Toute oeuvre veut tenir l'attention, la diriger et produire de l'effet. Mais l'attention et l'effet ne sont pas les memes selon que l'oeuvre en dit plus ou en dit moins c'est-a-dire selon sa densite. Le developpe ou le concis, l'emphatique ou l'elude, le riche ou l'austere ne produisent pas les memes intensites. En explorant les variations de la densite litteraire, on retrouve directement des enjeux essentiels. Que vise l'ideal du complet face a l'ideal du pur? Comment la litterature se rapporte-t-elle (...) au langage ordinaire? Quel peut etre le minimum artistique qui subsiste au bord du silence? Comment comprendre l'echec de la lecture, l'interet perdu et l'ennui? (shrink)

The existence of a partnership between knowledge and armies - and, connected with it, between knowledge and wars, conquests, and the entire apparatus of empires - has been affirmed since the time of Xenophon. The troops clear a path that the scholars follow, and an increase of knowledge is a side effect of the incursion. The great linguistic discoveries of the eighteenth century - that is, the Zend and Sanskrit languages - would have been impossible without the expansion of the (...) French and British empires into Asia; and Bonaparte, in his foray into Egypt, was accompanied by a large contingent of scholars. After the uniformed troops march in, official scholarly missions follow. For example, in 1849, Italian archives were opened to French scholars as a result of the French occupation of Rome. Renan's access to Italian libraries, monasteries, and manuscript collections was a result of the presence of French troops in Italy. This was a period of preliminary analyses, of the publication of catalogues, and of amazement at the wealth of available documents. In brief, it was a period of successful compilation, of rapid and exhilarating erudition. It was a time when everything rang true. In 1860, it was once more Renan who set off, on the margins of the French intervention in Syria and Lebanon, in search of epigraphical materials. In fact, all of nineteenth-century French, German, and English archaeology follows in the wake of the colonial expansion of the various empires. (shrink)

Cette étude consacrée à la dimension heuristique des métaphores cherche à comprendre le rôle qu’elles jouent dans l’activité générale de la pensée. Le rôle des métaphores est particulièrement visible à l’état naissant de la pensée connaissante, au point où son exploration trouve dans l’étoffe du langage les moyens de conceptualiser le nouveau. L’exemple de Savigny, de Bacon et de Kant montre comment l’intuition métaphorique et la reprise culturelle des schèmes métaphoriques ont une fonction intellectuelle féconde.

I borrow this title from an English mystical text written at the end of the fourteenth century, The Veil of Unknowledge, which has long been part of my life. The explicit aim of the book is to tear away this veil of unknowledge, or to give us the means to do it ourselves. The image of the veil invites a reciprocal gesture of raising, tearing, piercing. The desire that motivates this act goes beyond the veil, toward Isis and the truth, (...) the naked figure we're endeavoring to know. Once we have cleared away the obstacles and gained a clear view of her, we—and she—are transformed. (shrink)

Utopian literature is fascinating but impossible to summarize. Of course it is easy to see where its charm lies. We enjoy the “play” aspect of the Utopian convention, the common certainty— essential to both the author's intentions and the reader's pleasure—that we are dealing with a supposition described as a fact. In a Utopian text, we enjoy the power we have of imagining, and especially formulating, another overall framework for human experience—a framework which is specifically defined as being different and (...) described as if it had concrete existence. This is the underlying attraction of a mode of expression which permits the author to talk of serious things in the protected and detached manner permitted by play. Why, then, are summaries of utopias so disappointing? Why does a re-transmitted utopia convey only the idea of an insipid world and an arbitrary creation? Why is it so hard to write about works of this type? (shrink)

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

Proposer une oeuvre nouvelle, developper une idee neuve ou une vision personnelle differente, c'est dire autre chose. Mais c'est aussi dire quelque chose qui n'est pas radicalement inoui et sans connexion. Impacts, emprunts, initiatives, traditions ou ruptures: ces relations d'influence traversent la vie des idees et des oeuvres, leurs rapports entre elles, leurs caracteres de famille, et ce qui les rend chacune distincte. Invention et memoire vont ensemble. Leur liaison et leur ecart organisent ce qu'il y a d'autonome et d'unique (...) dans un point de vue novateur, et ce qu'il y a de commun et de partage. (shrink)

Choisir un livre, c'est en exclure beaucoup d'autres, contribuer à circonscrire le cercle lumineux de l'attention, participer à une aventure dont l'enjeu est la survie; vivre dans les lettres, ce n'est pas s'installer dans un patrimoine mais l'inventer, faire du soleil et de la place, inséparablement. Rééditer ce livre dans une édition de poche, ce n'est pas seulement faire en sorte qu'il soit de nouveau disponible; c'est en prolonger le rayonnement mais aussi le déplacer, l'inscrire autrement dans l'aventure de la (...) survie. Dans sa première vie, La Mémoire des œuvres s'est imposé à quelques-uns comme un bréviaire. Écrit pour tous et pour chacun, il demande et appelle l'amitié d'un plus large public, c'est un livre ami de la mémoire, qui aide à penser et qui aide à vivre, à habiter plus librement le séjour des livres. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 187 standing. He picks his way philosophicelly ~darough the many preludes, interludes and epilogues of the long, autobiographical poem, The Prelude. He succeeds in interpreting philosophically.Wordsworth's absorption in "the life of things" and the "immanence of the world soul." These ideas remain, it seems to me, in Wordsworth's mind as well as in.his art primarily "lyrical ballads." But Melvin Rader has given us a thoroughly intelligible account, (...) both historical and philosophical, of both Coleridge and Wordsworth as reflectiveminds, without detracting item them as artists. HERBERTW. SCHNEIDER Claremont Graduate School and Unlver~i~y Center gchelting et la R~alit~ Finis: Essai sur la Philosophic de la Nature et de l'[dentit~. By Judith E. Schlanger. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. Pp. 162. = Biblioth~que de Philosophie Contemporaine: Histoire de ta Philosophie et Philosophie Gfin6rale. Paper, F. 12.--) L'dtude de Judith E. Schlanger pr~se~te un bref expos6 des th~mes princ~paux de la pens~e philosophlque de Schelling en retra~ant de fa~on plus ou moius syst6matique l'itindraire spirituel de ce grand penseur qui a crd6 les fondsments spdculatifs du romantisme aIlemand. La philosophie de Schelling refl~te une ardeur,constants de recherche toujours progressive miroitant lea rythmes intimes de son articulation/~ la fois subtile et intensive. Nous allons donner en raccourci la principale ligne d'6volution de cette pens~e. L'essai de Schlanger a pour objet propre le probl~me philosophique qui rdsulte de la connexion 6troite de deux th~mes constituant les fondoments de la philosophie schellingienne, notamment le bh6me d'une philosophie concrAte qui rdcupAre intdgralement l'intuition et celui de la simultan6it6 de l'absolu et du finidans une rdalitdqui n'est constitu6e que par des totas diserAtes. Pour Schelling l'absolu n'est autre chose que la rdalitd concrete constitude par l'ensemble des totalitds individuelles et particuli6res qui sent con~ues comme dtant organiques et qui sent intelligibles, c'est-~.dire leur prdsence et leur raison d'etre coincident et ne peuvent ~tre saisiesque par l'immddiatetd de l'intuition intellectuelle et non par une rationslitd ddductive. L'absolu eat organicitd intelligibleau moyen d'un mode de connaissance intdgralement intuitif, done de rationalitd/t dvidence pleine et non de rationalitd ~t mddiation conceptuelle. L'absolu est done un total, une totalitd complexe ~ cause do ses articulations ind6finiment multiples ~tl'intdrieur. La philosophie enest la transposition aussi bien dans son d6veloppement actuel que dans l'embrassement des multiples ddterminations en un totalitarisme du savoir. L'instrument opdrationnel et cognitif capable d'61aborer cette transposition est l'intuition,la "Anschauung". En effet l'intuition joue un r61e capital dans la philosophie de Schelling. Issue directement de l'exp6rience sensible, c'est-~-dire, concrbte et individuelle, ellepermet d'englober dans l'immddiatetd d'une seule dvidence ~ la fois coner ~te et totale la coprdsence et la contemporandit6 de l'absolu et du finien une unit6 positive, non-dialectique, mais organique. Il est vrai que le scheme de l'organisme et de l'organicitd detains la pensde de ScheUing. L'absolu et le finisent en correlation organique. L'actualit6 dvidents de leur opposition manifeste leur copr~ence simultande, ce qui traduit leur unit~ absolue, sous-jacente qui a rendu possible cette opposition. La liaison effective, rdelle,empiriquement constatde des deux termes opposds leur suppose un fondement commun absolu. La dichotomie n'estpas primordiale, l'antith~sea pour support affirmatifun absolu. L'absolu est le lieu de l'identitd des opposds. C'est la coincidence immddiate entre des termes antinomiques qui d6finitl'unitd absolue. Et de cet absolu, la philosophic poss~de un savoir imm6diat, c'est-~dire absolu. II en rdsulte que l'intuitionest le principe m~me de l'intelligibilitd.Le probIAme phUosophique capital qui se pose et que Schlanger dtudie dana l'ceuvre de Schelling depuis les ddbuts de sa pensde en 1794jusqu'au moment o~1la philosophie de l'Identitd eat constitude, en 1804environ s'dnonce comme suit: La vision de l'identit6 immddiate des opposds comme forme de la rdalitd absolue pourra-t-elle s'articuler dans un savoir systdmatique et objective- 188 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ment communicable de la totalit6... (shrink)

The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival.

Why are we holding UNESCO's Philosophical Encounters and why have we chosen the question “What do we not know?” as the topic of the first one of these meetings? It is in order to respond to these two questions that Judith Schlanger has asked me to write a few lines. She added—for the record. What record, I then thought to myself, if—as I am sending her these pages—nothing has taken place yet? Unless it was the intention, the idea (...) so to speak, that was to be recorded. What seemed to me to be premature, then appeared to come rather late, i.e. to explain, after the event, as if going backwards, the reasons for the creation of the Philosophical Encounters and the choice of their first theme. We know that in the legal profession the summaries of the discussions that precede the adoption of a law allow us to understand its spirit; on this basis, could one not imagine a chronicle of ideas kept by whoever that would illuminate the life of the organization? Perhaps something similar is lacking in the history of an institution like UNESCO. Everything is being preserved in it, as if in a gigantic, impenetrable memory, because it never fell to anyone to preserve the thread of the original intentions. Whatever fate the future may have reserved for UNESCO's Philosophical Encounters, given their experimental nature, I will attempt here to describe the intentions. For whatever purpose if may serve! (shrink)

Anglophone theoretical reflections on gender often assume the generalizability of their claims without first asking whether “gender” as a term exists, or exists in the same way, in other languages. Some of the resistance to the entry of “gender” as a term into non-Anglophone contexts emerges from a resistance to English or, indeed, from within the syntax of a language in which questions of gender are settled through verb inflections or implied reference. A larger form of resistance, of course, has (...) to do with fears that the category will itself release forms of sexual freedom and challenges to existing hierarchies within the second language. The well-organized political attack on gender and gender studies now occurring throughout the world has many sources, and that is not the focus of this essay. This essay maintains that there can be no theory of gender without translation and that Anglophone monolingualism too often assumes that English forms a sufficient basis for theoretical claims about gender. Further, because the contemporary usage of gender emerges from a coinage introduced by sexologists and reappropriated by feminists, it proves to be a term that is bound up with grammatical innovation and syntactical challenges from the start. Without an understanding of translation—its practice and its limits—there can be no gender studies within a global framework. Finally, the process of becoming gendered, or changing genders, requires translation in order to communicate the new terms for recognizing new modalities of gender. Thus, translation is a constitutive part of any theory of gender that seeks to be multilingual and that accepts the historically dynamic character of languages. This framework can help facilitate a way of recognizing different genders, and different accounts of gender identity as requiring both translation and its limits. Without translation and historical coinage, there is no way to understand the dynamic and changing category of gender and the resistances it now encounters. (shrink)

This paper presents and defends an account of the coincidence of biological organisms with mereological sums of their material components. That is, an organism and the sum of its material components are distinct material objects existing in the same place at the same time. Instead of relying on historical or modal differences to show how such coincident entities are distinct, this paper argues that there is a class of physiological properties of biological organisms that their coincident mereological sums do not (...) have. The account answers some of the most pressing objections to coincidence, for example the so-called grounding problem , that material coincidence seems to require that coinciding objects have modal differences that do not supervene on any other properties. (shrink)

This paper explains the metaphysical implications of the view that species are individuals (SAI). I first clarify SAI in light of the separate distinctions between individuals and classes, particulars and universals, and abstract and concrete things. I then show why the standard arguments given in defense of SAI are not compelling. Nonetheless, the ontological status of species is linked to the traditional "species problem," in that certain species concepts do entail that species are individuals. I develop the idea that species (...) names are rigid designators and show how this provides additional motivation for SAI. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 501-519 [Access article in PDF] Nietzsche and Early Romanticism Judith Norman Nietzsche was in many ways a quintessentially romantic figure, a lonely genius with a tragic love-life, wandering endlessly (through Italy, no less) before going dramatically mad, taken by his gods into the protection of madness (to quote Heidegger's epithet on Hölderlin, one of Nietzsche's childhood favorites). 1 But this (...) is to be a romantic in an uncapitalized manner, and has nothing to do with the literary movement of Romanticism, a movement from which, as is well-known, Nietzsche distanced himself loudly and vigorously. Nietzsche famously follows Goethe in his verdict that Romanticism is a form of sickness and classicism a form of strength, and commentators, for the most part, have accepted this self-description. 2 That is, they do not blithely identify Nietzsche with that nineteenth-century artistic movement, whose proponents include Victor Hugo, Eugene Delacroix, and Richard Wagner. 3But Romanticism is a plural phenomenon. When Goethe made his famously dismissive remark, he was clearly not talking about Hugo and Wagner; he meant Romanticism in an earlier incarnation. Commentators have been less reticent about finding all sorts of affinities between Nietzsche and some of these earlier movements. In particular Nietzsche is frequently and positively compared to Jena Romanticism (also known as early Romanticism), a movement whose principal figures included August and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Tieck, Schleiermacher, and Schelling, and the writings they published in the 1790s, principally in the journal, Athenaeum. It is this romantic movement that will be the focus of my paper. Jena romantics, while Grecophile, had nothing to do with Rousseauean primitivism (they were well aware that their image of the [End Page 501] Greeks reflected contemporary fantasies more than historical reality), they had no cult of the genius, and they did not valorize emotion above reason. 4 What was central to their movement was profound skepticism about the viability of traditional attitudes towards truth, an intellectually rigorous theory of art that gave particular weight to playfulness, fragmented writing, the notion of literary irony, a sense that the philosopher ought to be or become more of an artist (though not a genius)—and, correlatively, that philosophy is or ought to become more artistic. All of which sounds decidedly Nietzschean. Romanticizing Nietzsche While Nietzsche himself never makes the connection, he never explicitly distances himself from the authors of Jena romanticism in the way he does from later romantic figures. 5 Indeed, he barely mentions the Jena romantics by name and probably never read Friedrich Schlegel, the figure most closely associated with this romantic movement. 6 As such, there is certainly space for commentators to argue for a close if tacit intellectual connection between Nietzsche and Jena romanticism; indeed, one commentator speaks of a fundamental affinity, 7 another calls Nietzsche the last romanticist, and yet another claims that "[Nietzsche's] story makes sense only when read in the larger context of his Romantic predecessors' history." 8It is undeniable that Nietzsche came out of a philological tradition inaugurated by the Schlegels (and developed by Schelling) which juxtaposed the Dionysian and the Apollinian in Greek tragedy. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, "an entire tradition of academic philosophy (which, on his own initiative, Nietzsche had joined) revolved around precisely this opposition." 9 At least in [End Page 502] his earlier works Nietzsche's view of the Greeks was influenced by (if not predicated on) the scholarly research and interpretative theories of figures associated with Jena romanticism. How profound and enduring this influence might have been is an interesting question, but not one I will explore at present. I will not discuss the influence of the Jena romantics in their scholarly capacity as classical philologists, but rather focus on any impact they may have had as philosophically minded literary critics during the 1790s. Similarly, I will not look at The Birth of Tragedy but rather focus on claims made concerning the romantic tendencies of Nietzsche's later work. A body of scholarship has been building which claims that the critical theories of Jena... (shrink)

In this paper, we critically and constructively examine the methodology of evidence-based development economics, which deploys randomized field experiments as its main tool. We describe the...

The cultural group selection approach provides a compelling explanation for recent changes in human societies, but has trouble explaining why our ancestors, rather than any other great ape, evolved into a hyper-cooperative niche. The cooperative breeding hypothesis can plug this gap and thus complement CGS, because recent comparative evidence suggests that it promoted proactive prosociality, social transmission, and communication in Pleistocene hominins.

: New genetic technologies continue to emerge that allow us to control the genetic endowment of future children. Increasingly the claim is made that it is morally "irresponsible" for parents to fail to use such technologies when they know their possible children are at risk for a serious genetic disorder. We believe such charges are often unwarranted. Our goal in this article is to offer a careful conceptual analysis of the language of irresponsibility in an effort to encourage more care (...) in its use. Two of our more important sub-claims are: A fair judgment of genetic irresponsibility necessarily requires a thick background description of the specific reproductive choice; and there is no necessary connection between an act's being morally wrong and its being irresponsible. These are distinct judgments requiring distinct justifications. (shrink)

This paper is a reflective account of the experience of designing and teaching a philosophy module as part of a research training programme for students studying for research degrees in education. In the course of the discussion, I address various problems and questions to do with the relationship between philosophy and educational research, the nature of philosophy of education and the role of the foundational disciplines in educational research.

In Ethics 1p5, Spinoza asserts that “In Nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute”. This claim serves as a crucial premise in Spinoza’s argument for substance monism, yet Spinoza’s demonstration of the 1p5 claim is surprisingly brief and appears to have obvious difficulties. This paper answers the principle difficulties that have been raised in response to Spinoza’s argument for 1p5. The key to understanding the 1p5 argument lies in a proper understanding of the (...) substance-attribute relationship and the principles of metaphysical individuation that Spinoza accepts. (shrink)

A great deal of philosophical work has explored the complex conceptual intersection between ethics and epistemology in the context of issues of testimony and belief, and much of this work has significant educational implications. In this paper, I discuss a troubling example of a case of testimony that seems to pose a problem for some established ways of thinking about these issues and that, in turn, suggests some equally troubling educational conclusions.