This paper focusses on the Belgian constitutional and legal regulations which are clearly and relatively directly linked to minority protection as welt as their relevance for South Africa by way of analogy, taking into account South Africa's specific circumstances.Generally, what seems to be highly relevant for South Africa is the different kind of solutions in Belgium for its three categories of minorities as related to a different degree of territorial concentration. Going from an emphasis on territorial federalism, providing autonomy, (...) for the highly territorial concentrated linguistic groups, over the use of the relative concentrations of the ideological and philosophical groups in certain federated entities, to a combination of individual human rights and group rights without a territorial connection whatsoever for the religious groups which are highly dispersed throughout the country.An analogous differentiation ofseveral types ofminority protection could bedivised in South Africa as the genera! lack of territoria! concentration of thecountry's several population groups bas a different degree for the ethnic/linguistic groups as compared to the religious ones. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Looking Beyond Neoliberalism: French and Fran-cophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis by Martin O’ShaughnessyJoseph MaiO’Shaughnessy, Martin. Looking Beyond Neoliberalism: French and Fran-cophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 224pp.Martin O’Shaughnessy has devoted a career to scouring the intersections of politics, identity, and contemporary French cinema, perhaps most notably in his 2007 book, The New Face of Political Filmmaking. In a review in Cineaste, (...) Jonathan Buchsbaum called that book “theoretically sophisticated” and a “powerful and eloquent polemic for retaining a class analysis of film” (90). According to Buchsbaum, The New Face asked “the central question of how films can formulate political critiques after the collapse of the grand leftist narrative(s) of the twentieth century” (89). O’Shaughnessy’s new book, Looking Beyond Neoliberalism: French and Francophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis, is a major publication with similar qualities of theoretical breadth, and is also once again inspired by cinematic attempts to envision different political futures.Things have not gotten better since 2007. The “crisis” of O’Shaughnessy’s title does not refer narrowly to the financial meltdown of 2007–2008 and subsequent government-funded bailouts. Crisis is not an event requiring austerity (disguised as “courageous decision-making”), but in many senses the essence of global neoliberalism, or as the frequently cited Maurizio Lazzarato puts it: “the form of government of contemporary capitalism” (qtd. in O’Shaughnessy 5). The 2008 crisis has, if anything, made this form of government ever more visible, and ever more punitive and essential to Western industrial societies. With a mastery of the philosophical critique of neoliberalism, O’Shaughnessy unpacks how the logic of crisis habituates the subject to self-entrepreneurship, debt, social and political isolation, conformism, precarity, social violence, and nihilism.The book looks at these issues through cinematic works by French and Belgian Francophone filmmakers, ranging from popular auteurs like Jacques Audiard and Luc Besson to more critically political filmmakers like the Dardenne brothers or Laurent Cantet. O’Shaughnessy is not looking only for thematic representations; he also seeks new answers in films that respond to, flee, or resist neoliberalism. Like the Occupy or Nuit Debout movements, much of this cinema seeks to reformulate identifications and cultivate political resistance, though O’Shaughnessy warns us early on [End Page 117] that we are not in a place “where there is a cohesive political cinema” (9). There is, therefore, a refreshingly normative concern throughout the book: the most valuable films seek paths toward social encounter, re-assemblage of identity categories, lives that are not defined through debt, and a future in which crisis and precarity do not structure action.The first three chapters focus on the “crisis of the neoliberal subject” (6). Chapter 1 approaches the work of Jacques Audiard, who has at times been read as reinforcing regressive gender roles and at other times embracing a rather more disruptive masculinity. Bringing the lens of the neoliberal subject to bear on films like Un prophète (2009) or Un héros très discret (1996), O’Shaughnessy emphasizes Audiard’s use of crime-genre filmmaking as a parallel to capitalism, and the genre hero as a corollary to the bourgeois entrepreneurial male subjectivity it fosters and puts into crisis. Desperately, Audiard’s masculine subjects rehearse, recreate, and “perfect” themselves, initiate profitable collaboration, self-define through flexibility, improvisation, and competence, in ways that are hallmarks of, but do not surpass, an internalized neoliberal subjectivity.Chapter 2 examines how the mechanisms of debt influence characters’ beliefs and actions. What does it mean, in works by the Dardenne brothers, Laurent Cantet, and Mia Hansen-Løve, to be “man in debt” (54)? O’Shaughnessy explores debt’s temporality as it limits the possibilities of the future by tying actions to the obligations of repayment. In Le silence de Lorna (2010), Lorna is enrolled in a logic of indebtedness in exchange for papers to cross borders, at the expense of another human, Claudy. Caught in an “overarching tension between systemic violence and an ethical commitment to the Other” (45), she seeks a way out in increasingly irrational attempts to escape. Vincent, the protagonist of L’emploi du temps... (shrink)

During a long and distinguished career, Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) pursued a coherent research program in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and related scientific areas. The main goal of this effort was establishing the origin of thermodynamic irreversibility (the ‘‘arrow of time’’) as local (residing in the details of the interaction of interest), rather than as global (being solely a consequence of properties of the initial singularity – the ‘‘Big Bang’’). In many publications for general audiences, he stated the (...) opinion that this scientific research had great philosophical importance. Prigogine and his colleagues considered that the most recent stages of this research program have been successful, so that the local origins of the arrow of time are now established. There is no scientific consensus as to whether or not this claim is valid. Similarly, there is no consensus on whether the competing global (initial singularity) explanation has been proven. (shrink)

During a long and distinguished career, Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) pursued a coherent research program in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and related scientific areas. The main goal of this effort was establishing the origin of thermodynamic irreversibility (the ‘‘arrow of time’’) as local (residing in the details of the interaction of interest), rather than as global (being solely a consequence of properties of the initial singularity – the ‘‘Big Bang’’). In many publications for general audiences, he stated the (...) opinion that this scientific research had great philosophical importance. Prigogine and his colleagues considered that the most recent stages of this research program have been successful, so that the local origins of the arrow of time are now established. There is no scientific consensus as to whether or not this claim is valid. Similarly, there is no consensus on whether the competing global (initial singularity) explanation has been proven. (shrink)

Magritte et les philosophes, written by a Belgian semiotician, puts in dialogue some paintings by René Magritte with some thoughts of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Foucault, and, in a chapter on La condition humaine, even Plato. Painted in 1933, La condition humaine represents a garden as seen from a salon, but in the room there is already a painting on an easel that represents the same garden. Because the second-order painting (the painting in the painting) is placed in (...) front of the window, we cannot see the full garden of the first-order painting. In it we see only the bottom of a hill and a part of a hedge, but in the second-order painting we see, in perfect continuity, the rest of the hill and the hedge. Thus we are inclined to think that the second-order painting covers exactly the reality it reproduces from the first-order painting and that, if we removed the second-order painting, we would see the same garden with a tree in the middle—a tree that for the moment we see only in the second-order painting.Therefore, some perceive in La condition humaine (and also in a similar painting, La belle captive) a parable of the transparency of painting. Opposing this position, Badir claims instead that “the pictures that are represented [that is, the second-order pictures] seem transparent; they give the sensation of transparency,... but their nature is totally different, and the painted landscapes in the [second-order] painting cannot make the representation [of the first-order painting] disappear.” We cannot superpose the painting over the reality to see whether the strokes of the painting cover exactly the lines of reality, since, if we do so, the painting gets between us and the garden. Still, we as observers cannot help but think that the second-order painting reproduces the reality behind it. But from where does that irresistible intuition come? Not from the resemblance between the picture and what it represents (since we know nothing about what is hidden by the picture), but from the continuity of the brushstrokes in the second-order painting and the lines of reality in the first-order picture.As in Plato's cave, in Magritte's room we have access to a semblance of reality, but in contrast to Plato, who regarded those shadows as pale imitations, Magritte offers us what may be a method of connecting semblance to reality less invidiously. The relation between the second-order picture and the first-order picture, between painting and reality, is not primarily a relation of analogy, since the analogy between the two orders is insinuated by other, nonanalogical relations—those of continuity and proximity between the brushstrokes of the painting and the lines of the garden. Even if Gilles Deleuze is not mentioned in Badir's book, this option seems to me to capture the gist of his critique of Platonism. When we are inclined to see a relation of analogy, Deleuze, like Magritte, wants us to pay attention to other, more diverse and more creative relations: nonanalogical relations that in some cases induce the sensation of resemblance.The title of Badir's book is Magritte and Philosophers, but it could just as well have been Magritte as Philosopher, because the classical philosophers he deals with play only a minor role as possible interlocutors for the painter. Magritte's thinking, as developed in his artwork, constitutes the main subject of this study. We learn while reading this book that painting can be a powerful tool for developing complex concepts and not merely percepts. Its argument may indeed be a critique of Deleuze's too-categorical distinction between the percepts proper to art and the concepts developed by philosophers. (shrink)

In a career extending over almost six decades, Nicholas Rescher has conducted researches in almost every principal area of philosophy, historical and systematic alike. In this extraordinary volume, two dozen scholars join in offering penetrating discussions of various facets of Rescher s investigations. The result is an instructively critical panorama of the many-faceted contributions of this important American philosopher. Born in Germany in 1928, Nicholas Rescher came to the U.S. at the age of nine. He is University Professor of Philosophy (...) at the University of Pittsburgh where he has also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department and as director (and currently chairman) of the Center for Philosophy of Science. In a productive research career extending over six decades, he has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style. His work represents a many-sided approach to fundamental philosophical issues that weaves together threads of thought from continental idealism and American pragmatism. And apart from this larger program Rescher has made various specific contributions to logic (the conception autodescriptive systems of many-sided logic), the history of logic (the medieval Arabic theory of modal syllogistic), to the theory of knowledge (epistemetrics as a quantitative approach in theoretical epistemology), and to the philosophy of science (the theory of a logarithmic retardation of scientific progress). Rescher has also worked in the area of futuristics, and along with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey is co-inaugurator of the so-called Delphi method of forecasting. Ten books about Rescher s philosophy have been published in four languages. Rescher earned his doctorate at Princeton in 1951 while still at the age of twenty-two a record for Princeton s Department of Philosophy. He has served as a President of the American Philosophical Association, of the American Catholic Philosophy Association, of the American G. W. Leibniz Society, of the C. S. Peirce Society, and of the American Metaphysical Society. He was the founder of the American Philosophical Quarterly. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Royal Society of Canada, the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, he has been awarded fellowships by the Ford, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundations. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated from English into other languages, he is the recipient of eight honorary degrees from universities on three continents. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, and the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007.". (shrink)

In recent years, Italian Thought has become an influential school of philosophical reflection. This explains the reputation of thinkers like Agamben, Negri, and Esposito far beyond the borders of Italy. Not only has Italian Thought called attention to the crisis of Derridian deconstructive thought in recent years and replaced it with a biopolitical approach, but it also attests to contemporary political issues of key urgency. I aim to clarify this diffusion process with the specific case of Belgium, where two extra (...) factors explain the rise of Italian Thought. The neoliberalisation of the university system renders Belgian universities particularly dependent on Anglo-Saxon research trends, while the political and economic developments of Belgium are a key example of the issues Italian Thought emphasizes. (shrink)

The philosophical thought of Perelman is characterized with criticism of all philosophies seeking the first, unshakable and absolute principles. Such philosophies are trying to attain their aim among others through referring to obviousness. The trends of this kind are characteristic for classical rationalism (e.g. Cartesian philosophy). R. Descartes thinks that cognizance worthy of being called "knowledge" should be such cognizance, which is characterized with perfection and homogeneousness. Perelman rejects existence of absolute criteria and emphasizes that a cognizing mind is shaped (...) by the intellectual tradition and education. Philosophical cognizance is able to improve and change itself continually when it is supported by certain reasons. The Belgian philosopher's thought resembles, in many respects, the concepts of the so-called new rationalism (F. Gonseth, G. Bachelard, J. Piaget). Simultaneously, however, Perelman stresses the fact of irreducibility of philosophy to science as philosophical problems are characterized with constant contestability, controversial character, and openness to new solutions. Generally speaking, the philosophical thought in question may be called "antiabsolutist" and "pluralistic". (shrink)

The Belgian Parliament passed in 1973 a law protecting the ideological and philosophical tendencies; this text is a legal translation of an agreement between most of Belgian political parties, the «culturalagreement».The laborious elaboration of this text especially is to be seen in connexion with the existence, since 1970, of autonomous cultural communities.This agreement organizes, in the «cultural» sphere, a protection of ideological and philosophical tendencies, more especially in connextion with political families, according to the traditional approach of the (...) pluralism - more precisely of the plurality - in the Belgian State.The cultural agreement has two objects in view : to prevent and to bring remedies to the discrimination by specific guarantees.The law institutes an organ of control, a national permanent Commission, with a principally consultative competence.The agreement is protecting at first minorities and majorities, with a political expression; the efficiency of these provisions chiefiy depends on the collaboration and the reciprocal confidence between the «culturalpartners». (shrink)

The Belgian senior civil servants do have a political ideology which, with respect to coherence and constraint, is not inferior to that of the members of Parliament and, therefore, far superior to that of the common man. The first characteristic of this ideology is its centrism: senior civil servants tend to shun the extremes, especially the socio-economic extremes. A second characteristic is its bias toward the center-right. But the latter may be an effect of recruitment and promotion practices under (...) the recent Belgian governing coalitions, rather than of the bureaucratic experience under all kinds of governments.That the bureaucratie experience leaves its mark on the ideological constructs of the bureaucratie elite can also be inferred from other data. They are inclined to centralism because the recent federalisation process imposes a heavy burden on their routines. They do not have a distinctive ideological profile with respect to religious and philosophical issues because these rarely appear on the agenda of most of the civil servants.The consequences of these characteristic ideological options are not to be underestimated. There is a clear affinity between a leftist ideology and a less technocratic and less alienated political attitude. At the same time leftist civil servantsare more inclined to commit themselves to active partisan politics. Their colleagues of the right tend more to up hold the traditional distance between bureaucracy and partisan politics. The optimal prescription for administrative reform would, perhaps, consist in furthering a more political, less technocratic style of administrative policy making, and in maintaining the traditional wariness of partisan politics. (shrink)

Taken as a philosophical issue, the idea of representation implies the prior assumption of a difference between reality and its “doubles.” Things are paired with images, concepts, or symbols, acts with rules and norms, events with structures. Traditionally, the problem with representations has been their “accuracy,” the degree of fit between reality and its reproductions in the mind. When philosophers lost the hope of ever determining accuracy , they found consolation in the test of usefulness: a good representation is one (...) that works. The proof of its working is that it enables us to act on the world together.1 In such a frame, science, including anthropology, is conceived as the pursuit of privileged representations, privileged in that, by their nature of by their combination, they establish knowledge of a special kind. In the case of anthropology, “culture” has served as a sort of umbrella concept for representations. The strcuturalists have been most explicit about the need to think of representation in the plural, but their position is shared, in varying degrees, by all those who conceive of knowledge as the selection and combination of signs in systems, patterns, or structures, in short, as some kind of conceptual order ruling perceptual chaos. 1. Remember the connection between the Kantian quest for synthetic forms and Émile Durkheim’s idea of collective representations sustained by the moral authority of a society. Durkheim certainly was one to look for the “ethic” in the “ethnic” primitive, and it makes me wonder whether Stephen A. Tyler’s characterization of postmodern ethnography as a return to “an earlier and more powerful notion of the ethical character of all discourse, as captured in the ancient significance of the family of terms ‘ethos,’ ‘ethnos,’ ‘ethics’” might not signal a return to the Durkheimian fold . Johannes Fabian is professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include Jamaa: A Charismatic Movement in Katanga , Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object , and Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880-1938 . Two books will appear in 1990: History from Below: The Vocabulary of Elisabethville by André Yav, a commented edition-translation of a colonial history written in Swahili by the colonized for the colonized, and Power and Performance, a study of conceptions of power through popular wisdom and theater in Shaba/Zaire. (shrink)

These 12 essays by Belgian philosopher and theorist Bart Verschaffel - many translated into English for the first time - explore the meaning and relevance of art today. They cover a rich and inventive range of topics, from mockery and laughter to the artwork as a 'gift', and from caricature to splendour.

Mark Coeckelbergh is a Belgian philosopher who specializes in the philosophy of technology. His work primarily explores the intersection of technology and society, specifically the philosophical implications of emerging technologies such as AI and robotics. He has written on whether machines can be moral agents and how ethical frameworks should be applied to autonomous machines. He has a broad philosophical perspective drawing on classical sources, Eastern philosophy, Marxism, Foucault, phenomenology, and the postmodernists. In this short text, he brings his (...) remarkable insights and erudition to bear on our attempts at self-improvement in the age of AI. (shrink)

Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher whose work proposes new questions and approaches to human–animal relations. Of central importance to her thought is an intellectual and cultural proposal to allow animals to show their agency and to be interesting. In scientific research animals are too often reduced to uninteresting, instinctive machines, whereas other modes of engagement allow us to see the wonderfully surprising, culturally rich, and intelligently inventive lives lived by animals. With genuine curiosity, Despret responds that humans and (...) animals transform one another through daily encounters, and she explores these metamorphoses through the history of philosophy, literature, science, field research, and art. In a playful though serious tone, Despret claims that animals are always more interesting than we give them credit for, and that the achievements of animals are never far from our own. (shrink)

This volume offers the first English language collection of academic essays on the post-Holocaust thought of Jean Améry, a Jewish-Austrian-Belgian essayist, journalist and literary author. Comprehensive in scope and multi-disciplinary in orientation, contributors explore central aspects of Améry's philosophical and ethical position, including dignity, responsibility, resentment, and forgiveness.

During the period 1870-1914 the existing discipline of psychology was transformed. British thinkers including Spencer, Lewes, and Romanes allied psychology with biology and viewed mind as a function of the organism for adapting to the environment. British and German thinkers called attention to social and cultural factors in the development of individual human minds. In Germany and the United States a tradition of psychology as a laboratory science soon developed, which was called a 'new psychology' by contrast with the old, (...) metaphysical psychology. Methodological discussion intensified. New syntheses were framed. Chairs were established and Departments founded. Although the trend toward institutional autonomy was less rapid in Britain and France, significant work was done by the likes of Galton and Binet. Even in Germany and America the purposeful transformation of the old psychology into a new, experimental science was by no means complete in 1914. And while the increase in experimentation changed the body of psychological writing, there was considerable continuity in theoretical content and non-experimental methodology between the old and new psychologies. This chapter follows the emergence of the new psychology out of the old in the national traditions of Britain, Germany, and the United States, with some reference to French, Belgian, Austrian, and Italian thinkers. While the division into national traditions is useful, the psychological literature of the second half of the nineteenth century was generally a European literature, with numerous references across national and linguistic boundaries, and it became a North Atlantic literature as psychology developed in the United States and Canada. The order of treatment, Britain, Germany, and the US, follows the center of gravity of psychological activity. The final section considers some methodological and philosophical issues from these literatures. (shrink)

The present paper focuses on the work of Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874), the Belgian author of the Social Physics who worked in the tradition of the French mathématique sociale, and of Otto Neurath (1882-1945), the Vienna Circle’s member who supported a “sociology within physicalism”. They shared some important philosophical and methodological positions: an empiricist approach to the social sciences, a unitary conception of the natural and the social sciences, and the appreciation of statistics as a tool for investigating and also (...) reforming society. My paper analyses these elements of continuity between the two authors, in order to highlight how an empirical-quantitative approach to society was (at least partially) inherited by Austrian sociology from an earlier French tradition. On the contrary, most German statisticians refused such an approach at the time in which social sciences were developing in Germany, and they strongly believed in an in-principle difference between natural and social sciences. From a systematic point of view, my paper devotes a special attention to the relationship between the application of statistics (praxis) and a unitary conception of the sciences (theory). Both in Quetelet’s and in Neurath’s work these two aspects support each other. Nevertheless Neurath can be said to have turned Quetelet’s reasoning upside-down: While Quetelet appealed to statistics to claim that the social sciences can reach the same objectivity and determinacy as the natural ones, Neurath referred to statistics to argue that the natural sciences – exactly like the social ones – are characterized by a certain degree of indeterminacy and underdetermination. (shrink)

The present article on John Dewey aims at pursuing the traces of the reception of Dewey’s work in France. It is intended as a survey of the writers who have taken note of Dewey and his ideas, and is meant to function as a sort of additive inventory, with no claim to comprehensiveness. Some of the articles mentioned were unfortunately unavailable for direct examination and are thus listed merely for purposes of information.Although the educational and philosophical writings of John Dewey (...) are actually indivisible, Dewey’s oeuvre has not been read in France and Europe generally as of a piece, but has largely been registered in terms of those parts which have relevance to education and teaching. Indicative of this is the fact that it took until 1975 forDemocracy and Education -the book which, in Dewey’s own view, most clearly presented his linking of pedagogy and philosophy — to be published in France. Gérard Delledalle, the translator ofDemocracy and Education, is the only person so far in France to have dealt systematically with the whole of Dewey’s writings. He has translated other works by Dewey and has written several books on him, dealing expressly with Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism as the foundation of his theory of education.It is actually inadequate to restrict the reception of Dewey’s work to France alone. Rather, one should speak of francophone Europe, for the first translations of Dewey’s educational writings into French were made by Adolphe Ferrière, Ovide Decroly and édouard Claparède — a Swiss, a Belgian, and a Frenchman. It was thanks to them that Dewey’s thoughts on education began to make an impact on the francophone movement for school reform in the early twentieth century.Discussion of his theory of education is typified in France as well by a division into proponents of a concept of ‘learning by doing’ indebted to Dewey and representatives of authoritarian forms of education, which reject Dewey. Although French thought has not yet concerned itself closely with pragmatism, Dewey’s opponents believed that they could denounce him and his theories simply by levelling the charge of “pragmatism.” This dualistic mode of thinking which appears to be deeply rooted in France has proved to be an obstacle to the reception of Dewey and has led to neglect and rejection of his theories. (shrink)

The article analyzes the commentaryof the Belgian phenomenologist MarcRichir on the Beilage III of the Crisis of Edmund Husserl. In this famous historico-philosophical treatise Husserl examines the eidetic dependencies of ideality, language and history from a genetic perspective. The model of ‘Ur-’, ‘Nach-’, and ‘Endstiftung’ is intended to bring to light a transcendental insight into the ‘inner historicity’ of the objects of knowledge which corresponds with an epistemological model of history. Marc Richir’s thesis is that in this field of (...) complex relations there are several confusions of phenomenological and actually symbolic aspects. To be able to name and criticize these implicit changes of register, it is necessary to elaborate on Richir’s own transcendental-phenomenological approach: the phenomenological architectonics of the phenomenological and symbolic field. This architectonics inserts into the Husserlian difference of intentional and formal-syntactic thinking, a symbolic field in the sense of ‘languagephenomenon’. (shrink)

This volume illustrates both theoretically and empirically the differences between religious diversity and religious pluralism. It highlights how the factual situation of cultural and religious diversity may lead to individual, social and political choices of organized and recognized pluralism. In the process, both individual and collective identities are redefined, incessantly moving along the continuum that ranges from exclusion to inclusion. The book starts by first detailing general issues related to religious pluralism. It makes the case for keeping the empirical, the (...) normative, the regulatory and the interactive dimensions of religious pluralism analytically distinct while recognizing that, in practice, they often overlap. It also underlines the importance of seeking connections between religious pluralism and other pluralisms. Next, the book explores how religious diversity can operate to contribute to legal pluralism and examines the different types of church-state relations: eradication, monopoly, oligopoly and pluralism. The second half of the book features case studies that provide a more specific look at the general issues, from ways to map and assess the religious diversity of a whole country to a comparison between Belgian-French views of religious and philosophical diversity, from religious pluralism in Italy to the shifting approach to ethnic and religious diversity in America, and from a sociological and historical perspective of religious plurality in Japan to an exploration of Brazilian religions, old and new. The transition from religious diversity to religious pluralism is one of the most important challenges that will reshape the role of religion in contemporary society. This book provides readers with insights that will help them better understand and interpret this unprecedented transition. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 141-144. This January, while preparing a new course, Robert Seydel was struck and killed by an unexpected heart attack. He was a critically under-appreciated artist and one of the most beloved and admired professors at Hampshire College. At the time of his passing, Seydel was on the brink of a major artistic and career milestone. His Book of Ruth was being prepared for publication by Siglio Press. His publisher describes the book as: “an alchemical assemblage that composes (...) the life of his alter ego, Ruth Greisman— spinster, Sunday painter, and friend to Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp. Through collages, drawings, and journal entries from Ruth’s imagined life, Seydel invokes her interior world in novelistic rhythms.” This convergence of his professional triumph with the tragedy of his death makes now a particularly appropriate time to think about Robert Seydel and his work. This feature contains a selection of excerpts from Book of Ruth (courtesy of Siglio Press) alongside a pair of texts remembering him and giving critical and biographical insights into his art and his person. These texts, from a former student and a colleague respectively, were originally prepared for Seydel's memorial at Hampshire College and have since been revised for publication in continent. For more information on Book of Ruth, please visit the book's page at the Siglio Press website. —Ben Segal draughty R. * Lauren van Haaften-Schick 2011 “The most apt way to order Smithson's library is with the conjunction 'and'; science and religion; modernism and mass culture; what is present and what is missing.” —Alexander Alberro, 248 Robert Seydel's classes on collage and collecting immersed his students in a curious world of cabinets, oddities, exhaustive archives and obscure histories, explored always with critical rigor and a sincere eye for wonder. His office was a compendium of the ancient, mythic, potential and unworldy, where seemingly unrelated references were endlessly pulled, piled and fused in an ecstatic dance of hyper-annotation. The small room and all its contents overflowed with notes tucked in every margin and corner. Books coated the walls like a switchboard, anxious and humming, waiting for infinite links to be activated. William Blake's books of Job and Urizen summoned Greek mythology and the animal as metaphor, leading to 19th century cryptozoology and the cave paintings at Lascaux, Gaston Bachelard's description of the bird in his garden and Robert Rauschenberg's Canyon . Tracking archetypes and following tangential threads, new revelations and ancient narratives were compiled and ordered to form a new text, a bibliography as assemblage, portrait and poem. Robert's library—one of his many collections—is a portrait, an “artifact, collage of time, a token and remnant” (Seydel, 2007) He is humming with it still. The imagination of this room—of Robert—breathes through the pages of Book of Ruth, as every decision and detail unfolds to a cosmos. Allegory, invention, personal and art histories are entangled and leveled, rendering lived, perceived and absorbed experiences indistinguishable. Anonymous scraps discovered on the street or studio floor, careful clippings and drawn figures are chosen and animated through serendipitous destruction and whimsical, delicate positioning. A precise vocabulary of characters and terms erupts and collapses as personas and passers-by wave and whisper, “Every figure reveals aspects of the total form, which is open and green” (Seydel, 2007). The initials R.S. repeat, a nod to Robert's true family tree and further complicating identification. Robt, Robert's sometimes alter-ego, appears in myriad forms as a trickster “half-wit,” mercurial and skittish, or soft and worn thin. Saul is a solemn tinkerer, parsing the world and sometimes blind. Ruth, the speaker of the book, records and translates all, her voice wavering between poetic verse and a cryptic half-speech as complex as it is sparse. The rhythm of frayed edges sets time - the weight of the world and the lightness of paper. Robert wrote of his process, “Material is essential; scuffings carry history, which wanders throughout” (Seydel, 2007). Collectors, assemblers, sway between careful movements of selection and placement as they pull from the found world, mediating calculated and unconscious association to form a lexicon of gestures, symbols and allusion, the “artifacts of a life... the refuse and rejecta of days” (Seydel, 2007). These assembled fragments shift and chatter, at home in their homelessness, actors performing in their own lives, populating an invented world of similar orphans. Such accumulated, severed parts carry the injury of their cutting and retain the evidence of their source, binding loss to creation in a symbiosis of trauma and repair. Mourning and remembrance are deeply embedded in the histories and acts of such practices. Grievance, acceptance, and the fragility of life are conveyed in the 18th century allegorical arrangements of fetal specimens by Frederik Ruysch. A certain melancholy reverence colors Joseph Cornell's intimately tactile assemblages rendering the universe tangible in miniature, or made in devotion to unrequited loves. Preserved in stasis, these ghosts and idols are kept in a purgatory where fact and fiction, past and present are irrelevant distinctions. Catalogued and contained, the subject of loss is transferred to an artifact. Every thread, scrap and letter may be glued, gathered and placed in a museum, a tomb, a box, a page, ripe and open for possession. Holding on to grief and reveling in disrepair, we opt to be haunted. Forever unbalanced and in flux, the sublime of collage is its resolve to irresolution. For Robert, “Art, as creation and as sign of primary Imagination, is not objects but a state, a kind of fluid” (Seydel, 2007) Reflecting on his work, life, and death, I am drawn to my library and the myriad titles acquired through his inspiration. There is Daniel Spoerri's An Anecdoted Topography of Chance , Susan Stewart's On Longing , various Borges, Barthes, Perec, and especially Life: A User's Manual , which concludes that the perfect puzzle will have no solution. I think of the drawers of miscellaneous swallowed objects at the Mutter Museum, Ray Johnson coding the every day in riddles, Wallace Berman twisting tongues, and Susan Hiller laying every detail to bear. Collectors and makers working in endless cycles of observation, ingestion and display. Every gesture informs and is defined by others, every space is shaped by that which surrounds and fills it, the knot has an inner logic, the gigantic is not so different from the miniature, there is a world in every detail, and “All art is collage” (Seydel, 2011) These thoughts have molded my life, my art, and all the minutia that keep the two so profoundly intertwined; There is no difference between life and what we do with our time. “I write my life. I make me up.” What a gift to share this secret way of knowing the world, and to leave this knowledge for us to do with what we please. “Art begins in admiration” (Seydel, 2011) Lauren van Haaften-Schick is a curator, writer and artist based in New York. Upcoming curatorial projects include "Cancelled" at the Center for Book Arts, and "The Spirit of the Signal" at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York. Recent activities include the workshops "Market, Alternative" and "Alternative Art Economies" at Trade School and Momenta Art, and the e-flux Time/Store, New York. She is the founding director of two arts spaces in Northampton, MA and Philadelphia, PA. She received a BA in Art History and Studio Art from Hampshire college in 2006. Sura Levine on Robert Seydel If early on in his time at Hampshire College I was officially his “mentor,” Robert Seydel quickly became one of my great teachers. Over the years we talked about everything, from art, music, collage, and poetry, to campus politics, this latter far too often. It was always a sublime pleasure, if all too rarely done, to enter his apartment to look at his work in progress, to peruse his bookshelves where, inevitably, there were always new treats to examine. And, while he was working on his Book of Ruth , I was given the opportunity over the course of many meals at the Korean and other restaurants, to talk with him about image and poem ordering. To see how he thought through each comma, each juxtaposition across the gutters of the Book, was to watch a brilliant curator at work. Each day, I walk past his wonderful collaged portrait of Ruth, purchased, after much haggling, as a birthday present, a couple of years ago. And each day, I think how lucky I am to have known Robert as he produced this magnum opus. One of my greatest pleasures in 24 years at the College was to teach “The Collector” with Robert. One of my greatest regrets is that the magic we created together in the classroom will not, and cannot, be duplicated. Its various incarnations, its utter intelligence and magic, were all so deeply Robert’s. His was a mind that put poetry, philosophy, history of science, and history together with art, and art together with music. His intellect and eye were unparalleled. He introduced us to so many artists. He shared his fascination with the cabinets of curiosity of Aldrovandi, of Seba, and Peter the Great’s collection of fetal anomalies, as well as the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Robert knew them all and so many more. He was a walking encyclopedia, his home a great archive. Arcane knowledge, perhaps, but oh so important for another of Robert’s heroes, the mid-20th century Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, whose name he invariably mispronounced as “Broadthayers.” In speaking his name, Robert would always look in my direction in a panic, and then he go on and maul it. I absolutely loved his various mispronunciations of French names and terms! “The Collector” was always filled with talented young artists, art historians, philosophers and writers who all came to understand the wondrous obsessions of the figure of the collector. Students in this course created dazzling projects each term. He always moved while looking and speaking. He read deeply, and commented on everyone’s work with wonderful generosity. Robert always found something to praise even in the least developed of projects. Robert inspired and mentored all of his students into making work that far exceeded their expectations—and ours. For those of you who were lucky enough to have been touched by or to have had an evaluation written by Robert, savor it, keep it, reread it, and share it. He loved working with you all; it is somehow fitting that he died while prepping yet another new course. Robert, it’s almost impossible to speak of you in the past tense, even though you left us a month ago. No doubt, if you knew about our gatherings and celebrations of you, you would be embarrassed that we are making a fuss over you; you always placed the focus on others rather than on yourself. This trait is exactly why so many people miss you now. We’re here to love you publicly as we all did privately for the eleven years you were among us. Robert, my very dear friend, you were an extraordinary artist—you were my brother of choice. My heart broke when yours did. I miss you profoundly. —Sura Levine, February 26, 2011 Sura Levine is a professor of art history at Hampshire College. Her field of specialty is 19th century Belgian and French art, particularly realism and impressionism. Having worked in museums for a number of years both prior to coming to the College, and, as guest curator and co-author of exhibition catalogues, she became particularly interested in the history of museum and trends in collecting. It was because of their shared interests that she and Robert Seydel developed their course, The Collector, which they co-taught for many years. (shrink)

In her scrutiny of the discipline of ethology, psychologist and philosopher Vinciane Despret is no respecter of disciplinary limits, species borders, nodes of prestige, impact factor, pre-existing truths and facts, or Western science's exclusive authority. Instead, she seeks out unanticipated communicatory modes and dialogic mixes – highlow, inout, natureculture. Her reach and popularity as a Belgian and French intellectual thus extend well beyond her formal citation index. The translation below surveys her five-minute segment on the radio show Bon week-end, (...) which is aired on Radio Télévision Belge Francophone. This compilation of recent programmes finds her sleuthing theory construction, legal status, taxonomic classification, research conditions, and capacities vis-àvis dogs, horses, humans, cassowary, dinosaurs, sheep, and tortoises. (shrink)

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca write in The New Rhetoric that, “The first half of this chapter is devoted to the analysis of the relations that establish reality by resort to the particular case. The latter can play a wide variety of roles; as an example, it makes generalization possible....” I will suggest that no fallacy theorist or philosopher of science who has a serious interest in bringing the fallacy of hasty generalization to theoretical heel should omit consideration of these wise (...) class='Hi'>Belgian words. Although these very words appear to endorse the fallacy outright, they do no such thing in fact. It proves instructive to learn why. (shrink)

A Thomistic ontology of spacetime seems impossible, given Thomas Aquinas’s (1224–1275) outdated science and mathematics. By extension, it would seem that his modern followers are foolhardy to attempt to defend such a view. Indeed, a critique of Jacques Maritain by Adolf Grünbaum proceeds apace, dismantling his attempts to save Thomistic philosophical realism from Einstein. However, Grünbaum’s attack was given in better form thirty years prior by the Belgian Thomist Charles De Koninck. The two critiques are analyzed here. De Koninck’s (...) arguments are superior to Grünbaum’s due to their greater precision as refutations as well as their more adequate ontology of spacetime, made possible but not explicit in Thomistic philosophy. (shrink)

SUMMARYHistorians of historiography have recently adopted the language of ‘epistemic virtues’ to refer to character traits believed to be conducive to good historical scholarship. While ‘epistemic virtues’ is a modern philosophical concept, virtues such as ‘objectivity’, ‘meticulousness’ and ‘carefulness’ historically also served as actors' categories. Especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians frequently used virtue language to describe what it took to be a ‘good’, ‘reliable’ or ‘professional’ scholar. Based on three European case studies—the German historian Georg (...) Waitz, his French pupil Gabriel Monod and the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne —this article argues that such virtues cannot neatly be classified as ‘epistemic’ ones. For what is characteristic about virtue language in historical scholarship around 1900 is an overlap or entanglement of epistemic, moral and political connotations. The virtues embodied by, or attributed to, Waitz, Monod and Pirenne were almost invariably aimed at epistemic, moral and political goods at once, though not always to the same degrees. Consequently, if ‘epistemic virtues’ is going to be a helpful category, it must not be interpreted in a strong sense, but in a weak one. (shrink)

Tom McLeish’s Music and Poetry of Science adds to along and complex literature looking at the creative powers of human genius. In addition to his own scientific field, McLeish draws on art, poetry, novels, music, and BBC television productions. Although positioned in the line of the ‘two cultures’ debate typically associated with C. P. Snow, McLeish reprises William Beveridge’s earlier contribution to that tradition, perhaps, to be aligned,although this McLeish does not do, with Peter Pesic’s Music and the Making of (...) Modern Science . The task of coordinating music, poetry, and science requires more, such that the material hermeneutics of the late Irish-Belgian physicist and philosopher, Patrick Heelan might have offered a basis for fruitful dialogue, although this,too, was a missed opportunity. Given McLeish’s illustration of the beauty key to mathematics in physics via BBC television, it seems an illustration of technological millenarianism via Andrew MacKendrick’s 1951 film, The Man in the White Sui , updated for today, key in a nano-context, might be helpful in raising issues of material‘instability,’ i.e., environmental detritus, nano-waste and pollution. (shrink)

The survey sums up some of the most important contributions to the philosophy of mathematics and physics made by the Belgian philosophers Renoirte, Dockx, Devaux, Ladrière, Hirsch, Apostel and Ruytinx. It is shown that most Belgia philosophers of science are more interested in giving a critical account of the actual practice of the working scientist than in sketching speculative and idealized pictures of science. This frame of mind is also affected by the allegiance that Positivism in its widest sense (...) commands in Belgium together with Gonseth's Idoneism and Piaget's genetic epistemology. The survey also refers to the seminal ideas of the new rhetorics developed by Prof. Perelman whose school in the philosophy of law has obtained important results in the analysis of the historian's and lawyer's reasoning. (shrink)

Le pendule de Foucault a exercé sur les savants belges une fascination durable. Dès 1852, l’expérience de Foucault suscite l’intérêt de Schaar, Pagani et Gilbert. À la suite des travaux de Mach, Duhamel, Poincaré, Duhem et d’autres mathématiciens, physiciens et philosophes, les publications de la Société scientifique de Bruxelles abritent de vives discussions sur les notions d’espace et de mouvement absolus, entre les savants belges De Tilly, Mansion et Pasquier et leurs collègues français Vicaire et Lechalas. Le cinquantième anniversaire de (...) l’expérience de Foucault est l’occasion d’une polémique entre Anspach et Pasquier, ce dernier défendant les idées de Poincaré. Au vingtième siècle, les études de Janne d’Othée et Bouny sur le pendule de Foucault montrent qu’ils sont définitivement acquis aux idées de Poincaré.Foucault’s pendulum has long fascinated Belgian scientists. From 1852 onward, the Foucault experiment attracted the interest of Schaar, Pagani and Gilbert. Following the work of Mach, Duhamel, Poincaré, Duhem and other mathematicians, physicists and philosophers, the publications of the Société scientifique de Bruxelles contain lively discussions of the concepts of absolute space and motion between the Belgian scientists De Tilly, Mansion, Pasquier and their French colleagues Vicaire and Lechalas. The fiftieth anniversary of Foucault’s experiment is the source of a polemic between Anspach and Pasquier, the latter defending Poincaré’s ideas against the former. In the twentieth century, the studies of Janne d’Othée and Bouny about Foucault’s pendulum show that Poincaré’s thesis has been fully adopted. (shrink)

IntroductionIn May 2006, the small group of doctoral students working on ecophilosophy at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at K.U.Leuven invited the Dutch environmental philosopher Martin Drenthen to a workshop to discuss his writings on the concept of wilderness, its metaphysical and moral meaning, and the challenge social constructivism poses for ecophilosophy and environmental protection. Drenthen’s publications on these topics had already been the subject of intense discussions in the months preceding the workshop. His presentation on the workshop and the (...) three critical responses by Wim Bollen, Glenn Deliège, and Richard Kover are published here in a thoroughly revised form on the basis of further and ongoing discussions about the issues involved. Three further contributions to the discussion are added: one by Nathan Edward Kowalski, a young Canadian philosopher who studied in Leuven and wrote his as yet unpublished dissertation on “Evil in Nature,” a second one by Kingsley Goodwin who is currently writing a dissertation on deep ecology at University College in Dublin and, finally, my own unsystematic thoughts inspired by Martin Drenthen’s provocative and stimulating hermeneutics of our postmodern understanding of nature and wilderness, as well as the diverse critical responses to Drenthen’s views by the other contributors. I owe gratitude to all of them for enriching my own ecophilosophical thought and enlarging its horizon although as my fragmentary reflections show at the cost of yet greater uncertainty and more questions about the possibilities of arguing for a radical environmentalist position. Such a position would somehow connect or ground our moral obligation to preserve genuine non-human otherness, wild and free nature, in the non-human meaning of such nature and in our essential need to be in direct and concrete contact with that field of wild non-human meaning because we ourselves belong to nature, because we are not only and purely civilized but are also and most fundamentally wild and free. Three fundamental questions need to be distinguished: the question about our moral obligations regarding nature and its preservation, the metaphysical question about the nature of nature or the meaning of nature, and the question of the metaphysical grounding of our morals in general, and of our moral obligation regarding nature in particular, in the nature or meaning of nature. The complex intertwinement between these three questions is at the heart of Martin Drenthen’s reflections.The authors contributing to the present discussion approach the various issues from markedly different philosophical backgrounds and concerns: critical theory, anthropology, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deep ecology are all to some degree or other brought to bear on the question of what wilderness means for us, why we are fascinated by it and what it actually and in the first place is.Another interesting difference between the five respondents to Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy relates to the place from which they write: while the Canadians Richard Kover and Nathan Edward Kowalski have wilderness of some sort still close at hand, the Belgians Wim Bollen and Glenn Deliège write from a place which has been thoroughly domesticated, cultivated, and industrialised for a long time. Martin Drenthen himself, of course, writes from the same kind of place as these last two, which explains why he only refers to the wilderness that he has read about in novels, seen in movies, or experienced as recreated in the reserves of the Netherlands. The Irish Kingsley Goodwin writes perhaps from a third, intermediate place that is not wild anymore but still much more natural than Belgium or the Netherlands are.The differences in philosophical approach and concern combined with the difference of place generate a rich tapestry of perspectives and voices wrestling with the fundamental questions of our perceived homelessness and alienation from nature, our cultural discontent, our longing for and need for radical alterity, of immanence and transcendence, of who we are and where we belong, and more concretely of whether there is more to ground our efforts to preserve nature than enlightened self-interest and subjective preference. Martin Drenthen deserves praise for inaugurating this fruitful discussion with his intriguing and highly paradoxical effort to hybridize a postmodern deconstruction of the idea and ideal of wilderness as unspoilt and true nature on the one hand with a new metaphysics of wilderness on the other. Arne Naess, who is generally regarded as the founding father of deep ecology, pointed out the positive and stimulating role that vagueness in the expression of ideas can play in political and philosophical debate. Such general and vague but highly suggestive expressions as ‘all life is one’ are not empty at all, as is often claimed; they are rather full of possibilities of ‘precisation’ and differentiation. Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy is certainly not vague to the degree of ‘all life is one,’ but his expositions are similarly pregnant with a wealth of further questions, precisations, distinctions, and conceptual clarifications. Good examples of different kinds are to be found in the contributions of Nathan Edward Kowalski and Richard Kover. Kowalski points out that Drenthen’s notions of culture and wilderness need to be made more precise by distinguishing them from the notions of civilization and wildness such that wild cultures become a conceptual possibility. Richard Kover takes the lead from Drenthen’s question about the reason for our postmodern fascination for wilderness to confront it with our primordial fascination in terms of the dependence in the evolution of our subjectivity and our consciousness on the focused perceptual attention on wild forms.Glenn Deliège situates Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy in its original context of the Dutch debate on the preservation of nature, in particular on the new wilderness paradigm. According to this paradigm, the nature to be preserved should be true and pure, truly natural and wild nature, that is nature outside of and free from the cultivating and domesticating influence of humans. In the Netherlands, however, such nature no longer exists; it can only be preserved after it has first been artificially recreated. Deliège gives an informative summary account of the highly charged three-cornered debate between the adepts of this wilderness-paradigm, the proponents of the more traditional form of conservation of remnants of the typical European landscapes created by pre-industrial farming practices and the modern technocratic functionalists. This debate makes obvious that there are quite different views of the nature of nature and its value. Enter social constructivism: the contested nature of nature is nothing more than a social construct, an idea in a collective mind. The contestation itself is a struggle for authority and power between different such social constructs, any claim to scientific objectivity and objective truth for one’s image of nature is an arrogation of a truth which doesn’t exist and is potentially oppressive by silencing other views. Nature then is up for the grabs of politics, political negotiation, and compromise between various interest groups who all want to get some benefit from nature, some use-value.The problem with Drenthen’s effort to articulate a normative concept of nature which cannot be deconstructed in this way is the extreme formality and emptiness of his metaphysical concept of wilderness as that which is always ‘beyond’, always ‘more’ and which can never be exhausted by any image and construction of nature. Any more concrete determination is mere appearance; the thing in itself is a border concept of that which in fact cannot be grasped conceptually. Glenn Deliège is critical of this formality and emptiness from which it will be impossible to derive any concrete guidance for our conservation practices. He then goes on to defend the Arcadian tradition of our appreciation of nature as giving us a historically well-grounded orientation for those practices. Of course that Arcadian tradition is obviously a cultural construction but that doesn’t make it completely arbitrary and contingent since it is itself ultimately grounded in and open to modification by our concrete sensuous experiences of nature.Deliège here raises the very important issue of the relation between our concrete perceptual and bodily experiences in and with nature and our concepts and metaphysical images of nature. Drenthen himself approaches this issue from the hermeneutical perspective of our need to make sense of our experiences and to articulate their meaning. His confrontation with social constructivism and his effort to salvage something from its relativizing acid lead him, however, into the direction of a highly abstract and empty concept of wilderness.Richard Kover shows that perception is, indeed, the key to a radical critique of social constructivism. He does this with the help of the ecological anthropology of Paul Shepard, the structuralist anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It needs to be said here that Kover takes his leave from an unpublished paper by Martin Drenthen with the title “How to appropriate wilderness appropriately?” – the paper is accessible though on Drenthen’s web-site - in which Drenthen comments and reflects upon three contemporary wilderness-tales, one of them being Werner Herzog’s much-discussed documentary on Timothy Treadwell, an American environmentalist drop-out who lived thirteen summers among wild grizzlies in the Alaskan wilderness before being killed together with his girlfriend by a grizzly bear.Kover tries to show that we are not imprisoned in the mirror-cabinet of our mind or of our human sociality. To make his case, he starts from Paul Shepard’s thoughtful observation that the evolutionary emergence of the mind did not remove us from the natural world but actually connected us deeper with it. Through our mind we evolved more fully into it because our mind is primordially in our senses and in the ability to articulate a perceptual world. The natural world in the form of the system of natural species and their relations is the primary model for perceptual discriminations, for the fundamental discovery of order with its twin-aspects of distinction and discontinuity on the one side and relations and continuity on the other side. Our cognition is essentially perceptually based, our subjectivity is primordially informed by our inherence in the sensible world. Perceptual cognition is inherently intentional and relational, it is not an autonomous mental construction, it is rather in the world and informed by that which is perceived. The other is always intertwined with the subject. We are always already hooked up with the world, with the others, before we start reflecting, thinking, and conceptualizing. This is one of the major themes in Shepard’s work: what this insight means with regard to our relations to non-human otherness, in particular to our perceptual encounter with wild animals. In our encounter with non-human otherness, we are confronted with an essentially ambiguous sense of both affinity and disjuncture. Wild animals demonstrate to us that we are not homeless or alien to this world, that we fundamentally belong to it and are part of it. Their difference, however, shows us that there are different perspectives and ways of being in the world. “Thus the encounter with non-human others inform humans that we are both of the world and simultaneously not the world and there are horizons of significance beyond our own perspective.”Nathan Edward Kowalski comes to a similar conclusion when he situates our morality in the larger moral order of wild nature. According to Kowalski it is indeed a moral order though not our own, an Other to our morality but not simply a negative one. It is, as Drenthen says, a highly paradoxical amoral morality. But what can it mean to speak of morality here? For Kowalski it means that the issue is not merely the theoretical recognition and acknowledgment of axiological transcendence, of non-human values out there, but whether we will appropriately conform to and comport ourselves towards that axiological transcendence so that we can find a human homeland in wild nature instead of turning it into a wasteland. The question then is, how to fit our own human morality into this larger order and greater reality, to subordinate it to that greater reality as a part of it and encompassed but not denied by it so that we can be moral and natural at the same time, tender carnivores hunting the sacred game. Indigenous people follow a moral protocol in their relationship with non-human others which acknowledge and respects their autonomy, their alterity, and the sacred mystery of their different ways of being. They are not befriended but some of them are hunted and eaten – as an exchange in the gift-economy of nature.The problem of the homelessness and alienation from nature is discussed by Wim Bollen from the radically different vantage point of critical theory. In Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment the human story unfolds as a tragic effort to liberate ourselves from nature and to become fully human through rational control when in the end this effort turns against ourselves and instead of liberation and human flourishing we get social domination and repression of our natural needs. The frustrations and mutilations imposed upon us by a repressive civilization give rise to the regressive desire for a return to a natural existence. Referring to the myth of Odysseus and Circe as interpreted by Adorno and Horkheimer, Wim Bollen equates such a natural existence with animal life. In the light of contemporary knowledge about primitive existence, however, this equation is highly problematic. Palaeolithic foragers were already fully human in all respects. A life without civilization need not be an animal-existence.According to Adorno/Horkheimer, our subjectivity and autonomy have to be wrested from animal-nature through an exertive struggle that cannot but proceed by a threefold strategy of domination: the domination of non-human otherness, of human others, and of our own inner nature. The siren song of nature consists in the temptation to give up that struggle for the promise of an unreflective, non-alienated natural existence without toil.When Odysseus’ men give in to Circe’s seduction they are, however, not transformed into wild animals but into swine. According to Bollen this signifies that we cannot re-wild ourselves, that we remain imprisoned in civilization, either as master-subjects or as domesticated animals. Bollen, by the way, like Drenthen, does not distinguish conceptually between civilization and culture. Since re-wilding for Bollen means the impossibility of returning to animal-existence, which is actually the impossibility of becoming another species since biologically we are animals already, to be imprisoned in civilisation means nothing else than to be imprisoned in our humanity. The fact that we cannot become wild animals again – according to Paul Shepard, however, we are still wild animals – is indeed, as Bollen stresses, a trivial form of alienation. A more meaningful concept of alienation which can be put to critical use must refer to a culturally and historically determined frustration and deficit inside the cultural order that is to be overcome not by an impossible regression but by progressive politics leading beyond the three intertwined forms of domination. Not back to nature but forward towards a reconciliation of culture with nature! Such a reconciliation would neither collapse culture into the immanence of nature nor submerge nature into the transcendence of culture. According with the three forms of domination it would be a three-dimensional form of reconciliation.Odysseus’ men did not got what they thought were promised them: the complete liberation from the burden of being autonomous subjects, of being civilized, but they got something worthwhile, namely a certain from of pleasure, a limited and provisional relief and escape. Bollen sees a critical potential in these piggish pleasures after all and consequently even in the siren song of nature since these pleasures were only experienced because Odysseus’ men gave in to it. But one has to give in to this siren song critically if it is to unfold its liberating potential. The problem with pleasure though in bourgeois society is that it is necessarily betrayed, instrumentalized and sold.Kingsley Goodwin’s paper starts by defending deep ecology against the charge of asserting a naïve and dogmatic metaphysics of nature. For convenience sake, but not quite unproblematically, he identifies deep ecology with the environmental thought of Arne Naess. A metaphysics of nature for Naess is always part of a personal worldview. Worldviews which are partly inspired by ecology Naess calls ecosophies. Naess always stresses the personal character of such a worldview and the irreducible plurality of them. It used to be a common misunderstanding of the platform of deep ecology which Naess conceived together with George Sessions that it expressed in a condensed form the metaphysical beliefs of deep ecology. Naess’ intention, however, was to try to articulate in a general fashion the basic viewpoints on which the supporters of the deep ecology movement agreed. It would be possible then to derive these viewpoints from quite different worldviews. In light of this, I think, that Goodwin’s characterisation of the platform as “pragmatic and activist” is not quite appropriate.Goodwin goes on to compare Drenthen’s conception of wilderness and wildness with the similar position developed by Neil Evernden in his book The Social Creation of Nature. He like Naess in his personal ecosophy stresses the crucial role of perceptual experience of wild otherness to find an antidote to the relativity and contingency of our interpretations of nature. Evernden refers to studies on child development to argue for a non-dualistic and relational conception of the self, similar to Naess’ relational ontology. According to Goodwin, Drenthen, in spite of his hermeneutical approach remains too much indebted to the Western subject/object-dualism. The object, in this case wild nature, is pure otherness.With regard to a compost heap, Goodwin shows that we are not separated from nature by an inseparable gulf, that nature is close at hand, and that we can experience and explore it, appreciate the complex play of identity and difference it consists of, the exchanges and transformations and that we can identify with the organisms involved in these exchanges.*The proceeding remarks only highlight some of the prominent themes and considerations in the various contributions to this topical issue of Ethical Perspectives. Hopefully the reader will feel invited and enticed to read the articles themselves, starting, preferably of course, with the essay by Martin Drenthen, who sparked off this lively discussion on the moral meaning of wild nature. I am honoured and pleased to be able to introduce these rich explorations by such talented young environmental philosophers who are eager to develop environmental philosophy further and lead it into new directions. They all have to wrestle with and find answers to the challenge postmodern deconstruction and social constructivism pose for environmental philosophy. In the face of that challenge, it is even more difficult than it already was to provide solid and convincing arguments for the defence of wild and free nature beyond merely pragmatic arguments in terms of its utilitarian value for us. The reason for that defence is not clear-cut and proves to be just as evasive as the moral meaning of nature itself. But neither that reason nor that meaning are mere phantoms and mirages that vanish when we approach them and try to grasp them. They are more substantial, even if they will never have the solidity of a mathematical proof or a scientific measurement. Their locale is the lifeworld which from the point of view of scientific and logical precision and clarity is a messy place where subject and object, reason and heart, fact and value, experience and thought and, yes, nature and culture cannot be clearly separated. This has important consequences for environmental philosophy and its methodology. Conceptual analysis and logical argumentation have to become sensitive to the richness of experience in the lifeworld and to the diverse efforts of its articulation: i.e., they have to open themselves up and maybe even to subordinate themselves to phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. For me personally this is one of the most important conclusions I draw from the discussion presented here. (shrink)

The article « La Défenestration » by Belgian philosopher Marc Richir has been translated into Russian for the first time for this issue of the “Horizon. Studies in Phenomenology.” In his early work “The Defenestration” Richir raises the question of relation between the subject and conceivable world. Here, a philosopher is pictured contemplating the world through the window of his tower. In such detachment from the world the thinker finds himself according to all Modern philosophies of consciousness. Husserl’s phenomenology (...) inherits this detachment, since Husserl imposes the structure of transcendental ego as external to the world. Richir abolishes the concept of transcendental ego with the help of heideggerian Dasein, but analyzing Heidegger’s ontology he comes to the conclusion that the latter remains fixated on beings. Believing a person to live in the fundamental openness of Being, Heidegger places such a person in the secondary world of “truth.” In order to overcome the remains of traditional philosophy in Heidegger’s ontology Richir turns to Merleau-Ponty’ “cosmology of the visible.” The author takes the Merleau-Ponty’s thesis that everything visible has something fundamentally invisible in it. This allows him to discover the universe of “nothing”, which includes both the visible and what is “behind” it. As a result Richir overcomes the classical dualism of the sensual and the intelligible. The concept of defenestration places the subject and the world in the same universe. (shrink)

When it comes to invasive manipulation of animals on the biological level, reactions of disgust are common and often influential on people’s moral judgments. As a case in point, the Belgian Blue, a breed of hyper-enhanced cattle which will serve as a case study for the present article, has historically been met with revulsion. Traditionally, in bio- and animal ethics, this ‘yuck factor,’ has been denied any productive role in proper moral justification, since rationalism is still a dominant paradigm (...) in those disciplines. This is not surprising since rationalism offers the fulfilment of certain expectations we have of morality, like universality, intersubjective communicability, and objectivity. Increasingly, however, the preconceptions of rationalism have been brought into question, both through empirical as well as philosophical insights. In this paper, we will explore a way in which researchers who are, accordingly, critical of rationalism, and who wish to take seriously the role disgust plays in the formation of moral judgments when it comes to biological manipulation of animals, can do so without abandoning those virtues of rationalism which make it such an appealing position. We will do so by offering what we call a ‘tempered’ kind of rationalism, that is, one which conceives of rationality in the terms of Mary Midgley, not as distinct from, but as a possible function of, well-ordered emotion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.4 (2001) 705-720 [Access article in PDF] On the Notion of "Disinterestedness": Kant, Lyotard, and Schopenhauer Bart Vandenabeele The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown (...) up.--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. DallowayIf the genuine aesthetic experience exists empirically--and it does--then the definition of its specific quality is at the core of any aesthetic theory that is concerned with the particularity of aesthetic appreciation. Firstly, I shall attempt to provide an acceptable interpretation of this extremely intricate issue in Kant and, moreover, question the interpretation of two philosophers--Lyotard and Schopenhauer--who both struggled with the notion of "disinterestedness" and provided a highly original (but often misunderstood) interpretation of it in their own aesthetic theories. I shall argue that Lyotard took for granted something in Kant's aesthetics that Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory tries to resolve, that is, the wide gap between the agreeable and the charming on one side, and the beautiful on the other. Kant: Disinterestedness and Existence The first moment of Kant's Analytic of the Beautiful asserts that our liking in the beautiful cannot originatefrom any interest and that in the beautiful "we are not compelled to give our approval by any interest, whether of sense or of reason" (§ 5, 52). 1 But Kant also insists that the liking in the beautiful does not createany interest in the object either. [End Page 705]What may this mean? As Kant asserts in the beginning of section 5, it means that "a judgment of taste is merely contemplative, i.e., it is a judgment that is indifferent to the existence of the object [indifferent in Ansehung des Daseins eines Gegenstandes]: it [considers] the character of the object only by holding it up to our feeling of pleasure and displeasure [nur seine Beschaffenheit mit dem Gefühl der Lust und Unlust zusammenhält]" (§ 5, 51). The requirement that a pure judgment of taste be devoid of all interest forms the foundation of Kant's important distinction between aesthetic liking and the pleasure that may accompany moral judgment or action. 2 Kant's analysis of aesthetic response calls for another discrimination, too: the separation of aesthetic liking from mere sensory pleasure, which is the distinction that will occupy us here.Objects that arouse mere sensual pleasure, such as Belgian chocolates, are said to "gratify" (vergnügen) someone, and are then called "agreeable" (angenehm). An object "which one just likes" (was ihm bloß gefällt) is called beautiful. The incentive that corresponds to this object for thought is, respectively inclination (Neigung) or favor (Gunst). Favor, thus accorded the beautiful, is "the only free liking" (das einzige freie Wohlgefallen) (§ 5, 52). 3 Only pleasure in the beautiful is free of a connection with an interest. Both inclination and rational desire are connected with interest, and "all interest either presupposes a need [Bedürfniß] or gives rise to one; and, because interest is the basis that determines approval [als Bestimmungsgrund des Beifalls], it makes the judgment about the object unfree" (ibid.). As Paul Guyer rightly remarks, "in defining the 'quality' of aesthetic judgment Kant is not making a phenomenological distinction between different kinds of feelings of pleasure, but a distinction between the ways in which different instances of pleasure may be occasioned." 4 What Kant is suggesting is "that the presence or absence of a connection to interest may serve as a criterion for the reflective classification of given pleasures" (ibid).Section 3 aims to show that "a liking for the Agreeable is connected with Interest" (§ 3, 47). Pure favor, which is connected with the beautiful, "cannot be an inclination, or else the beautiful would be agreeable and there would be no aesthetic pleasure." 5 Kant, therefore, makes a crucial (but often overlooked) distinction between two senses of "sensation." 6 In the sense of the Critique of... (shrink)

ArgumentThis article contributes to a global history of relativity, by exploring how Einstein’s theory was appropriated in Belgium. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, yet the early-twentieth-century Belgian context, because of its cultural diversity and reflectiveness of global conditions (the principal example being the First World War), proves well-suited to expose transnational flows and patterns in the global history of relativity. The attempts of Belgian physicist Théophile de Donder to contribute to relativity physics during the 1910s (...) and 1920s illustrate the role of the war in shaping the transnational networks through which relativity circulated. The local attitudes of conservative Belgian Catholic scientists and philosophers, who denied that relativity was philosophically significant, exemplify a global pattern: while critics of relativity feared to become marginalized by the scientific, political, and cultural revolutions that Einstein and his theory were taken to represent, supporters sympathized with these revolutions. (shrink)

In the work of the late Belgian philosopher, logician and freethinker Leo Apostel (1924–1995) the concept of ‘world view’ is extensively developed. From the diverse research of Apostel, I gather and examine the constituents of a world view and their relationships. I propose to understand it as a pluralist and open, rationalised ontology of the ‘world whole’, comprising knowledge systems, valuative ethical systems and concomitant action guiding systems, to a large extent reflecting insight in the exact sciences. The prolific (...) and scattered opus of Apostel renders my account of encompassing world views approximate and incomplete. It merely outlines the intrinsically unfinished project and presents a recent development. This development mainly involves our approach to the phenomenon of emergence from a quantum theoretical perspective. (shrink)

During the second half of the 20th century, despite the flourishing of Spinoza scholarship (particularly in the French-speaking world) references to Spinoza seem to be rather infrequent in the famous Catholic journal Revue philosophique de Louvain. On closer inspection, however, it is possible to trace a precise attitude of the editors of the Belgian journal, according to which the historiographic representation of the Dutch philosopher constitutes the test-bed of a more general cultural strategy. In contact with phenomenology, anti-Cartesianism, the (...) biological sciences, psychoanalysis and Marxism, the Spinoza of the Catholic journal becomes an entirely new and unusual figure, with respect to the image still prevalent in Spinoza studies today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethnophilosophy, Comparative Philosophy, Pragmatism:Toward a Philosophy of EthnoscapesThorsten Botz-Bornstein, Associate ResearcherIn this essay I would like to reflect on the place of philosophy within a "globalized" world and reconsider its status as a phenomenon that is potentially linked to a "local" culture. Whenever we question the authority of "general" truths and we look for ways of integrating "local discourses" into the overall construction called "global philosophy," we come across (...) the old idea of "ethnophilosophy." Far from suggesting ethnophilosophy as a model for the philosophy of the future, I intend to rethink certain themes of ethnophilosophy and contrast them with disciplines such as "comparative philosophy" and pragmatism. I will sketch an approach that I believe to be appropriate for the development of philosophy in times of globalization.One of the negative undertones of the term "globalization" is that it is seen as a uniformizing and flattening power that eliminates existing cultural differences. On the other hand, there is an important side effect of globalization represented by those movements acting against it, stressing the importance of "localization" or "regionalization." Ethnophilosophy, in spite of its outdated origin and its potential dangers, remains interesting as an intellectual model as long as it is not formulated in a radical fashion. When it is formulated in a radical fashion it has to face the reproach of relativism and of enclosing itself in a cultural sphere that it declares to be inaccessible to others.Ethnophilosophy: A Renaissance?Ethnophilosophy was developed in Africa in the 1960s, although its origin can be traced back to a book on Bantu philosophy by the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels. In this book, published in 1946, Tempels tried to conclude with the view that primitive peoples have neither ontology nor logic and are unable to recognize the nature of being or even of reality as such. Tempels was looking for an ontology colored by "local" cultural components but also by language,1 and he made a serious attempt to build a philosophical system based on Bantu thought.What followed were endless controversies about the nature of African philosophy that made of "ethnophilosophy" a stream of thought much richer than its name might allow one to suppose. A part of its stimulating power can perhaps be traced to the ambiguity of Tempels' approach: on the one hand it could easily be dismissed as paternalism or the attempt to force African philosophy into the straightjacket of European concepts, while on the other hand the expressed desire to give "ethnic" [End Page 153] philosophy a new role within the international hierarchy of the philosophies was immensely attractive. Be that as it may, Tempels' book became the real manifest of "ethnophilosophy."Another point at issue that spurned internal ethnophilosophical discussions was the question whether African philosophy is advanced by an entire people (that is, by a collective) or by individual philosophers. This question (which does not arise in Tempels' book) was first taken up by the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji,2 who claimed that ethnophilosophy is no philosophy at all because it remains indifferent toward individually critical, that is, typically philosophical, approaches. Related debates touch upon fundamental questions concerning the meaning of "collective thinking" or the nature of philosophy as such.3However subtle the points may be that emerge from these discussions, for the outside observer ethnophilosophy appears to be a kind of anthropology (whose premises it continues to share) with an incorporated interest in metaphysical questions. Its opposite is "conventional" Western philosophy, which persistently explores truth with the help of a single, individual mind, aiming at the crystallization of a truth relevant for everybody. What matters for ethnophilosophy is the truth brought forward by a certain way of life of a group of people that can be found on the "inside" of a culture and that can exist independently of any considerations of those things that exist on the outside. Ethnophilosophy is radical in the sense that it not only aims to reestablish, through its opposition to the all-intruding "international" philosophy, its own philosophy within the borders of a certain nation; going much further than many of today's opponents of globalization would dare to go, ethnophilosophy thinks of philosophy... (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In this article, we will look at the political philosophical theories of Brian Barry ( Culture and Equality , 2001) and Chandran Kukathas ( The Liberal Archipelago , 2003) and see which consequences both theories have for the Belgian model of church and state. For both authors, the liberal state should be neutral toward religion but they interpret this neutrality in a different way. According to Kukathas, neutrality implies a hands-off policy and therefore, (...) recognizing and financing religions is out of the question. For Barry on the other hand, the state is neutral if equal people have equal opportunities. Consequently, state support for religions and even the recognition of religions is possible, if religions are treated in the same way. However, a hands-off policy is also in line with Barry’s theory. Both from a pragmatic and from a normative point of view, Barry’s egalitarian liberalism seems the most interesting theory as an inspiring source for the evolvement and modification of the Belgian system, towards more fairness and equality. (shrink)

This article presents a contextualisation of Belgian philosopher and historian of psychiatry and sexuality, Patrick Vandermeersch’s (1946–), unpublished analysis of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) interpretation of Methodius of Olympus’ (d.ca.311) views on virginity and chastity, in Histoire de la sexualité 4 ( Les aveux de la chair ), published in February 2018 at Gallimard in Paris under the editorship of Frédéric Gros. The article contributes to the reception and the ongoing analyses of Les aveux de la chair by (...) exploring Foucault’s reading while highlighting both the importance of Vandermeersch’s analysis and the sexological-historiographical significance of his broader oeuvre that spans over four decades. Vandermeersch shows that Foucault, as many other commentators of Methodius, did not substantially engage Methodius’ explicit indebtedness and persistent references to Plato (already evident in the title Symposium but especially regarding the Phaedrus ). Platonic homoeroticism is, according to Vandermeersch, as a consequence often too hastily, and therefore problematically, transposed on contexts of female virginity. Likewise, Foucault, when indicating already at the end of Histoire de la sexualité 2 ( L’usage des plaisirs 1984), the particular relevance of homoeroticism in the development of Western sexuality, seemed to adhere to this transposition. Could ‘beautiful boys’ truly be transposed onto ‘female virgins’ without severe sexual-discursive complications? And could Methodius’ encomium of virginity in any way be understood independent of his understanding of the ‘resurrection of the body’, with the integrity of its (virginised) sexual desire intact? These are among Vandermeersch’s valid and challenging questions to both Foucault and his contemporary readership. Contribution: Foucault’s reading of the church- and desert fathers in Histoire de la sexualité 4 ( Les aveux de la chair ) impacts early Medieval philosophy, early Medieval history, church history, patristics, philosophy of religion, psychology of religion and sociology of religion. Since these proximate disciplines are drawn towards Foucault’s text, they may well note its ongoing examinations. Foucault’s direct impact on these disciplines is illustrated in Vandermeersch’s significant analysis of Foucault’s reading of Methodius in Les aveux de la chair. Vandermeersch’s broader oeuvre in philosophy, theology, psychiatry, psychology, psychology of religion and the history of sexuality is concurrently contextualised as of ongoing contemporary importance for these disciplines. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pour une histoire de la ‘double vérité’David PichéLuca Bianchi. Pour une histoire de la ‘double vérité’. Conférences Pierre Abélard. Paris: Vrin, 2008. Pp. 192. Paper, €18.00.Since the publication of the work of the Belgian medievalist Fernand Van Steenberghen, a solid consensus seems to have emerged in the community of historians of medieval philosophy: no scholar in the Middle Ages defended the so-called “doctrine of the double truth” (...) that the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, had denounced in the prologue of his 1277 Condemnation. Moreover, how could a professional philosopher or theologian seriously contend that two contradictory statements are simultaneously true, one due to natural reason, and the other through the authority of faith? Therefore, the matter seemed settled and the file definitely closed: the double truth is nothing more than a “legend.” Yet the Italian medievalist Luca Bianchi’s in-depth critical analysis of the pseudo-historical evidence has now changed this. Without wanting to propose an entirely new interpretation of the historical ins and outs of this famous doctrine, Bianchi carries out a re-examination of the subject through a meticulous study of certain key texts that he has read in the light of a three-fold question: What impact did passages from Tempier’s decree on the “double truth” have on the medieval scholars themselves? Does the expression itself, ‘duplex veritas’, appear in some medieval documents? What were medieval thinkers’ attitudes in the face of philosophical arguments leading to conclusions contradicting the teachings of the Catholic faith?Due to space constraints, I will limit my discussion to Bianchi’s most crucial results. The answer to the first question (ch. 1) leads us in a surprising fashion to the famous Disputatio of Luther (1539). In this text, the father of the Reformation opposes the principle according to which what is true in theology must also be true in philosophy—a thesis whose paternity he attributes to Parisian theologians. Wanting to ensure the pre-eminence of faith-based teachings over all forms of human rationalization, Luther came to subscribe to a certain form of the double truth, since he claimed that what is absolutely true according to faith can be false and impossible from the perspective of philosophy. This explains his radical opposition to the “Parisian” principle that Bianchi calls “the principle of the oneness of truth.” We learn that some theologians in fifteenth- century Paris, notably Jean Gerson and Guillaume Baudin, were actually inspired by Tempier’s decree to defend some form of this principle.To respond to the second question (ch. 2), Bianchi first researched the electronic database Library of Latin Texts (CLCLT-6), and came up with “disappointing results”: no author uses the expression ‘duplex veritas’ in the relevant sense. Nevertheless, as imposing as it is, this database is not exhaustive, and Bianchi, well aware of this, extended his research by consulting other documents on paper, allowing him ultimately to reach a positive conclusion: the expression ‘duplex veritas’ appears in the course of a debate that took place around [End Page 99] 1470 on the subject of the truth-value of statements about future contingents. This debate involved a master of arts from Louvain, Pierre de Rivo, who considered it essential to distinguish between the truth of philosophers and the “popular” truth upheld by the churchmen, and a Parisian theologian whom we have already encountered, Guillaume Baudin, who invoked the “principle of the oneness of truth” to denounce the “double truth” that his adversary was promoting.From Bianchi’s multifaceted response to the third question (chs. 3–4), I can only present the groundswell. From the statutes promulgated by the Parisian Arts Faculty in 1272 up to the condemnation of Galileo in 1633, including the constitution Apostolici regiminis issued by the Fifth Lateran Council (1513), a significant evolution may be observed in the requirements academic and religious authorities imposed on professors of philosophy (as well as on scientists) in the western Christian world. Indeed, we may observe that these requirements correspond, first, to the obligation to counter, as far as possible, arguments that contradict faith, and then transform into the duty to commit to a strong... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pour une histoire de la ‘double vérité’David PichéLuca Bianchi. Pour une histoire de la ‘double vérité’. Conférences Pierre Abélard. Paris: Vrin, 2008. Pp. 192. Paper, €18.00.Since the publication of the work of the Belgian medievalist Fernand Van Steenberghen, a solid consensus seems to have emerged in the community of historians of medieval philosophy: no scholar in the Middle Ages defended the so-called “doctrine of the double truth” (...) that the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, had denounced in the prologue of his 1277 Condemnation. Moreover, how could a professional philosopher or theologian seriously contend that two contradictory statements are simultaneously true, one due to natural reason, and the other through the authority of faith? Therefore, the matter seemed settled and the file definitely closed: the double truth is nothing more than a “legend.” Yet the Italian medievalist Luca Bianchi’s in-depth critical analysis of the pseudo-historical evidence has now changed this. Without wanting to propose an entirely new interpretation of the historical ins and outs of this famous doctrine, Bianchi carries out a re-examination of the subject through a meticulous study of certain key texts that he has read in the light of a three-fold question: What impact did passages from Tempier’s decree on the “double truth” have on the medieval scholars themselves? Does the expression itself, ‘duplex veritas’, appear in some medieval documents? What were medieval thinkers’ attitudes in the face of philosophical arguments leading to conclusions contradicting the teachings of the Catholic faith?Due to space constraints, I will limit my discussion to Bianchi’s most crucial results. The answer to the first question (ch. 1) leads us in a surprising fashion to the famous Disputatio of Luther (1539). In this text, the father of the Reformation opposes the principle according to which what is true in theology must also be true in philosophy—a thesis whose paternity he attributes to Parisian theologians. Wanting to ensure the pre-eminence of faith-based teachings over all forms of human rationalization, Luther came to subscribe to a certain form of the double truth, since he claimed that what is absolutely true according to faith can be false and impossible from the perspective of philosophy. This explains his radical opposition to the “Parisian” principle that Bianchi calls “the principle of the oneness of truth.” We learn that some theologians in fifteenth- century Paris, notably Jean Gerson and Guillaume Baudin, were actually inspired by Tempier’s decree to defend some form of this principle.To respond to the second question (ch. 2), Bianchi first researched the electronic database Library of Latin Texts (CLCLT-6), and came up with “disappointing results”: no author uses the expression ‘duplex veritas’ in the relevant sense. Nevertheless, as imposing as it is, this database is not exhaustive, and Bianchi, well aware of this, extended his research by consulting other documents on paper, allowing him ultimately to reach a positive conclusion: the expression ‘duplex veritas’ appears in the course of a debate that took place around [End Page 99] 1470 on the subject of the truth-value of statements about future contingents. This debate involved a master of arts from Louvain, Pierre de Rivo, who considered it essential to distinguish between the truth of philosophers and the “popular” truth upheld by the churchmen, and a Parisian theologian whom we have already encountered, Guillaume Baudin, who invoked the “principle of the oneness of truth” to denounce the “double truth” that his adversary was promoting.From Bianchi’s multifaceted response to the third question (chs. 3–4), I can only present the groundswell. From the statutes promulgated by the Parisian Arts Faculty in 1272 up to the condemnation of Galileo in 1633, including the constitution Apostolici regiminis issued by the Fifth Lateran Council (1513), a significant evolution may be observed in the requirements academic and religious authorities imposed on professors of philosophy (as well as on scientists) in the western Christian world. Indeed, we may observe that these requirements correspond, first, to the obligation to counter, as far as possible, arguments that contradict faith, and then transform into the duty to commit to a strong... (shrink)

A logic is said to be paraconsistent if it does not allow everything to follow from contradictory premises. There are several approaches to paraconsistency. This paper is concerned with several philosophical positions on paraconsistency. In particular, it concerns three ‘schools’ of paraconsistency: Australian, Belgian and Brazilian. The Belgian and Brazilian schools have raised some objections to the dialetheism of the Australian school. I argue that the Australian school of paraconsistency need not be closed down on the basis of (...) the Belgian and Brazilian schools’ objections. In the appendix of the paper, I also argue that the Brazilian school’s view of logic is not coherent. (shrink)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, jésuite et paléontologue, est surtout connu pour ses idées peu orthodoxes, au travers desquelles il tenta de concilier la science évolutionniste avec ses théories spirituelles personnelles. En dépit de la censure de la part des autorités ecclésiastiques, Teilhard essaya d’élaborer cette conciliation et de la disséminer dans les milieux intellectuels catholiques. Pour mener à bien ces deux projets, il trouva du soutien dans les cercles évolutionnistes de l’Université Catholique de Louvain et la maison jésuite de la (...) même ville belge. Le réseau louvaniste de Teilhard agit comme un amplificateur important de ses idées et lui offrit une aide concrète pour répandre celles-ci et pour éviter la censure. Malgré leur influence mutuelle significative, des divergences d’ordre philosophique entre Teilhard et ses amis louvanistes demeurèrent pourtant, et finirent par les séparer. Pendant les années 1930, le réseau louvaniste de Teilhard fut dissous en grande partie. Ses actions ne restèrent pourtant pas sans résultat. Ce petit groupe d’intellectuels fit sans aucun doute évoluer le climat en faveur de l’évolutionnisme au sein des milieux catholiques, et prépara, de cette manière, le succès des idées teilhardiennes à la suite de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. The Jesuit and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is basically known for his not always orthodox conceptions by which he tried to reconcile evolutionist science with his personal spiritual ideas. In spite of censorship from the ecclesiastical authorities, Teilhard attempted to elaborate this conciliation and to spread it among catholic intellectuals. For both of these projects he found crucial support in evolutionist circles at the Catholic University of Louvain and the Jesuit house in the same Belgian town. Teilhard’s Louvain network proved to be an important sounding board and it offered concrete help in spreading his ideas and in bypassing the censorship. Despite significant mutual influences, philosophical divergences between Teilhard and his Louvain friends remained, and would eventually drive them apart. Therefore, in the 1930s, Teilhard’s Louvain network largely dissolved. However, its actions had not been without result. This small group of intellectuals definitely changed the climate among Catholics in favour of evolutionism and thus prepared the success that Teilhardian ideas would have in the aftermath of the Second World War. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit und Paläontologe, ist vor allem wegen seiner nicht immer orthodoxen Ideen bekannt, mit denen er versuchte, die Evolutionstheorien mit seinen persönlichen spirituellen Überzeugungen zu vereinbaren. Ungeachtet der Zensur durch die kirchlichen Autoritäten bemühte sich Teilhard um die Ausarbeitung dieser Versöhnung und um ihre Verbreitung in den katholischen Intellektuellenmilieus. Bei der Verwirklichung dieser beiden Projekte fand er Hilfe in den evolutionistischen Kreisen der Katholischen Universität Löwen und bei der Jesuitengemeinschaft derselben Stadt. Das Löwener Netzwerk half ihm dabei, seine Ideen einem größeren Publikum zugänglich zu machen, und lieferte konkrete Unterstützung bei der Verbreitung der Thesen und bei der Umgehung der Zensur. Trotz ihrer bedeutenden gegenseitigen Beeinflussung bestanden jedoch auch weiterhin philosophische Divergenzen zwischen Teilhard und seinen Löwener Freunden, die schließlich zur Trennung führten. In den 30er Jahren wurde der Löwener Kreis um Teilhard größtenteils aufgelöst. Sein Handeln blieb jedoch nicht ohne Resultat. Diese kleine Gruppe Intellektueller hat mit Sicherheit dazu beigetragen, das Klima zugunsten der Evolutionstheorien innerhalb der katholischen Kreise zu verbessern und bereitete auf diese Weise den Weg für den Erfolg der teilhardschen Ideen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. (shrink)

With its sixteen years, experience of pluralism, the FDF appears to represent a new type of political party in Belgian politics. Owing to the multiplicity of its origins the federalist party of Brussels was obliged in an initial stage to reconcile manifold philosophical, ideological and political tendencies; in later years it has succeeding in giving an even more concrete contents to this pluralism. lt now consciously tends to make this pluralism a political advantage in its competition with the traditional (...) parties. Both the evolution and the structure of the party were strongly determined by this specific characteristic. (shrink)

The philosophy of language pioneered by Ludwig Wittgenstein, far from being inimical to the metaphysical concerns of philosophy, can be understood as complementing and perhaps even deepening the approach to metaphysics first employed by the Belgian Jesuit philosopher Joseph Marèchal: a ‘metaphysics of knowledge’ illuminating the deeper‐than‐conceptualist movement in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. The relationship of words and reality was radically reconfigured in the linguistic turn inaugurated in the work of Wittgenstein, but that work itself still presupposes what (...) might be called the existential act of judgement, which was the foundation of Marèchal's Thomistic retrieval. (shrink)

The intention of this paper is to relate the various standpoints regarding anxiety and uncertainty. Within the humanities and social sciences, research is pursued in many different disciplines without much interaction between them. Everyone's thinking is based on concepts which are domain-specific, and the distinctions, methods and arguments used are the ones that are generally accepted within the discipline. The divergent conclusions constitute pieces of a puzzle that are seldom if ever put together. There are even doubts about whether such (...) a puzzle can be put together. It can hardly be denied, however, that inspiration is to be found in a consideration of the views and findings of colleagues from other disciplines who are working on the same problems. Now that we have as our guests two prominent academics, each with specific views about our subject, we should take this opportunity to discuss together some of the sociological, anthropological, economic, philosophical and theological approaches to anxiety and uncertainty.If a number of well-known authors are to be believed, lack of trust, uncertainty and insecurity affect the most affluent and modern societies. In French one speaks of précarité , in German of Unsicherheit and Risikogesellschaft , and in English of “fear”, “risk” and “insecurity” . All modern Western societies seem to be afflicted with the same dismal and frustrating human experience.Belgian society is no exception to this. In recent years we have regularly been subjected to the emotional reactions provoked by sensational events in the areas of politics , justice and public health . Less spectacular but no less real were the results of opinion polls which showed that confidence in public institutions in general, and politics in particular, is at an all-time low. (shrink)

No other scientist may have had a greater impact on modern cosmology than the Belgian physicist, astronomer and priest Georges Lemaître. In 1927 he predicted the expansion of the universe on the basis of the cosmological field equations; and four years later he proposed what he called the primeval-atom hypothesis, the first version of the later big bang universe. In all his work on cosmology the cosmological constant Λ played a significant role. A recognized expert in the theory of (...) general relativity, Lemaître also contributed significantly to the theoretical clarification of local and global singularity problems. Still, when he died in 1968, at a time when the standard big bang model celebrated its first victories, he was largely forgotten or recalled only as a somewhat shadowy figure of the past. This essay reviews in a historical context the scientific work of Lemaître with particular attention to his seminal contributions in the decade between 1925 and 1934. (shrink)