Saint-Simon, Comte, Proudhon, Marx, the founders of the sociology, examined the transformations of norms and values, leading the way to sociology of morals. Nevertheless, M. Weber and L. Lévy-Bruhl created sociology of morals as an autonomous field, with its own questions and difficulties. So, from Durkheim to G. Gurvilch, a special field was composed, not greatly explored, but well-defined. We put here the question of the actual possibilities, examining the contemporaneous sociological paradigms. What paradigm is effective for a sociology of (...) morals ? (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans L'Homme et la Société, 1988, vol. 90, n° 90, p. 15-24. Il est également accessible ici. Résumé : Les fondateurs du socialisme ont en commun de penser l'avènement d'une coupure historique, d'une révolution marquant le début d'un nouveau monde riche de rythmes temporels sans précédents. Mais leurs constructions des temps sociaux divergent profondément. Saint-Simon, puis Eugène Buret, Constantin Pecqueur, font du passé de l'Europe un temps scandé par la succession de systèmes (...) - XIXe (...) siècle – Nouvel article. (shrink)

This essay discusses an important early French response to the American Revolution, chapters 38-52 in Book 18 of Raynal and Diderot's Histoire des deux Indes (1780), and explores how this reponse was shaped by the influence of Montesquieu. In Raynal and Diderot's conception of political freedom, as in Montesquieu's, universalism is tempered by empiricism. Public opinion must never be ignored, local factors matter: the two philosophes praise the American revolutionaries for their wisdom in this respect. Clearly Montesquieuan in inspiration, the (...) American chapters of the Histoire des deux Indes constitute one of the most significant pre-revolutionary examples of moderate liberalism in France. (shrink)

Reflection Principles are commonly thought to produce only strong axioms of infinity consistent with V = L. It would be desirable to have some notion of strong reflection to remedy this, and we have proposed Global Reflection Principles based on a somewhat Cantorian view of the universe. Such principles justify the kind of cardinals needed for, inter alia , Woodin’s Ω-Logic.

Kaiho Seiry (1755-1817) is probably the first Japanese thinker to proclaim the contractual nature of human relationships. I examine in this paper the view of human beings that led him to this conclusion. Giving up previous definitions of humans, Seiry focuses on the faculty of practical reason. While this leads him to recognize a hierarchy of humans, some having more humanity than others, it also allows him to develop the most modern understanding of social relationship available in his time. His (...) radical reinterpretation of what it is to be a human being is all the more remarkable because it was done with the concepts and ideas provided by the Chinese Classics. Establishing new connections, giving new life to ideas that were never exploited, Seiry showed it was possible to make sense of modernity without using foreign concepts. (shrink)

Comment caractériser les utopies actuelles de la communication ? Le terme même d’utopie convient-il en ce domaine ? Pour répondre à ces questions, on se propose de retracer les thèmes fondamentaux des utopies d’autrefois, de Platon à Fourier , et de les confronter aux thèmes contemporains. La confrontation conduit à mettre en relief l’étendue des fausses similitudes.How to characterize the current utopias about communication ? Is the term itself – utopia – really appropriate ? To answer these questions, we propose (...) to review the fundamental themes of former utopias, from Plato to Fourier and to confront them to present themes. This comparison tends to clear the ambiguities of contemporary utopias and the extension of inadequate similarities. (shrink)

To understand the political theory—and especially its alleged modernity—of Ogy Sorai, one of the most important philosophers of Tokugawa Japan, we need to understand the pivotal role that heaven, gods and spirits play in this theory. This is no easy task. This article will start with an analysis of the reasons of this difficulty: the numerous tensions and contradictions found in Sorai's remarks on the subject. Refusing to ignore one side of the story, refusing (...) also to reach too quickly a verdict of inconsistency, it also questions the rare attempt at a unified interpretation undertaken by Maruyama Masao. The article suggests that the solution is to understand that Sorai needs to speak from two different perspectives on the Way: the external perspective of the sages who grasp the relationships between the Way and the natural world as purveyor of the raw materials the Way is made of, and the internal perspective of commoners who must accept everything that is in a Way. This permits us to rescue the positivist interpretation of Sorai advanced by Maruyama and much criticized in recent years. (shrink)

Phenomena like the happiness of the wicked or the misfortune of the worthies were for Confucian thinkers, just as for Christian theologians, puzzles that their ‘theories on fortune and misfortune’, just like Theodicies in the West, were trying, with some difficulty, to explain or rationalize. This article first surveys some standard explanations of the phenomena given by scholars of eighteenth-century Japan within the framework of the available monist, rationalist paradigms. Afterward, it turns to another type of representation of the world (...) that could answer the puzzles—not, it should be stressed, by solving them, but rather by dis-solving them: by making them disappear as problems. In this new representation, for which many inhabitants of industrialized societies today have much affinity, the world in which humans live is ruled by many independent and mutually irreducible rationalities—economic, productive, military, moral (under various forms), political, physical, etc. If humans view the world in such manner, they are certainly confronted by many questions—for example the need to order or prioritize those logics in order to achieve an overarching order—but they are delivered at least of one burden: the necessity to justify scandals like the happiness of the wicked. Most such tragedies arise then simply from the encounter of different rationalities qua independent rationalities: say, the encounter of the physical laws that produce devastating earthquakes with the moral principles that lead us to attach value to human lives. There is no mystery to explain, just a tragedy to lament. The article thus captures the most important developments in political, social and economic thought of the Japanese eighteenth century through the concept of concurrent rationalities, following the thread of the treatments of the puzzle of the happy villains. (shrink)

Inleidend overzicht van de wijsgerige ethiek.

Scientific realists have suggested that changes in our scientific communities over the course of their history have rendered those communities progressively less vulnerable to the problem of unconcieved alternatives over time. I argue in response not only that the most fundamental historical transformations of the scientific enterprise have generated steadily mounting obstacles to revolutionary, transformative, or unorthodox scientific theorizing, but also that we have substantial independent evidence that the institutional apparatus of contemporary scientific inquiry fosters an exceedingly and increasingly theoretically (...) conservative form of that inquiry. I conclude that contemporary scientific communities are actually more vulnerable to the problem of unconceived alternatives than their historical predecessors, and I briefly suggest how we might seek to pursue scientific inquiry in a less theoretically conservative way. (shrink)

Il y a dans le roman des Lumières une véritable vogue de la parenthèse utopique. Les textes retenus pour cette étude sont donc des romans non utopiques dans lesquels figurent une ou plusieurs "micro-utopies.".

인간의 이성적 의식과 법의 관계를 밝히고 법의 해석 과 판단에 인간의 의식이 어떻게 작용하는가를 고찰 한 저술. 제1부에서는 법의 형이상학적인 측면에서 법의 실체, 그리스의 법, 데카르트의 법, 로크와 법, 칸트와 법, 헤겔과 법, 아담스미스의 법의 경제, 중국의 도덕과 법사상을 다루었다. 제2부에서는 심리학적 분석으로 헌법의 심리학적 해석, 법의 판결절차, 증거법, 형법과 죄, 청소년과 가족법, 조세법, 플라톤의 법, 칸트의 도덕론의 경험적 확인, 헤겔의 자아와 노동법, 법의 4차원에 대해 다뤘다.

Writing around the time of the French Revolution, Condorcet was a very early advocate of women’s suffrage. To fully appreciate the importance and originality of his contribution to the cause of women’s political rights, it is necessary to situate his ideas within the broad context of revolutionary feminist activism in general, its goals, modes of expression, successes or failures, as well as the nature of the opposition it faced. Such contextualization confirms that Condorcet, whose affirmation of women’s voting rights was (...) grounded in the theory of natural rights, was the most articulate and consistent feminist voice during the Revolution. My analysis of the Convention’s decision to ban all women’s political clubs in the fall of 1793 also calls into question a common and influential assessment of the Revolution. In contrast to the anti-feminist arguments of the Montagnards who wielded power at the time, arguments predicated on a restrictive understanding of natural law, Condorcet’s earlier feminist reasoning based on natural rights, one of the central political concepts of the Enlightenment, casts doubt on the claim that the Revolution was inherently misogynist and that the bourgeois public sphere to which it gave rise was founded on the exclusion of women. (shrink)

George Berkeley is one of the greatest and most influential modern philosophers. In defending the immaterialism for which he is most famous, he redirected modern thinking about the nature of objectivity and the mind's capacity to come to terms with it. Along the way, he made striking and influential proposals concerning the psychology of the senses, the workings of language, the aims of science, and the scope of mathematics. In this Companion volume a team of distinguished authors not only examines (...) Berkeley's achievements but also his neglected contributions to moral and political philosophy, his writings on economics and development, and his defense of religious commitment and religious life. The volume places Berkeley's achievements in the context of the many social and intellectual traditions - philosophical, scientific, ethical, and religious - to which he fashioned a distinctive response. (shrink)

One diagnosis of what is wrong with the Knowledge Argument rests on the Ability Hypothesis. This couples an ability analysis of knowing what an experience is like together with a denial that phenomenal propositions exist. I argue against both components. I consider three arguments against the existence of phenomenal propositions and find them wanting. Nevertheless I deny that knowing phenomenal propositions is part of knowing what an experience is like. I provide a hybrid account of knowing what an experience is (...) like which is the coherent expression of a single idea: knowing what an experience is like is knowing what it would be like to have the phenomenal content of the experience as the content of an experience one is currently having. I explain how my conclusions indicate that the focus of discussion should be on the alleged explanatory gap between phenomenal facts and physical facts and not on the Knowledge Argument. The latter is a poor expression of the difficulty Physicalists face. (shrink)

Typical discussions of virtual reality (VR) fixate on technology for providing sensory stimulation of a certain kind. They thus fail to understand reality as the place wherein we live and work, misunderstanding it instead as merely a sort of presentation. The first half of the paper examines popular conceptions of VR. The most common conception is a shallow one according to which VR is a matter of simulating appearances. Yet there is, even in popular depictions, a second, more subtle conception (...) according to which VR is a matter of facilitating new kinds of interaction. The latter half of the paper turns to questions about the contemporary technology of Internet chatrooms. The fact that chatrooms can be used in certain ways suggests something about the prospects for VR. The penultimate section asks whether chatrooms may legitimately be thought of as places. (In a sense, they may.) The final section asks whether cybersex may legitimately be thought of as sex. (Again, yes.) Chatroom technology thus provides an argument for the second conception of VR over its much ballyhooed rival. (shrink)

There has been an increase in recent years in the use of empirical methods in healthcare ethics. Appeals to empirical data cannot answer moral questions, but insights into the knowledge, attitudes, experience, preferences and practice of interested parties can play an important part in the development of healthcare ethics. In particular, while we may establish a general ethical principle to provide explanatory and normative guidance for healthcare professionals, the interpretation and application of such general principles to actual practice still requires (...) interpretation and judgement. And many situations in healthcare practice are complex and may involve a variety of principles, each of which may conflict with the others. Simple surveys or interview studies may not be sufficient if we wish to develop a nuanced approach to ethical practice that can be set out in guidelines, codes or directives. We do not resolve moral questions by plebiscite. In this paper, the authors argue for the use of consensus methods to develop shared understanding of ethical practice, and they argue further for the combination of the Delphi method with the use of vignettes to illustrate the kind of situations that may occur in practice. They develop their argument in part by reference to their experience of using this approach in their recent research. (shrink)

As family physicians, general practitioners play a key role in safeguarding children. Should they suspect child abuse or neglect they may experience a conflict between responding to the needs and interests of the child and those of an adult patient. English law insists on the paramountcy of the interests of the child, but in family practice many other interests may be at stake. The authors argue that uncritical adoption of the paramountcy principle is too simplistic and can lead, paradoxically, to (...) greater harm. They argue for a more subtle and nuanced view of interests and of conflicts of interest in safeguarding children. (shrink)