This book offers a comprehensive treatment of the philosophical system of the seventeenth-century philosopher Pierre Gassendi. Gassendi's importance is widely recognized and is essential for understanding early modern philosophers and scientists such as Locke, Leibniz and Newton. Offering a systematic overview of his contributions, LoLordo situates Gassendi's views within the context of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century natural philosophy as represented by a variety of intellectual traditions, including scholastic Aristotelianism, Renaissance Neo-Platonism, and the emerging mechanical philosophy. LoLordo's work will be essential (...) reading for historians of early modern philosophy and science. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce qu'un 'philosophe', au regard de l'histoire et singulièrement du XXIe siècle? Frank Pierobon, en s'appuyant sur son propre parcours et aussi sur ses dix années d'engagement dans la riche aventure des Matins-Philo à Bruxelles, tente d'apporter une réponse située à la question. Loin des imageries populaires, il fait du philosophe un homme de métier et de savoir-être dont toute l'existence oscillerait entre la création de concepts et, en même temps, une quête incessante du désir de sens. Un texte (...) court et fulgurant qui redit que nul n'est dispensé de philosopher. (shrink)

Avatar, le film de James Cameron (2009), aura ete un succes commercial d'une ampleur exceptionnelle, a considerer davantage comme le symptome d'une certaine societe en crise spirituelle, que comme l'expression personnelle d'un createur, fut-il exceptionnel. Sur cette base, Frank Pierobon, au terme d'une deconstruction tres poussee, en extrait l'embleme de notre postmodernite finissante: un Deus ex Fantasma, soit une derisoire redemption par le reve, faute de tout autre salut.

In several early 19th century works, Mary Shepherd articulates a theory of causation that is intended to respond to Humean skepticism. I argue that Shepherd's theory should be read in light of the science of the day and her conception of her place in the British philosophical tradition. Reading Shepherd’s theory in light of her conception of the history of philosophy, including her claim to be the genuine heir of Locke, illuminates the broader significance of her attempt to reinstate reason (...) as the source of scientific knowledge. Reading Shepherd's theory in light of the science of the day helps make plausible her claim that there are robust natural kinds in nature, defined by their causal powers: this is precisely what then-recent advances in chemistry hold. (shrink)

This is the first modern edition of an important work by a previously neglected early 19th century woman philosopher, Mary Shepherd. Shepherd develops a distinctive philosophical system that can be seen as a competitor to Kant's Transcendental Idealism. The edition is aimed at researchers in early modern philosophy and is also intended to be used in graduate and undergraduate courses. It contains a concise introduction as guide for the reader.

Antonia LoLordo - Malebranche - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.1 124-125 Andrew Pyle. Malebranche. London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. xiii + 289. Cloth, $80.00. Despite Malebranche's widely recognized importance, no comprehensive overview of his system was available before Pyle's excellent and wide-ranging study. Pyle agrees with scholarly consensus that occasionalism and the vision in God are Malebranche's two most significant doctrines, but his scope extends well beyond those to matters of theology, (...) physics and biology. In the first half of the book, Pyle lays out Malebranche's two key doctrines as responses to tensions within the Cartesian accounts of causation and of ideas. He details how Malebranche's theory of ideas is involved.. (shrink)

Teaching and learning in a virtual learning environment poses some difficulties, but also challenges and opportunities to rethink the whole learning process, particularly in abstract subjects like logic or high level mathematics. On the other hand, resources and ways to work, now available in VLEs, might soon extend to all kinds of environments. In this paper, we will present experiences at the Open University of Catalonia , a particular VLE, concerning the whole process of teaching logic and mathematics. In addition, (...) we will discuss some challenges and we will present some innovation projects allowed by the present and near future technologies. (shrink)

La Critique de la raison pure d'Emmanuel Kant est incontestablement l'un des ouvrages-clefs de la tradition philosophique. Paradoxalement, la fascination qu'elle a durablement exercée sur des générations de philosophes est à la mesure du mystère de sa construction dont on a maintes fois constaté la rigueur et l'omniprésence, mais dont on a peu examiné, jusqu'à présent, les conditions de possibilité. Pourtant Kant ne se lasse pas de souligner la prépondérance de la systématicité, qu'il appelle " architectonique ", dans la fonction (...) critique de sa pensée. Cette architectonique est souvent assimilée à une quelconque architecture de façade et qui serait à la philosophie ce que devrait être un bon système de rangement pour une bibliothèque : rien de plus qu'une commodité instrumentale qui ne peut rien ajouter à la valeur littéraire des livres qui y sont rangés. A l'opposé de cette conception naïve et réductrice, il faut prendre conscience de ce que l'architectonique régit jusqu'au détail l'essentiel de la pensée kantienne et, loin de constituer un système de juxtaposition rhétorique, guide d'une main sûre la pensée, là où celle-ci devient aveugle. Il s'agit non seulement de la très célèbre illusion transcendantale, mais encore de ce qui ne se laisse pas représenter adéquatement : l'idée. Or le système architectonique de la raison pure dépend lui-même d'une idée et de ce fait reste principalement inexponible en une seule représentation conceptuelle. Cet ouvrage livre non seulement la structure architectonique complète sous-jacente à la Critique mais encore retrouve le schème kantien de l'architectonique qui permet de penser cette description en tant que complète, à travers le jeu d'éclipses dont la logique transcendantale fait son propos. Les lecteurs de Kant seront en particulier intéressés par la reconstitution génétique de la table des catégories en tant que système et par l'explication de cette apparence propre à la table des catégories et, par là, à l'entendement pur (c'est-à-dire la logique formelle), d'être sans fondement, sans racine, comme la connaissance absolue d'un entendement intuitif. Jetant ainsi de nouvelles lumières sur cet ouvrage méconnu à force d'être commenté, Kant et la fondation architectonique de la métaphysique en propose une lecture dont l'originalité tient à ce qu'elle prend la Critique de la raison pure au pied de la lettre et qu'ainsi elle en retrouve l'esprit authentique et en révèle la vertigineuse modernité. (shrink)

A première vue, la différence que Kant fait dans sa Critique de la raison pure entre jugements particulier et singulier semble être dénuée d’une véritable importance philosophique. D’ailleurs, dans cette même veine, l’on s’est demandé très tôt s’il fallait vraiment que les catégories soient regroupées par trois plutôt que par deux, puisque la troisième semble résulter de la connexion des deux autres, et c’est l’observation que le fidèle Johann Schultz s’enhardira à faire respectueusement au philosophe dans une lettre de 1784 (...) dont nous aurons à reparler. Entre-temps, l’on s’est habitué: le caractère tout d’abord déconcertant de l’architectonique kantienne est ce qui disparaît à l’usage, sinon à l’usure; et s’il ne perd rien de son caractère insolite aux yeux des générations d’étudiants qui se penchent avec perplexité sur ces pages sacrées, cet «art des systèmes» paraît un décor baroque que l’on finit par oublier par la force de l’habitude pour se concentrer sur ce qui ferait office d’intrigue et peut se raconter à qui n’aurait pas lu l’oeuvre. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans la revue E-rea [En ligne], 13.1 | 2015. Nous remercions Antonia Rigaud et la revue E-rea de nous avoir autorisé à en reproduire le début ici. Représentant une journée dans la vie d'une ville, Manhatta oscille entre un traitement narratif nous invitant à suivre le quotidien de la ville et un traitement beaucoup plus abstrait, cherchant à capter une atmosphère beaucoup plus qu'à produire un document exact. Tourné en 1921, le film est resté (...) dans l'histoire comme le premier film - Cinéma, animation et vidéo – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Antonia Lolordo presents an original interpretation of John Locke's metaphysics of moral agency, in which to be a moral agent is simply to be free, rational, and a person.

Any contextualist approach to knowledge has to provide a plausible definition of the concept of context and spell out the mechanisms of context changes. Since it is the dynamics of context change that carry the main weight of the contextualist position, not every mechanism will be capable of filling that role. In particular, I argue that one class of mechanisms that is most popularly held to account for context changes, namely those that arise out of shifts of conversational parameters in (...) discourses involving knowledge claims, are not suited to the job because they cannot account for the genuinely epistemic nature of the context shift. A form of epistemic contextualism that defines the context through the structure of our epistemic projects is suggested. Context changes in this account are linked to changes in the background assumptions operative in our epistemic projects and the methods used to carry out our inquiries. (shrink)

Just as bodily actions are things you do with your body, mental actions are things you do with your mind. Both are different from things that merely happen to you. Where does the idea of mental action come from? What are mental actions? And why do they matter in philosophy? These are the three main questions answered in this paper. Section 1 introduces mental action through a brief history of the topic in philosophy. Section 2 explains what it is to (...) be a mental action in terms of intentional action. Section 3 argues that the fact that we can perform mental actions has some striking consequences concerning mental content. Section 4 shows how mental action helps to explain some important facts about self-knowledge and the normativity of thought. The conclusion mentions two further fruitful avenues for philosophical research on mental action. (shrink)

There has recently been a resurgence of interest in the early nineteenth century Scottish philosopher Mary Shepherd. This Element is intended to provide an overview of Shepherd's system, including her views on the following wide range of topics: causation, induction, knowledge of the external world, matter, life, animal cognition, the relationship between mind and body, the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, miracles, and the nature of divine creation. The author also provides an overview of relevant secondary literature (...) and argues for their own interpretation of Shepherd's metaphysics. (shrink)

Where was he active, and where did his surroundings act upon him? In addition to these questions, Antonia Landois deals with the relevance of status of birth and 'acquired' scholarship.

La conception qu'Emmanuel Kant se faisait des mathematiques etait en parfaite consonance avec l'opinion philosophique la plus courante au XVIIIe siecle a l'egard de cette science. Il conviendrait par consequent de tenir davantage compte de l'histoire des idees scientifiques, ce qui permettrait de faire remarquer que la pensee kantienne releve d'un paradigme scientifique plus ancien, celui de la geometrie euclidienne (ou l'image reste intimement articulee au signe), alors que les critiques ordinairement adressees au Kant mathematicien s'appuient indirectement sur l'heritage de (...) la revolution algebrique par lequel le signe est desormais dissocie de l'image. Il convenait donc d'examiner dans le plus grand detail la maniere dont, a travers son oeuvre, Kant recevait et discutait les conceptions mathematiques de son temps, et en particulier la tension marquee entre la geometrie et l'arithmetique. Ce faisant, il redevient possible de recontextualiser le concept kantien d'intuition par rapport aux evidences de son temps, qui ne sont plus tout a fait les notres. Les reticences de Kant vis-a-vis des concepts les plus problematiques de l'algebre se laissent ainsi interpreter a nouveaux frais, faisant ressortir la signification de l'architectonique. (shrink)

Many great authors claim that reading literature can expand your phenomenal imagination and allow you to imagine experiences you have never had. How is this possible? Your phenomenal imagination is constrained by your phenomenal concepts, which are in turn constrained by the phenomenology of your own actual past experiences. Literature could expand your phenomenal imagination, then, by giving you new phenomenal concepts. This paper explains how this can happen. Literature can direct your attention to previously unnoticed phenomenal properties of your (...) own past experiences, as brought to mind by involuntary memory. This process gives you the opportunity to notice those phenomenal properties for the first time, and so also to form phenomenal concepts of those properties. Forming a new phenomenal concept strictly expands the range of your phenomenal imagination. It gives you the capacity to imagine more than you could have before, including certain specific kinds of experience that you yourself have never enjoyed firsthand. Literature’s capacity to expand your phenomenal imagination in this way is central to its social, moral, and epistemic value. (shrink)

In the thirteenth-century Bibles moralisées there appears a new iconographical type in which God the Father, and figures depicted in moralising illustrations, are shown with a compass. This article argues that these images throw light on the medieval concept of reason and its role in the Divine Economy. In these French Capetian Bibles, the compass is the symbol of divine or human reason, depending on the context where it occurs. When depicted in the scene of Creation in the frontispieces, the (...) compass is the instrument of Christ-Logos as Divine Reason, used to impose God’s rational order on formless matter, but also to initiate the Divine Economy. The compass is depicted again, in the same sense, at the beginning of the New Testament, as a ‘dynamic sign’ which links the start of God’s plan for humankind salvation during Creation with the re-enactment of the Divine Economy through the Incarnation. When a compass occurs elsewhere, in a moralised image for a biblical story which takes place in the earthly realm, the instrument becomes the tool used by human reason to discern between good and evil. The analysis which leads to this interpretation is borne out by an examination of related themes in the Bibles moralisées: those of the sleep of mortal reason, and of the endurance of Divine Reason as a guide to true knowledge. (shrink)

This is a review of Stephen Gaukroger's book Descartes's System of Natural Philosophy.

Aesthetic value empiricism claims that the aesthetic value of an object is grounded in the value of a certain kind of experience of it. The most popular version of value empiricism, and a dominant view in contemporary philosophical aesthetics more generally, is aesthetic hedonism. Hedonism restricts the grounds of aesthetic value to the pleasure enjoyed in the right kind of experience. But hedonism does not enjoy any clear advantage over a more permissive alternative version of value empiricism. This alternative is (...) aesthetic liberalism. On this view, an object’s aesthetic value is fully grounded in any value—not just the hedonic value—of a correct and complete experience of its sensory features. To demonstrate the advantages of liberalism over hedonism, I apply both views to analyze the aesthetic value of the Spring Temple Buddha and Anselm Kiefer’s Seraphim. I detail four advantages of liberalism over hedonism, and I conclude by defending liberalism from two kinds of objection. (shrink)

Infolge der Moderne schwinden absolute Erklärungsprinzipien: Man sucht Orientierung, um seine Lebenswelt und den erfahrungswissenschaftlich aufgeschlossenen Kosmos zu überschauen. Seine sich in diesem Kontext ausbildende, nie ganz bewusst gestaltete Weltanschauung artikuliert der Mensch auch in der Literatur. Antonia Bräutigam analysiert anhand von Jenseitsreisen in Werken von Autoren wie Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett und C.S. Lewis die durch die Moderne geprägte Weltanschauung und reflektiert diese philosophisch-theologisch. Literatur erweist sich dabei als locus theologicus, als Erkenntnisort für die Theologie, das Motiv der (...) Jenseitsreise als Daseinsmetapher von hoher theologischer Relevanz. (shrink)

Locke claims that we have sensitive knowledge of the external world, in virtue of the fact that simple ideas are real, true, and adequate. However, despite his dismissive remarks about Cartesian external-world skepticism, Locke gives us little to go on as to how knowledge of the external world survives the fact of perceptual error, or even how perceptual error is possible. I argue that Locke has an in-principle problem explaining perceptual error.

Paulo Friere is considered to be one of the most influential educational philosophers of the twentieth century. Within many progressive circles, he would be considered the most important radical educational philosopher of our times, given his contribution to a revolutionary understanding of education and his certainty and faith that education can function as one of the most significant empowering and democratizing forces in the lives of the disenfranchised. In this deeply personal introduction to the man,and his ideas and their contribution (...) to ideas of progressive schooling, Antonia Darder reflects on her personal memories of time spent with Freire and his influence on her own work. (shrink)

Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, best known for his work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, challenged education plans that contributed to the marginalization of minorities and the poor. Freire believed that education should be used for liberation by helping learners reflect on their experiences historically, giving immediate reality to issues of racism, sexism, and the exploitation of workers. Known as one of the most influential theoretical innovators of the twentieth century, his views have left a significant mark on progressive thinkers about education (...) and liberation. Reinventing Paulo Freire is an homage to him by protégé Antonia Darder. Here, she explores the legacy of Freire, interviews eight former students who studied him-- now teachers themselves, and reflects on the teaching practice as demonstrated by Freire himself. The interviews take the form of first person narratives; the epilogue consists simply of a letter and a poem. (shrink)

You can come to know that you believe that p partly by reflecting on whether p and then judging that p. Call this procedure “the transparency method for belief.” How exactly does the transparency method generate known self-attributions of belief? To answer that question, we cannot interpret the transparency method as involving a transition between the contents p and I believe that p. It is hard to see how some such transition could be warranted. Instead, in this context, one mental (...) action is both a judgment that p and a self-attribution of a belief that p. The notion of embedded mental action is introduced here to explain how this can be so and to provide a full epistemic explanation of the transparency method. That explanation makes sense of first-person authority and immediacy in transparent self-knowledge. In generalized form, it gives sufficient conditions on an attitude’s being known transparently. (shrink)

The comprehension of the tragic in Hegel and Lacan states Antigone’s unconditional desire as heroic. Against this tendency, another hypothesis is explored: The heroic, be it ironic or a sublime brilliance of the sublime, bars the access to the unconditional by attaching it to a transcendence, rather than inquiring into its address. To play down heroism means to reinterpret the capacity of solitude which characterizes heroic courage. What courage then reveals is an ignorance regarding the law of totality, regarding the (...) world that is to be lived in, through a risk taken by a single one. The direct reference to a “conflict of worlds” throws new light on the approaches of Hegel and Lacan. (shrink)

To this day no consensus has been reached concerning the authorship of the 3rd book of Philoponus’ on the Soul. I will begin this article by surveying the discussion of the authorship. In this first section I go into some detail concerning the arguments of scholars who attribute the DAC 3 to Philoponus, and those who do not believe that it is by Philoponus, including those who attribute it to Stephanus of Alexandria. The second section of the paper consists in (...) an analysis and evaluation of the arguments involved in the debate. Finally, I conclude by presenting my own position, including new arguments in favor of the attribution of the DAC 3 to John Philoponus. (shrink)

The notion of spirit was a central notion of two ancient traditions: the medical and the philosophical tradition of ancient Greece and the neoplatonic philosophical one. In this paper we will examine the way in which a Byzantine philosopher of the 6th century, John Philoponus, handled this notion from a neoplatonic point of view, and how he assimilated the Aristotelian, the medical and the neoplatonic “πνεῦμα” theory in a single conception. Philoponus’ career can be divided into two periods: the one (...) during which he was studying under Ammonius and the one during which he was writing in his own name, expressing his Christian convictions as a Byzantine philosopher, and criticizing neoplatonic doctrines opposed to the Christian dogma. We shall, thus, also present the refutation he gives to the neoplatonic theory of “πνεῦμα”, during the second period of his career. (shrink)