western categories of reason and nature, from Homer to Nietzsche.

This collection presents a broad and compelling overview of the most recent work by a world-renowned figure in contemporary thought. The book is in four parts: Koinonia, Polis, Psyche, Logos. The opening section begins with a general introduction to the author's views on being, time, creation, and the imaginary institution of society and continues with reflections on the role of the individual psyche in racist thinking and acting. The second part is a critique of those who now belittle and distort (...) the meaning of May 1968 and other movements of the sixties as well as the French Revolution. In part three, Castoriadis shows how psychoanalysis, like politics, can contribute to the project of individual and collective autonomy and challenges Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, and others in his report on 'The State and Subject Today'. Finally he examines how Aristotle's original aporetic discovery and cover-up of the imagination were repeated by Kant, Freud, Heidegger, and even Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)