Leo Strauss's approach to politics may indeed be regarded as realist. Some traits of his thought, however, seem to align him to an opposite, idealist tendency. Among these are Strauss's criticism of the moderns for their rejection of the political philosophy of the classics on the grounds of its being utopian and his attention toward the concept of natural right. This article shows how these traits, which at first glance oppose the classification of Strauss as a political realist, can be (...) traced back to a framework that is able to lessen, and even overturn, the apparently idealistic character of his thought. In doing so, it delves into Strauss's understanding of ancient utopianism - notably, of the best city described in Plato's Republic - and his criticism of the modern interpretation thereof. Explaining why Strauss regarded such an interpretation as based on a fundamental misunderstanding, the article emphasizes the role played by the Biblical tradition in turning philosophy from a theoretical way of life into a practical pursuit in the service of the political sphere. This also sheds light on Strauss's twofold definition of political philosophy as both the philosophical treatment of politics and the 'political' (i.e. rhetorical) introduction to philosophy. (shrink)

Examines how Leo Strauss sought to recover "nature," which he saw as inseparable from genuine philosphy since its inception in ancient Greece.

Whereas Western moral philosophy has mainly accounted for recurrent failed or irrational actions through the concept of weakness of will, many early Chinese texts on self-cultivation, notably the Zhuangzi, stand for a philosophical position that explains our frustrations and failures as an "excess of the will." Leaving aside external factors such as accidents or mistakes, this essay explores the sources of thwarted plans and frustrated expectations that are due to factors internal to the individual—more precisely, to the nature of intentional (...) conscience. Such a view was generally inadmissible in Western moral philosophy, which revolves around the paradigm of a causal agent endowed with a 'muscular ethics' for which all that is desired, and indeed all that is achieved, may only be a direct effect of the will. In striking contrast to this orientation, the Zhuangzi presents a variety of situations in which things do not happen as planned because we were too aware of the plan that guided us. Here, I will use Jon Elster's concept of by-product states in order to explore this contrast between two contending models of action that, far from being culturally rooted, express an inner criticism in both traditions, European and Chinese. (shrink)

Integrated information theory postulates that a conscious experience depends on a repertoire of hypothetical experiences. This makes consciousness depend on the context that constrains the set of possibilities and on the scenarios imagined by the external observer, and not only on the system itself.

“Neural coding” is a popular metaphor in neuroscience, where objective properties of the world are communicated to the brain in the form of spikes. Here I argue that this metaphor is often inappropriate and misleading. First, when neurons are said to encode experimental parameters, the neural code depends on experimental details that are not carried by the coding variable. Thus, the representational power of neural codes is much more limited than generally implied. Second, neural codes carry information only by reference (...) to things with known meaning. In contrast, perceptual systems must build information from relations between sensory signals and actions, forming an internal model. Neural codes are inadequate for this purpose because they are unstructured and therefore unable to represent relations. Third, coding variables are observables tied to the temporality of experiments, whereas spikes are timed actions that mediate coupling in a distributed dynamical system. The coding metaphor tries to fit the dynamic, circular, and distributed causal structure of the brain into a linear chain of transformations between observables, but the two causal structures are incongruent. I conclude that the neural coding metaphor cannot provide a valid basis for theories of brain function, because it is incompatible with both the causal structure of the brain and the representational requirements of cognition. (shrink)

Avec l'extension du domaine du risque, consecutive aux avancees technologiques de tous ordres et a l'amplification des echanges a l'echelle planetaire, chacun porte desormais une responsabilite etendue, dans l'espace et le temps. Cette situation inedite, generatrice de nouveaux questionnements ethiques, met en lumiere un paradoxe: bien qu'essentielle dans un tel contexte, la notion de responsabilite semble avoir perdu de son sens et de sa clarte, comme dissimulee derriere la multiplicite de ses occurrences. Il devient ainsi decisif d'interroger a nouveau ce (...) concept: qu'est-ce que la responsabilite? Comment prendre une decision responsable face aux dilemmes moraux, juridiques, economiques, environnementaux, politiques, sociaux et societaux? Analysant a la fois les fondements philosophiques de la responsabilite et ses recentes metamorphoses, cet essai introduit autant a l'ethique appliquee, notamment dans le domaine des affaires et du management, qu'il suggere une nouvelle forme de sagesse pratique, singuliere et incarnee, centree sur l'exercice quotidien de vertus adaptees aux enjeux du monde contemporain. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:New Rhetoric's Empire:Pragmatism, Dogmatism, and SophismRomain LauferPragmatism vs. RationalismThere are at least two reasons to devote some attention to sophism when dealing with the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric in the context of Franco-American intellectual exchanges. The first reason is that it lies at the very origin of classical philosophy which could be described as resulting directly from the way in which Plato and Aristotle succeeded in separating the (...) realm of rhetoric from the realm of philosophy. The second reason arises out of the way in which Durkheim, the founder of French academic sociology, thought it necessary to establish a clear distinction between sociology and pragmatism. This was done in a course given at the Sorbonne during the academic year 1913–14. The course could be considered a direct answer to the lectures on pragmatism given by William James at the Lowell Institute in Boston in 1906–7 (Durkheim 1955).From the very beginning of his talk, Durkheim expresses an extremely ambivalent point of view. On the one hand, pragmatism, better than any other doctrine, allows one to feel the necessity of reforming or renovating the type of "traditional rationalism" that dominated the French intellectual atmosphere of the time. On the other hand, it represents a real threat for this same rationalist tradition. Is it not a declaration of war that pragmatism launches on rationalism when William James writes that "against [End Page 326] rationalism as a pretension and a method pragmatism is fully armed and militant" (1975, 32)? In the face of this attack Durkheim declares that what is at stake are the very foundations of French culture: "Our whole French culture is essentially based on rationalism. Here the eighteenth century lives on. Thus, a radical negation of rationalism would constitute a danger: it would imply a complete disruption of our national culture. The whole French spirit would have to be transformed if the form of irrationalism that pragmatism represents were to be admitted" (1955, 28). Durkheim adds that this threat is not limited to the French tradition: "Not only our culture but the whole of the philosophical tradition has been, since the very beginnings of philosophical speculation—apart from a single exception that will be dealt with later—of a rationalist tendency. Therefore it is toward the disruption of all this tradition that one would have to proceed if pragmatism were valid" (1955, 28).Durkheim insists that what pragmatism tends to destroy is the "cult of truth," the fact that there are judgments that are necessary, which he will allude to throughout his analysis as corresponding to a dogmatic conception of truth that is repeatedly criticized by William James. James writes in his lectures on pragmatism that "rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions[;]... objective truth must be something non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted. It must be the absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally absolute reality.... Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this question!" (1975, 38).This allows Durkheim to declare that by stating that the human mind is free in front of the truth, pragmatism approaches the single exception he mentioned, namely, sophism, which in a similar manner negated truth. This connection is not arbitrary: it is avowed by the pragmatists themselves (1955, 28–29). Thus F. C. S. Schiller proclaims himself a "Protagorean" and recalls the axiom that "man is the measure of all things."Thus the debate between rationalism and pragmatism—between, according to Durkheim, a French philosophical tradition characterized by its link with a Cartesian dogmatic form of rationalism and an American philosophy characterized by its link with pragmatism—can be seen as the continuation of the debate between Plato and Aristotle, on the one hand, and the Sophists, on the other, at the origin of Western philosophy. Moreover, Durkheim tells us that the resurgence of the debate between pragmatism and philosophy corresponds to a historical transformation that affects the whole Western world. Pragmatism is becoming the only and dominant philosophy of the time. The central trait of this intellectual orientation is its [End Page 327] focus on action, a focus it shares with sociology itself: both are "daughters of... (shrink)

Onofri [Onofri, A. 2018. ‘The Publicity of Thought.’ Philosophical Quarterly 68 (272): 521–541.] proposes an individuation criterion for thoughts that purports to satisfy both shareability (the notion that different thinkers, or a single thinker at different times, can and generally do think type-identical thoughts) and Frege's constraint (according to which two thoughts are different if it is possible for a rational subject to endorse one while rejecting the other). I argue that his proposal fails to satisfy Frege's constraint. Then I (...) propose a modification to Onofri's proposal to fix the problem. (shrink)

To make the voice heard of those for whom the written word is not part of their cultural tradition is Romaine Moreton’s project as Aboriginal poetess and performer. We publish here two poems from her collection Post Me to the Prime Minister. Flowing by the beat of the bongo, originally written in English, manoeuvering between the written language of the colonisator and the music of the colonised, they forcefully express Romaine Moreton’s struggle : the combat of a people for the (...) right to represent itself and to be the author of its own existence. (shrink)

« Nous savons que nous voulons nous retrouver. Tout ce dont nous avons besoin, c’est des cérémonies qui nous rassembleront » écrit la poétesse afro-féministe Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Les noms que nous utilisons pour nous dire font parfois office de cérémonies : un nom nous appelle, et nous répondons à son invocation. Ce peut être un cri de ralliement « Not GAY as in Happy but QUEER as in Fuck You! », mais même les collectifs les plus émeutiers et les (...) plus retors à l’identification courent le risque, en se nommant, de se voir réassigner à résidence par l’interpellation policière (« hé toi, là-bas! »). Comment éviter les pièges de l’identité? Les études queer ont élaboré le concept de désidentification pour décrire la tentative fugitive d’échapper aux marquages policiers des identités. Ce texte tente de détailler les enjeux politiques de ce refus d’identification en le situant dans les allers-retours franco-états-uniens des études et des activismes queer. (shrink)

Essai général sur le philosophe et prosateur chinois Tchouang-Tseu dont l'oeuvre se situe à l'origine du taoïsme philosophique et religieux. Ses leçons métaphysiques, son ironie contre toute forme d'autorité s'épanouissent sous forme de dialogues, fables et historiettes que l'auteur interprète et commente pour en dégager les enjeux.

Inner speech has been shown to vary in form along several dimensions. Along condensation, condensed inner speech forms have been described, that are supposed to be deprived of acoustic, phonological and even syntactic qualities. Expanded forms, on the other extreme, display articulatory and auditory properties. Along dialogality, inner speech can be monologal, when we engage in internal soliloquy, or dialogal, when we recall past conversations or imagine future dialogs involving our own voice as well as that of others addressing us. (...) Along intentionality, it can be intentional (when we deliberately rehearse material in short-term memory) or it can arise unintentionally (during mind wandering). We introduce the ConDialInt model, a neurocognitive predictive control model of inner speech that accounts for its varieties along these three dimensions. ConDialInt spells out the condensation dimension by including inhibitory control at the conceptualization, formulation or articulatory planning stage. It accounts for dialogality, by assuming internal model adaptations and by speculating on neural processes underlying perspective switching. It explains the differences between intentional and spontaneous varieties in terms of monitoring. We present an fMRI study in which we probed varieties of inner speech along dialogality and intentionality, to examine the validity of the neuroanatomical correlates posited in ConDialInt. Condensation was also informally tackled. Our data support the hypothesis that expanded inner speech recruits speech production processes down to articulatory planning, resulting in a predicted signal, the inner voice, with auditory qualities. Along dialogality, covertly using an avatar’s voice resulted in the activation of right hemisphere homologs of the regions involved in internal own-voice soliloquy and in reduced cerebellar activation, consistent with internal model adaptation. Switching from first-person to third-person perspective resulted in activations in precuneus and parietal lobules. Along intentionality, compared with intentional inner speech, mind wandering with inner speech episodes was associated with greater bilateral inferior frontal activation and decreased activation in left temporal regions. This is consistent with the reported subjective evanescence and presumably reflects condensation processes. Our results provide neuroanatomical evidence compatible with predictive control and in favor of the assumptions made in the ConDialInt model. (shrink)

In these three Indian biographies dating from the 1920s, Romain Rolland introduces the French reader to Gandhi's political struggle and to the spiritual careers of Ramakrishna and his disciple Vivekananda, while revealing the deep meaning of his attraction to Hindu India at this time of his life.

Qu’est-ce que laisser une trace à la postérité? Comment les traces du passé, matérialisées dans l’écriture d’un récit, peuvent-elles s’apparenter à des œuvres et former un monde? Dans la Condition de l’homme moderne, Hannah Arendt cherche à penser la narrativité comme une condition de possibilité de l’Histoire : libérée de tout historicisme, l’historiographie, loin d’apparaître comme un savoir positif consignant les marques d’un passé disparu, a pour fonction de révéler phénoménologiquement le sens des actions historiques des êtres parlants dans des (...) œuvres prenant la forme d’un récit. Le problème husserlien de la transmission mondaine des idéalités du passé dans une écriture affranchie de la mémoire subjective se voit ainsi réinterprété à la lumière d’une analyse de l’action politique, reconfigurée dans une narration : c’est par la médiation d’un récit mettant en forme les traces du passé que les êtres humains peuvent accéder rétrospectivement à une histoire non passéiste. (shrink)

Written in the early 1990s by a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Die ersten Bemerkungen Wittgensteins zur Identität stammen vom Herbst 1913; Spuren zeitweise intensiver Beschäftigung mit dem Thema finden sich indes bis in die Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung. Die vorliegende Arbeit versucht jenen Gedankenläufen Wittgensteins zu folgen, die in seine eigentümliche Schreibweise gebundener Variablen und der Streichung des Identitätszeichens aus der Begriffsschrift mündeten. Neben der Typentheorie Russells hat,was im ersten Abschnitt gezeigt wird, besonders seine Analyse definiter Beschreibungen Wittgensteins frühe Gedanken zur Identität angeregt, zumal er sich nach der Ablehnung von Russells Definition der (...) Identität der neuerlichen Frage gegenübersah, ob sich Sätze, worin das Zeichen der Identität vorkommt, weiter zerlegen lassen oder ob dieses vielmehr als Urzeichen angenommen werden müsse. Diese Frage stand für Wittgenstein in engem Zusammenhang mit dem,was er als das Grundproblem der Logik ausgemacht zu haben glaubte, d. i. mit der Frage nach der Beschaffenheit eines idealen Zeichensystems, das jede Tautologie auf ein und dieselbe Weise als Tautologie erkennen ließe. Wie in einer ausführlichen Besprechung der ab-Notation im dritten Abschnitt nachgewiesen wird, war die Lösung des Grundproblems denn auch das Ziel seines fieberhaften, letztlich aber erfolglosen Versuchs, die ab-Notation auf allgemeine Sätze - und insbesondere auf solche, worin das Identitätszeichen vorkommt - auszuweiten. Der vierte Abschnitt schließlich folgt Wittgensteins neuerlichem Anlauf zur Lösung des Grundproblems, der ausgeht von einer früheren Betrachtung zu dem bereits im zweiten Abschnitt behandelten Phänomen der Rekurrenz und deren Affinität zur Frage nach der richtigen Handhabung der Identität. Am Ende erweist sich die durch eine veränderte Variablenschreibweise ohne Verlust an Ausdruckskraft ermöglichte Streichung des Identitätszeichens gleichsam als Begleitprodukt der umfassenderen Bemühung, das Grundproblem der Logik doch noch einer Lösung zuzuführen. (shrink)

Les mots nous manquent pour dire le plus banal des paysages. Vite à court de phrases, nous sommes incapables de faire le portrait d'une orée. Un pré, déjà, nous met à la peine, que grêlent l'aigremoine, le cirse et l'ancolie. Il n'en a pourtant pas toujours été ainsi. Au temps de Goethe et de Humboldt, le rêve d'une " histoire naturelle " attentive à tous les êtres, sans restriction ni distinction aucune, s'autorisait des forces combinées de la science et de (...) la littérature pour élever la " peinture de paysage " au rang d'un savoir crucial. La galaxie et le lichen, l'enfant et le papillon voisinaient alors en paix dans un même récit. Ce n'est pas que l'homme comptait peu : c'est que tout comptait infiniment. Des croquis d'Alfred Wallace aux " proêmes " de Francis Ponge, des bestiaires de William Swainson aux sonnets de Rainer Maria Rilke, ce livre donne à entendre le chant, aussi tenace que ténu, d'un très ancien savoir sur le monde - un savoir qui répertorie les êtres par concordances de teintes et de textures, compose avec leurs lueurs des dictionnaires éphémères, s'abîme et s'apaise dans le spectacle de leurs métamorphoses. (shrink)

Les leçons du décolonial sont multiples pour celleux qui avaient cru aux récits de la fin des Empires : aux côtés des luttes anticoloniales qui nous ont appris à rejeter les formes les plus directes d’oppression politique et économique, avec les impasses du post-colonialisme et des pensées de l’hybridation, le décolonial fait le jour sur la saisie des imaginaires, des sensibilités et des rationalités par la logique coloniale. À l’ère de la sixième extinction, l’Anthropocène prend le visage d’un âge de (...) la Plantation, où la logique d’appauvrissement et de simplification des naturecultures est partout à l’œuvre. Parce que cette « oxydentalisation » qui coupe le souffle n’épargne personne, il est urgent d’entendre les ouvertures contre-plantationnelle du décolonial. (shrink)

Les femmes ont toujours travaillé, mais à quel prix? L’ouvrage de la sociologue et féministe Elisabetta Pernigotti, paru à titre posthume en avril 2018, repose sur un constat poignant. L’indépendance des femmes conquise par l’accession généralisée au marché du travail est une construction fallacieuse dissimulant une position largement inégalitaire dans leurs activités professionnelles. Dans la lignée des récents travaux de la feminist labour history, cette étude, issue d’une thèse de doctora...

"Saturne, c'est ici l'Absolu de Hegel, un Absolu pensé si seul qu'il ne vit que de la perpétuelle dévoration de ses propres enfants, craignant d'être détrôné de son absoluité s'il n'absorbe pas, à mesure qu'il la produit, sa propre altérité. C'est cette solitude de Dieu qui est ici interrogée, en suivant au sein de l'oeuvre hégélien l'évolution, puis le plein déploiement conceptuel de la notion de Singularité, qui n'est autre que le nom divin par excellence. Si Dieu, l'Absolu, est pour (...) Hegel la Singularité même, ce n'est que parce qu'il est le mouvement de réflexion réciproque de l'Universel et du Particulier : l'Esprit est la réflexion du Logique dans la Nature, et de la Nature dans le Logique. Hegel ou Le Festin de Saturne se présente alors comme une enquête destinée à dévoiler le meurtre rituel dont la Singularité est le nom dans le Système hégélien. Or, cette Singularité, que nous sommes habitués à entendre individuelle, s'y révèle être boulimique ou, justement, saturnienne. S'ouvrant sur la faillite spéculative des singuliers sensibles au début de la Phénoménologie de l'Esprit, le présent ouvrage ne pourra se conclure qu'avec le triomphe de la Singularité dialectique ne laissant rien - pas même ou surtout pas son Autre - hors d'elle-même, lorsque ce triomphe sera mesuré à l'aune de la conceptualité chrétienne dont se revendique le protestant Hegel, mais qu'il trahit sur un point capital en voulant l'accomplir. Mais Saturne, c'est aussi le "soleil noir" des alchimistes, que l'on a pu associer au soleil obombré au moment de la mort du Christ : quoi de plus naturel, dès lors, que d'en faire l'astre tutélaire d'un système qui se construit tout entier autour d'un "Vendredi saint spéculatif"? Car, comme Dante dut traverser les neuf cercles de l'Enfer avant d'espérer pouvoir s'élever au Purgatoire, puis au Paradis, l'homme pensant doit traverser le Système de la Science, en subir peut-être les glaçantes tentations, en méditer en tous cas la fascinante rigueur conceptuelle, pour pouvoir ensuite espérer voir scintiller devant lui les lueurs matinales d'un inattendu "dimanche de Pâques spéculatif"."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The neural coding metaphor is so ubiquitous that we tend to forget its metaphorical nature. What do we mean when we assert that neurons encode and decode? What kind of causal and representational model of the brain does the metaphor entail? What lies beneath the neural coding metaphor, I argue, is a bureaucratic model of the brain.

Résumé La comparaison de la cybernétique de Wiener et du schéma narratif de Greimas permet de repérer leurs points forts respectifs : dans le schéma de la rétroaction de Wiener, les fonctions de commande et d’information des messages, d’une part, ainsi que les opérations relatives à la transmission des messages, d’autre part ; dans le schéma narratif de Greimas, la sanction finale anticipée par un sujet et qui motive celui-ci à donner suite à la proposition d’un autre sujet. La nouvelle (...) théorie proposée fusionne ces points forts et ajoute des notions élaborées ailleurs : notamment celle de besoin, inspirée de la théorie de la motivation de Maslow. Nous aboutissons ainsi à un schéma de la satisfaction d’un besoin en six étapes, auquel sont associées plusieurs notions complémentaires : en particulier, celles de valeur d’un objet par rapport à la satisfaction de l’un des quatre besoins essentiels, de jugement de réalité ou de valeur exprimé par un sujet, d’opération qui modifie ou non l’avoir d’un sujet et de sujet individuel ou collectif. Finalement, dans le cadre de la nouvelle théorie, la notion de sujet s’élargit et inclut tout être vivant ou association d’êtres vivants – êtres humains, animaux ou plantes. (shrink)

Psychiatry is becoming a cognitive neuroscience. This new paradigm not only aims to give new ways for explaining mental diseases by naturalizing them, but also to have an influence on different levels of psychiatric norms. We tried here to verify whether a biological paradigm is able to fulfill this normative goal. We analyzed three main normative assumptions that is to say the will of giving psychiatry a valid nosology, a rigorous definition of what is a mental disease, and new tools (...) for destigmatizing mentally ill patients. Although these different kinds of normativity are very heterogeneous, we must conclude that, in all these cases, biological psychiatry is a failure, in part because of a lack of epistemological conceptualization. (shrink)

The role of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) in mate choice in humans is controversial. Nowadays, the availability of genetic variation data at genomic scales allows for a careful assessment of this question. In 2008, Chaix et al. reported evidence for MHC‐dependent mate choice among European American spouses from the HapMap 2 dataset. Recently, Derti et al. suggested that this observation was not robust. Furthermore, when Derti et al. applied similar analyses to the HapMap 3 European American samples, they did (...) not see a significant effect. Although some of the points raised by Derti et al. are relevant, we disagree with the reported absence of evidence for MHC‐dependent mate choice within the HapMap samples. More precisely, we show here that the MHC dissimilarity among HapMap 3 European American spouses is still extreme in comparison to the rest of the genome, even after multiple testing correction. This finding supports the hypothesis of MHC‐dependent mate choice in some human populations. (shrink)

After forty years of incessant wars begun in 1494, the Italian peninsula is experiencing a long period of relative peace, until the end of the 18th century. Florence, Venice and Rome are at that time the three cultural and political spaces that give birth to the most important – and the most “European” – thinking upon the question of war and “post-war era”. After Florentine political thought and its connection of conquest politics to conservation in times of war, the “after-war” (...) is always virtually tensed between the impossibility of peace and the consent to political and military domination. The understanding of such a situation is expressed by the praising of neutrality and pacification of power relations, in particular in venetian thought. In this perspective, peace is in the same time an imposed and a mobile framework. At stake is what does war transmit to after-war. Since war is a radical experience, a limit-experience, it brings a knowledge that gains necessity: therefore this knowledge continues to inform the reflection even when the circumstances are totally different. Even when the reasons of conservation are placed before the reasons of conquest, war is not replaced with peace. It is not thought anymore that after war comes peace: on the contrary, it is considered that peace has its origins in war. (shrink)

Résumé Le formalisme relève d’une vision unilatérale et dualiste qui lutte contre les formes. La forme est vivante comme désir conscient et inconscient, matière, couleur, rythme, métamorphose, Gestaltung énergétique et érotique au sens de Klee. Ces perspectives semblent échapper à nombre de théoriciens qui la figent dans ses oppositions traditionnelles avec le contenu et la matière. Refoulant l’événement sensible et corporel qu’elle constitue, les uns l’assimilent au formalisme, les autres élaborent un concept d’informe, tous s’avérant incapables de distinguer la forme (...) du formalisme. (shrink)

Focusing on the reception of Maine de Biran by Alexis Bertrand in his thesis, L’aperception du corps humain par la conscience (1880), I will demonstrate how the “corps propre” (one’s own body) becomes a key concept in order to re-orientate the French spiritualist movement. To do so, Bertrand’s neo-Biranism uses a new methodology with phenomenological issues. The image of the body, the primitive space or the engagement within the world becomes new research themes for spiritualism. His interpretation of Biran’s philosophy (...) leads him to criticize mechanistic epistemology, and especially the concept of reflex. In this context, Bertrand proposes an animist metaphysics, aiming to reconcile his Biranism with the advances of science. As a consequence, the history of the concept of one’s own body must take into account metaphysical perspectives and not only scientific and experimental researches. (shrink)

The question of a pragmatist justification of religious beliefs appeared in James’s writing in 1898, as an alternative to Royce’s theory of the absolute. This pragmatist justification was repeated in The Varieties of Religious Experiences in 1902 but it failed to give a proper account of the truth of religious beliefs based on private religious experiences and ultimately failed to answer Royce’s arguments. James knows that any possible pragmatist justification of religious belief based on the practical consequences of religious belief (...) must be completed by a metaphysical theory of the non-natural causality of religious experiences. But that would require going beyond the dualistic and naturalistic account of the Varieties. Nevertheless, the difficulties of the monistic theories of the Essays in Radical Empiricism pushed James to defend, in A Pluralistic Universe, a pantheistic theory in which the Absolute is accepted as a logical possibility, which in turn supposes to accept the composition theory of consciousness that he had rejected in The Principle of Psychology. Therefore, James’s final theory isn’t very different to Royce’s theory, since Royce’s theory is not a theory of the necessity of the Absolute but rather a theory of its possibility. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Wittgenstein-Studien Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 1 Seiten: 101-132.