Providing an introduction to Laruelle's novel theory of 'non-epistemology' or 'unified theory of thought', this volumes challenges the way we think about the traditional philosophical problems.

La naissance de la philosophie s'accompagne d'un refus énigmatique, celui de l'exil. Persécuté par Athènes, Socrate choisira de se donner la mort plutôt que de vivre les dernières années de sa vie à errer hors de ses murs. Par ce refus qui résonne par-delà les siècles jusqu'à nous, Socrate nous oblige à réfléchir à ce lien intime entre l'individu et sa communauté d'origine. Dans l'histoire de la vie de l'esprit, tous ne feront pas le même choix. Plusieurs, écrivains, poètes, philosophes, (...) préféreront la vie ailleurs à la persécution ou à la mort certaine. Comment l'exil ou les longues périodes d'errance ont-ils influencé ceux qui en ont fait l'expérience? Leur témoignage nous permet-il de penser les défis particuliers de notre époque? De manière plus précise, est-ce que la pensée des auteurs qui ont vécu l'exil est de nature à nous inciter à célébrer davantage les vertus de l'enracinement ou au contraire nous convie-t-elle à souhaiter qu'advienne encore plus rapidement un monde cosmopolite? À l'heure où les enjeux migratoires deviennent de plus en plus pressants et où est remise en question de multiples manières la pertinence des frontières, la pensée de ceux qui ont connu l'exil doit éclairer notre réflexion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Exemplarities: A Response to Timothy Hampton and Karlheinz StierleFrançois Cornilliat*Karlheinz Stierle and Timothy Hampton have both played a major part in defining and mapping the much-debated subject of exemplarity: Stierle as early as 1972, in his ground-breaking article for Poétique, 1 Hampton in his acclaimed 1990 book, Writing from History. 2 While their approaches have a lot in common, they also reveal a number of important differences, and it (...) seems to me that those differences teach us something not only about the problem of exemplarity in the Renaissance but also about the role played by that notion in our latest effort to capture that mercurial era. In what follows I will—somewhat unfairly—focus on the conceptual differences revealed by our authors’ contributions and reflect on what they suggest regarding the problematic usefulness of the exemplary in the Renaissance as well as in Renaissance studies.A convenient place to start, to differentiate the two contributions, is the status of the emerging genre of the novella vis-à-vis the problem of exemplarity. For Stierle “contingency is the real poet of the novella.” For Hampton, the novella genre also marks a shift in the regime of exemplarity, but the “real poet of the novella” is not exactly contingency; it is not exemplarity either, but some kind of sub-species. Yet to define that sub-species in Hamptonian terms is to abandon the immanent or “formal” descriptions practiced in the discipline of “pure” poetics. It would not be sufficient, for instance, to decide that the novella poetic principle is “political exemplarity,” [End Page 613] as opposed to “moral exemplarity.” Hampton tells us that the Heptameron recasts the fictions of aristocratic heroism “as tales whose exemplarity is moral, rather than political.” But such a recasting, seen from another level of interpretation, is indeed a political gesture.Whatever is political—as a topic—in the romance genre, is anachronistic and fictional; it is a set of poetic tricks appealing only to private fantasy. Fantasy, however, still has the capacity to mistaking itself for a pertinent social ambition and a program for action, as in the case of Don Quixote. This makes it all the more visible as a symptom of displaced politics. Whatever is moral—as a topic—in the novella genre, bears witness to the prince’s reinforced power to define what noble people are supposed to do—to talk about, that is, within closely guarded borders. The “moral” is, if considered in its infrastructure, a topic mapped by the political; similarly the production of discourse, the very domain of rhetoric or poetics is recast as the new type of political “action” expected from the former ruling class. So the “real poet” of the novella splits in two; and in that sense, one could say that the novella has no such thing as a “real poet.” The poets of the novella are a class whose conception of exemplarity has just been redefined by the prince. One could say that the “real poet” is the prince or the emerging nation state, but this would overlook the division of tasks between the poet and the prince. Instead of expressing the values of its own politics, the poetic class of the Heptameron’s narrators fundamentally exemplifies those values which the prince or the state allows them to have. Conversely, it is not the prince who does the talking or the writing in this exemplification process. And this, incidentally, leads us to a perhaps naive question about the status of the Queen of Navarre as an author vis-à-vis this new princely role: is she on one side or the other, is she a go-between?At any rate, exemplarity also splits: a good exemplar of those recast values (say, honnesteté) also exemplifies something else which is not set within those values per se but has to do with who institutes them, and why. In other words a good exemplar is also, from an interpretative standpoint, immediately a symptom, insofar as it is an operator for some invisible casting. Behind a “I want to be like x” kind of statement lurks an “I want you to be like that,” with the latter... (shrink)

The received view about meteorological predicates like ‘rain' is that they carry an argument slot for a location which can be filled explicitly or implicitly. The view assumes that ‘rain', in the absence of an explicit location, demands that the context provide a specific location. In an earlier article, I have provided a counter-example to that claim, viz. a context in which ‘it is raining' receives a location-indefinite interpretation. On the basis of that example, I have argued that when there (...) is tacit reference to a location, it takes place for pragmatic reasons and casts no light on the semantics of meteorological predicates. But several authors have reanalysed the counter-example, so as to make it compatible with the standard view. I discuss those attempts, and argue that my account is better. Methodological considerations concerning the relations between pragmatics and logical form are offered along the way. (shrink)

1 Pragmatics and ordinary language philosophy 2 Speech acts 3 Contextual implications 4 Non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning 5 Indexicals 6 Levels of meaning 7 Open texture 8 The semantics/pragmatics distinction 9 Context and propositional attitudes 10 Presupposition 11 Interpretation and context-change 12 The strategic importance of conversational implicatures 13 Communicative intentions 14 The intentional-inferential model 15 Pragmatics and modularity 16 Cognitive science and contextualism.

Should we consider irony as a good thing for democratic life? As it is portrayed in the classical texts through which we know Socrates, eirōneia appears as a humble manifestation of self-consciousn...

Ce livre célèbre le transfert, tous les transferts, pas uniquement celui de la psychanalyse, c'est-à-dire les passages de l'extérieur à l'intérieur. Il tente aussi de rassurer ceux qui voient dans l'extériorité la mort du psychisme, la lente agonie de l'intériorité puisque c'est au-dehors que celle-ci prouve son énergie, à tel point qu'il n'a pas été possible ni de l'isoler, ni de la refouler.

Linguistique et philosophie logique du langage: deux traditions de pensee que bien des choses opposent. La premiere est plutot mentaliste, et orientee vers l'etude de la syntaxe; la seconde, plus preoccupee de semantique, cherche volontiers le sens dans les conditions de verite des phrases. Ce portrait n'est pas faux, mais il est incomplet: entre logique et linguistique, les relations n'ont pas ete, ne sont pas que d'opposition. Dans cet ouvrage, les auteurs proposent une sorte d'histoire conceptuelle des interactions fecondes entre (...) les deux disciplines au cours du XXe siecle. La premiere partie, consacree a la notion de categorie semantique et/ou syntaxique, raconte comment les theories a priori de la signification (Husserl, Frege, Russell) ont progressivement donne lieu au programme des grammaires categorielles, d'inspiration plus descriptive et empirique. La deuxieme partie traite d'un autre episode, datant des annees cinquante a soixante-dix, et lie a la naissance des grammaires generatives: celui au cours duquel l'opposition entre la these avancee par Chomsky de l'autonomie de la syntaxe, et l'idee de la priorite conceptuelle de la semantique, soutenue par des logiciens comme Montague, vient au premier plan. Enfin la troisieme partie traite des recherches tout a fait contemporaines concernant l'etude des expressions indefinies et des relations anaphoriques qu'elles soutiennent, theme ou se dessinent des convergences nouvelles entre l'analyse logique et l'analyse linguistique: la comprehension des rapports entre generalite et reference dans les langages naturels y gagnera certainement en finesse et en adequation empirique. (shrink)

Nous vivons une période étrange, probablement même périlleuse à bien des égards. Les avancées de la science, de la médecine et des technologies sont telles qu'elles posent désormais la question de l'avenir de notre commune humanité. Mon corps est-il ma personne ou est-il une chose? S'agit-il simplement d'un ensemble de pièces que l'on peut remplacer, ou d'une enveloppe que l'on pourrait changer? Notre destin est-il, tout entier, inscrit dans nos gènes? Avec le développement des techniques de procréation médicalement assistée, l'enfant (...) demeure-t-il un sujet de droit ou devient-il un objet auquel on aurait droit? L'aventure humaine est-elle réellement menacée par le posthumanisme? Que penser enfin des promesses d'un homme manipulé et amélioré par le transhumanisme, grâce aux nanotechnologies, aux biotechnologies, à l'informatique et aux sciences cognitives... Jean-François Mattei nous propose un retour à une culture du doute, nécessaire pour armer notre pensée face aux défis à venir. Nous invitant à une réflexion éthique, philosophique et politique, il nous amène à nous demander si, modifiant notre humanité, nous pourrions néanmoins rester humains... (shrink)

Content Description #Includes bibliographical references and index.

Can we solve the problem of the essential indexical, and account for de se belief, by appealing to 'relativized propositions' (functions from rich indices to truth-values)? According to John Perry, we cannot. This paper offers a detailed examination and a critique of Perry's argument.

The aim of the paper is to develop the notion of partial probability distributions as being more realistic models of belief systems than the standard accounts. We formulate the theory of partial probability functions independently of any classical semantic notions. We use the partial probability distributions to develop a formal semantics for partial propositional calculi, with extensions to predicate logic and higher order languages. We give a proof theory for the partial logics and obtain soundness and completeness results.

This paper takes place inside the theoretical frame restored after that the false secular Bortkiewicz-debate around the transformation problem has been solved in the years 1990 and whose flaw had not been identified for ages by most of Marxist economists, accepting its double accountancy of prices’ in money prices and workhours “prices”. Beyond the re-identification of finite values and prices, this paper aims at showing that, going back to a concept of value as an infinite working process which unifies money, (...) time and work, machinery not only devoids every particular work of any peculiarity, but also its time, reduced to the mechanical clock movement. Once such spatialization of time occurs, succession dominates duration instead of the other way round. Time is not the time of any living movement any longer, but merely corresponds to locomotion. Hence, money as a mathematical real, is not neither quantity of anything, but pure number. Money and clock time made identical as empty numbers identify into value with devoiced work, reduced to mere, or pure, unqualified effort.work becomes real abstraction by making the real still more adequate to itself, i.e., work still simpler abstract work induces simple work. (shrink)

Enactive metaphorizing is about making something “tangible” and “familiar” that is not. One way to describe this process more precisely is to think in terms of traces of and for ….

La question se pose de savoir si la Justice est capable de réparer le tragique de l’histoire. François Dosse situe son analyse sur l’axe pragmatique de la préoccupation citoyenne exprimée par Ricœur, dès les premières lignes de La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, lorsqu’il se dit troublé par le trop de mémoire ici et le trop d’oubli ailleurs. On assiste en effet à une judiciarisation progressive de la discipline historique. Elle se traduit par une inquiétante inflation mémorielle depuis la loi Gayssot (...) de 1990. La fonction du juge et de l’historien a certes des points communs, comme l’a montré Marc Bloch dans Apologie pour l’histoire ou Carlo Ginzburg dans Le juge et l’historien. Le juge d’instruction peut s’apparenter à l’historien, mais pas celui du siège qui doit rendre un jugement. Cette emprise progressive de la justice sur le passé a pour effet pervers une tentative de sanctuarisation des questions historiques. Ricœur nous aide à repenser les relations entre justice, histoire et mémoire en distinguant et en articulant ces diverses dimensions par un travail de clarification des concepts. Il permet de mieux articuler la fonction judiciaire, le travail de mémoire et l’opération historiographique en respectant la validité de chacune de ces dimensions. (shrink)