Éditorial. Universités, Églises, Société – Anthony Feneuil Le moins que l’on puisse dire est que la théologie, parmi les disciplines académiques, occupe une place marginale. Toutefois, au sens plus général d’un discours sur Dieu, depuis la question de Dieu, à destination de celles et ceux qui sont concernés par cette question, elle dépasse de loin le cadre académique. La légitimité de ce cadre fait d’ailleurs elle-même l’objet de discussions nourries depuis longtemps, dont les premiers articl...

Anthony Feneuil | : Cet article vise à comprendre la posture paradoxale de Karl Barth à l’égard de Friedrich Schleiermacher, mélange de sévérité critique et de grande admiration. Pour cela, il explore le reproche fondamental adressé par Barth à Schleiermacher, celui d’éthicisme. Il se trouve que l’entière compréhension de ce reproche suppose non seulement de comprendre la place de l’éthique chez Schleiermacher selon Barth, mais aussi et surtout la place de l’éthique chez Barth, et en particulier l’importance de (...) la question éthique dans l’écriture de la théologie. | : This paper aims at understanding the paradoxical attitude of Karl Barth towards Friedrich Schleiermacher. This attitude is a mix of sharp criticism and great admiration. The main criticism Barth address to Schleiermacher is that of ethicism. Understanding this criticism entails not only to show what ethics are in Schleiermacher — at least in Schleiermacher in Barth’s view ; but also to study the role of ethics in Barth himself, and in its theological writing. (shrink)

Peut-on sentir et expérimenter que l'on est éternel? On dit parfois que l'art, la philosophie ou la religion peuvent nous permettre d'échapper à notre condition temporelle, et nous faire accéder à l'éternité. Mais sait-on alors ce qu'on dit? Prétendre à une telle expérience de l'éternité, ne serait-ce pas plutôt une marque de folie? Ce livre ne veut pas en préjuger. À l'écoute de la littérature, de la philosophie, de la théologie, mais aussi de la clinique psychiatrique, il veut saisir les (...) contours de ces expériences de l'extrême pour les évaluer et tâcher d'en tirer les enseignements pour la compréhension de l'expérience, de l'éternité et de notre condition temporelle. De Spinoza aux tatouages des individus borderline, de la deep ecology à Simone Weil, ce livre explore les manières de faire sentir et résonner l'éternité."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Bergson avait-il prévu dès 1903, dans un article qui annonçait la possibilité de passer par approfondissement de l’intuition du moi à celle d’une "éternité de vie", la suite de son œuvre, et en particulier son grand livre de 1932, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion ? Oui, si rien, dans sa méthode philosophique intuitive, n’a changé en trente ans. A la suite de Jean Nabert (1941), cet article veut montrer que la méthode philosophique bergsonienne subit un (...) changement majeur en 1932, contrainte d’abandonner l’immédiateté qui la caractérisait et découvrant la médiation. (shrink)

Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus offre un exemple de ce que Bergson appelle le mysticisme «à l’état pur», c’est-à-dire épuré de tout ce qui entoure l’expérience mystique sans la constituer essentiellement: visions, formules théologiques et même croyance en une révélation. Cet article interroge le statut de ce qu’il reste après cette épuration. Des images, images des ténèbres qui n’ont autre chose à montrer que l’aveuglement de la carmélite. En les examinant pour tâcher de dépasser le paradoxe, c’est toute la poétique thérésienne (...) que nous sommes amenés à penser, poétique indissociable tant de la théologie de la «petite voie» que d’une pragmatique de l’écriture comme outil de conversion. (shrink)

William Alston et Henri Bergson semblent défendre une même thèse : celle de la valeur de l’expérience mystique pour la connaissance. L’étude comparée de la manière dont chacun d’entre eux la formule et la défend constitue un bon angle pour envisager la différence entre tradition « analytique » et tradition « continentale » en philosophie de la religion. Cet article vise à montrer les divergences et les convergences entre les deux auteurs, mais surtout à situer le point d’origine des divergences. (...) Il apparaît que celui-ci n’est pas à chercher dans deux conceptions irréductibles de la philosophie ou de la rationalité, mais dans une différence de compréhension de la mystique. (shrink)

« — Voyez-vous, ai-je dit, à mon avis, il n’y a pas de croyants ou de non-croyants. Il y seulement des gens qui veulent croire et d’autres qui ne veulent pas croire.— Vous voulez dire que ceux qui veulent ne pas croire croient déjà en quelque chose? a dit Sakerdon Mikhaïlovitch. Et que ceux qui veulent croire ne croient en rien au départ déjà? » Daniil Harms, La Vieille (1939) La distinction de la croyance et de l’incroyance est redoutablement piégieuse (...) ; elle ne cesse de se retourner contr... (shrink)

L’auteur de cet article veut montrer qu’il existe entre les deux premiers livres de Quentin Meillassoux, Après la finitude et Le Nombre et la sirène un tournant engageant le rapport de sa philosophie avec ce qu’il appelle le « corrélationnisme ». L’étude de ce tournant rend possible une relecture du premier livre à la lumière du second, mais elle permet aussi d’envisager des rapprochements inattendus entre la philosophie de Quentin Meillassoux et des pensées de la finitude, ainsi que la théologie.

This article addresses Barth’s dialectical notion of experience in the 1920s. I argue that the theoretical problem raised by recent studies on Barth’s notion of experience after his break with liberalism (i.e. the apparent inconsistency between Barth’s move towards an increasingly neo-Kantian understanding of experience and his emphasis on the existential and psychological dimensions of experience) can be solved by the hypothesis of a Nietzschean influence on Barth’s epistemology in the 1920s. I defend not only the historical plausibility but also (...) the conceptual fecundity of such a hypothesis, which casts a new light on Barth’s relation to philosophy and the notion of experience, and lays the basis for a consistent Barthian theology of experience. (shrink)

Le désir d'imiter Dieu n'est pas nécessairement sous-tendu par un délire ou une dérisoire présomption. Il met plutôt en tension deux réalités irréductibles. D'un côté, la réalité d'une vocation de l'humain à répondre à plus haut que lui et à trouver la voie de son accomplissement dans la reconnaissance d'un don qui le transforme. De l'autre côté, l'irréductibilité du statut créaturel, et donc de la finitude qui implique une distance toujours maintenue, même si, par instants, certains spirituels sont convaincus de (...) vivre une union allant jusqu'à la coïncidence de l'âme et de Dieu même. C'est cette tension que ce livre explore en considérant spécialement le christianisme occidental sur la longue durée, mais en jetant également des coups de sonde du côté du platonisme et du néoplatonisme, du judaïsme et du christianisme oriental. À travers cette tension se joue toute la question de la relation entre le fini et l'infini"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Au point de départ de ce qui est aujourd’hui le deuxième dossier thématique de ThéoRèmes, et qui fut d’abord un colloque organisé à la Faculté de théologie de l’Université de Genève en juin 2010 par l’Institut romand de systématique et d’éthique (IRSE), un étonnement. L’étonnement devant la reprise depuis déjà plusieurs décennies dans le monde anglo-saxon, mais plus récemment encore en francophonie, de questions qui semblaient ne plus pouvoir être posées en philosophie, et surtout dont il sem...

Pourquoi consacrer, dans la revue ThéoRèmes, un dossier à la théologie protestante libérale? Plusieurs raisons doivent être invoquées. La plus évidente est le caractère relativement méconnu de ce courant de pensée pourtant d'une grande importance au tournant des xixe et xxe siècles, et décisif pour l'histoire de la théologie chrétienne au xxe siècle et jusqu'aujourd'hui. Plus généralement, l'histoire de la théologie et des théologies se trouve, dans le monde scientifique d'expression françai...

Le christianisme est-il essentiellement lié à l’histoire, au sens restreint de l’histoire enregistrée à partir du Néolithique? Cet article montre que la pensée de Teilhard de Chardin offre une tentative de répondre « non » à cette question, en imaginant un christianisme sans histoire et dont la portée pourrait ainsi dépasser les limites de notre histoire. À partir de deux problèmes, celui de la préhistoire et celui de la vie extra-terrestre, et des questions qu’ils posent au christianisme, l’article décrit la (...) manière dont Teilhard s’engage dans cette entreprise de reconfiguration des principaux concepts chrétiens pour les adapter à la fin du Néolithique et à la sortie de l’histoire humaine vers celle de l’Univers. (shrink)

Henri Bergson is usually considered to be a ‘continental’ philosopher. This stimulating book is an attempt to introduce his philosophy into contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Therefore,...

Anthony Feneuil : Une question concernant votre parcours : pourquoi avoir choisi l'incroyance comme thème de prédilection? Comment y êtes-vous venu et quels sont selon vous les enjeux d’une histoire de l’incroyance aujourd’hui? Est-ce qu'ils sont d'abord épistémologiques (parce que la question de l'incroyance pose des questions à l'historien sur les sources qu'il utilise et leurs biais, oblige à se poser la question des rapports de pouvoir etc.)? Sont-ils politiques? Il est vrai que l'inc...

It seems that, whereas a person's death needn't be a bad thing for him, it can be. In some circumstances, death isn't a "bad thing" or an "evil" for a person. For instance, if a person has a terminal and very painful disease, he might rationally regard his own death as a good thing for him, or at least, he may regard it as something whose prospective occurrence shouldn't be regretted. But the attitude of a "normal" and healthy human being (...) - adult or child - toward the prospect of his death is different; it is not unreasonable in certain cases to regard one's own death as a bad thing for oneself. If this is so, then the question arises as to why death is bad, in those cases in which it is bad. (shrink)

Addressing the matter of attention from a phenomenological perspective as it bears on the problem of becoming aware, I draw on Edmund Husserl''s analyses and distinctions that mark his genetic phenomenology. I describe several experiential levels of affective force and modes of attentiveness, ranging from what I call dispositional orientation and passive discernment to so-called higher levels of attentiveness in cognitive interest, judicative objectivation, and conceptualization. These modes of attentiveness can be understood as motivating a still more active mode of (...) reflective attention, i.e., philosophical attentiveness, and to this extent, even it would be subject to varying influences of affection. What role, if any, does affection play in a peculiar kind of reflective attention that is phenomenological? I conclude by briefly considering phenomenological reflective attentiveness and its relation to affection. (shrink)

Kantian transcendental arguments are aimed at uncovering the necessary conditions for the possibility of thought and experience. If such arguments are to have any force against Cartesian skepticism about knowledge of the external world, then it would seem that the conditions the transcendental argument uncovers must be non-psychological in nature, and their special status must be knowable a priori. In "Transcendental Arguments", Barry Stroud raised the question whether there are any such conditions., He answered that it was very doubtful that (...) one could argue deductively from the premise that there is thought and experience to the conclusion that certain conditions concerning non-psychological, external reality are satisfied. In the intervening 27 years, no one has decisively answered those doubts. No one has succeeded in constructing a convincing Kantian anti- skeptical transcendental argument of the desired kind. In a recent paper, however, Stroud has suggested that things might well be looking up a bit for the transcendental arguer. Stroud now holds that there is a modest variant of the ambitious Kantian anti-skeptical strategy that offers the promise of an answer of sorts to the skeptic that is free of various objectionable Kantian excesses. In this paper, I will describe the more modest sort of transcendental argument that Stroud finds promising, and I will then raise some doubts about the prospects of this modest approach. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the experience of hope by focusing on experiences that seem to rival hope, namely, disappointment, desperation, panic, hopelessness, and despair. I explore these issues phenomenologically by examining five kinds of experiences that counter hope (or in some instances, seem to do so): first, by noting the cases in which hope simply is not operative, then by treating the significance of both desperation and pessimism, next by examining the experience of hopelessness, and finally, by treating the (...) experience of despair. Here despair is shown to constitute the most profound challenge to hope among these experiences and to be foundational for the others, even though it is disclosed ultimately as founded in hope. (shrink)

Recent legal rulings concerning the status of advance statements have raised interest in the topic but failed to provide any definitive general guidelines for their enforcement. I examine arguments used to justify the moral authority of such statements. The fundamental ethical issue I am concerned with is how accounts of personal identity underpin our account of moral authority through the connection between personal identity and autonomy. I focus on how recent Animalist accounts of personal identity initially appear to provide a (...) sound basis for extending the moral autonomy of an individual - and hence their autonomous wishes expressed through an advance directive - past the point of severe psychological decline. I argue that neither the traditional psychological account nor the more recent Animalist account of personal identity manage to provide a sufficient basis for extending our moral autonomy past the point of incapacity or incompetence. I briefly explore how analogies to similar areas in law designed to facilitate autonomous decision, such as wills and trusts, provide at best only very limited scope for an alternative justification for granting advance statements any legal or moral authority. I conclude that whilst advance statements play a useful role in formulating what treatment is in a patient’s best interests, such statements do not ultimately have sufficient moral force to take precedence over paternalistic best interest judgements concerning an individual’s care or treatment. (shrink)

Sidgwick famously claimed that an argument in favour of utilitarianism might be provided by demonstrating that a set of defensible philosophical intuitions undergird it. This paper focuses on those philosophical intuitions. It aims to show which specific intuitions Sidgwick endorsed, and to shed light on their mutual connections. It argues against many rival interpretations that Sidgwick maintained that six philosophical intuitions constitute the self-evident grounds for utilitarianism, and that those intuitions appear to be specifications of a negative principle of universalization (...) (according to which differential treatments must be based on reasonable grounds alone). In addition, this paper attempts to show how the intuitions function in the overall argument for utilitarianism. The suggestion is that the intuitions are the main positive part of the argument for the view, which includes Sidgwick's rejection of common-sense morality and its philosophical counterpart, dogmatic intuitionism. The paper concludes by arguing that some of Sidgwick's intuitions fail to meet the conditions for self-evidence which Sidgwick himself established and applied to the rules of common-sense morality. (shrink)

Drawing on and developing the phenomenological work of figures such as Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, Knowing by Heart details the various feelings and feeling states that pertain to matters of the heart.

Using hypersets as an analytic tool, we compare traditionally Gibsonian (Chemero 2003; Turvey 1992) and representationalist (Sahin et al. this issue) understandings of the notion ‘affordance’. We show that representationalist understandings are incompatible with direct perception and erect barriers between animal and environment. They are, therefore, scarcely recognizable as understandings of ‘affordance’. In contrast, Gibsonian understandings are shown to treat animal-environment systems as unified complex systems and to be compatible with direct perception. We discuss the fruitful connections between Gibsonian affordances (...) and dynamical systems explanation in the behavioral sciences and point to prior fruitful application of Gibsonian affordances in robotics. We conclude that it is unnecessary to re-imagine affordances as representations in order to make them useful for researchers in robotics. (shrink)

This paper examines Kierkegaard 's discussion of patience in some of his Upbuilding Discourses, and its connection with his understanding of the nature of selfhood as it appears both in the Discourses and in The Sickness unto Death. That understanding stresses that selfhood is not simply given, but is a task to be achieved—although a task that can only be achieved by the self that is formed in the process of undertaking it. For Kierkegaard, an account of the self that (...) recognizes its essential temporality must give a crucial role to patience as a virtue necessary for the formation and maintenance of personal identity. However, although the self is essentially temporal for Kierkegaard, it is also essentially such as to participate in eternity, and this complexity and tension in his concept of the self gives his understanding of patience a particular character—one that presents an important challenge to some of the dominant assumptions of recent and contemporary philosophy in both the analytic and the continental traditions. (shrink)

Anthony J Wesson; Edgley, Education and Work: a critical note, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 16, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 245–249, https://doi.o.

St. Thomas Aquinas treats penance as both a sacrament and a virtue. In either form, penance’s principal human act is contrition—a willed sorrow for one’s sins and an intention to avoid future sins. A look at Aquinas’s understanding of penitential contrition reveals a complex interplay of the different objects of love, the gift of fear, and finally friendship with God. This article offers an analysis of Aquinas’s accounts of penance and contrition with respect to these key elements. I argue that (...) contrition performs a fundamental role in countering, restoring, and safeguarding a proper ordering of love and attainment of the ultimate good of union with God. In short, contrition is the act that directly counters the interior disorder wrought by sin and provides an ongoing counter to the threat of additional disorder. Sin’s disorder is the aversion to God and conversion to self, while contrition involves the aversion to self and a conversion to God. (shrink)

Using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), recent experiments have demonstrated a strong and automatic positive evaluation of White Americans and a relatively negative evaluation of African Americans. Interpretations of this finding as revealing pro-White attitudes rest critically on tests of alternative interpretations, the most obvious one being perceivers’ greater familiarity with stimuli representing White Americans. The reported experiment demonstrated that positive attributes were more strongly associated with White than Black Americans even when (a) pictures of equally unfamiliar Black and White (...) individuals were used as stimuli and (b) differences in stimulus familiarity were statistically controlled. This experiment indicates that automatic race associations captured by the IAT are not compromised by stimulus familiarity, which in turn strengthens the conclusion that the IAT measures automatic evaluative associations. © 2000 Academic Press.. (shrink)

The Quine/Putnam indispensability approach to the confirmation of mathematical theories in recent times has been the subject of significant criticism. In this paper I explore an alternative to the Quine/Putnam indispensability approach. I begin with a van Fraassen-like distinction between accepting the adequacy of a mathematical theory and believing in the truth of a mathematical theory. Finally, I consider the problem of moving from the adequacy of a mathematical theory to its truth. I argue that the prospects for justifying this (...) move are qualitatively worse in mathematics than they are in science. (shrink)

The familiar “centrisms” in environmental ethics aim to make ethics progressively more inclusive by expanding a single circle of moral consideration I propose a radically different kind of geometry. Multicentrism envisions a world of irreducibly diverse and multiple centers of being and value—not one single circle, of whatever size or growth rate, but many circles, partly overlapping, each with its own center. Moral consideration necessarily becomes plural and ongoing, and moral action takes place within an open-ended context of negotiation and (...) covenant. Much critical and constructive work, both in environmental ethics proper and in many related fields, is already multicentric in spirit. It needs to be drawn together into an explicit, alternative environmental-ethical “platform.”. (shrink)

Critical notice of Robert Audi's The Good in the Right in which doubts are raised about the epistemological and ethical doctrines it defends. It doubts that an appeal to Kant is a profitable way to defend Rossian normative intuitionism.

This understanding of dirty hands should dispell the air of paradox so often associated with it. Dirty hands is a genuine moral problem, but not a conceptual one. The temptation to see it as a conceptual one arises from a hasty acceptance of these assumptions:Moral criticism is appropriate if and only if we can always do what is right. If we cannot do X or avoid doing Y, we cannot be criticized for failing to do X or for doing Y.We (...) are always free to avoid moral compromise since goodness is a matter of having the will to do what is right.We are morally compromised if and only if we either intentionally do what is wrong, or if we do what is right for the wrong reasons.As a general description of conscientiousness, these conditions are uncontroversial. However, conscientiousness does not exhaust the moral realm. The problem with the individuals in the cases above is not that they are guilty of being unconscientious. They are conscientious and still cannot avoid dirtying themselves.The Kantian aspiration to render ourselves invulnerable to moral compromise is well-intentioned and deserves our respect insofar as it alerts us to the importance of struggling with courage and imagination against evil. But to the extent that it rejects or ignores the possibility of moral tragedy, the Kantian conception paints too optimistic and artificial a picture of the human condition. We are complicated creatures with diverse and often conflicting ethical loves. Rigging our ethical theories to eliminate such conflicts does nothing to change life as real-life moral agents experience it. As with any kind of theory, we need to be careful about unwittingly deforming the world in order to make it conform to the beloved castles we so often build in the air. (shrink)

Paul (Noûs 36:578–596, 2002; Noûs 40:623–659, 2006, The Handbook of Mereology, forthcoming) has argued for a bundle theory of objects that analyzes the bundling relation between properties and objects in terms of parthood relations. In this paper I argue that any mereological bundle theory with the explanatory power of Paul’s theory will entail the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII). This is problematic, since similar bundle theories seem to fall to Max Black’s two sphere counterexample to (PII). I argue, (...) however, that a fully developed mereological bundle theory provides a new way of interpreting Black’s two sphere universe that dispels the counterexample. I argue that this solution to Black’s puzzle is superior to other solutions on offer, and consequently that mereological bundle theory is an attractive ontological strategy for friends of (PII). (shrink)