A weak and equivocal sign, raised to the rank of a central conceptual scheme in the philosophies of Levinas and Derrida, the notion of trace appears in an allusive but insistent way in Merleau-Ponty's writings devoted to speech and writing. Traces challenge the hegemonic omnipotence of the sign; they both conjure up the mundane contextuality of speech and the lacunar dimension of the expression of meaning, beyond any phenomenal presence and any presentive intuition. Through Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty examines the essential (...) character of writing in the constitution of corporeality, otherness, intersubjectivity, and historicity: graphic signs, thought of as traces and the “experience of an absent”, acquire a dimension of material ideality of a new kind, at the limits of phenomenology. (shrink)

“Logic and Agon” is the text of a lecture given in Rome in 1958 by the German philosopher and mathematician Paul Lorenzen. In this inaugural text are laid the foundations of the dialogic logic, which represents an alternative approach to the question of meaning and logical truth, based on a dynamic formalism. Through the enrichment of the standard approach to logic with original tools, it allows a philosophical explanation of the foundations of the concept of formal validity. Clément Lion proposes (...) an unpublished French translation of this text as well as a presentation, in which he tries to show that the initial ambition of Paul Lorenzen was not so much to propose a new logical formalism as to question in principle any enterprise based on the use of such a formalism. (shrink)

“Thin description and thick description of a work of art” is at the crossroads of analytical philosophy and iconology. The author Johann Michel questions the demarcation between the description and the interpretation of a work of art. Rather than opposing them, the article seeks to put them in dialectic, starting from the distinction proposed by Ryle between “thin description” and “thick description”. Refusing the principle of a pure and neutral description of a work of art, the contribution pleads in favor (...) of the “integral relativism” defended by J. Margolis which is based on the principle of tolerance of incompatible interpretations, as long as they remain plausible. (shrink)

Our purpose is to give a phenomenological interpretation of fear and to highlight, while following Heidegger's reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric, the basic tone in which average existence moves. We show that signs that are given in fear are related to a certain kind of knowledge. The knowledge of coming into closeness of farness. But since knowledge of what comes into closeness is also what second Heidegger tries to think with the word premonition (Ahnung) — premonition as knowledge of Ereignis — (...) we wonder if hermeneutics of fear is really to be considered as a phenomenological description, or if it’s not already a sort of attention paid to the dimension, phenomenology itself, belongs to. (shrink)

In Le volontaire et l’involontaire, Ricoeur develops an original reflection on the foundations and justification of free will. This would be unthinkable without a natural basis of necessity which is at the same time its source, its horizon and its limit. We must therefore think of the dialectical unity of the voluntary and the involuntary, but by privileging the language of the cogito. The language of objectivity, of natural causality, fails to extract itself from determinism, although it offers the phenomenologist (...) a useful counterpoint to his approach. Ricoeur thus adopts a form of compatibilism making it possible to preserve a strong sense of free will in coherence with a natural necessity without rupture. (shrink)

In his 1960 paper “The concept of moral insight and the Kantian doctrine of the Fact of Reason” (introduced and translated in french by Laura Tavernier), Dieter Henrich argues that Kant’s doctrine of the Fact of Reason—according to which pure reason can not theoretically anticipate or ground the possibility of its practical use—does not betray a lack of systematicity, as post-Kantians reproached it to Kant. After the repeated failures of his own attempts to deduce moral insight from theoretical reason in (...) the “silent decade”, Kant eventually acknowledges that the moral law and our awareness of it cannot be logically derived from a higher principle. The Kantian doctrine of the Fact of Reason thus remains faithful to the phenomenon of moral insight, the paradoxical knowledge of the good, and offers a methodologically adequate answer to the problem that D. Henrich considers to be at the foundation of metaphysics: Kant thinks of a unity of the theoretical and the practical reason that does not imply any derivation of one from the other, nor any subsumption of the two under a unifying principle. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to bring out the core commitments underlying Kojève’s ontological position. My main claim is that he designs an original ontological framework, which integrates (but also regionalizes) Hegel’s and Heidegger’s analysis, and which can be properly characterized as a “double dualism”. In order to assess this thesis, I discuss Kojève’s relationship to Heidegger and show that: a) on Kojève’s view, Heidegger’s phenomenology is marked by an attenuation of the scope of negativity which gives rise to (...) a tendentially monistic phenomenology; b) for Kojève, Heidegger’s main philosophical innovation is the idea of a dualist ontology. This thesis relies on Kojève’s hermeneutical conjecture that in the unpublished part of Being and Time Heidegger accomplishes a doubling (or a duplication) of ontology. (shrink)