LA PHILOSOPHIE A L'ECOLE NATIONALE AVANT 1960 : LOUIS ALTHUSSER. Louis Althusser (1918-1990) : psychologie. Louis Althusser (1918-1990) : philosophie politique. LA PHILOSOPHIE A L'ECOLE NATIONALE AVANT 1960 : JEAN HYPPOLITE. Jean Hyppolite (1907-1968) : Aristote, Spinoza, Hume. Jean Hyppolite (1907-1968) : Aristote, Spinoza, Hume, Comte. Jean Hyppolite (1907-1968) : Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Comte, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, psychanalyse. AUTRES REPERES DE L'EPOQUE 1960-2000. Le dossier Althusser cinquante ans après. L'aventure de la philosophie française depuis les années 1960. (...) EXPLORATION DE DIVERS TYPES DIALECTIQUES. Alain lecteur et admirateur de Hegel et de Marx. L'encyclopédisme dialectique dans la psychologie d'Henri Wallon. Le style dialectique dans les travaux de Germaine Wallon. (shrink)

Emil Fackenheim, now retired from the University of Toronto, is one of Canada's most influential and internationally recognized philosophers. Bringing together philosophy and Jewish studies, his writings are relevant to a number of philosophical inquiries, including the philosophy of history, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion. In this book an international group of publishers presents an overview of Fackenheim's thought. The volume includes an introduction, ten papers, and response from Fackenheim himself. Among the topics discussed are the influence of Hegel (...) and German philosophy on Fackenheim, the elements that make up his own philosophy, and his views on Judaism, the Holocaust, and Christianity. (shrink)

This article is essentially a commentary on a little-known text by `Alain' (whose real name was Emile-Auguste Chartier), successively entitled Les marchands de sommeil and Vigiles de l'esprit. This piece of work, initially a prize-giving speech to students in a Parisian lycée, was rewritten by Alain many years later during the Second World War. It describes with acute intelligence and in a splendid metaphoric language the enduring and compelling proposition that the formation of critical judgement should be the ultimate (...) purpose of all teaching. (shrink)

The opposition between constraint and free necessity leads Spinoza's commentators to conceive of ethical liberation as a reconciliation with one's self against alienations due to external causes, and to confuse constraint with contrariety. Analysis of the word coactus in Spinoza's works shows that finite modes can't exist and can't free themselves without constraints, which are not always a source of contrariety. Such an analysis is close to those of Émile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu.

Émile Durkheim zählt zu den Klassikern der Soziologie. Der Band greift erstmals unbekannte Rezeptionslinien Durkheims auf und zeigt ihn so in all seiner Komplexität und Aktualität: als Vorreiter einer transdisziplinären Sozialwissenschaft, als scharfsinnigen Theoretiker, als Denker des Materiellen und des Symbolischen. Neben ihm kommen auch seine Kollegen, Erben und zeitgenössischen Kritiker in den Blick. Dabei wird deutlich, dass Durkheims Werk nicht nur die Soziologie prägte, sondern auch der Ethnologie und der Philosophie grundlegende Impulse gab. Mit Beiträgen von Stéphane Baciocchi, Stefan (...) Beck, Tanja Bogusz, Heike Delitz, Emmanuel Désveaux, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Joachim Fischer, Marcel Fournier, Bruno Karsenti, Frédéric Keck, Wiebke Keim, Steven Lukes, Stephan Moebius, Lothar Peter, Devyani Prabhat, Anne W. Rawls, Thomas Scheffer, Michael Schillmeier, Robert Seyfert, Susan Stedman Jones und Jean Terrier. (shrink)

A milestone in the development of post-war Marxist thought.

In Engineering Philosophy, the author explores how the concerns of philosophers are relevant to engineering thought and practice in negotiating tradeoffs in diagnosing failure, in constructing adequate models and simulations, and in teaching.

With several never-before published writings, this volume gathers Althusser's major essays on psychoanalytic thought----documenting his intense and ambivalent relationship with Lacan, and dramatizing his intellectual journey and troubled personal life.

Buddhism was not really known in the West until a little more than 150 years ago. Although since the thirteenth century there had been numerous contacts with local Buddhist traditions, the travellers and missionaries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had not yet brought to light the history of Buddhism and its unity across this immense diversity of worship and doctrine, disseminated through most of the countries of Asia. Of course, since the seventeenth century some Europeans had guessed at (...) the Indian origin of the Buddha and they succeeded in pinning down his historical existence after a fashion. In 1691 and 1693 Simon de la Loubère, Louis XIV's envoy at the court of the king of Siam, published remarkable research which established the possibility of a link between the different regions of Siam, Ceylon, Japan and China and conjured up the possible existence of a single founder long before Christ. But this far too isolated knowledge had scarcely any impact in Europe. It was only with the foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 that orientalism was to enjoy a rapid and decisive expansion. The word ‘Buddhism’ appeared from the 1820s onwards, and with it the first conceptualization of a tree with many branchings. But it was not until the publication, in 1844, of Eugène Burnouf's magisterial Introduction l'histoire du buddhisme indien, that more detailed knowledge became available, thanks to a critical scrutiny of the most varied sources. The works of the French scholar and of other pioneers in Buddhist studies - mainly Alexander Csoma de Koros and Edmond Foucaux on Tibet, Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat and Stanislas Julien on China, Christian Lassen and Spence Hardy on Ceylon - were to give rise to a tremendous craze for Buddhism in Europe. Since then there has been no break in the successive waves disseminating it right up to the present day, when the majority of Western countries appear to be so receptive to the message of the Buddha that for some years the media have been insistently questioning the reasons for this ‘Buddhist wave’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century, volume two of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. By BERNARD MCGINN. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Pp. xv + 630. $49.50. This second volume of the History of Western Mysticism covers the period from the sixth through the twelfth century, from Gregory the Great to the Victorines. It fully lives up to (...) the high expectations raised by the first part and displays the same skill in presenting the fruit of enormous learning in a clear, comprehensible manner. The compact section of notes, occupying onethird of the volume, shows how well the author has succeeded in mastering the abundance of sources, primary and secondary, the current Renaissance of medieval studies has rendered available. Undaunted by the mass of recent literature McGinn's established and constantly renewed acquaintance with the original texts enables him judiciously and critically to compare interpretations and judgments. Method and balance mark this work as much as learning and erudition. Its unadorned but easy style, the language of the lectern, renders his work accessible to a wider public, even if the casual tone does not always reflect the intensity of its subject. The author has structured his study around four major figures: Gregory the Great (sixth century), Scottus Eriugena (ninth), Bernard and William of Saint-Thierry (twelfth). They form the centers of three spiritual epochs of the early Middle Ages. Each one of these periods is introduced by informative chapters on the general conditions of spiritual life. The study concludes with a chapter on visionaries who belong to none of the schools represented by the key figures and a chapter on Victorine writers that already prepares for the next volume on the high season of Christian mysticism. The simple structure allows each of the great ones to be given a full chapter. Rather than drowning his survey in an abundance of forgettable names as encyclopedic histories tend to do, McGinn has accommodated the minor figures in his transition chapters where general headings dominate individual characteristics. By devoting so much space to the great ones, the author has transformed much of what could have remained a mere survey into a series of monographs. It enabled him to highlight the unique significance of at least two previously neglected figures in the rather arid span of time that separates the patristic period from the flowering of the twelfth century: Scottus Eriugena and William of Saint-Thierry. Eriugena's intellectual importance has been established for some time, yet mainly with historians of philosophy and Neoplatonist thinkers. Here he appears as the key thinker who transmits 475 476 BOOK REVIEWS Dionysius's negative theology to the Latin West and who prepares the new mysticism of the divine image that was to culminate in Eckhart and Ruusbroec. Was Eriugena a mystic? The question returns us to the provisional definition given in the general Introduction and consistently maintained throughout volume one and most of volume two. There we learned that "mystical" refers to any belief, system, or practice conducive to the experience of God's presence (vol. I, p. xvii). This definition happily replaces the one adopted through much of the modem period of exclusively private, mostly exceptional, experiences and the unusual expressions (visions, raptures, etc.) that often accompany them. Professor McGinn presents a more objective and more controllable criterion. He extends the mystical to a more or less direct consciousness of the divine presence as evident in texts that witness of, or are conducive to, such a consciousness. This sensible change enables him to include a great many theological texts of the first millennium without having to worry about the degree of their authors' subjective awareness of God's presence and to avoid the predicament to which all attempts to ascertain another person's private experience lead. Before the twelfth century almost no reports of private experiences exist and the ones that do exist, such as Augustine's "vision" of Ostia, so closely follow an established Neoplatonic pattern that they leave us wondering about their private nature. His more objective approach also dispensed the author from having to be overly concerned about the fine, in the early... (shrink)