Kunc, Francois When I told another lawyer that I was coming here tonight he sent me an email commiserating that 'the art of after dinner speaking is doubly difficult for judges who are expected to be witty and entertaining, but not say anything controversial-or maybe nothing at all'. I also had the pleasure of spending some time recently with your Bishop Peter, who admonished me to 'keep it light'.

Moral error theorists face the so-called “now-what problem”: what should we do with our moral judgments from a prudential point of view if these judgments are uniformly false? On top of abolitionism and conservationism, which respectively advise us to get rid of our moral judgments and to keep them, three revisionary solutions have been proposed in the literature: expressivism, naturalism, and fictionalism. In this paper, I argue that expressivism and naturalism do not constitute genuine alternatives to abolitionism, of which they (...) are in the end mere variants—and, even less conveniently, variants that are conform to the very spirit of abolitionism as formulated by its proponents. The main version of fictionalism, by contrast, provides us with a recommendation to which abolitionists cannot consistently subscribe. This leaves us with only one revisionary solution to the now-what problem. (shrink)

L’homélie liturgique a mauvaise réputation, alors qu’elle continue de toucher chaque dimanche une foule de personnes et de constituer la principale nourriture de la foi de nombreux fideles. L’essai énonce quelques réflexions issues de la pratique et de l’enseignement de l’homilétique, afin de faire de la prédication un lieu de proposition de la foi, au service d’une ≪ pastorale d’engendrement ≫. Le prédicateur est comme mandate par sa communauté pour fréquenter le Seigneur en sa Parole puis partager celle-ci cordialement. S’il (...) parle de manière vraie, intelligente, vivante et positive, l’activité homilétique deviendra une sorte d’accompagnement spirituel communautaire auprès d’assemblées contemporaines les plus diverses. (shrink)

Unlike traditional sentimentalists, sophisticated sentimentalists don’t think that the main linguistic function of evaluative terms is simply to express emotional responses. Instead, they contend that to predicate an evaluative term to an object is to judge that a particular emotion is justified toward that object. I will raise a fundamental difficulty for the sophisticated sentimentalists’ attempt to provide a credible account of the meaning of our most important evaluative terms. A more careful examination of the relations between the affective and (...) the reflective elements characteristic of our evaluative thinking will suggest that the emotions play a less central role in an account of the meaning of evaluative terms than sentimentalists have assumed. (shrink)

Two contradictions are in contradiction. One is tragic, or insurmountable, contradiction: two equally founded demands oppose each other without any possibility of reconciliation (e.g., Antigone's conflict). The other is dialectical contradiction, which guarantees its own overcoming. Hegel's use of the German word Aufhebung, which means both preservation and suppression, is well known. Translators have proposed equivalents such as “replacement” or “sublimation.” I would suggest incorporation, indeed, digestion. Such a translation is not without consequences because it prompts one to think that (...) even if the dialectic has a strong stomach, its functioning is not free of aftereffects: one has to wonder if there is such a thing as dialectical waste. (shrink)

The paper clarifies what is at stake in the theory/antitheory debate in ethics and articulates the distinctive core of the method of reflective equilibrium which distinguishes it from a generic coherence constraint. I call this distinctive core 'maieutic reflection'. The paper then argues that if she accepts constructivist views in metaethics, a proponent of the method of reflective equilibrium will be committed to the existence of a moral theory.

A discussion of Frege's views concerning the meaning of 'I' and his distinction between the 'I' of soliloquy and the 'I' of conversation.

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

Réponse aux objections soulevées par Oswald Ducrot à l'encontre de mon approche "gricéenne" de la performativité.

Response to Egré's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop.

La notion de passage n’a pas été conceptualisée en linguistique ; cependant, elle se révèle utile dans des domaines d’application aussi divers que la thématique, la recherche d’information ou la représentation des connaissances.En s’appuyant sur l’expérience de la sémantique de corpus, cette étude précise la notion de passage par l’examen des rapports de sémiosis entre contenu et expression du passage, comme par l’étude des rapports contextuels au sein du passage et entre passages. Tenant compte des rapports entre fonds et formes (...) sémantiques, puis des transformations entre passages, l’investigation conduit à préciser des phénomènes qui intéressent tant la textualité que l’intertextualité, de la citation à la traduction. (shrink)

Les notions relatives au vivant jouent un rôle central dans l'économie interne du système de la nature selon Leibniz. Cet aspect est étudié ici, ainsi que son influence sur les théories qui ont ponctué le développement des sciences de la vie.

The 'Metaphysics of Dasein ' is the name which Heidegger gave to a new philosophical project developed immediately after the partial publication of his masterwork Being and Time. As Heidegger was later to recall, an 'overturning' took place at that moment, more precisely right in the middle of the 1929 treatise On the Essence of Ground. Between the fundamental-ontological formulation of the question of being and its metaphysical rephrasing, Heidegger discovered that a 'metaphysical freedom' stood at the root of Dasein (...) 's relation to his world and, thus, at the basis of his whole ontological questioning. This article will show how the very structure of the 1929 essay clearly illustrates the path Heidegger followed between Being and Time and the new philosophical beginning of the mid 1930s. It will conclude with a few critical remarks concerning Heidegger 's attempt to free his thinking from traditional philosophy and to overcome metaphysics. (shrink)

We provide a Kripke semantics for a STIT logic with the "next" operator. As the atemporal group STIT is undecidable and unaxiomatizable, we are interested in strict fragments of atemporal group STIT. First we prove that the satisfiability problem of a formula of the fragment made up of individual coalitions plus the grand coalition is also NEXPTIME-complete. We then generalize this result to a fragment where coalitions are in a given lattice. We also prove that if we restrict the language (...) to nested coalitions the satisfiability problem is NP-complete if the number of agents is fixed and PSPACE-complete if the number of agents is variable. Finally we embed individual STIT with the "next" operator into a fragment of atemporal group STIT. (shrink)

Abordées dans leur radicalité, les thèses de Schopenhauer consacrées à la musique font plus encore que rassembler le mouvement entier de sa pensée. S’y réalise en effet une véritable phénoménologie de la musique avant la lettre, plus pénétrante et plus adéquate à l’ordre musical que toutes les tentatives depuis élaborées à partir de la conscience intentionnelle, dont elle a comme anticipé les insuffisances. Ce faisant, elles pointent en direction d’une phénoménologie d’avant le phénomène, d’une phénoménologie du pâtir, où en amont (...) de la visibilité, au désaisissement de tout projet, préalablement encore à la structure perceptive, se contractent ensemble l’existence elle-même et la possibilité d’un monde. (shrink)

Une conférence que Scheler prononça en 1926, intitulée « Leib und Seele » (« Le corps et l?âme »), contient le propos suivant : F. Nietzsche, Bergson, Simmel, Dilthey, l?activisme ( Aktivismus ) et toutes les variétés ( Spielarten ) d?un nouveau pragmatisme, la mauvaise philosophie de la vie ( Lebensphilosophie ) dans son ensemble, puisqu?on l?appelle ainsi, ont présenté ce courant selon la rationalité philosophique (voyez la philosophie de la vie [ Philosophie des Lebens ], voyez Rickert ; « (...) la grande raison du corps et la petite raison de notre conscience »). L?homme comme société hiérarchisée ( Gesellschaftsb [?]) de pulsions ( Trieben ) 1 . Il est question de l?intérêt de la jeunesse, dans tous les pays, pour le sport, la danse, la « force et la beauté » ( die ?Kraft und Schönheit? ) 2 . Un tel intérêt serait solidaire d?une horreur pour les valeurs de l?esprit conscient ainsi que pour une société mécaniste du travail. Tout cela, Scheler le nomme la « manière d?être dionysiaque » ( dionysischer Zug ) 3 . Les trois principaux thèmes de la critique adressée par Scheler à Nietzsche et Bergson sont présents ici : la théorie de la connaissance (il est question d?un « pragma­tisme »), l?ontologie de la vie (c?est à une certaine « philosophie de la vie » que Scheler s?en prend) et l?anthropologie (c?est une conception déterminée de l?homme qui est impliquée par la. (shrink)

Shortly after his death in 1997, the New York Review of Books called him “one of the most influential men in contemporary France.” Lies, Passions, and Illusions is a fitting capstone to this celebrated author’s oeuvre: a late-career ...

We take self‐governance or autonomy to be a central feature of human agency: we believe that our actions normally occur under our guidance and at our command. A common criticism of the standard theory of action is that it leaves the agent out of his actions and thus mischaracterizes our autonomy. According to proponents of the endorsement model of autonomy, such as Harry Frankfurt and David Velleman, the standard theory simply needs to be supplemented with the agent's actual endorsement of (...) his actions in order to make room for our autonomy. I argue that their proposal fails and that a more substantive enrichment of the standard theory is called for. (shrink)