Les philosophies et les sciences humaines sont des fabriques de l'homme, selon le double sens du génitif. Elles sont fabriquées par des hommes, mais elles fabriquent aussi l'homme, en tant qu'elles véhiculent une représentation de ce qui le constitue et (ou) du rapport qu'il entretient avec ce qui n'est pas lui (nature, société). La construction d'un discours impose en effet une grille de lecture, un découpage et une articulation du réel. Aussi, en dépit de l'effort que l'on rencontre parfois pour (...) élaborer des discours sans présupposé ontologique sur la nature humaine, une prise de position au sujet de l'homme semble en fait inévitable. Prendre par exemple pour point de vue celui de l'individu ou, au contraire, celui du tout social n'est pas neutre mais il s'agit déjà d'une façon de régler le rapport de l'un à l'autre. Et partir d'un homme ramené au statut d'agent rationnel visant à maximiser son profit est un choix massif qu'il convient d'analyser. Mais, s'il y a toujours, en philosophie morale et politique, ou dans les sciences humaines, des présupposés anthropologiques, on ne trouve pas forcément dans, ou à l'arrière-plan de tout discours sur les hommes, l'admission d'une essence générique de l'homme; autrement dit, le présupposé peut être aussi de contestation. Quoi qu'il en soit, il faut mettre en évidence un personnage abstrait, parfois assumé, parfois caché et parfois contesté donc, mais toujours là à sa façon, à défaut d'être à chaque fois opératoire. (shrink)

This article compares the two approaches to Spinoza by French philosophers Louis Althusser and François Zourabichvili. In spite of substantial differences between these approaches, they also display significant areas of convergence. This convergence is seen first in the antihumanist reading of Spinoza operated by both philosophers, that is, the refusal to posit a subject, both master and source of its thoughts and actions, as a primal concept to forge a normative essence of man. There is also convergence between the two (...) philosophers in their conception of psychic life that is specifically Spinozist or perhaps that goes beyond Spinozism. French philosophy –Canguilhem after Politzer– has formulated a number of criticisms of psychology. But Spinoza gives, in an actualising method, critical tools against all forms of psychological precipitation. At the same time, it shows within philosophy a way that makes possible a delimitation of psychic life within its own movement. It is therefore not a form of reductionism: psychic phenomena have a specific existence, a substance that allows them to resist too hasty a subordination to the jurisdiction of an external and heterogeneous cause. Zourabichvili and Althusser therefore reinvest, each in his own way, the Spinozist articulation between criticism of the prerogatives of the modern subject and identification of an irreducible psychological domain. (shrink)

In 1810, Gall and Spurzheim proposed the following diagnosis: the scant of knowledge of the cerebral substratum responsible for mental faculties must be attributed to the excessive subservience of anatomy to metaphysics. In this article, we examine this historic judgement with reference to Niels Steensen’s Discourse on the Anatomy of the Brain. By presenting the cerebral localisation “systems” of which Steensen is critical (those proposed by the “ancients”, by Thomas Willis and Descartes), we will firstly provide an overview of the (...) different conceptions of the “seat of the soul” in the seventeenth century. We will then show how, in these three cases, the correlation between a lacunar brain mapping and a spatial representation of mental faculties leads to the postulation that a particular part of the brain is the seat of memory, imagination or common sense. Finally, we will show that it was in the name of anatomical science, limited to what can be evidenced by eyewitnesses, that Steensen rejected the very principle of cerebral localisation. (shrink)

Argues for the primacy of the phylogenetic system as the general reference system in biology. This book, first published in 1966, generated significant controversy and opened possibilities for evolutionary biology.

In his Elementorum Myologiae Specimen, Steno geometrizes "the new fabric of muscles" and their movement of contraction, so as to refute the main contemporary hypothesis about the functioning of the muscles. This physiological refutation relies on an abstract representation of the muscular fibre as a parallelepiped of flesh transversally linked to the tendons. Those two features have been comprehensively studied. But the method used by Steno, as well as the way he has chosen to present his physiological results, have so (...) far been neglected. Yet, Steno's work follows a true synthetic order, which he conceives as a tool to separate uncertain anatomical "elements" from the certain ones. We will show that the true understanding of this "more geometrico" order is the only way to avoid frequent misconceptions of the scientific aim pursued by Steno, which is neither to give a mathematical explanation of the functioning of the muscles, nor to reduce the muscles to some mathematical shapes. (shrink)

Cet article a pour objectif d’apporter un éclaircissement sur l’évolution des représentations d’attachement à l’âge adulte, et plus exactement, au sein de la relation de couple. Nous avons en particulier étudié l’influence des modèles internes opérants ( MIO ) et de l’organisation défensive sur la qualité des représentations d’attachement mise en place par rapport au conjoint. Il s’avère que dans les couples réunissant une personne sécure avec un conjoint insécure, c’est la personne sécure qui révisera ses MIO en développant des (...) représentations d’attachement similaires à celles de son conjoint. Ces résultats tendent à confirmer la théorie de l’exclusion défensive comme frein au changement. (shrink)

Nicolas Steno’s criticism of L’Homme played a major role in the early reception of Cartesianism: from the late 1660s, the Discourse on the Anatomy of the Brain has never ceased being used in order to discredit Descartes’s philosophy. And yet, the anatomical works of Nicolas Steno are themselves informed by Cartesian method. This paradox has led to the depiction of Steno either as a repentant Cartesian or a non-Cartesian mechanist. In this paper, I clarify such problematic labels by studying the (...) different kinds of relationships between anthropology and anatomy that L’Homme may have used to justify. In particular, I show how Descartes’ clock analogy was used to defend two different conceptions of the articulation between anatomical observations and functional hypotheses respectively in La Forge and in Steno. (shrink)

This article is about the exchanges between Leibniz, Arnauld, Bayle and Lamy on the subject of pain. The inability of Leibniz’s system to account for the phenomenon of pain is a recurring objection of Leibniz’s seventeenth-century Cartesian readers to his hypothesis of pre-established harmony: according to them, the spontaneity of the soul and its representative nature cannot account for the affective component of pain. Strikingly enough, this problem has almost never been addressed in Leibniz studies, or only incidentally, through the (...) more general problem of evil. My purpose in this article is to clarify Leibniz’s psychophysical parallelism by opposing his representationist account of pain to the functionalist account endorsed by Arnauld, Bayle, Lamy and Malebranche. (shrink)

How are we to connect the mechanist methodology used by Baglivi in his physiological treatises with the apparently strict empiricism that he promotes in his therapeutic work entitled Practice of Physick, reduc’d to the Ancient Way of Observations? In order to answer this question, we examine the methodological implications of the “history of diseases” that Baglivi promotes by using Bacon’s recommendations in the Novum organum. Then, we compare this result with the place that historians generally gave to Baglivi in the (...) medical context of that time: the place of a dogmatic and “iatromechanist” physician who was far from practical and therapeutic concerns. This confrontation allows us first to apprehend the polemical origin of the so-called “iatromechanism” as a historiographical label, and second, to question the preeminence of the role of observations in the shaping of the classical distinction between “rational” physicians and “empirical” ones. When Early Modern physicians use the dichotomy between “empirical” and “rationalist” in order to discredit what they perceive as oversimplification or dogmatism, there is most often a third group at stake: a group which is depicted as the providential and intelligent solution to sectarianism. For Baglivi, this third group would be an “Empirick rational sect.” The distinction between a medicina prima and a medicina secunda allows us to understand such an apparently paradoxical category. (shrink)

Garrod, Smith and the contributors of the volume envisage the longue durée poetics of an early modern genre. They interpret its poetics alongside its various epistemic agenda and make a case for the literary status of natural history.

The literary nature of Kant's work, although traditionally dismissed, has an essential, formative impact on his philosophy. Tracing the experimental nature of Kant's early writing of "essays" up to his development of a new literary genre, the Kritik, this study explores Kant as an author highly aware of the problems of writing philosophy and whose self-conscious search for adequate means of expression and philosophical self-reflexivity culminates in his "transcendental style". A close reading of the "pre-critical" writings shows a Kant feeling (...) his way forward toward a form satisfying the new requirements his method was about to establish. The essay becomes the genre of free literary experimentation. When Kant turned to the Kritik he was thus consciously looking for a new genre. Departing from any former philosophical genres the Kritik is essay-derived. But it formulates its own generic set of rules by its performance-based self-legitimation. The Kritik der reinen Vernunft is the first of its kind, producing in its new genre a new form of discourse. The creation of an adequate genre displaying a chorus of voices marks the change in Kant. Writing after the Kritik, which contains the blueprint of philosophical discourse, means that Kant now does so from the now attained vantage point of self-reflexivity: his publications then divide themselves into theoretical or academic ones and--following his own use of the word--into practical ones: public statements taking firm stands for the cause of enlightenment. The notion of enlightenment that Kant develops in these publications denotes a rich, deeprooted concern which demonstrates Kant's underlying self-perception as a writer. (shrink)

Exploring the subject of Jewish philosophy as a controversial construction site of the project of modernity, this book examines the implications of the different and often conflicting notions that drive the debate on the question of what ...

Comment figurer visuellement les effets des bouleversements qui marquent notre entrée collective dans l’Anthropocène? Comment saisir l’imminence de ces transformations, sans verser dans une forme de voyeurisme de la catastrophe qui, en se soumettant aux formes du spectaculaire, stérilise toute forme d’action efficace au lieu de la favoriser? Peut-être en cherchant des images en creux, des images inquiètes, incomplètes, qui suscitent l’interrogation et l’exercice projectif de la pensée et de l’imagination : des images qui ne représentent pas les effets des (...) bouleversements, mais les laissent flotter à la lisière de la représentation. On voudrait ainsi définir les contours possibles d’un iconotexte de l’effondrement qui constitue un nouveau régime d’articulation du visible et du lisible, propre à l’imminence des transformations qui nous guettent. (shrink)

COMPARING LAW COMPARING RELIGION -- THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION AND ITS CULTURED DESPISERS -- INTRODUCING RELIGION -- Index of Authors.

Dans cet ouvrage, Marc Parmentier entreprend une étude des Nouveaux essais dont l’originalité est à la fois de ne pas adopter le seul point de vue leibnizien et de tenir compte de la diversité des objets philosophiques abordés dans ce monumental ouvrage. La thèse centrale qui guide l’auteur dans cette entreprise est la suivante : les Nouveaux essais ne doivent pas être lus comme un simple dialogue philosophique, mais plutôt comme une « intrigue philosophique ». Elle permet de faire droit (...) au c.. (shrink)