This article proposes to trace the presence of a discreet but continuous critical engagement with the Aristotelian category of phronesis in Foucault’s work. During the 1970s, Foucault’s research was devoted to several instances of techne, a form of practical wisdom close to, yet distinct from, phronesis. Although he hardly mentions the latter, we will show that this omission is anything but an oversight. It is through the work of phronesis and on phronesis that Foucault thinks the complexity of practical wisdom (...) and negotiates the distinction between his own “genealogical” method and the methods that he studies. We will see that this distinction is articulated around a second doublet, that of the case and the singularity—a distinction whose meaning becomes clear once it is scrutinised through the lens of the Aristotelian triad of knowledge: episteme, techne, and phronesis. We will see that the Foucauldian notion of singularity, far from being identical to the particular case, constitutes rather its principle of internal difference. By substituting the hermeneutics of singularity for the hermeneutics of the particular, Foucault is able to articulate a renewed phronesis adapted to the present moment. (shrink)

The professional situation is considered a major interface of practicum training, here conceived as a School of conjunction, a school where one learns to make links, a foundation for the engineering of professionalization. The notion of situation is here developed based on the study of a data corpus elaborated during an experience with a practicum training model centred on writing and the construction of the professional situation by a subject-actor-author of the situation, in interaction with others, in the context of (...) nurse training. The analysis and interpretation of data brings to light a complex and unique unit, constructed in the space-time of a professional practice, a process during which several states succeed one another. The critical moment in action characterizes this unit; it is central to the process, mobilizing reflection in action, internal deliberation, and action-related decision. La situation professionnelle est identifiée comme interface majeure de la formation en alternance conçue ici comme une Ecole de la conjonction, une école où l’on apprend à relier, fondement d’une ingénierie de professionnalisation. La notion de situation est approfondie à partir de l’étude d’un corpus de données constitué au fil de l’expérimentation d’un modèle de formation en alternance centrée sur l’écriture et la construction de la situation professionnelle par un sujet-acteur-auteur de la situation, en interaction avec autrui, dans le contexte de la formation en soins infirmiers. L’analyse et l’interprétation des données permettent de mettre en évidence une unité singulière complexe, construite dans l’espace-temps d’une pratique professionnelle, un processus au cours duquel plusieurs états se succèdent. Le moment critique dans l’action la caractérise ; il occupe la place centrale du processus, mobilisant réflexion dans l’action, délibération intérieure et décision d’action. (shrink)

L’article porte sur le rapport entre la phronèsis (prudence ou sagesse pratique) et la vertu éthique dans la conception aristotélicienne de l’action et du bonheur. La question principale est la suivante : faut-il penser, selon une conception « humienne », que, chez Aristote, les buts sont fixés par notre désir, tandis que la raison servirait de simple instrument pour déterminer les moyens de les atteindre? La thèse défendue est que la vertu de caractère donne bien le contenu des fins, mais (...) cela ne conduit pas à reléguer la phronèsis au rang de simple instrument. En effet, la phronèsis est l’excellence de la délibération sur les choses en vue d’une fin. Elle nous permet de comprendre ce que signifie avoir une fin. Pour le démontrer, l’auteur examine conjointement le fonctionnement des syllogismes délibératif et démonstratif, qui sont tous deux des arguments explicatifs. Cette comparaison permet à l’auteur d’établir que la vertu éthique donne le « que » (« quoi faire »), alors que la phronèsis permet de comprendre le « pourquoi », c’est-à-dire en vue de quelle fin l’action doit être accomplie. La vertu complète suppose de saisir le « pourquoi » ; c’est pourquoi la phronèsis a une importance éthique et est nécessaire au bonheur. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern PracticeDavid DepewPrudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice. Ed. Robert Hariman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 337. $65.00, cloth."This volume," writes the editor, "is one contribution to the contemporary revival of interest in the concept of prudence" (ix). What interest? Notably, that of latter-day "virtue ethicists," whose discontents with the algorithmic decision-making procedures of modernism have given wings to a hope (...) that we (considered as members of some sort of imagined polis) will return to the context-sensitive "practical wisdom" of the ancients. (Prudentia is Cicero's Latin translation of the Greek phronesis, practical wisdom.)In theory, this line of reasoning was supposed to break the mold of contemporary politics. In practice, it has been captured by the political right. Virtue ethicists and civic republicans like Benjamin Barber have been outflanked by "virtuecrats" such as Bill Bennett (he of the gambling habit), the pompous columnist George Will, and Amitai Etzioni, the neo-corporatist founder of the Communitarian Party. It should be said right away, then, that few, if any, of the contributors to this collection are sympathetic to this sort of thinking. Admittedly, they share with virtuecrats a critique of rule-governed forms of decision-making, whether deontological or utilitarian, especially when these procedures masquerade as ways of "operationalizing" morality. Such calculi are indeed creatures of the institutional cultures of business firms and bureaucracies, which have increasingly affected law and politics. In addition, the authors of this volume are no less inclined than right-leaning virtuecrats to rake through intellectual history in order to come up with something relevant to the present and future. "There is a looking backward in order to see more clearly a mentality that is overlooked and undervalued in the present" (20). But they do so with a view to seeing what will come up when management of the topic of prudence is taken away from philosophers and reconnected (as it was from antiquity [End Page 167] until the nineteenth century) with the art of rhetoric, considered as an array of teachable discursive practices that are helpful in identifying and commending appropriate responses to contingent circumstances. The most salient features of the volume follow: a shift of the center of gravity from Aristotle to Cicero (ix), and a consideration of how, through rhetorical performances that involve the construction of a visible, embodied self, that strangest of creatures, a post-modern prudence, might be brought forth.I am pleased to report that changes of meaning in the collection's key term are discernible as we move from Cicero's prudentia to Machiavelli's prudenzia, and from the prudence that Edmund Burke invoked to justify American independence against his government's blind, imprudent rule-following to the quite different, and indeed incompatible, prudence that the Americans actually ended up with by the Jacksonian period, which is explored here by James Jasinski and Christine Oravec. Still, greater attention to the first great fracture in the concept, as phronesis moved across the Adriatic and became prudentia, would have made it clearer that, if there is to be a post-modern prudence, whether on terms set forth here by Maurice Charland or Hariman, or elsewhere by others, it cannot conceivably be seen as emerging out of a continuous root stock that managed to cross two seas intact, but as invented by doing repeated violence to a term, in part by providing it with a handsome pedigree that must be fitted up for the occasion.At this point let me register my only complaint. In spite of some useful remarks about Aristotle's notion of phronesis by Hariman and Charland, the volume lacks a systematic treatment of the Greek notion of practical wisdom (phronesis) even as a foil. This makes it difficult to see that the notion of phronesis was diversely interpreted by fourth-century Greeks; that Cicero's assimilation of phronesis to a Latin term already loaded with local associations—the subject of an informative essay by Robert Cape—might not preserve the Greek notion intact; that to the extent that Cicero does preserve aspects of Greek phronesis, his version is probably closer to Isocrates' rhetoric-friendly... (shrink)

Les contributions réunies dans le présent recueil ont, pour la plupart, fait l’objet de communications à l’occasion de deux Journées d’étude organisées l’une à l’Université de Rouen Haute-Normandie par l’ « Équipe de recherche sur les aires culturelles » (ERIAC), l’autre à l’Université de Rennes I par « Philosophie des normes », respectivement les 23 et 25 janvier 2008. Leur ensemble ne donne pas une cartographie complète, même dans les grandes lignes, de la conception aristotélicienne de la rationalité sous ses (...) divers visages : la pratique scientifique d’Aristote et sa conception de la physique, par exemple, ne sont pas considérées ici, pas plus que la contribution décisive du Stagirite à l’histoire de la philosophie première, ontologie ou théologie. La forme achevée du recueil reflète l’esprit dans lequel ont été envisagées les deux Journées dans le prolongement desquelles il s’inscrit et lors desquelles ont été privilégiés les aspects publics et éthiques de la rationalité telle qu’a pu la concevoir celui qui, comme auteur dudit Organon et héritier de la dialectique socratique et platonicienne, est tout d’abord le fondateur de ce que nous appelons « logique », dont il envisage aussi, dans les Seconds analytiques, les prolongements scientifiques (didactiques et démonstratifs). L’ouvrage, qui traite à plusieurs reprises de l’influence d’Aristote, comporte ainsi trois sections : « De la dialectique à la science », « Art oratoire et poésie », « La rationalité éthique ». Ont été réunies, dans la première section, des contributions de Jean-Baptiste Gourinat (« Dialogue et dialectique : la place de la dialectique dans l’organon d’Aristote »), Pierre Joray (« Principe de contradiction et ecthèse dans la syllogistique d’Aristote »), Franck Varenne (« Le rapport entre science et logique chez Aristote vu à travers la critique de Dewey ») ; d’Annie Hourcade (« Le conseil dans la Rhétorique d’Aristote »), Jean-Pierre Cléro (« La Rhétorique d’Aristote et les penseurs des passions du xviiie siècle »), Michele Corradi (« Aristote et la réflexion de Protagoras sur les noms »), Maddalena Vallozza (« Entre poésie et histoire. Aristote, Poétique 1451 a 36-b 11, et l’Évagoras d’Isocrate ») dans la seconde ; dans la troisième, de David Lefebvre (« Avoir un èthos et être philotoioutos. Sur le sens de la notion d’èthos dans les Éthiques d’Aristote »), Michel Narcy (« La phronèsis entre Platon et Aristote »), René Lefebvre (« Syllogisme de l’action et délibération : deux formes de l’alternative pratique chez Aristote ») Marco Zingano (« Décisions morales et interdictions absolues chez Aristote »). (shrink)

L’opposition entre déterminisme et contingence, esquissée par Aristote dans le chapitre 9 du De interpretatione, a été l’objet d’un débat exégétique très fécond chez les commentateurs, débat qui n’a pas connu des développements uniquement logiques, mais aussi éthiques comme la question de la liberté de l’action, évoquée par Aristote lui-même dans ce même traité. Dans un fragment du commentaire d’Olympiodore sur le De interpretatione ainsi que dans son commentaire au Gorgias, la critique du déterminisme est associée à celle de l’astrologie. (...) Cette interprétation antiastrologique, en dépit de sa singularité, ne revêt pas un rôle marginal dans le débat sur la question des futurs contingents issu de De int. 9 puisque l’astrologie constitue une forme institutionnalisée de prévision des événements futurs et un exemple à la fois concret et paradigmatique de théorie déterministe. On se propose ici d’identifier quelle est l’astrologie et qui sont les astrologues qu’Olympiodore combat et de montrer que la critique du déterminisme astrologique est, en fin de compte, cohérente avec la philosophie d’Aristote. (shrink)

Nous posons à Aristote une question bien claire : en quoi consiste l'autonomie de la Raison pratique? Cette autonomie ne sera pas assuree par la Raison kantienne et sa prétention à l'universalité mais par une " perception morale " (aisthesis), par la phronésis. Notre entreprise fait avancer la question d'un pas supplémentaire. Elle prétend imprimer à la réponse aristotelicienne une orientation précise, étant donné qu'elle fait dépendre cette autonomie de la possibilite d'une ontologie (c'est-à-dire, d'une phénoménologie) de l'action morale. Notre (...) position peut donc s'annoncer ainsi : la phronésis, en tant qu'accès aux principes de la prakis, constitue la condition de possibilite de toute action morale. La fonction de la phronésis se trouvera éclairée à travers l'analyse du problème de l'altérité, de la reconnaissance de l'autre. Cet autre " en chair et en os ", nous le rechercherons dans l'ami aristotélicien. La structure de l'amitié sera déterminée dans son opposition par rapport aux modèles de la techné et de la Sophia, ce qui conduira finalement à l'autonomie de la sphère pratique. Si cette description de la praxis s'avère être effectivement en adéquation avec les phénomènes eux-mêmes, nous aurons ouvert une voie destinée à faire apparaitre une coïncidence de l'ontologie et de la morale, auquel cas l'ontologie de la praxis reflétera les principes du " bien agir " lui-même. (shrink)

La distinction qu’Aristote propose de la connaissance pratique et de la connaissance théorique semble laisser le statut de la technique problématique : présentée comme une étape vers la science en Métaphysique A 1, la technique est rapprochée de la prudence en Éthique à Nicomaque VI 1, en ce qu’elles relèvent toutes deux de la même « raison délibérative ». Cette indétermination semble légitimer la critique célèbre adressée par Kant à la distinction aristotélicienne, ainsi que la conclusion radicale qu’il en tire (...) de rapatrier l’ensemble de la technique et des maximes de la prudence dans le domaine de la connaissance théorique. Le commentaire aristotélicien lui-même reste divisé sur cette question. Dans cet article, nous souhaitons proposer une interprétation nouvelle de la place qu’assigne Aristote à la technique dans le domaine du savoir, et notamment de son autonomie vis-à-vis des sciences théoriques. Cette interprétation se fonde sur l’analyse par Aristote de la délibération pratique comme d’une forme de recherche (ζήτησις), qui s’oppose fondamentalement à l’ἐπιστήμη comme savoir constitué et achevé dans sa présentation déductive. La technique apparaît alors comme le savoir positif qui permet de guider la délibération, et qui a donc trait aux méthodes. L’intérêt de cette lecture est de suggérer l’existence d’un lien profond entre la technique et la logique de l’ Organon, qui pointe vers notre concept moderne de « procédure », dont le rôle est central dans la théorie moderne de la calculabilité et en informatique. (shrink)

Autour et avec le cas exemplaire qu’est Marcel Raymond, l’article présente ce qu’il en est du voyage d’un sujet, de sa reprise dans un récit et de l’établissement qui en résulte d’une critique affinitaire. La part du sujet, celle d’une existence et de sa formation intellectuelle dans ses années d’apprentissage et la part de l’objet, en l’occurrence des œuvres littéraires, y trouvent un équilibre dialectique entre expérience et connaissance, existence et interprétation, singularité d’un sentiment et intelligibilité.

Cet article s’intéresse en premier lieu à quelques passages des Esquisses pyrrhoniennes de Sextus (I 1-3 ; 8-10 ; III 119-122). Ces « études de cas » permettent d’examiner la relation dialectique entre Sextus et Aristote. Le Stagirite y est représenté à la fois comme une sorte de primus inter dogmaticos pares, et par conséquent comme une cible privilégiée des attaques pyrrhoniennes contre les dogmatismes, et, de façon indirecte, comme une sorte d’« ombre » se profilant derrière l’attitude critique de (...) Sextus. Parallèlement, la stratégie de Sextus consiste à utiliser le matériel aristotélicien à l’appui soit de l’attitude propre à l’ἀγωγή sceptique, soit de la construction d’une διαφωνία spécifique. En second lieu, la section finale de l’article examine en outre un passage difficile du Contre les moralistes (XI 77‑78), proposant une correction qui permettrait, en éliminant le nom d’Aristote, d’y voir une citation d’Ariston. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est désormais à tous égards un classique. Il a assurément, lors de sa première édition en 1939, suscité nombre de réactions critiques à la mesure de la nouveauté réelle d'un travail qui, délaissant les voies et les impasses de la méthode génétique, s'attachait, plutôt que de reconstituer dans sa systématicité prétendue la pensée du Stagirite, à dégager les cadres généraux ou les schèmes qui structurent effectivement une recherche se faisant. En se sens, il s'agissait bien d'étudier la méthode (...) d'Artistote, non pas tant celle qui est expressément thématisée dans l'Organon ou dans les excursus méthodologiques, mais celle qui se trouve concrètement mise en œuvre au vif des différents traités, et en particulier de la Physique. Déployant ce que l'auteur appelle lui-même une " sorte d'analyse structurale ", à travers une référence discrète mais significative, à Claude Lévi-Strauss et à Michel Foucault, l'ouvrage parvient à mettre en lumière un niveau originaire de la pensée aristotélicienne, lié aux schèmes du langage, de la fabrication, et surtout à l'expérience de la vie et du mouvement. Rien d'étonnant alors qu'une telle interprétation, attentive aux ambiguités ou aux apories de la recherche aristotélicienne, soit une des premières à avoir proposé une réinterprétation positive de la dialectique et des topiques. (shrink)

La nature du projet de Danielle Lories est exposée clairement dans les premières pages de l’ouvrage. L’auteure situe les origines de son entreprise dans la volonté d’affronter la difficulté que présente la notion de «sens commun», aux paragraphes 18, 22 et 40 de la Critique de la faculté de juger de Kant, mais aussi le propos de Hannah Arendt tiré de «La crise de la culture» qu’elle cite en page 2, sur la jonction des sens communs kantien et aristotélicien. Ce (...) qui préoccupe essentiellement l’auteure, dans la pers-pective d’une pensée de la «spécificité du jugement praxique», est ici la façon dont s’articulent le sens commun en tant qu’unification de l’expérience sensorielle par-delà la diversité des cinq sens, et le sens communautaire en vertu duquel nous communions dans une même appréhension du réel, la constitution d’un rapport au réel étant d’abord affaire de sens: «Chez Arendt, tout se passe comme si le partage des choses perçues avec autrui et donc leur réalité “objective” était le prolongement naturel du partage d’une même chose perçue par nos divers sens». En arrière-plan de l’entreprise figure un intérêt pour les rapports entre jugements pratique et esthétique. L’auteure se trouve amenée à traiter d’Aristote, et entend montrer que si chez lui le sens commun du De anima et des Parva naturalia est bien un sens global du réel, il n’a guère encore cette dimension communautaire que présente en revanche la φρόνησισ, «excellence du jugement pratique et excellence politique», laquelle φρόνησισ se trouve en continuité avec la discrimination perceptive unitaire, dans la mesure où pour l’une comme pour l’autre, l’objet est le particulier du monde réel perçu. Danielle Lories est également conduite à examiner si, entre le livre VI de l’Éthique à Nicomaque, d’une part, et la Critique de la faculté de juger d’autre part, il n’y a «rien qui vaille mention». Ayant travaillé sur Shaftesbury, un des pères britanniques de la philosophie du sens commun, sous l’espèce notamment du sens moral, par ailleurs précurseur du désintéressement esthétique kantien, et enfin lecteur d’Épictète, l’auteure se trouve orientée dans la direction de sa source stoïcienne. De là cette fois, malgré l’obstacle apparent que constitue le fait pour le stoïcisme de s’apparenter davantage au platonisme qu’à l’aristotélisme en concevant la φρόνησισ comme une science et en l’identifiant à la σοφία, tout en faisant en outre à peu près silence sur l’αἴσθησισ κοινή, l’idée d’«étudier l’éventuel apport du stoïcisme — ancien — à l’analyse du jugement pratique — celui du phronimos au sens où l’entendait Aristote», la thèse étant que la marque du stoïcisme dans l’histoire de la pensée occidentale du jugement pratique «consiste à faire converger dans ce jugement plusieurs formes de “sens commun” dont certaines sont dérivées de l’aisthèsis koinè ou encore de la phronèsis aristotéliciennes». (shrink)

Prolegomena pour une nouvelle modalite critique d’edition et de reference concernant le temoignage d’Alexandre sur le texte de la Metaphysique d’Aristote. Methode et cas d’etude : ‘Alexandre’ et le ‘telephone sans fil’ des apparats critiques in Metaphysique 1072b2‑3. Quel ‘Commentaire’ d’Alexandre? Un texte a re‑etablir. Les editions du commentaire d’Alexandre au XIXe siecle : le role du manuscrit Monacensis gr. 81, a. 1550 env.. L’edition Hayduck 1888 du commentaire d’Asclepius comme etude de cas parallele et comme source supplementaire. Le commentaire (...) d’Alexandre selon la recensio laurentiana. L’independance des deux recensiones comme dilemme. La tradition indirecte de la tradition indirecte de la Metaphysique : le commentaire d’Asclepius. L’analyse des parties communes entre Asclepius et la recensio laurentiana sur Δ29 : un cas particulier. Les arguments de Hayduck 1891 pour l’athetese du texte du Laurentianus. L’argument de Hayduck 1891 sur la recensio laurentiana in Arist. 985a18‑20 et ses developpements recents : la suppression des mots d’Aristote concernant la fonction du νοῦς chez Anaxagore. La nouvelle athetese de la recensio laurentiana : arguments pro et contra. Discussions de nos jours sur l’edition d’Alexandre : l’hypothese du Paris. 1878 comme branche β. Tradition d’exegese, souci de legitimation, perte d’information, normalisation du langage. L’hypertexte possible et autres perspectives. (shrink)

Quand bien même notre époque ne serait plus tout à fait celle de Foucault, les impulsions qui nous viennent de son travail ne cessent de s'intensifier. Ce n'est pas tant que désormais son étoile brille au firmament de la philosophie universitaire, que ses livres sont devenus cette caverne d'Ali Baba qu'explorent avec passion les chercheurs de toutes disciplines. C'est surtout que la puissance de la pensée de Foucault se manifeste comme cette force qui nous descelle de nous-mêmes et survient en (...) renfort chaque fois que nous nous efforçons de nous déprendre des évidences du présent. Alain Brossat chemine en compagnie de Michel Foucault, de notion en concept et de A à Z - davantage qu'il n'entreprend un commentaire savant d'une oeuvre, constamment récusée comme "belle totalité" par celui-là même qui n'aimait pas à se définir comme un auteur. Il s'active à mettre en relation le texte foucaldien avec notre présent entendu comme cette actualité dont nous sommes appelés à évaluer la singularité et sur laquelle nous devons exercer nos facultés critiques. (shrink)

Le discours psychiatrique s’établit au XIXe siècle par un corps médical qui reproduit des relations de pouvoir : dans le cas de l’hystérie, le corps médical (majoritairement masculin) impose un discours de vérité sur un corps féminin qui est celui de la patiente. C’est la dimension genrée de ce phénomène que nous chercherons à clarifier en ce qui a trait aux relations de pouvoir, en avançant la thèse que les hystériques se dressent comme figure de résistance devant le pouvoir psychiatrique (...) – cette résistance étant rendue possible par la réappropriation d’une parole dérobée dans la production d’un discours de vérité. Pour ce faire, nous présenterons en premier lieu les démarches de Charcot, puis de Freud et Breuer dans les études sur l’hystérie. Nous emprunterons ensuite le cadre conceptuel foucaldien pour analyser les relations de pouvoir qui se trouvent au cœur de ces deux exemples, et nous tenterons finalement de montrer comment les hystériques peuvent être vues comme « militantes », à partir d’une perspective critique et féministe. (shrink)

This paper aims at investigating Aristotle’s criticism of Plato on the practical good. It confronts the practical functions attributed to the Idea of the good in Plato’s Republic to Aristotle’s objections against this Idea in the Ethics, objections that point out its practical inefficiency. Then I turn to Aristotle’s own elaboration of the practical good, showing how indebted it is to the treatment of the human good in the Philebus. This leads to assess how and how far Aristotle distances himself (...) from Plato’s views on the practical good. (shrink)

L’examen de certains manuscrits inédits du Fonds Foucault déposé par Daniel Defert à la BnF, en 2013, montre que le Descartes de Foucault est une variante simplifiée de celui de Heidegger. Foucault reprend en effet à la lecture heideggérienne de Descartes la liaison que le philosophe allemand met en place entre la mathesis universalis et le cogito, qui ne se trouve assurément pas chez Descartes. C’est de cette manière que ces deux auteurs critiquent ce qu’ils mettent eux-mêmes au jour chez (...) Descartes – le sujet de la certitude – et qu’ils font de l’inquiétude l’affect historique propre à la pensée. La présente étude reconstruit le lien entre la mathesis et le cogito et la critique de la vérité comme certitude, tel qu’il est élaboré dans les cours de Heidegger sur Descartes, Augustin et Aristote, au début des années 20. La manière dont Heidegger établit ce lien suit l’évolution de la pensée de Heidegger, mais nous prenons le parti de mettre l’accent sur le cours sur Descartes de 1922-1923 (Introduction à la recherche phénoménologique), car dans les années 20, Heidegger fait de l’inquiétude la figure de l’ipséité. Nous reconstruisons en parallèle la manière dont Foucault intègre la lecture heideggérienne de Descartes à la sienne et comment il en déplace la signification, en évoquant certains textes connus de l’Histoire de la folie, mais aussi en analysant des manuscrits inédits de Foucault. Car le rapprochement que nous proposons entre les deux auteurs, tout comme la mise en relief de ce qui les distingue, se fait à la faveur de l’occasion historique que constitue la mise à disposition de textes qui étaient auparavant inédits. Et, en effet, les cours de Heidegger que nous analysons ont été publiés dans la Gesamtausgabe après la mort de Foucault, et leur traduction en français est toute récente. En procédant ainsi, nous voulons montrer comment la redéfinition contemporaine de la subjectivité s’est élaborée, au XXe siècle, à partir de la notion d’inquiétude, et plus spécifiquement de l’inquiétude historique. (shrink)

The paper reconsiders Aristotle’s criticism of Platonic forms as causes together with its wider implications for the differences but also similiarities between the two philosophers. Analyzing the relevant texts of Metaphysics A 9 and Generation and Corruption II, 9, where Aristotle addresses the hypothesis of forms as put forward in the Phaedo, it discusses two interpretative options : that Aristotle takes these forms for an imperfect anticipation of formal causes, and that he sees them as an aborted attempt at grasping (...) the efficient causation whose proper discovery Aristotle claims to be uniquely his own. Although both readings have their virtues and can be defended from the Aristotelian perspective, their check against the text of the Phaedo reveals that, in this context, efficient causation distinct from material causation is quite plausibly the issue Aristotle has in mind first and foremost. This, however, is only one side of Aristotle’s broader critical stance towards forms as causes : while he seems to detect a split in Plato’s own understanding of the relation between the forms and causation, he is equally critical of the craft-like model as personified by the demiurge of the Timaeus. However, other passages from the Metaphysics suggest that some features of precisely this model, once it is carefully stripped of its personal aspect, may ultimately bear on Aristotle’s own conception of efficient cause. (shrink)

“Hijack” has etymological connotations of force. It is intended here as a purposeful turn away from expert authority and from singular authorship, towards a more expanded sphere of multiple experience in art aesthetics. If there is a hijacking force in art, it is the dynamic desire to reclaim the impossible and the unexpected. These qualities are evident in telepathy as a system of transmitted aesthetic information. Isabelle Stengers, who has investigated the role of the charlatan, might urge us to follow (...) such a turn away from regulated forms of sensory information and repurpose telepathy as a propagated extra-sensory activity. Like the charlatan or other maligned characters of ill repute, the art writer who responds to the essence of the artwork through participation rather than judgment becomes the outsider and, in this case, the telepath. This paper addresses the work of Australian artist Jacquelene Drinkall as an aggregate of telepathic transmissions, ripe for hijacking. I argue that a telepathic hijack, as an unexpected reclamation and as a method of aesthetic experimentation, can be enacted as a speculative form of art writing. Telepathy in art and of art allows a writing with the artwork. By this I mean that a super-sensory and speculative mode of writing can exist beside the artwork, rather than in judgment of it. This is a divergence from an overt critique of art through established constructs of history, origin or relations alone. In this paper I will explore the concept of telepathy as a quality of speculative aesthetics, which is distinguished by contingent change, variable outcomes and meandering. I will focus on: telepathic art transmissions as a hijack of conventional aesthetics; Jacquelene Drinkall’s telepathic artwork as an interrupted experience; and Isabelle Stengers’ figure of the charlatan. (shrink)

Clément Rosset critique dans L’Objet singulier la généralité de nos représentations du réel, qui en manqueraient la singularité en projetant sur ses objets d’illusoires identités. Il risque alors un ineffabilisme insatisfaisant dans lequel tombent encore beaucoup de réalistes directs contemporains. Mais on peut confronter ces vues à ce qu’affirme au contraire Jocelyn Benoist dans Concepts de l’adéquation de nos représentations à la singularité du réel. On en gardera la saine prudence sceptique face aux tentations de beaucoup de « (...) nouveaux réalistes » contemporains de brouiller les différences entre l’intentionnel et le réel, sans faire de l’écart entre ces deux niveaux un fossé pour la connaissance. (shrink)

" Faire d'Aristote un Aufklârer serait méconnaître ce qu'il y a en lui de religiosité authentique, cette intuition de la transcendance et du chorismos, qui sont la raison profonde de sa prudence spéculative. Faire d'Aristote un tragique serait méconnaître cette confiance en l'homme, en sa recherche et en son action, qui tranche sur les lamentations du chœur de la tragédie et sur une certaine résignation socratique et, avant la lettre, stoïcienne. Mais Aristote exalte l'homme sans le diviniser ; il en (...) fait le centre de son éthique, mais il sait que l'éthique n'est pas ce qu'il y a de plus haut, que Dieu est au-delà des catégories éthiques, ou plutôt que l'éthique se constitue dans la distance qui sépare l'homme de Dieu. Livré à ses seules forces par un Dieu trop lointain, qui est suffisamment visible pour être désiré, mais se tient trop à distance pour être possédé, l'homme est en butte, dans la région du monde qu'il habite, à un hasard qu'il ne peut entièrement dominer. Ou plutôt la vie de l'homme se meut entre deux hasards : le Hasard fondamental de la naissance, qui fait que la bonne nature n'est pas également partagée ; le hasard résiduel de l'action, qui fait que les résultats ne sont jamais tout à fait prévisibles. Mais le hasard de la naissance est le hasard résiduel de l'action divine, et la grandeur de l'homme consiste, en prolongeant par la prudence l'action d'une Providence défaillante, à reculer le plus possible les limites de l'imprévisible et de l'inhumain. " Pierre Aubenque. (shrink)

It is often claimed that feminist philosophy has moved into a second phase of development, a self critical period in which previous theories are subjected to rigorous analysis and evaluation. Jean Elshtain's Public Man, Private Woman is an excellent example of this second phase. Her text offers a powerful critique not only of traditional philosophers' theories of the relation of the public-private distinction to sex identity, but also classifies and evaluates several different contemporary feminist philosophies. Finally, Elshtain suggests a theory (...) of her own about how the public and private spheres ought to be structured for the future of women and men. (shrink)

Foucault’s theory of power and subjectification challenges common concepts of freedom in social philosophy and expands them through the concept of ‘freedom as critique’: Freedom can be defined as the capability to critically reflect upon one’s own subjectification, and the conditions of possibility for this critical capacity lie in political and social institutions. The article develops this concept through a critical discussion of the standard response by Foucault interpreters to the standard objection that Foucault’s thinking obscures freedom. The standard response (...) interprets Foucault’s later works, especially The Subject and Power, as a solution to the problem of freedom. It is mistaken, because it conflates different concepts of freedom that are present in Foucault’s work. By differentiating these concepts, this article proposes a new institutionalist approach to solve the problem of freedom that breaks with the partly anarchist underpinnings of Foucault scholarship: As freedom as critique is not given, but itself a result of subjectification, it entails a demand for ‘modal robustness’ and must therefore be institutionalized. This approach helps to draw out the consequences of Foucault’s thinking on freedom for postfoundationalist democratic theory and the general social-philosophical discussion about freedom. (shrink)

La question de l'articulation du général et du particulier n'a pas qu'une dimension épistémologique, elle commande aussi la résolution du problème du rapport entre théorie et pratique éclairée, et ceci dans la mesure où la pratique s'exerce toujours sur des processus ou des phénomènes individués. Après avoir réalisé un examen critique de trois tentatives de réponse à cette question — l'approche positiviste traditionnelle, celle fondée sur la notion de « modèle » et celle, weberienne, qui fait appel aux « types (...) idéaux » —, nous envisageons cette articulation comme rapport particulier entre concepts théoriques — portant sur des déterminations ou objets abstraits-formels —, et concepts empiriques — portant sur celles de la singularité des objets concrets —. Cette solution méthodologique est présentée via la construction d'un concept exemplaire, celui de « formation sociale », et l'analyse de son fonctionnement dans l'étude d'un cas concret, à savoir les sociétés latino-américaines.The articulation of the general and the particular is not a question merely of epistemology. It also comprises a relation between theory and enlightened practice to the extent that processes and individualized phenomena always take place in practice. In this paper we examine critically three approaches to this question of articulation: that of traditional positivism, that based on the notion of "model" and that of Weberian "ideal types". We propose that this articulation is a particular relation between theoretical concepts relating to formal abstract objects or determinations and empirical concepts relating to particular determinations of concrete objects. We illustrate this methodological solution with the concept of "social formation" examining the sense in which it applies to the concrete case of Latin American societies. (shrink)

While Foucault referred to Benjamin just once in his entire corpus, scholars have long noticed affinities between the two thinkers, mainly between their conceptions of history: their emphasis on discontinuity, their historiographical practices, and the role of archives in their work. This essay focuses, rather, on their practice of critique and, more specifically, on their conception of the relation of this practice to exercise or askesis. I examine the role of askesis as a self-transformative exercise in Foucault’s late work and (...) how this concept reverberates throughout his idea of critique as the exercise of an ethos demanding arduous work. Against this background, the role of exercise (Übung) in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Traeurspiel, his interest in ascetic kinds of exercise or schooling, and its ties to critique are discerned. This comparison reveals significant similarities in Foucault’s and Benjamin’s conception of philosophy, as well as different emphases in their inheritance of the Kantian critical project: critique as an exercise of an attitude attentive to possibilities for transformation in the present vs. critique as involving an attitude-transforming exercise; critique as a modern ethos that needs to be reactivated vs. critique as propaedeutic, as a preparation for a modern tradition. (shrink)

Michel Foucault was an energetic activist, yet his bleak depiction of totalizing power and his refusal to make normative claims have led many to judge that Discipline and Punish (1975) did not sustain a positive political project. This article offers a new, contextualist account of Foucault’s political purposes by reading Discipline and Punish as a tool for coalition building through historical worldmaking. Addressing the division and marginalization of movements on France’s “alternative left” like feminism and gay liberation, Foucault wove together (...) their differentiated concerns into a shared historical world. His apparently demoralizing identification of the same forms of power everywhere in fact revealed new possibilities for alliance. Focusing on Foucault’s unifying historical narratives reveals a positive project beyond the negative, denaturalizing “critique of power” we usually associate with his political thought. Foucault’s coalitional work of worldmaking may offer a model for genealogical political theory today. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to (...) push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems. (shrink)

While increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the relation between Foucault’s conception of critique and Kant’s, much controversy remains over whether Foucault’s most sustained early engagement with Kant, his dissertation on Kant’s Anthropology, should be read as a wholesale rejection of Kant’s views or as the source of Foucault’s late return to ethics and critique. In this paper, I propose a new reading of the dissertation, considering it alongside 1950s-era archival materials of which I advance the first (...) scholarly appraisal. I argue that Foucault manifests a fundamental ambivalence to Kantian anthropology, rejecting it in theoretical terms while embracing its practical (‘pragmatic’) conception of the subject. Furthermore, I take these texts to collectively evidence Foucault’s attempt to situate himself within the anthropological-critical tradition rather than extricating himself from it. If we interpret Foucault to reject this tradition’s appeal to an essentialized, theoretical conception of subjectivity, what remains of anthropology is its inherent practical reflexivity in structure. Thus, I situate Foucault’s conception of ethics as one’s relation to oneself in continuity with this tradition. (shrink)

Juger, c'est trouver l'exemple qui atteste la loi. Et, inversement, quand on n'a pas la loi d'abord, c'est imaginer la règle que recèle et qu'exige le cas. Le juge dispose d'un code, le cas à juger y est traité. L'arrêt se termine alors, en principe, par application de l'un à l'autre. Mais en fait le juge doit encore juger que le cas est bien tel cas prévu par le code. Ou pire, si le cas n'y est pas traité, le juge (...) doit en juger sans règle préétablie, et son jugement peut faire jurisprudence. Cette "prudence" est la vertu de se bien guider sans boussole. Avant l'institution. Déboussolés autant et plus que nous le sommes, six philosophes examinent ici comment juger quand la loi manque. L'occasion leur en est donnée par les écrits de l'un deux, Lyotard, lors d'un colloque à Cerisy en 1982. Le présent titre fait allusion à Kant. La force de juger ne fait pas seulement l'objet de la critique, elle est ce qui tend son ressort. Elle s'exerce et se réfléchit dans l'éthique et la politique, dans l'évaluation pratique ou esthétique, dans l'invention littéraire, scientifique, artistique. Elle est peut-être toute l'énergie du philosophe, sa faiblesse invincible. (shrink)

Y a-t-il des Idées et peut-on démontrer qu’elles existent ? Parmi les protagonistes anciens de la controverse qui a opposé partisans et adversaires des Idées, Aristote mérite une attention toute particulière. De fait, si – au moment où Aristote intervient dans le débat autour de l’hypothèse des Idées – ce débat a déjà une histoire, c’est avec lui que cette histoire atteint une maturité qui est à la fois d’ordre doctrinal et doxographique. De fait, non seulement Aristote est le premier (...) à avoir défini certaines au moins des propriétés de ce qui est et se dit en commun de plusieurs, mais encore a-t-il pris soin d’inscrire ces définitions dans la continuité de l’héritage socratique dont il s’est explicitement revendiqué tout en dénonçant sa dérive aux mains des successeurs de Socrate. L’objectif principal du cycle de conférences a été d’étudier les objections qu’Aristote a formulées à l’encontre des partisans des Idées en prenant comme fil conducteur la notion de substance que sa discussion des Formes platoniciennes tantôt présuppose, tantôt mobilise explicitement. Pour ce faire, nous avons procédé à une lecture détaillée d’un certain nombre de documents, tirés aussi bien de ses écrits d’école que des vestiges de ses traités perdus, où Aristote rejette la notion d’un universel substantiel (autant dire, en l’occurrence, séparé) et s’efforce de mettre à mal les arguments que ses partisans avançaient pour prouver son existence. (shrink)

« L’histoire de la “pensée clinique” – prise en son sens le plus large – peut être dite vectorisée par une dé-singularisation toujours plus nette des situations de soin. Que ce soit en médecine somatique, en psychiatrie ou en psychologie, le colloque soignant/soigné s’est progressivement standardisé, par l’opérationnalisation d’un ensemble de procédures thérapeutiques jugées efficaces. La psychanalyse, dernière-née des sous-disciplines cliniques, occupe à ce titre une position “à la limite”. Soucieuse comme les autres de connaître pour mieux soigne r, elle (...) monte en généralité ( cf. ses étiologies, ses diagnostics et le modèle métapsychologique). Mais elle adopte simultanément – suivant cette même exigence d’efficacité – une démarche inverse qu’on peut à bon droit nommer “descente en singularité”. De fait, Freud met en évidence que certaines représentations uniques verbalisées au cas par cas de ses patients (non reproductibles par d’autres, et non utilisables pour d’autres) constituent le principal levier thérapeutique pour une série de troubles et souffrances psychiques. Son legs scientifique consiste ainsi en une reproblématisation de la question des niveaux logiques opérants dans le champ clinique : est-ce avant tout au niveau du générique (comme en médecine) qu’il faut situer l’effort de vérité pour bien soigner, à l’échelle du typique (comme en psychologie), ou, au contraire, dans l’ordre de l’ unique (proposition originale de la psychanalyse)? Une relecture du fameux cas freudien de Lucy R., tiré des Études sur l’hystérie (1895) – permet de préciser ces enjeux épistémo-cliniques, toujours d’actualité. Est alors discutée la proposition de l’extension de l’usage de l’adjectif “clinique” pour désigner toute pensée du singulier – même hors cadre thérapeutique –, dans l’art, en littérature ou en sciences humaines. ». (shrink)

The close ties between modes of governing, subjectivities and critique in contemporary societies challenge the role of critical social research. The classical normative ethos of the unmasking researcher unravelling various oppressive structures of dominant vs. dominated groups in society is inadequate when it comes to understand de-politicizing mechanisms and the struggles they bring about. This article argues that only a non-normative position can stay attentive to the constant and complex evolution of modes of governing and the critical operations actors themselves (...) engage in. The article outlines a non-normative but critical programme based on an ethos of re-politicizing contemporary pervasive modes of governing. The analytical advantages and limitations of such a programme are demonstrated by readings of both Foucauldian studies and the works of and debates regarding the French pragmatic sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot. (shrink)

Foucault's theory of power and subjectification challenges common concepts of freedom in social philosophy and expands them through the concept of 'freedom as critique': Freedom can be defined as the capability to critically reflect one's own subjectification, and the conditions of possibility for this critical capacity lie in political and social institutions. The article develops this concept through a critical discussion of the standard response by Foucault interpreters to the standard objection that Foucault's thinking obscures freedom. The standard response interprets (...) Fou-cault's later works, especially The Subject and Power, as a solution to the problem of freedom. It is mistaken, because it conflates different concepts of freedom that are present in Foucault's work. By differentiating these concepts, this paper proposes a new institutionalist approach to solve the problem of freedom that breaks with the partly anarchist underpinnings of Foucault scholarship: As freedom as critique is not given, but itself a result of subjectification, it entails a demand for 'modal robustness' and must therefore be institutionalized. This approach helps to draw out the consequences of Foucault's thinking on freedom for postfoundationalist democratic theory and the general social-philosophical discussion on freedom. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungNach Descartes besteht der Hylomorphismus nur beim Menschen und sonst gar nicht. Die Cartesische Lehre wird an Hand von vier Fragen untersucht. 1. Wie sehen die Texte aus, in denen Descartes gegen die substantiale Form im allgemeinen bzw. fur die substantiale Form im Men schen spricht? 2. Wie verhält sich die Cartesische Lehre von der Stelle des Menschen in der Natur zur Aristotelischen Fassung? 3. Wie hat Descartes das scholastische Modell umgedeutet, um zu seiner Kritik der substantialen Form zu gelangen? (...) 4. Welche Rolle spielt die substantiale Form in der Entwicklung der Cartesischen Metaphysik, und wie verandert sich der Substanzbegriff durch diese Entwicklung?SummaryAccording to Descartes hylomorphism occurs in man only and nowhere else. The Cartesian doctrine is examined in relation to four questions. 1. What are we to make of the texts in which Descartes speaks against substantial form in general and for substantial form in the human case? 2. How does Descartes's doctrine of the place of man in nature compare with Aristotle's? 3. How did Descartes reinterpret the scholastic model, in order to arrive at his critique of substantial form? 4. What role does substantial form play in the development of Descartes's metaphysic, and how is the traditional concept of substance altered by this development?RésuméPour Descartes, l'hylomorphisme ne se trouve que chez I'homme, et nulle part ailleurs. L'auteur examine cette doctrine en essayant de répondre à quatre questions: 1. Que peut‐on tirer des textes où Descartes se prononce contre les formes substantielles dans le cas général et pour ces mêmes formes dans le cas de l'homme? 2. Comment se présente, comparée à celle d'Aristote, la doctrine cartésienne de la place de I'homme dans la nature? 3. Comment Descartes, réinterpré‐tant le modéle scolastique, est‐il arrivéà sa critique des formes substantielles? 4. Quel rôle les for mes substantielles jouent‐elles dans le développement de la métaphysique cartésienne et en quoi le concept traditionnel de substance a‐t‐il été affecté par ce développement? (shrink)

Les lectures plotinienne et proclusienne de Métaphysique Λ ne se résolvent pas dans ces résultats doctrinaux que sont la hiérarchisation de l’Intellect et de l’Un-Bien et l’harmonisation des causalités efficiente et finale. Pour les saisir tant dans leur différence que dans celle qui les oppose toutes deux aux lectures concordistes, il faut déplacer l’analyse du plan des doctrines à celui des concepts. Plus précisément, il faut demander comment Plotin et Proclus intègrent le concept qui, en Métaphysique Λ, condense la charge (...) polémique portée par Aristote contre Platon, à savoir le concept d’energeia. Ce dernier engage en effet une conception radicalement antiplatonicienne du principe premier, dont on montre qu’elle s’articule en quatre critiques fondamentales. On analyse dès lors les stratégies de lecture de Λ mises en oeuvre par Plotin et Proclus de façon à évaluer les angles de contreattaque qu’elles déterminent. Plutôt qu’à une harmonisation ou à une simple hiérarchisation, on a affaire, dans les deux cas quoique sous des modalités différentes, à une intégration dialectique qui en passe par la neutralisation de la charge polémique du concept d’energeia ainsi que par sa réélaboration, elle-même solidaire de modèles causaux distincts tant de celui de Platon que de celui d’Aristote. (shrink)

Girard a opéré une virulente dénonciation du fondement des sciences humaines dont on dresse un bref panorama : philosophie, psychanalyse, nouvelle critique littéraire, ethnologie, droit, économie politique, science politique. Seules deux sciences échappent à ce procès dont elles sont les instigatrices : la science de la guerre de Clausewitz et la science de la religion de Girard. De cette remise en place, il ne reste alors qu'à tirer un bilan conforté par la dialectique d'Aristote."--Page 4 of cover.

On May 27, 1978, Michel Foucault gave a lecture to the French Society of Philosophy where he redefines his entire philosophical project in light of Immanuel Kant's 1784 text, "What Is Enlightenment?" Foucault strikingly characterizes critique as the political and moral attitude consisting in the "art of not being governed in this particular way," one that performs the function of destabilizing power relations and creating the space for a new formation of the self within the "politics of truth." This volume (...) presents the first critical edition of this crucial lecture alongside a previously unpublished lecture about the culture of the self and three public debates with Foucault at the University of California, Berkeley in April 1983. There, for the first time, Foucault establishes a direct connection between his reflections on Enlightenment and his analyses of Greco-Roman antiquity. However, far from suggesting a return to the ancient culture of the self, Foucault invites his audience to build a "new ethics" that bypasses the traditional references to religion, law, and science. (shrink)

Contre la critique platonicienne, Aristote a confié au théâtre la charge d’une opération mimétique associant à la valeur épistémique de la fable la fonction politique d’une catharsis collective des passions, produite par la représentation théâtrale. Qu’en est-il de ces thèses aujourd’hui, où aller au théâtre n’est plus un rite politique? En quoi l’art du théâtre peut-il contribuer à l’expérience des spectateurs, comme connaissance du monde et comme formation subjective? En dépit des critiques de Deleuze et de Foucault, on réhabilitera la (...) notion de représentation dans son rapport à l’expérience. On soutiendra la valeur esthétique et politique de la narrativité théâtrale, non pour récuser les gestes de subversion du sens des années 70, mais pour en reprendre l’intention critique par d’autres voies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:92 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY seulement apr~s qu'on a drmontr6 son existence (pp. 182, 183, 185, 188). Or ceci nous parait tout h fait erronr: la critique mrt~physique de l'activit6 rrv~le qu'elle implique drpendance, et non seulement par rapport ~t d'autres 8tres finis (ce qu'Aristote a drift vu), mais par rapport ~t une Cause transcendante et infinie qui, en crrant l'~tre fini, lui donne constamment le pouvoir de se drpasser (...) en produisant ses aetes seconds. C'est pourquoi l'analyse mrtaphysique de l'activit6 est une des voies qui conduisent ~t la drcouverte de Dieu. Scot lui-m~me, du reste, reconnait que tout changement implique drpendance et rrv~le l'existence d'un Etre immuable et absolu (pp. 184-185). Ceci nous donne l'occasion de revenir h la prima via de Thomas d'Aquin. La libert6 avec laquelle nous avons discut6 nagu~re la valeur des quinque viae ne permet pas de nous SOUl~onner d'attachement servile aux positions du saint Docteur. La prima via est une preuve incomplete de l'existence de Dieu entendu comme le Crrateur unique de l'univers, nous avons dit et redit pourquoi. Mais l'argumentation qui s'appuie sur le principe de motion nous a toujours paru et nous parait encore inattaquable: dans la Summa contra Gentiles (I, 13), Thomas 6tait encore emp~tr6 dans la physique d'Aristote, mais, dans la Summa theologiae il se maintient strictement au plan mrtaphysique : un ~tre qui change vraiment ne saurait changer par lui-mSme. Ce principe est inrbranlable et la critique de Duns Scot est inol~rante ici. F. VAN STEENBERGHEN Louvain Francesco Sanchez. By Salvatore Miecolis. (Bari: Tipografia Levante, 1965. Universith di Bari, Pubblicazioni dell'Istituto di filosofia, no. 8. Pp. 100, one plate. No price given). Francisco Sanches,1 the Portuguese philosopher and physician of Jewish parentage who was also a relative of Montaigne, ranks as one of the more interesting of sixteenthcentury thinkers. Not only is he an important reviver of scepticism in the sixteenth century, but his best known work Quod nihil scitur (first printed in 1581) was still well enough known in the next century to draw several separate attacks. What is more, various scholars have pointed out the similarities between the arguments used in Sanches' work and Descartes' cogito argument. Though there are now quite a number of studies on Sanches, especially in Portuguese, there is not yet a defnitive study of aU aspects of his life, thought, and influence. In English there is very little indeed and we could well use a monograph or at least an article on Sanches to make some of his ideas accessible to a wider audience. A definitive study will require much work and 1 This is the Portuguese form of his name. It is also sometimes given the Spanish spelling 'Sanchez' as in the title of Miccolis' book. He was born near the Spanish-Portuguese border about 1550 and moved to France, while still a boy, and there spent the remainder of his life. There has been much discussion whether Sanches was in fact Portuguese or Spanish by birth and, consequently, which is the correct form of his name. It does not seem as though the question of his nationality can be answered with certainty. We have chosen to use the Portuguese form since the Portuguese seem to have adopted him as one of their philosophers more frequently than have the Spanish. BOOK REVIEWS 93 would have to use the extensive notes made by H. P. Cazac, who died before he could utilize all of the material which he had collected,z For these reasons one might look to Miccolis' book as a new contribution to Sanches studies. One is bound to be disappointed, however, for little new material is brought forth here and even previous studies on Sanches are not fully utilized. Although this study has the format of a book, its length is little more than that of a substantial article (ca. 25,000 words). After a very brief introductory section on the life and works of Sanches, the author treats the Quod nihil scitur and 'Sanches and medicine' in... (shrink)