This article examines the term “Radical Enlightenment” as a historiographical category through the lens of the philosophical work of Dorothea Christiane Erxleben (1715–1762), a keen advocate for women’s education and the first female medical doctor in Germany. The aim of the article is to develop a methodological framework that makes it possible to critically assess the radicalism of Erxleben’s philosophical position as it is presented in her highly systematic work Rigorous Investigation (1742). In the first part of the article, the (...) term “Radical Enlightenment” is briefly discussed in the German context. The second part is dedicated to articulating two methodological problems concerning the use of the term “radical” with regards to early feminist writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The aim of this section is to develop a new approach to the classification of radical thinkers of this period. In the remaining three parts, this methodological approach is applied to the analysis of Erxleben’s views on equality and education, focusing on her call for women’s active participation in society. Finally, it is concluded that there is sufficient evidence to categorize vital parts of Erxleben’s philosophy as radical. (shrink)

This study investigates the prevalence of ‘Seeking God's Help’, its relation to time since diagnosis, and its association with Life Satisfaction for all cancer types. This study also investigates Disease-Specific Quality of Life for patients with breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers. Data were obtained from the third wave of the Nord-Trøndelag Health Study of Norway, with 2,086 cancer patients identified by the Cancer Registry of Norway and 6,258 cancer-free controls. Our results indicate a higher prevalence of ‘Seeking God's Help’ after (...) a shorter time since diagnosis among men. No association was observed in multivariate analyses between ‘Seeking God's Help’ and ‘Life Satisfaction’ or ‘Disease-Specific QoL’ in long-term cancer survivors. Longitudinal investigations are needed to elucidate the relationship between the ‘Seeking God's Help’ variable and Life Satisfaction and Disease-Specific QoL among cancer patients in a Norwegian context. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDe l’esprit was read and commented on by Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire, in 1758. So was De l’homme when it appeared posthumously in 1773. We will go into this series of books, marginalia, and refutations, to address the question: what exactly was widely discussed between the three authors during the 1750s? Is it ‘materialism’? Our first point is to interpret the potential distortions, re-workings or re-appropriations in Rousseau’s marginalia, known as Notes sur De l’esprit, especially here about the so-called theory (...) of passive judgement. We will then see that there certainly is, in the discussion between Rousseau and Helvétius, a real opposition on the question of matter and its properties, as the examination of the Favre manuscript and the revised version of Émile would easily prove it. But this question is not the key to Rousseau’s first reaction to Helvétius's De l’esprit. I shall focus on the moral and anthropological dimensions of the discussion in the Notes. From this point of view, we wil... (shrink)

From a purely formalist viewpoint on the philosophy of mathematics, experiments cannot (and should not) play a role in warranting mathematical statements but must be confined to heuristics. Yet, due to the incorporation of new mathematical methods such as computer-assisted experimentation in mathematical practice, experiments are now conducted and used in a much broader range of epistemic practices such as concept formation, validation, and communication. In this article, we combine corpus studies and qualitative analyses to assess and categorize the epistemic (...) roles experiments are seen—by mathematicians—to have in actual mathematical practice. We do so by text-mining a corpus of reviews from the _Mathematical Reviews_, which include the indicator word “experiment”. Our qualitative, grounded classification of samples from this corpus allows us to explore the various roles played by experiments. We thus identify instances where experiments function as references to established knowledge, as tools for heuristics or exploration, as epistemic warrants, as communication or pedagogy, and instances simply proposing experiments. Focusing on the role of experiments as epistemic warrants, we show through additional sampling that in some fields of mathematics, experiments can warrant theorems as well as methods. We also show that the expressed lack of experiments by reviewers suggests concordant views that experiments could have provided epistemic warrants. Thus, our combination of corpus studies and qualitative analyses has added a typology of roles of experiments in mathematical practice and shown that experiments can and do play roles as epistemic warrants depending on the mathematical field. (shrink)

Hume's project, in Book 3 of the Treatise, of showing that virtue and vice are discerned by feeling, not reason, is notorious for its contradictions. Armies of Humean scholars have fought valiantly, ingeniously, but unsuccessfully, to resolve them, and in the first half of Hume's Morality, Cohon shows herself an admirably doughty follower in their footsteps. The second half concerns Hume's division between natural and artificial virtues. We learn how self-interest is redirected, and moral sentiment strengthened to provide artificial virtues (...) with the motives they lack naturally, so as to enable them to facilitate impersonal co-operation, though a particular virtuous act may benefit no-one. The author explains why .. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of regulation and legislation on influencing the development and diffusion of technologies and methods of crop production. To do this, the change in pesticide registration under European Regulation 1107/2009 ‘Placing Plant Protection Products on the Market’ was followed through the UK’s agricultural system of innovation. Fieldwork included: a series of interviews conducted with scientists, agronomists and industry organisations; a programme of visiting agricultural events; as well as sending an electronic survey to British potato growers. The (...) innovation system is noted to have made the legislation less restrictive than originally proposed. The most notable system response to the legislation is the adjustment of agrochemical company pesticide discovery strategy and their expansion into biologically derived treatments. There have also been other innovation responses: agricultural seed companies have been breeding in pathogen resistance in their cultivars; agricultural consultancies are prepared to recommend pathogen-resistant seeds; scientists are using the change as justification for adopting their solutions; the agricultural levy boards funded research into off-label pesticide uses; and producers, potato growers in particular, have been seeking advice, but not changing their growing practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 174-189 [Access article in PDF] Sophie's Choice: Letting Chance Decide Suzanne Dovi University of Arizona When, if ever, should individuals facing a genuine moral dilemma adopt a random decision procedure to determine the outcome of that dilemma? Or to put the question more metaphorically, is it ever morally preferable to determine the outcome of a moral dilemma by flipping a coin? In this (...) paper, I will argue that sometimes it is. To make this argument, I consider a particularly agonizing moral dilemma—the one found in William Styron's Sophie's Choice. Drawing on this famous example of a moral dilemma, I identify three salient features of a moral dilemma that make it morally permissible, and even morally preferable, for an agent to adopt a random decision procedure to determine its outcome. By 'morally preferable,' I do not mean to imply that an agent is morally required to adopt a random decision procedure to determine the outcome of a moral dilemma. As will be seen, I disagree with the view that humans must always pursue the most morally preferable course of action. Nevertheless, I contend that agents should adopt a random decision procedure when faced with a moral dilemma that possesses three salient features. These three features are: (1) when there is clearly no "better" outcome from the range of choices available to the agent; (2) when particular kinds of moral burdens (guilt burdens) can be alleviated by that agent adopting a random decision procedure; and (3) when the alternatives were given to, and not made by, the agent. The first two salient features are necessary for it to be morally permissible [End Page 174] to decide a moral dilemma using a random decision procedure. The third feature is not necessary since a person could, due to her morally permissible decisions, face a moral dilemma whose outcome could be legitimately determined by a random decision procedure. However, I maintain that all three features are jointly sufficient for determining when it is morally preferable to adopt a random decision procedure to decide the outcome of a moral dilemma. I Hard choices are decisions that require us to choose among conflicting goals, purposes, values, or goods that are very important to us. Such choices pervade our lives. According to David Schmidtz, to face such a hard choice can be "the price of the richness and complexity of a life well-lived. To have both ideals and loved ones is to run the risk of having to make decisions under unresolved conflicts of value."1 Although hard choices are often ordinary, some hard choices can also be genuine moral dilemmas.2For my purposes, hard choices become genuine moral dilemmas when an agent cannot avoid violating his or her deeply held moral beliefs. Moreover, genuine moral dilemmas are dilemmas that have no "right" answer. So, for example, genuine moral dilemmas occur when an agent faces a decision between outcomes that are, as far as the agent can reasonably determine, equally bad or incommensurable. Indeed, some genuine moral dilemmas can involve choices between such horrible outcomes that it does not make sense to use moral language to justify their decisions—that is, to provide reasons for thinking that one outcome is preferable to another. In these cases, genuine moral dilemmas do not offer any possibility for moral redemption: the agent cannot morally justify choosing one outcome over another. Thus, genuine moral dilemmas can impose serious (and potentially devastating) moral costs on the decision-maker.William Styron's Sophie's Choice presents an example of such a genuine moral dilemma. Sophie Zawistowska has been asked to choose which of her two children, Eva or Jan, will be sent to the gas chamber in Auschwitz. An SS doctor, Fritz Jemand von Niemand, will grant a dispensation to only one of Sophie's children. If she does not choose which one should live, Dr. von Niemand will send both to their death. Sophie chooses her daughter Eva to go to the gas chamber. Her son, Jan, is sent to the Children's Camp and she... (shrink)

This discussion takes up the politics of gestational labour and uterine productivity in connection with genetic self-reproduction and the family in the oeuvre of Paul B. Preciado. In his autotheoretical treatise Testo Junkie, Preciado dispensed with the standard Marxist-feminist term ‘sexual division of labour’, positing instead a ‘technogestational division of labour’ to describe the mechanism by which capitalism segments people’s bodies and constructs the capacity to make babies. Taking up that coinage, with enthusiasm for the political horizon it illuminates, I (...) nevertheless read Preciado against Preciado. I identify moments (including in An Apartment on Uranus) of oscillation away from the earlier work’s posit of always already non-sovereign ‘politically assisted procreation’; moments which break faith with the ‘copyleft’ spirit of collective gestational anti-authorship insofar as they call for trans and queer individuals’ equal access to ‘genetic speech’ and for our reappropriation of parental property rights qua ‘confiscated patrimony’. (shrink)

This paper looks at the development of certain Foucauldian concepts and themes within the work of the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. Where Agamben is well-known for his critique of biopower in Homo Sacer, his recent work a more complex engagement with Foucault both in terms of his subject matter, governmentality and economy, and his critical methodology, most notably, his reaffirmation of the value of Foucault’s archaeological method. Focusing on three of Agamben’s recent publications, Signatura Rerum: Sul Metodo, Il regno e (...) la gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell'economia e del governo and What is an Apparatus?, the article looks first at Agamben’s development of Foucault’s archaeological method within his own concept of the signature. It then goes on to consider Agamben’s identification of an economic theology in contradistinction to Schmitt’s political theology and how Agamben’s discussion of collateral damage might be related to Foucault’s notion of security as developed in Security, Territory, Population. Finally, the article considers how Agamben links Foucault’s notion of ‘dispositif’ [apparatus] to an economic theology of government, calling for the development of counter-apparatuses in a similar way to Foucault’s call for ‘resistances.’ The article concludes by considering both the benefits and the limitations of Agamben’s engagement with Foucault. (shrink)

Objective To explore attitudes towards conscientious objections among medical students in the UK. Methods Medical students at St George's University of London, Cardiff University, King's College London and Leeds University were emailed a link to an anonymous online questionnaire, hosted by an online survey company. The questionnaire contained nine questions. A total of 733 medical students responded. Results Nearly half of the students in this survey stated that they believed in the right of doctors to conscientiously object to any procedure. (...) Demand for the right to conscientiously object is greater in Muslim medical students when compared with other groups of religious medical students. Discussion Abortion continues to be a contentious issue among medical students and this may contribute to the looming crisis in abortion services over the coming years. This project sheds some light on how future doctors view some of their ethical rights and obligations. Using empirical evidence, it reveals that conscientious objection is an issue in the UK medical student body today. These data could help anticipate problems that may arise when these medical students qualify and practise medicine in the community. Conclusion Clearer guidance is needed for medical students about the issue of conscientious objection at medical school. (shrink)

The protagonists are Sophie Amundsen, a 14-year-old girl, and Alberto Knox, her philosophy teacher. The novel chronicles their metaphysical relationship as they study Western philosophy from its beginnings to the present. A bestseller in Norway.

In 1869, Johann Friedrich Miescher discovered a new substance in the nucleus of living cells. The substance, which he called nuclein, is now known as DNA, yet both Miescher’s name and his theoretical ideas about nuclein are all but forgotten. This paper traces the trajectory of Miescher’s reception in the historiography of genetics. To his critics, Miescher was a “contaminator,” whose preparations were impure. Modern historians portrayed him as a “confuser,” whose misunderstandings delayed the development of molecular biology. Each of (...) these portrayals reflects the disciplinary context in which Miescher’s work was evaluated. Using archival sources to unearth Miescher’s unpublished speculations—including an analogy between the hereditary material and language, and a speculation that a series of asymmetric carbon atoms could account for hereditary variation—this paper clarifies the ways in which the past was judged through the lens of contemporary concerns. It also shows how organization, structure, function, and information were already being considered when nuclein was first discovered nearly 150 years ago. (shrink)

Epiphanies is a philosophical exploration of epiphanies, peak experiences, 'wow moments', or ecstasies as they are sometimes called. What are epiphanies, and why do so many people so frequently experience them? Are they just transient phenomena in our brains, or are they the revelations of objective value that they very often seem to be? What do they tell us about the world, and about ourselves? How, if at all, do epiphanies fit in with our moral systems and our theories of (...) how to live? And how do epiphanic experiences fit in with the rest of our lives? These are Sophie Grace Chappell's questions in this ground-breaking new study of an area of inquiry that has always been right under our noses, but remains surprisingly under-explored in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The actions of able agents are often reliably successful. I argue that their success may be modally robust along two dimensions. The first dimension helps distinguish the exercise of abilities, which requires local control, from lucky success. The second concerns the global availability of acts: agents with the ability to φ can φ across a variety of circumstances. I introduce a framework that captures the two dimensions and their interaction, and show how it bears on a disagreement about the modal (...) force the robustness of ability requires: while local control involves a kind of local necessity, global availability does not. (shrink)

This paper introduces and motivates the claim that we possess doxastic agent’s awareness. I argue that this is a form of agentive awareness concerning our belief states that we enjoy in virtue of deliberating and judging. Namely, we experience these activities as those of making up our mind and keeping it made up regarding our beliefs. Following related work in the philosophy of action, I understand this awareness as a form of conscious experience which can then ground our self-ascriptions. As (...) such, this enables me to also propose a new account of self-knowledge of belief and the way in which deliberating and concluding that p can warrant us in self-ascribing the belief that p (i.e., employing the so-called ‘transparency method’). Philosophers often appeal to our arguably agentive relation to our beliefs in explaining this. I, though, I extend work in the philosophy of action in a way that is surprisingly flatfooted way given that belief is a state and not an action. (shrink)

Recueil d'actes du SIRL (Bruxelles, septembre 1999-juin 2001) et d'autres contributions. Réflexions sur la dimension épistémique de l'oeuvre littéraire, l'oeuvre littéraire comme réorganisation du réel, les relations entre savoir littéraire et autres sciences humaines et l'originalité du savoir littéraire.

This paper argues for a feminist genealogy of anti-nuclear protest art, around the nucleus of the women’s camp at Greenham Common, 1981–87, a coherent account of whose significance is missing from both feminist film history and left protest history. Drawing on Adrienne Rich’s poetics as a thread connecting the larger anti-nuclear and non-violent/anti-military feminist movement specifically to aesthetic and political formations that informed films made at and about Greenham, the paper constellates a number of experimental works in relation to the (...) well-known observational documentary Carry Greenham Home. Their legacy, and the concept of a Greenham genealogy, is apparent in Sally Potter’s anti-nuclear Cuban Missile Crisis-set drama Ginger & Rosa, whose imbrication of poetry, politics, and experimental film techniques argues for a Greenham poetics. In particular, this paper considers a feminist poetics of attending to the nuclear, re-visioning the atomic, molecular and core as both an ecopoetics and a refusal of heteropatriarchal structures, both necessary to a viable alternative political formation. In their granular detailing of both world and work, these feminist texts offer a rich and continuous history, practice and analysis of anti-nuclear protest art that demands the same attention as they enact. (shrink)

Étant donné la priorité d’intérêt que ce volume entend donner aux textes écrits par Rosenzweig en 1917, alors qu’il se trouvait sur le front des Balkans, j’ai choisi de me pencher sur les tout premiers paragraphes du texte intitulé « Globus. Études sur la théorie de l’espace dans l’histoire universelle », et de mettre ces lignes en regard de ce que Rosenzweig développe dans L’Étoile de la Rédemption. C’est donc d’une lecture suivie de l’introduction de « Globus » dont je (...) partirai. Le texte s’... (shrink)

Si les approches des dispositifs de durabilité se sont multipliées ces dernières années, elles se sont principalement portées sur le projet de développement et sa mise en œuvre. Les effets du passage du temps demeurent aujourd’hui peu connus car encore guère étudiés de manière systématique. La technique de la revisite est ici mobilisée afin de comprendre et d’expliquer les variations ayant lieu au cours du temps. Peu d’attention est accordée à ce qui déroute. Que peut-on apprendre des dynamiques qui décontenancent, (...) dérivent de l’itinéraire prévu, voire modifient sa consistance? Ne faut-il pas envisager les équilibres inattendus ou instables tant dans la rhétorique qu’en pratique? On montre ici comment l’analyse du développement durable sous l’angle des temporalités peut s’avérer féconde afin de repenser la manière dont les professionnels du secteur du logement et les habitants reçoivent et intègrent dans leur existence les changements de paradigmes induits par l’action politique. Des combinatoires d’opérations plutôt que des trajectoires sédimentées, les revisites des terrains bâtis il y a dix ans discernent l’envers d’un cadrage stratégique à l’endroit du développement de l’habitat durable. Bien souvent assimilés à des revers, les contretemps déconcertent et, ce faisant, dénotent une prénotion dominante sur la durabilité, celle d’un temps planifié de manière unifiée. (shrink)

People routinely use facial expressions to communicate successfully and to regulate other’s behaviour, yet modelling the form and meaning of these facial behaviours has proven surprisingly complex. One reason for this difficulty may lie in an over-reliance on the assumptions inherent in existing theories of facial expression – specifically that (1) there is a putative set of facial expressions that signal an internal state of emotion, (2) patterns of facial movement have been empirically linked to the prototypical emotions in this (...) set, and (3) static, non-social, posed images from convenience samples are adequate to validate the first two assumptions. These assumptions have guided the creation of datasets, which are then used to train unrepresentative computational models of facial expression. In this article, we discuss existing theories of facial expression and review how they have shaped current facial expression recognition tools. We then discuss the resources that are available to help researchers build a more ecologically valid model of facial expressions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper will be to show that certain strongly realist forms of scientific realism are either misguided or misnamed. I will argue that, in the case of a range of robustly realist formulations of scientific realism, the ‘scientific’ and the ‘realism’ are in significant philosophical and methodological conflict with each other; in particular, that there is a tension between the actual subject matter and methods of science on the one hand, and the realists' metaphysical claims about which (...) categories of entities the world contains on the other. (shrink)

La philosophie doit-elle, aujourd'hui encore, quelque chose à la langue, à la culture et à la pensée grecques? Sophie Klimis, en s’entretenant avec Frank Pierobon, réfléchit sur ces manières de penser et ces nouvelles formes de vie, inventées en Grèce ancienne, conjointement à l’émergence du projet politique de la démocratie. Elle propose un voyage vers ces temps lointains et toujours inspirants, pour en percevoir les ressources, notamment en montrant comment des dispositifs institutionnels et symboliques – dont ceux du choeur (...) dans le théâtre – structurent la Cité et forment ses citoyens. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of the nature of creativity in high-energy physics experiments through an integrated historical and philosophical study of the current and planned attempts to measure the self-coupling of the Higgs boson by two experimental collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider and the planned High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider. A notion of creativity is first identified broadly as an increase in the epistemic value of a measurement outcome from an unexpected transformation, and narrowly as a condition for (...) knowledge of the measurement of the self-coupling of the Higgs. Drawing upon Tal’s model-based epistemology of measurement this paper shows how without change to ‘readings’ a transformation to the model of the measurement process can increase the epistemic value of the measurement outcome. Such transformations are attributed to the creativity of the experimental collaboration. Creativity, in this context, is both a product, a creative and improved model, and the distributed collaborative process of transformation to the model of the measurement process. For the case of the planned measurements at the HL-LHC, where models of the measurement process perform the epistemic function of prediction, creativity is included in the models of the measurement process, both as projected quantified creativity and as an assumed property of the future collaborations. (shrink)

Mental causation has been a hotly disputed topic in recent years, with reductive and non-reductive physicalists vying with each other and with dualists over how to accommodate, or else to challenge, two widely accepted metaphysical principles—the principle of the causal closure of the physical domain and the principle of causal non-overdetermination—which together appear to support reductive physicalism, despite the latter’s lack of intuitive appeal. Current debate about these matters appears to have reached something of an impasse, prompting the question of (...) why this should be so. One possibility well worth exploring is that, while this debate makes extensive use of ontological vocabulary—by talking, for instance, of substances, events, states, properties, powers, and relations—relatively little attempt has been made within the debate itself to achieve either clarity or agreement about what, precisely, such terms should be taken to mean. Hence, the debate has become somewhat detached from broader developments in metaphysics and ontology, which have lately been proceeding apace, providing us with an increasingly rich and refined set of ontological categories upon which to draw, as well as a much deeper understanding of how they are related to one another. In preparing this volume, the editors invited leading metaphysicians and philosophers of mind to reflect afresh upon the problem of mental causation in the light of some of these recent developments, with a view to making new headway with one of the most challenging and seemingly intractable issues in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

In the history of the scientific revolution, Descartes is often considered as the mechanical philosopher par excellence, and opposed as such to the founder of mechanical science, that is to say, Galileo: this cliché is not without foundation, but it must not make us forget that Descartes was himself a practitioner of mechanical science. In the article "Cartesian Mechanics" I detail the meaning and reach of "mechanics" in the Cartesian corpus, and do so in three steps. 1. I begin by (...) explaining the genesis of the thesis which states that there is no difference between the physical and the mechanical; this thesis is so famous that it is often imagined that it is constituted in Descartes's first writings. But we can in fact show that the first works of Descartes and Beeckman arise from a "physico-mathematical" practice which does not necessarily imply a complete reworking of traditional physics, even if it might have favored the Cartesian ambition for a physics as certain as geometry; it was only in the late 1630s that Descartes began to systematically affirm the identity of physics and mechanics, or of "rules of motion", of "laws of Nature" and of "laws of mechanics". I then analyze the consequences of this affirmation. 2. In the second part of this article I provide a step-by-step commentary of the response proposed by Descartes in a letter to Mersenne in July 1638 to the question raised by Beaugrand's Geostatice (...) dissertatio mathematica (1636), that is to say the question of whether a body weighs more when it is farther from the center of Earth than when it is close. Compared with other texts of the Cartesian corpus, this sample of mechanics has been little analyzed (to my knowledge, the only analyses are those of P. Duhem, P. Costabel, A. Gabbey and D. Garber). This text is nonetheless extremely interesting: Descartes responds to the geostatic question in turn in terms of physics, then mathematics; even more interesting, the examination of the details of his procedures allows us to confront Cartesian statics to other writings, whether those of Guidobaldo del Monte, Galileo, Stevin, Mersenne or Roberval. 3. In the third and final section, I analyze the reasons that lead Descartes to exclude velocity from his statics, I examine the difficulties that his explanation of gravity created for statics, and conclude with the confrontation between mechanical philosophy and mechanical science in the case of Descartes. (shrink)

The theoretical originality of John Locke's position concerning his doctrine of tolerance leads him on the one hand to raise the right to exist for "particular Churches" and on the other hand to erect the process of conviction above the intrinsic content of any belief. In the philosopher's reasoning, the Church is never rendered superfluous because only the practice of worship can demonstrate the sincerity of any spiritual approach. On the other hand, he refutes the postulates of clerical authority on (...) the truth in matters of faith since God would not have prescribed any model. Yet the tension between faith and knowledge is diminished by the Lockian demonstration that consciences, although and because they are weak, must never be violated. (shrink)

The most widespread statement of political philosophy is presented here in the simplified and trivialised form of “man is X; he must become Y. ” Man must do so at the same time for himself, for his own survival, but also for the good of all, of the Community, of the City: the plurality must absolutely, in any way whatsoever, give way to unity, subject to [sous peine] and under threat of chaos. The essential question found confronting political doctrines, moreover (...) since the prominence of the idea of democracy is the following: how to bring about the existence of a united society across a heterogeneous social body? The response from philosophy articulates itself around three principle schemas: the theoretical construction of a unified community under the order of similar laws to those of nature (Platonic schema); the search for the best regime, which will have as its ultimate end the moderation and perpetual regulation of conflicts, by an optimal combination of freedom and stability (Aristotelian schema); and the theorisation of the “end of politics” by the locating of a “social wrong” inscribed in a structure doomed to collapse by the practical negation of its ideological foundations (Marxian schema and derivatives). The mode of thought which imposes itself here is decisional. Beyond the third schema which constitutes in some way a meta-political critique, and necessitates that it alone has a particular analysis, in the two preceding, man constitutes a kind of material – raw or primary, depending – that philosophy will work on, and sculpt to give it a form that harmonises fully with the Whole that it prescribes. In political philosophy, we always turn more or less around the “Let’s make man” of Hobbes, that is, around the technical transformation of a material given. Or to say it otherwise: the creation of an oeuvre from crude and imperfect elements, an oeuvre thought like a masterpiece – that is to say, one that contains within it an idea of perfection and permanence – but doomed here to serial reproduction. (shrink)

L'influence decisive de Christian Wolff sur la pensee du XVIIIe siecle ne saurait plus etre mise en question aujourd'hui. Toutefois, les commentateurs ont longtemps pris a la lettre la critique kantienne du wolffianisme, assimilant la doctrine de Wolff a celle de ses disciples et mettant l'accent presque exclusivement sur la rupture accomplie par l'oeuvre de Kant. Cela a contribue a sous-estimer le role considerable joue par Wolff dans la constitution du criticisme. Les etudes rassemblees dans ce volume se proposent d'interroger (...) les multiples formes sous lesquelles la conception wolffienne a determine le Denkweg kantien et de preciser comment la philosophie de Kant s'articule a celle de Wolff. Ni simple opposition, ni continuite sans heurt, le rapport de Kant a Wolff est complexe et passionnant, et demande, aujourd'hui encore, des analyses prenant en compte l'ensemble des disciplines philosophiques. (shrink)

Historienne, Sophie Wahnich est chargée de recherche au Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Labyrinthe a souhaité la rencontrer car sa pratique déplace les cadres ordinaires de son métier. Jeu temporel tout d’abord : spécialiste de la Révolution française, elle ne s’interdit jamais de confronter son savoir à des enjeux contemporains, qu’il s’agisse des guerres du début du xxe siècle, de celles de l’ex-Yougoslavie ou des formes de revendications les plus récentes. Jeu ensuite avec le...