Sartre importe à l'histoire vivante de la philosophie sous plusieurs angles. Héritier de Hegel qui le hante, il conteste celui-ci dans sa conviction « totaliste ». S'il reste fidèle au dynamisme hégélien, à l'interrogation constante du vécu, il les traduit pourtant par nos langages présents.

Art is a language. Art objects are therefore decipherable into more or less elaborated and restricted codes. These codes change with the relative solidarity of the community in which they are produced. The more solidary the group, the more restricted the code; the less solidary the community, the more elaborated the artistic codes they produce. In general, realism is a more elaborated code and abstraction a more restricted code, and accordingly more solidary communities should produce more abstract art and less (...) solidary groups should produce more realistic art. This theoretical relationship between artistic codes and group solidarity is captured in the idea of a "semantic equation" and is applied to changes in the styles of New York art from the 1940s through the mid 1980s. (shrink)

The sacred has survived where religion has not. The sacred is acknowledged by prominent atheists and agnostics. They emphatically agree that the person is sacred and less clearly that nature is as well. Closer examination of their remarks shows that today the sacred comes in two versions, the rightful sacred, best known under the heading of human rights, and the graceful sacred of concrete reality?things and practices of nature and art particularly. The division of the sacred into its rightful and (...) graceful versions (a division that is mirrored in the distinction philosophers make between the right and the good) is the crucial cultural event of the modern era. The two are distinct at least and sometimes thought to be incompatible. Yet they can and must be reconciled and seen as complementary?a general requirement of human well-being. And for a Christian like me they find their perfect union in the truly sacred person?God. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to consider the possibility of a new analytical methodology that could include multidisciplinary approaches into the study of religious ideologies and practices, taking benefit from historical and ethnographic interpretations, but also from linguistic and philological, psychoanalytical, philosophical, sociological, and anthropological considerations. If one tries to study the role or function played by religion in society, considering human beings as builders of symbolic worlds, one should set out to analyze, if not rules, at least general (...) processes of the religious readjustment with respect to the rest of social life, whenever the gap is much too wide, or the religious transfer from one realm to another entirely different. (shrink)

In a survey spanning over half a century of his own work, Hirschman, among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century on political economy, celebrates the ability to undermine one’s own claims and theories. Whereas skepticism toward other people’s work is not noteworthy, Hirschman argues, self-critque is crucial in relation “to one’s own generalizations or constructs.” But self-criticism and interpretive changes do “not in the end cancel out or refute the earlier findings”; rather, they help to define domains of (...) the social world where originally postulated relations do not hold. Exercises in “self-subversion,” while often experienced at first as traumatic, are eventually, as Hirschman’s own career attests, “rewarding and enriching.”. (shrink)

This paper interprets the Critique of Judgment as the culmination of Kant's contribution to our understanding of freedom--the human meaning of which is being-with-other-as-with-own. Central to that complex achievement and to the overarching role assigned by Kant to the aesthetic dimension (beauty, feeling, judgment, and art) is his revolutionary new way of seeing beauty and art as the expression of aesthetic ideas--a definition of them which carries him beyond formalism to illuminate also the modern and romantic search for freedom. This (...) move also brings Kant to the threshold of religious ethics as man's ultimate freedom, his being-with-the-infinitely-transcendent-as-with-own, is, in art and beauty, disclosed for imagination and made available for the life of feeling in this world. (shrink)

0.1 Logic, in particular the modern symbolic logic, is not accused of being deficient in precision and accuracy, but one does sometimes hear that it is unrealistic, that it cannot be applied to reality, that it is utopian.