Martin Heidegger's overt alliance with the Nazis and the specific relation between this alliance and his philosophical thought--the degree to which his concepts are linked to a thoroughly disreputable set of political beliefs--have been the topic of a storm of recent debate. Written ten years before this debate, this study by France's leading sociologist and cultural theorist is both a precursor of that debate and an analysis of the institutional mechanisms involved in the production of philosophical discourse. Though Heidegger is (...) aware of and acknowledges the legitimacy of purely philosophical issues, Bourdieu points out that the complexity and abstraction of Heidegger's philosophical discourse stems from its situation in the cultural field, where two social and intellectual dimensions--political thought and academic thought--intersect. Bourdieu concludes by suggesting that Heidegger should not be considered as a Nazi ideologist, that there is no place in Heidegger's philosophical ideas for a racist conception of the human being. Rather, he sees Heidegger's thought as a structural equivalent in the field of philosophy of the "conservative revolution," of which Nazism is but one manifestation. (shrink)

The French philosopher and intellectual historian Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) is known primarily for his conception of philosophy as spiritual exercise, which was an essential reference for the later Foucault. An aspect of his work that has received less attention is a set of methodological reflections on intellectual history and on the relationship between philosophy and history. Hadot was trained initially as a philosopher and was interested in existentialism as well as in the convergence between philosophy and poetry. Yet he (...) chose to become a historian of philosophy and produced extensive philological work on neo-Platonism and ancient philosophy in general. He found a philosophical rationale for this shift in his encounter with Wittgenstein's philosophy in the mid-1950s (Hadot was one of Wittgenstein's earliest French readers and interpreters). For Hadot, ancient philosophy must be understood as a series of language games, and each language game must be situated within the concrete conditions in which it happened. The reference to Wittgenstein therefore supports a strongly contextualist and historicist stance. It also supports its exact opposite: presentist appropriations of ancient texts are entirely legitimate, and they are the only way ancient philosophy can be existentially meaningful to us. Hadot addresses the contradiction by embracing it fully and claiming that his own practice aims at a coincidence of opposites (a concept borrowed from the Heraclitean tradition). For Hadot the fullest and truest way of doing philosophy is to be a philosopher and a historian at the same time. (shrink)

Certain authors, in speaking of their works, say: My book, my commentary, my history, etc. They smack of these bourgeois homeowners, with “my house” always on their lips. They should rather speak of: our book, our commentary, our history, etc., since, generally speaking, there is far more in them of others than of their own.

An English translation of Pierre Bayle's posthumous last book, Entretiens de Maxime et de Themiste (1707), in which Bayle defends his skeptical position on the problem of the evil. This book is often cited and attacked by G.W. Leibniz in his Theodicy (1710). Over one hundred pages of original philosophical and historical material introduce the translation, providing it with context and establishing the work's importance.

Un dialogue est un logos (discours, propos, argument) qui va d'un interlocuteur a un autre. Cet echange d'idees, s'il veut etre fructueux, s'appuie sur un principe tres simple: comme le dialogue n'est pas un monologue, on dialogue avec quelqu'un; et on dialogue sur quelque chose. C'est le cas des travaux qui composent ce volume. L'interlocuteur privilegie est Pierre Aubenque. Ses travaux, son activite en tant qu'enseignant, ses prises de position sur des sujets tres divers ont suscite, de la part (...) de ses disciples, collegues et amis, une veritable envie de dialoguer avec lui, un desir de suivre son exemple (car Pierre Aubenque a toujours dialogue avec les Anciens, notamment avec Aristote). Les auteurs de ces reflexions ont ainsi voulu demontrer que le dialogue instaure pendant plus de vingt ans par le Directeur du centre Leon Robin (Universite de Paris IV), reste toujours ouvert. (shrink)

_Democracy Past and Future_ is the first English-language collection of Pierre Rosanvallon's most important essays on the historical origins, contemporary difficulties, and future prospects of democratic life. One of Europe's leading political thinkers, Rosanvallon proposes in these essays new readings of the history, aims, and possibilities of democratic theory and practice, and provides unique theoretical understandings of key moments in democracy's trajectory, from the French Revolution and the struggles for universal suffrage to European unification and the crises of the (...) present. In so doing, he lays out an influential new theory of how to write the history of politics. Rosanvallon's historical and philosophical approach examines the "pathologies" that have curtailed democracy's potential and challenges the antitotalitarian liberalism that has dominated recent political thought. All in all, he adroitly combines historical and theoretical analysis with an insistence on the need for a new form of democracy. Above all, he asks what democracy means when the people rule but are nowhere to be found. Throughout his career, Rosanvallon has resisted simple categorization. Rosanvallon was originally known as a primary theorist of the "second left", which hoped to stake out a non-Marxist progressive alternative to the irresistible appeal of revolutionary politics. In fact, Rosanvallon revived the theory of "civil society" even before its usage by East European dissidents made it globally popular as a non-statist politics of freedom and pluralism. His ideas have been shaped by a variety of influences, ranging from his work with an influential French union to his teachers François Furet and Claude Lefort. Well known throughout Europe as a historian, political theorist, social critic, and public intellectual, Pierre Rosanvallon was recently elected to a professorship at the Collège de France, Paris, a position held at various times by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu. _Democracy Past and Future_ begins with Rosanvallon's groundbreaking and synthetic lecture that he delivered upon joining this institution. Throughout the volume, Rosanvallon illuminates and invigorates contemporary political and democratic thought. (shrink)

Ways of Seeing is a unique collaboration between an eminent philosopher and a world famous neuroscientist. It focuses on one of the most basic human functions - vision. What does it mean to 'see'. It brings together electrophysiological studies, neuropsychology, psychophysics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. The first truly interdisciplinary book devoted to the topic of vision, it will make a valuable contribution to the field of cognitive science.

Pierre Soulages : régulièrement j’élimine des toiles, inabouties ou qui ont “tourné mal ”, banales, sans rien qui m’excite et qui sont d’ailleurs des sortes d’aventures avortées… Alors qu’à un moment, il y avait quelque chose qui était apparu, qui me paraissait intéressant à pousser, à intensifier, et puis ça s’est détourné, ça s’est terminé par quelque chose de morne, pas vraiment inachevé parce que l’inachevé c’est par rapport à un modèle parfait ou… qui n’est pas du tout ce (...) que je poursuiv... (shrink)

Best known for his work in literary criticism, Pierre Macherey has, over the past two decades, produced a series of original philosophical works. This first collection of his philosophical writings to be published in English discloses the full range of Macherey's interventions, testifying to his signal status as one of France's leading philosophers. In a Materialist Way ranges over Macherey's writings on philosophy and theory, critiques of the work of major figures in contemporary French thought such as Lacan, Foucoult (...) and Canguilhem, and analyses of the work of Spinoza. It reveals to English-speaking audiences what has long been common knowlege in France: that Pierre Macherey is among the most fertile, imaginative and subtle of contemporary philosophers. (shrink)

Letter to du Faur de Pibrac, 1621.--Exercises against the Aristotelians, 1624.--Letter to Diodati, 1634.--De motu, 1642.--The rebuttals against Descartes, 1644.--The syntagma, 1658.

L'actualite du kantisme n'est plus a demontrer. Que l'on songe a l'ethique de la discussion, a la theorie de la justice, a la philosophie des relations internationales, au probleme des arguments dits transcendantaux ou encore a la theorie de l'experience esthetique, la pensee de Kant temoigne aujourd'hui d'une incontestable vigueur et d'une etonnante jeunesse. Cette contemporaneite de Kant se traduit par de multiples tentatives de dialogue avec cette oeuvre afin d'en degager la pertinence pour le debat actuel. L'oeuvre de (...) class='Hi'>Pierre Laberge a su repondre de maniere exemplaire a ses ordres de preoccupations dans l'etude de Kant. Les auteurs sollicites ont eu l'occasion de collaborer avec Pierre Laberge et lui rendent ici un hommage posthume. Ce recueil reflete ainsi cette double exigence d'actualiser le kantisme et d'en analyser les textes. (shrink)

This work by Pierre Bourdieu develops the anthropological theory which has formed the basis of his scientific research. It discusses the problems posed by "structuralist" philosophers in order to solve or dissolve them.

Interview with Pierre Rosanvallon, conducted by Javier Fernández Sebastián, in Madrid, September 28, 2006.

Résumé Le présent article analyse d’un point de vue sémiotique les rapports entre la /lumière/ et l’/obscurité/ et les catégories discursives au sein d’un corpus de quatre textes de la littérature du dix-neuvième et vingtième siècle. Il s’agit de montrer que les propriétés physiques et sensibles fondent les structures sémio-narratives et orientent les catégories axiologiques, thymiques, spatiales et temporelles. Autrement dit, on observe une primauté de la lumière et de l’obscurité en tant que catégories organisées en structure élémentaire qui génère, (...) par un système de conversion, les unités abstraites et concrètes aux niveaux successifs du parcours génératif. (shrink)

The present volume consists of diverse individual texts, produced between 1980 and 1986, which take two forms: interviews in which Bourdieu confronts a series of probing and intelligent interviewers, and conference papers that clarify and extend specific areas of his research. Now that Bourdieu's work has achieved wide diffusion and celebrity, this is an appropriate time for this volume, a pause for retrospection and resynthesis, for corrections of misreadings and extension of previous insights, and for projection of the next stages (...) of his work. For this English edition, Bourdieu's celebrated inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Leçon sur la Leçon, has been added. The texts fall into two fundamental areas. The first area provides an overview of Bourdieu's central concepts, never before clearly explained. The second area clarifies the philosophical presuppositions of Bourdieu's studies and gives an account of his relations with the series of thinkers who formulated the problems in social and cultural theory that still preoccupy us: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Wittgenstein, Weber, Parsons, and Lévi-Strauss. Bourdieu's visions of these figures is personal and penetrating, and in his vivacious, spontaneous responses one sees at work a mode of thought that can in itself be a liberating tool of social analysis. Bourdieu applies to himself the method of analyzing cultural works that he expounds, evoking the space of theoretical possibilities presented to him at different moments of his intellectual itinerary. (shrink)

A magisterial mappa mundi of the terrain that Pierre Hadot has so productively worked for decades, this ambitious work revises our view of ancient philosophy- ...

Over the last four decades, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died two years ago, he was considered to be a thinker on a par with Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan--a public intellectual as influential to his generation as Sartre was to his. Science of Science and Reflexivity will be welcomed as a companion volume to Bourdieu's now seminal An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (...) . In this posthumous work, Bourdieu declares that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, and military research--that it risks falling under the control of industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and profit. Science thus endangered can become detrimental to mankind. The line between pure and applied science, therefore, must be subjected to intense theoretical scrutiny. Bourdieu's goals in Science of Science and Reflexivity are to identify the social conditions in which science develops in order to reclaim its objectivity and to rescue it from relativism and the forces that might exploit it. In the grand tradition of scientific reflections on science, Bourdieu provides a sociological analysis of the discipline as something capable of producing transhistorical truths he presents an incisive critique of the main currents in the study of science throughout the past half century and he offers a spirited defense of science against encroaching political and economic forces. A masterful summation of the principles underlying Bourdieu's oeuvre and a memoir of his own scientific journey, Science of Science and Reflexivity is a capstone to one of the most important and prodigious careers in the field of sociology. (shrink)

Highlighting the social tensions that confront the liberal tradition, Pierre Manent draws a portrait of what we, citizens of modern liberal democracies, have become. For Manent, a discussion of liberalism encompasses the foundations of modern society, its secularism, its individualism, and its conception of rights. The frequent incapacity of the morally neutral, democratic state to further social causes, he argues, derives from the liberal stance that political life does not serve a higher purpose. Through quick-moving, highly synthetic essays, he (...) explores the development of liberal thinking in terms of a single theme: the decline of theological politics. The author traces the liberal stance to Machiavelli, who, in seeking to divorce everyday life from the pervasive influence of the Catholic church, separated politics from all notions of a cosmological order. What followed, as Manent demonstrates in his analyses of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Guizot, and Constant, was the evolving concept of an individual with no goals outside the confines of the self and a state with no purpose but to prevent individuals from dominating one another. Weighing both the positive and negative effects of such a political arrangement, Manent raises important questions about the fundamental political issues of the day, among them the possibility of individual rights being reconciled with the necessary demands of political organization, and the desirability of a government system neutral about religion but not about public morals. (shrink)

La theorie physique? Ce titre, qui fut au debut de notre siecle celui d'un ouvrage controverse, suggere bien une question, celle de savoir si en matiere de science la theorie doit se qualifier en fonction d'un domaine plus particulier d'application. L'auteur, Pierre Duhem, n'aurait pas hesite, semble-t-il, a repondre par l'affirmative en ce qui concerne le vaste champ de la recherche que l'on peut signifier sous le nom de physique. Son ouvrage est en fait construit comme une preparation rigoureuse (...) a une telle reponse et bien que les annees aient modifie considerablement le contexte du champ sus-dit, les analyses proposees ont ete jugees suggestives par de nombreux epistemologues d'aujourd'hui. (shrink)

"This wonderfully eloquent and playful colloquy of two brilliant minds gives new life to the old notion of Dialogue, a sadly forgotten form now.... I "love" this book!

Cambrai, Bibl. munic. 940, ff. 1-59 [integralement reproduit]--Bibl. Vatic. Reg. Lat. 689 A, ff. 334-353.--Bibl. Vatic. Reg. Lat. 1653, ff, 1v-2v (feuilles de garde), ff. 3r, 29r-35r.--Pièces justificatives.

A simple definition of consciousness is sensory awareness of the body, the self, and the world. The fetus may be aware of the body, for example by perceiving pain. It reacts to touch, smell, and sound, and shows facial expressions responding to exter- nal stimuli. However, these reactions are probably preprogrammed and have a subcortical nonconscious origin. Furthermore, the fetus is almost continuously asleep and unconscious partially due to endog- enous sedation. Conversely, the newborn infant can be awake, exhibit sensory (...) awareness, and process memorized mental representations. It is also able to differentiate between self and nonself touch, express emotions, and show signs of shared feelings. Yet, it is unreflective, present oriented, and makes little reference to concept of him/herself. Newborn infants display features characteristic of what may be referred to as basic consciousness and they still have to undergo considerable maturation to reach the level of adult consciousness. The preterm infant, ex utero, may open its eyes and establish minimal eye contact with its mother. It also shows avoidance reactions to harmful stimuli. However, the thalamocortical connections are not yet fully established, which is why it can only reach a minimal level of consciousness. (shrink)

Pierre Macherey est philosophe, professeur honoraire à l’université de Lille. Rattaché à l’UMR « Savoirs Textes Langage » du CNRS, il continue d’animer un blog « La philosophie au sens large » dont les travaux sont publiés sur le net ( https://philolarge.hypotheses.org/ ). Il a écrit de nombreux ouvrages, aussi bien en philosophie (sur Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Comte, Canguilhem, Foucault) qu’en littérature et sur la manière de philosopher avec la littérature ( Philosopher avec la littérature est la reprise de (...) sa thèse soutenue en 1991 ; mais il y a aussi, par exemple : Proust. Entre littérature et philosophie ; En lisant Jules Verne ). Son dernier ouvrage s’intitule À l’essai (Paris, Kimé, 2019). Sur l’utopie, il a notamment écrit : De l’utopie! (Le Havre, De l’incidence éditeur, 2011) ainsi que « Utopie et quotidien : les deux faces d’une même réalité? », article publié dans Peggy Avez, Louis Carré et Sébastien Laoureux (dir.), Utopie et quotidien. Autour de Pierre Macherey (Bruxelles, Presses de l’Université Saint Louis, 2016). (shrink)

Rik Peels has ingeniously argued that ignorance is not equivalent to the lack or absence of knowledge. In this response, I defend the Standard View of Ignorance according to which they are equivalent. In the course of doing so, some important lessons will emerge concerning the nature of ignorance and its relationship to knowledge.

We study one way in which stable phenomena can exist in an NIP theory. We start by defining a notion of ‘pure instability’ that we call ‘distality’ in which no such phenomenon occurs. O-minimal theories and the p-adics for example are distal. Next, we try to understand what happens when distality fails. Given a type p over a sufficiently saturated model, we extract, in some sense, the stable part of p and define a notion of stable independence which is implied (...) by non-forking and has bounded weight. (shrink)