Qu'est-ce qui oriente la philosophie? Depuis Platon, le philosophe est celui qui tourne son regard vers le Bien et qui adopte une manière de vivre en accord avec sa pensée. Qu'est devenue cette manière de vivre comme exigence philosophique, pour un philosophe qui se laisse inspirer par la révélation chrétienne? Faut-il la nommer "sainteté"? Cet ouvrage présente six philosophes du XXe siècle qui ont cherché à accorder leur pensée et leur manière de vivre : Maurice Blondel, Erich Przywara, Simone (...) Weil, Aimé Forest, Michel Henry, Edith Stein. Des philosophes à l'écoute d'une inspiration qui oriente leur existence. La philosophie comme un acte de résistance spirituelle. Il y a là beaucoup à apprendre. (shrink)

If there is an inherent connection between love and generosity, between love and creativeness, as this book argues there is, then how can love itself be selfish, destructive and tyrannical? Concerned with questions about love in its different forms, this book seeks and discusses the views of writers--Plato, Proust, Sartre, Freud, D. H. Lawrence, Erich Fromm, C. S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil and Kahlil Gibran--who have suggested distinctive solutions to the problems which love poses in the face of (...) its obstacles. The enquiry which the book undertakes emcompasses both the conceptual and existential experience of love. (shrink)

En 1933-1934, Simone Weil était professeur à Roanne. Dans un petit pavillon isolé au fond d'un parc, sur l'herbe ou sous la neige, elle enseigna alors la philosophie à quelques élèves. On découvrira ici, à travers les notes recueillies par une de ces jeunes filles, ce que furent ces leçons, véritables entretiens socratiques. Le lecteur y reconnaîtra l'unité profonde de Simone Weil dont la vie brève fut intensément consacrée à la recherche de la vérité.

A detailed multi-disciplinary analysis of Sudan in the post-colonial era with a consideration of possibilities for the future.

In a time in which an exuberant, trans-classical, non-trivial machine culture redesigns terminologies, remodels logics, produces new evidence, and reorganizes semantic resources, a new, neocybernetic regime of truth is taking shape. Many of our recent self-descriptions and theory formations are coined by our media-technological condition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of Niklas Luhmann, especially in his inherent narrative of the history of rationality. This essay attempts to reconstruct Luhmann’s redescription of European rationality, especially the media- and (...) machine-historical conditions that remain apparent in Luhmann’s account. The decisive issue is that Luhmann’s history of rationality reveals the technological unconscious of systems theory and indeed the epochal imaginary it belongs to. With the help of the theories of machines developed by von Foerster, Simondon and Günther, Luhmann’s oeuvre must be read as probably the most striking conceptual edifice to emerge from what could be called the 20th-century’s epochal technological shift of meaning. (shrink)

For both Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, providing a philosophical account of the concept of number was a central goal, pursued along similar logicist lines. In the present paper, I want to focus on a particular aspect of their accounts: their definitions, or re-constructions, of the natural numbers as equivalence classes of equinumerous classes. In other words, I want to examine what is often called the ‘Frege-Russell conception of the natural numbers’ or, more briefly, the Frege-Russell numbers. My main concern (...) will be to determine the precise sense in which this conception was, or could be, meant to constitute an analysis. I will be mostly concerned with Frege’s views on the matter; but Russell will come up along the way, for illustration and comparison, as will some recent neo-Fregean suggestions. (shrink)

Ancient Rhodes reached a pinnacle of power in the early second century B.C. For twenty years—from Apamea to Pydna—her fleet was unrivalled in the Aegean and her mainland possessions encompassed most of Lycia and Caria. Ally and helpmate of Rome in the war on Antiochus III, Rhodes gained much profit from the association, in prestige and territorial acquisitions. But her heyday was brief, her fall swift and calamitous. After Pydna, Rhodes felt the heavy hand of Rome: she forfeited most of (...) her mainland holdings; her economy suffered ruinous setback; the island republic was humbled and humiliated. So dramatic a reversal of fortune demands explanation. (shrink)

In this essay, Weil undertakes a meditation on the idea of “reading”, which she thinks can shed new light on a diverse range of conceptual and experiential “mysteries”, especially with respect to our existential responses to the world. A central concern is how we ascribe meaning and respond to phenomena. She argues that, for the most part, our reading of the world and the things in it are immediate, not subject to “interpretation”, at least as this is regularly conceived. (...) Further, Weil says, our readings of the world are invariably tied to particular kinds of valuation, of ethical assessment and orientation, which appear to us as both obvious and immediate. This immediacy of reading, however, does not entail that our readings cannot be changed or challenged—only that such a change or challenge requires a particular kind of labor. (shrink)

cinq conférences Eric Weil. IV LA CONSTITUTION II faudra donc admettre que l' État hégélien est fondé sur la liberté et agit en vue de la liberté, que, pour citer le mot d'un des disciples immédiats du philosophe, la Philosophie du Droit « tout ...

This collection of Weil's later writings captures her insightful philosophical explorations of the nature of value, moral thought, and the relation of faith and reason.

All thinking is done by our brains. They are also responsible for our feelings of love and hate, and for our ability to make and appreciate art. But there is a popular reluctance to credit the brain with some of these so-called higher functions. We have difficulty associating our appreciation of beauty with electrical impulses propagating down nerve fibres. We don't see love as residing in the organ that is hidden away inside the skull, where it sits, shaped like a (...) boxing glove, grey, motionless, and seemingly inert. Instead, the icon of love is that fist-sized muscle in your chest. (shrink)

Our brains are characterized by sensory pathways that are highly reflexive, allowing higher cortical centres to control neural activity patterns at peripheral sensory areas. This feature is characterized as an internal sketchpad and involves recursive interactions between central symbols and peripheral images. The process is assumed to be the fundamental mechanism underlying most cognitive functions. The paper attempts to portray the beginnings of art and language as natural extensions of these pre-existing internal processes, made possible by the greatly enlarged human (...) prefrontal cortex. It views these highly social activities as originating in subjective, private discourse between the emerging self and its externalized expressions. (shrink)