Lacan fait régulièrement référence à Kierkegaard dans son enseignement et ce dernier occupe une place cruciale dans le retour à Freud. En analysant les écrits de Kierkegaard, l'auteur éclaire certains concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, remet en question le rapport de Lacan à Hegel et établit une nouvelle perspective entre psychanalyse et existentialisme.

The Honor of Thinking investigates the limits of criticism, theory, and philosophy in light of what Martin Heidegger and French post-Heideggerian philosophers have established about the nature and tasks of thinking. In addition to in-depth analyses of Walter Benjamin's conception of critique—and in particular the relation of critique to ethics, as well as alternative models of criticism (such as Heidegger's notion of “Auseinandersetzung,” and Derridean deconstruction)—this book contains essays on the notion of theory from the Greeks and the early German (...) Romantics to the contemporary use of this notion in literary studies. The last part of the book investigates the different ways of understanding philosophical thinking that are found in contemporary French thought, examining works of Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Derrida. (shrink)

Is the idea of Europe outdated? The concept of European unity, the animating spirit of the European Union, seems increasingly fragile in the face of far-right populist movements. In Locating Europe, Rodolphe Gasché attempts to answer the question of how to think about Europe. Is it a figure, a concept, or an idea? Is there anything still compelling and urgent about the idea of Europe? By looking at phenomenologist and postphenomenological thinkers in the second half of the 20th century, (...) Gasché reveals that Europe is more than just one geographical and cultural entity. The idea of Europe is based on common foundations: a distinctive conception of reason, of self-criticism, of responsibility, freedom, equality, human rights, and democracy, and it is these foundations that are under threat. In Locating Europe: A Figure, a Concept, an Idea? Gasché engages the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Jaspers, Karl Löwith, and others, focuses on the most significant philosophical representations of Europe, and explores the potential, and especially the limits, of the notion of Europe. (shrink)

Persuasion (Aristotle) -- A truth resembling truth -- Probability or necessity -- Logos, topos, stoikheion -- Reflection (Heidegger) -- Breaking with the primacy of the theoretical -- The genesis of the theoretical -- Beyond theory: theoria, or watching over what is still to come -- Judgment (Arendt) -- The space of appearance -- The wind of thought -- A sense of the world.

The claim of this paper is that the everyday functions of knowledge make most sense if we see knowledge as contrastive. That is, we can best understand how the concept does what it does by thinking in terms of a relation “a knows that p rather than q.” There is always a contrast with an alternative. Contrastive interpretations of knowledge, and objections to them, have become fairly common in recent philosophy. The version defended here is fairly mild in that there (...) is no suggestion that we cannot think in terms of a simpler not explicitly contrastive relation “a knows that p.” Some, for instance Schaffer (2005) and Karjalainen and Morton (2003), have hinted that this stronger possibility may be right. But all that I am arguing now is that facts that are easily expressed in contrastive terms are vital to understanding why we need the concept of knowledge. In a piece that is in some ways a companion to this one ("Contrastivism" in Duncan Pritchard and Sven Bernecker, eds. The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Routledge 2010, 513-522), I give a general survey of theories of contrastive knowledge and the differences between them. (shrink)

When one encounters disagreement about the truth of a factual claim from a trusted advisor who has access to all of one's evidence, should that move one in the direction of the advisor's view? Conciliatory views on disagreement say "yes, at least a little." Such views are extremely natural, but they can give incoherent advice when the issue under dispute is disagreement itself. So conciliatory views stand refuted. But despite first appearances, this makes no trouble for *partly* conciliatory views: views (...) that recommend giving ground in the face of disagreement about many matters, but not about disagreement itself. (shrink)

Une critique de la métaphysique du sujet, prise entre une théorisation substantialiste de l'individu ou au contraire une approche dynamique de la subjectivité. ©Electre 2017.

Meditation on the character of the Eleatic Stranger in Plato's late dialogues, arguing that the prominent place afforded to this foreigner-the other-represents an important philosophical and political legacy regarding the way thought, and life in the community, is understood.

Many favor representationalism about color experience. To a first approximation, this view holds that experiencing is like believing. In particular, like believing, experiencing is a matter of representing the world to be a certain way. Once you view color experience along these lines, you face a big question: do our color experiences represent the world as it really is? For instance, suppose you see a tomato. Representationalists claim that having an experience with this sensory character is necessarily connected with representing (...) a distinctive quality as pervading a round area out there in external space. Let us call it “sensible redness” to highlight the fact that the representation of this property is necessarily connected with the sensory character of the experience. Is this property, sensible redness, really co-instantiated with roundness out there in the space before you? (shrink)

Le cannabis est envisagé ici comme un instrument de la politique d’aménagement des territoires, au sens où R. Neuburger évoque les territoires de l’intime. Ceci permet la création de nouvelles narrations qui permettent de sortir de l’impasse où le cannabis est le problème pour les parents alors que c’est la solution pour le jeune. Deux vignettes cliniques illustrent cette métaphore et les opportunités qu’elle offre pour la thérapie.

In order to predict and explain behavior, one cannot specify the mental state of an agent merely by saying what information she possesses. Instead one must specify what information is available to an agent relative to various purposes. Specifying mental states in this way allows us to accommodate cases of imperfect recall, cognitive accomplishments involved in logical deduction, the mental states of confused or fragmented subjects, and the difference between propositional knowledge and know-how .

In this paper, I do a few things. I develop a (largely) empirical argument against naïve realism (Campbell, Martin, others) and for representationalism. I answer Papineau’s recent paper “Against Representationalism (about Experience)”. And I develop a new puzzle for representationalists.

Quantum mechanics is humanity's finest scientific achievement. It explains why the sun shines and how your eyes can see. It's the theory behind the LEDs in your phone and the nuclear hearts of space probes. Every physicist agrees quantum physics is spectacularly successful. But ask them what quantum physics means, and the result will be a brawl. At stake is the nature of the Universe itself. What does it mean for something to be real? What is the role of consciousness (...) in the Universe? And do quantum rules apply to very small objects like electrons and protons, but not us? In What is Real?, Adam Becker brings to vivid life the brave researchers whose quest for the truth led them to challenge Bohr: David Bohm, who picked up Einstein's mantle and sought to make quantum mechanics deterministic, all while being hounded by the forces of McCarthyism; Hugh Everett, who argued that everything, big and small, must be governed by the same rules; and John Bell, who went to great lengths to eradicate the power of the god-like observer from the core of quantum physics. And they paid dearly, their reputations, careers, and sometimes lives ruined completely. But history has been kinder to them than their contemporaries were. As Becker shows, the brave intellectual giants have inspired a growing army of physicists and philosophers intent both on making a philosophically more satisfying theory of the universe and a more useful one as well. A gripping story of some of humanity's greatest ideas and the high cost with which many have pursued them, What is Real? is intellectual history at its passionate best. (shrink)

In a letter to Wlodek Rabinowicz, David Lewis introduced a decision scenario that he described as “much more problematic for decision theory than the Newcomb Problems”. This scenario, which involves an agent with foreknowledge of the outcome of some chance process, has received little subsequent attention. However, in one of the small number of discussions of such cases, Huw Price's Causation, Chance and the Rational Significance of Supernatural Evidence it has been argued that cases of this sort pose serious problems (...) for causal decision theory. In this paper, I will argue that these problems can be overcome: scenarios of this sort do not pose fatal problems for this theory as there are versions of CDT that reason appropriately in these cases. However, I will also argue that such cases push us toward a particular version of CDT developed by Wlodek Rabinowicz. (shrink)

Against all expectations. The phenomenon of attention in aesthetic experienceThis paper aims to show how aesthetic experience, by the type of attention it requires, can lead us to consider sensitivity as a way to take care of the visible. Based on a reflection about the concept of repetition developed by Sören Kierkegaard, it is shown how attention is at the same time a manner to concern for oneself and to concern for the sensitive environment. The main thesis of this article (...) is that artistic creation can be considered as a privileged path to experiment in how far the expectation influences our perception of the sensitive. By inviting us to embrace a certain kind of presence, art works can as well be considered as an outstanding way of access to reality. (shrink)

This text articulates the concept of subjective truth developed by Søren Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, in connection to a conception of testimony which both exceeds and reveals the possibilities of thinking and acting of the witness. This imbalance between the testimony and the witness finds an important extension in the distinction between the Saying and the Said made by Emmanuel Lévinas in Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. This distinction opens up an understanding of thought as (...) affectivity and allows witnessing to be viewed in the light of responsibility to the other. By being part of this philosophical heritage, Jean-Louis Chrétien shows how the testimony of the infinite is also phenomenalized in the experience of a chant that discovers its own modalities in this excess of beauty on the voice that tries to say it. (shrink)

À partir de l’examen d’un ensemble de films amateurs conservé à la Cinémathèque de Saint-Étienne, identifié sous le titre de « dépôt Gourbeyre », ce texte se propose d’établir quelques caractéristiques de ce qu’a pu être le film de famille pratiqué au moyen de caméras argentiques. Outre la disponibilité à l’acte de filmer que demandent les outils de prise de vue pellicule, la pratique du 8 mm relève d’une exposition à l’imprévu et à l’accident. Quelques exemples d’incidents sont examinés ici, (...) qui relèvent soit de l’usage, soit du fonctionnement de la caméra, mais qui élaborent ensemble les contours d’une poétique de l’accident. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the gesture confronted with its own impossibility, in situations that open the gesture to a dimension of transcendence. Focusing first on the event of beauty, as it is discussed by Jean‑Louis Chrétien, and on the encountering of the face, as it is considered by Emmanuel Lévinas, this paper envisions a “below” and a “beyond” of the gesture, in exceptional situations where the gesture is faced with an excess, acquiring a dimension of a theopathy. Subsequently, I (...) emphasize that the transcendence that takes gesture beyond itself can inhabit and nourish the daily gestures, and this can be an occasion of pain and difficulties. In this perspective, Simone Weil shows how the repeated gestures of manual labour can become the mirror of supernatural beauty. (shrink)

Causal decision theory is one of our most prominent theories of rational choice and the “why ain’cha rich?” argument is one of the most prominent objections to this theory. According to WAR, CDT is not an adequate theory of rational choice because it leads agents to make decisions that foreseeably leave them less well off than agents that decide in some other manner. Some philosophers take WAR to decisively undermine CDT. On the other hand, others take WAR to fail to (...) resolve the debate over CDT’s adequacy. In this paper, I will defend this second view: WAR does not resolve the debate at hand but instead leads to deadlock. Then, in the second half of this paper, I will show that this deadlock is not broken by a recent variant on WAR due to Caspar Hare and Brian Hedden. Not only does this result have implications for the debate over CDT’s adequacy but this discussion also casts light on the broader success/rationality link. (shrink)

How best to think about quantum systems under permutation invariance is a question that has received a great deal of attention in the literature. But very little attention has been paid to taking seriously the proposal that permutation invariance reflects a representational redundancy in the formalism. Under such a proposal, it is far from obvious how a constituent quantum system is represented. Consequently, it is also far from obvious how quantum systems compose to form assemblies, i.e. what is the formal (...) structure of their relations of parthood, overlap and fusion. In this paper, I explore one proposal for the case of fermions and their assemblies. According to this proposal, fermionic assemblies which are not entangled—in some heterodox, but natural sense of ‘entangled’—provide a prima facie counterexample to classical mereology. This result is puzzling; but, I argue, no more intolerable than any other available interpretative option. (shrink)

The problem of trust in social relationships was central to the emergence of the modern form of civil society and much discussed by social and political philosophers of the early modern period. Over the past few years, in response to the profound changes associated with postmodernity, trust has returned to the attention of political scientists, sociologists, economists, and public policy analysts. In this sequel to his widely admired book, The Idea of Civil Society, Adam Seligman analyzes trust as a (...) fundamental issue of our present social relationships. Setting his discussion in historical and intellectual context, Seligman asks whether trust--which many contemporary critics, from Robert Putnam through Francis Fukuyama, identify as essential in creating a cohesive society--can continue to serve this vital role. Seligman traverses a wide range of examples, from the minutiae of everyday manners to central problems of political and economic life, showing throughout how civility and trust are being displaced in contemporary life by new "external' system constraints inimical to the development of trust. Disturbingly, Seligman shows that trust is losing its unifying power precisely because the individual, long assumed to be the ultimate repository of rights and values, is being reduced to a sum of group identities and an abstract matrix of rules. The irony for Seligman is that, in becoming postmodern, we seem to be moving backward to a premodern condition in which group sanctions rather than trust are the basis of group life. (shrink)

Discusses recent work on representationalism, including: the case for a representationalist theory of consciousness, which explains consciousness in terms of content; rivals such as neurobiological type-type identity theory (Papineau, McLaughlin) and naive realism (Allen, Campbell, Brewer); John Campbell and David Papineau's recent objections to representationalism; the problem of the "laws of appearance"; externalist vs internalist versions of representationalism; the relation between representationalism and the mind-body problem.

Deconstruction is no game of mirrors, revealing the text as a play of surface against surface. Its more radical philosophical effort is to get behind the mirror and question the very nature of reflection. The Tain of the Mirror explores that gritty surface without which no reflection would be possible.

The foundation for a system of morals, this 1749 work is a landmark of moral and political thought. Its highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment, and virtue offer a reconstruction of the Enlightenment concept of social science, embracing both political economy and theories of law and government.

This paper considers the possibility that ‘epistemic hypocrisy’ could be relevant to our blaming practices. It argues that agents who culpably violate an epistemic norm can lack the standing to blame other agents who culpably violate similar norms. After disentangling our criticism of epistemic hypocrites from various other fitting responses, and the different ways some norms can bear on the legitimacy of our blame, I argue that a commitment account of standing to blame allows us to understand our objections to (...) epistemic hypocrisy. Agents lack the epistemic standing to blame when they are not sufficiently committed to the epistemic norms they are blaming others for violating. This not only gives us a convincing account of epistemic standing to blame, it leaves us with a unified account of moral and epistemic standing. (shrink)

This paper introduces a novel strategy for responding to skeptical arguments based on the epistemic possibility of error or lack of certainty. I show that a nonclassical logic motivated by recent work on epistemic modals can be used to render such skeptical arguments invalid. That is, one can grant that knowledge is incompatible with the possibility of error and grant that error is possible, all while avoiding the skeptic’s conclusion that we lack knowledge.

A scholarly edition of a work by Adam Smith. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

The book analyzes the sources of widespread dissatisfaction with democracies around the world and identifies directions for feasible reforms"--Provided by publisher.

Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. (...) What explains this? Individualistic views explain this in terms of individualistic notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke any distinctive features of organizations. They just invoke the features of individual members of organizations. Collectivistic views, instead, explain this in terms of collective notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke the features of individual members of organizations. They just invoke the features of those organizations. We argue that neither approach works. Instead, one needs to synthesize the two approaches. Some individual interests, we think, are distinctively collective. We, as individuals, have a distinctive interest in playing a part in successful collective action. From this, so we argue, flows the apparently peculiar, fragmented moral status of organizations. (shrink)