Résumé L’immortalité est la grande quête de l’humanité, l’utopie par excellence. René Barjavel, dans son roman de science fiction Le grand secret, pense la convergence entre l’amour qui défie le temps, la science qui vient à bout de la maladie et la sagesse qui triomphe de la mort. Spinoza nous rappelle que la mort ne peut pas avoir ontologiquement une place dans la pensée des vivants et Bergson suppose un « courant de vie » traversant les corps et les générations, (...) se divisant et s’intensifiant sans perdre de force. Cette force de vivre n’a rien à voir avec les nouvelles philosophies du trans-humain ou du post-humain qui s’imaginent une post-humanité vivant plus longtemps, en meilleure santé et moins malheureuse, grâce à la biotechnologie. Si l’humanité a représenté dans la ligne de l’évolution une ouverture exceptionnelle, celle-ci est intensification, création et émancipation et non pas extension et rajout comme le veulent les sciences de la vie. (shrink)

This contribution is a presentation of the encounter between Greek philosophy and Islam and of the way in which philosophical thought was consequently appropriated by the Muslim world. What made this encounter possible was the existence, within the Muslim world, of a spirit of openness able to overcome the fear of a ‘pagan’ thought: this spirit helped develop the position that Greek philosophy, qua wisdom, could not be ‘foreign’ to the universe of the Koran. The Arabic language, as it became (...) a philosophical language, bears traces of such an appropriation. Today, in Africa, the debate on philosophy could usefully take into account the tradition of Islamic philosophy which is also African to some extent and which would help enlighten, in particular, the question of transforming African tongues into philosophical languages. (shrink)

The utopia we are dealing with here could have been called ‘the mother of all utopias’ since it is in fact humanity's greatest, most primal dream, indeed the one that defines us as human. This great utopia, from which are woven our representations of paradise, for example, is immortality, the theme of René Barjavel's novel entitled The Immortals (1973).

Le;opold Se;dar Senghor (1906–2001) was a Senegalese poet and philosopher who in 1960 also became the first president of the Republic of Senegal. In African Art as Philosophy , Souleymane Bachir Diagne takes a unique approach to reading Senghor’s influential works, taking as the starting point for his analysis Henri Bergson’s idea that in order to understand philosophers one must find the initial intuition from which every aspect of their work develops. In the case of Senghor, (...) class='Hi'>Diagne argues that his primordial intuition is that African art is a philosophy. _ To further this point, Diagne looks at what Senghor called the “1889 Revolution,” and the influential writers and publications of that time—specifically, Nietzsche and Rimbaud, as well as Bergson’s Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. The 1889 Revolution, Senghor claims, is what led him to the understanding of the “Vitalism” at the core of African religions and beliefs that found expression in the arts. _ This book offers a distinct, incisive look at an important figure in African literature and politics that will be welcomed by scholars in African Studies and philosophy. (shrink)

And how to not philosophize? -- How a language becomes philosophical -- What does it mean for a philosophy to be Islamic -- Against philosophy? -- A lesson in ecological philosophy -- The obligation to philosophize -- The need for philosophy -- The philosophy of reform -- The philosophy of movement -- Pluralism.

It is important to read afresh today the meaning of the Negritude movement without reducing it, as is often the case, to a counter-essentialism in response to the essentialism of the discourse of coloni-alism; to realize that Senghor, Césaire, and Damas were ????irst and foremost global philosophers, that is, thinkers of the plural and decentred world that the Bandung conference of 1955 had promised. Thus, their different perspectives converge as the task of thinking a humanism for our times based on (...) a non-imperial universal, a univer-sal of encounter and translation founded on equality. And, consequently, a socialism that is, in its different translations, a force of emancipation, but also of humanization and spiritualization of the earth. That task is still ours. (shrink)

This paper compares Leibniz’s statements about Islamic fatalism with the way in which the question has been debated in Islamic theology and philosophy, in particular by Indian philosopher Muhammad Iqbal. Speaking of destiny, Iqbal writes that it is “a word that has been so much misunderstood both in and outside the world of Islam”. He meant that, on the one hand, Muslims themselves have misconstrued the notion as a strong belief in absolute predestination while, on the other hand, non-Muslims have (...) mischaracterized Islam as a religion based on blind fanaticism stemming from a faith in an already written fate. Such a characterization was given philosophical dignity by Leibniz when, responding to the criticism that his philosophy inevitably led to necessity and fatalism, he insisted on establishing a distinction between what his doctrine did say about necessity and what it must not be mistaken for: Islamic fatalism, or fatum mahometanum. The author concludes on Iqbal’s philosophy of time as duration as the condition for an amor fati without fatalism. (shrink)

Claude Imbert often declares that the activity of philosophy now needs to be in line with the teachings of anthropology. In her book Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the very fact that the last course of the author of Phenomenology of Perception, questioning ‘The Possibility of Philosophy’, sketched out ‘the anthropological outline of an intellectual activity unburdened by any a priori’ [les contours anthropologiques d'un activité intellectuelle délestée de tout a priori] is considered by her as more evidence for such a necessity. My (...) contribution explores the meaning of Claude Imbert's affirmation that today the possibility of philosophy is deeply connected with anthropological knowledge. It will, in particular, confront such an affirmation with the debate among African philosophers, concerning the relationship between philosophical activity and ethnography. (shrink)

"Partant de ce fait que la philosophie africaine connaît aujourd'hui un important développement et fait l'objet de nombreuses publications, l'auteur examine le champ de questions et l'espace de débat que constitue l'activité philosophique en Afrique pour présenter ici à la fois un "précis" de cette activité et un exposé de ses propres réflexions sur les thèmes les plus importants autour desquels elle s'organise. L'on peut considérer en effet, constate-t-il, que pour l'essentiel quatre grandes questions constituent les enjeux majeurs de la (...) réflexion philosophique africaine : premièrement celle de l'ontologie en relation avec les religions et l'esthétique, deuxièmement celle du temps plus particulièrement de l'avenir et de la prospective, troisièmement celle de l'oralité et des implications de sa transcription/traduction, quatrièmement enfin celle, politique, des socialismes. Ces grandes questions posent aussi celle, fondamentale, et qui les traverse, des langues et de la traduction."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in the pluralistic world in which we now live, there cannot be an overarching and vertical universal (universel de surplomb) anymore: we have now to find paths, methods, towards what he called, by contrast, a “lateral universality” (universalité latérale). When we consider the human tongues in their de facto plurality, none of them being by essence the language of the universal, that of philosophy and logos, we can see that one meaning of what is called “lateral (...) universal” is translation. It could be said then, somehow, that, “translation is the language of languages” as the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o wrote. The significance of translation as a method or path towards the “lateral universal” is the notion to be explored in this contribution. (shrink)

At a moment of renewed interest in Bergson's philosophy, this book, by a major figure in both French and African philosophy, gives an expanded idea of the political ramifications of Bergson's thought in a postcolonial context.

Nadia Yala Kisukidi : Le titre de cet entretien reprend celui d’une communication que vous avez donnée à l’Université de Genève en juin 2012. Comme vous l’aviez indiqué alors, l’expression est tirée d’un texte de Léopold Sédar Senghor lui-même daté du 31 Décembre 1963 intitulé Hommage à Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [Senghor 1993, pp. 9-13], dont voici l’extrait : « Pendant des années, j’ai cherché Dieu dans l’œuvre immense des deux penseurs [il s’agit de Marx et Engels]. En vain. Et (...) pourtant je... (shrink)

The utopia we are dealing with here could have been called ‘the mother of all utopias’ since it is in fact humanity's greatest, most primal dream, indeed the one that defines us as human. This great utopia, from which are woven our representations of paradise, for example, is immortality, the theme of René Barjavel's novel entitled The Immortals (1973).

Haydon White’s Metahistory interprets representations of history as inherently reflecting historians’ subjectivity. That is, the modes in which historians represent history are significantly determined and grounded by their ideological commitments. In this article, I offer a metahistorical analysis of the modes of doing history undertaken by the African Islamic intellectual historians Ousmane Kane and Souleymane Bachir Diagne. I critically evaluate the consistency between the object of history as they assume it to be and the discourses they produce, (...) taking account of their ideologically grounded mode of realizing their chosen object of history. Taking the general object of history for the African intellectual to be the resistance of the colonial library, I argue that, in their pursuit of this object of history, Kane and Diagne fall short owing to their use of the Islamic library to assert the existence of an African intellectual history. (shrink)

Deux penseurs entrent en dialogue. Pour relever ensemble un même pari. Afin de dire symphoniquement le pourquoi et le comment de l'embrasement de la violence religieuse à l'échelle planétaire. Qu'en est-il du christianisme et de l'islam, de leurs théologies et de leurs histoires au regard de la philosophie, née en Grèce? La rencontre, nouée au Moyen Âge, est-elle devenue impossible aujourd'hui? Comment peut-on et doit-on philosopher en islam et en christianisme pour le bénéfice d'une mutuelle compréhension? Une religion sans philosophie (...) ne risque-t-elle pas l'irrationalisme jusqu'au fanatisme? Une philosophie sans religion ne risque-t-elle pas le rationalisme jusqu'à l'aveuglement? Pour lutter contre ces deux écueils et transcender l'affrontement des croyances, ces deux philosophes de renom et de la même génération, l'un catholique, l'autre musulman, Philippe Capelle-Dumont et Souleymane Bachir Diagne, nous font partager ici leur science, leur passion et leur appel à la paix, sous la houlette de Damien Le Guay, lui-même philosophe, attentif aux signes du temps présent. Un livre pour apprendre et enfin savoir. Un vibrant plaidoyer contre la tentation identitaire et conflictuelle. Un ouvrage salutaire à lire, à méditer et à transmettre."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The Militant Listener: Reading Mongane Wally Serote's Sikhahlel' u-OR alongside Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History In Sikhahlel' u-OR: A Praise Poem for Oliver Tambo, Mongane Wally Serote presents an unflinching yet delicate meandering through the questions, reflections and provocations resistance history offers up through O. R. Tambo's life. As Ciraj Rassool points out, in this work Tambo appears not as an individual, but as an integral node in a web connecting various lives.1 This counter-neoliberal interpretation of Tambo's (...) life offers what Michael Löwy calls 'a heterodox form of the narrative of emancipation' rebuilding the struggle hero narrative along a decentred framework.2 By radically dislodging this narrative, Tambo is portrayed as the 'non-iconic icon' he was esteemed to embody, and in this move, the poem, notably, points to the dearth of dialectic politics, both in our quotidian praxis, and the commemoration of others.3 Aptly, Serote's work contributes to what Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle describe as a 'total decentring of all thought, one that rejects all "centrisms" and highlights instead branchings and connections, transfers, analogies and reciprocal influences between cultural places and intellectual fields that may be distant but are not distinct in space and time'.4 To this end, the poem presents us with a constellation of historical actors who flicker on the horizon, beckoning us to engage in the labour of freedom. (shrink)

The circulation and entanglements of human beings, data, and goods have not necessarily and by themselves generated a universalising consciousness. The "global" and the "universal", in other words, are not the same. The idea of a world-society remains highly contested. Our times are marked by the fragmentation of a double relativistic character: the inevitable critique of Western universalism on the one hand, and resurgent identitarian and neo-nationalistic claims to identity on the other. Sources of an argumentation for a strong universalism (...) brought forward by Western traditions such as Christianity, Marxism, and Liberalism have largely lost their legitimation. All the while, manifold and situated narratives of a common world that re-address the universal are under way of being produced and gain significance. This volume tracks the development and relevance of such cultural and social practices that posit forms of what we call minor universality. It asks: Where and how do contemporary practices open up concrete settings so as to create experiences, reflections and agencies of a shared humanity? With contributions by Isaac Bazié, Anil Bhatti, Jean-Luc Chappey, Elsie Cohen, Leyla Dakhli, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Nicole Fischer, Albert Gouaffo, Stefan Helgesson, Fatma Hotait, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Christopher M. Hutton, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Mario Laarmann, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Olivier Remaud, Gisèle Sapiro, Bénédicte Savoy, Maria-Anna Schiffers, Laurens Schlicht, Sergio Ugalde, Hélène Thierard, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll. (shrink)

The present article is published in Proche-Orient Chrétien, N.66, VOL.3-4, JAN. 2017, USJ: Beirut, pp. 425-430. It is a philosophical review of Philippe Capelle-Dumont and Yannick Courtel book “Religion et Liberté” that fetches the records of the First International Symposium of the Francophone Society of Philosophy of Religion about the two concepts Religion and Freedom. On one hand, religion has always been considered as a pole of practices and references contrary to freedom declining a dependence on a "binding doctrine"; on (...) the other hand, religion has undergone several political representations in the many spaces of cultural, social and international life which is urgent to re-examine. The article proposes a synthesis of the conferences of Philippe Capelle-Dumont, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean Greisch, Joseph O’Leary, François Chenet, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Francis Jacques, Pierluigi Valenza, Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Yannick Courtel and Jean Grondin who concludes with the “freedom to philosophize about religion”. (shrink)

El impacto emocional de la interpretación de enlace atrae la atención de la investigación desde hace décadas (los procesos cognitivos que intervienen en la interpretación de lenguas, el estrés y las emociones en el desempeño de los intérpretes). En contextos de asilo árabe-español la investigación es aún escasa, lo que no hace justicia a la alta demanda que se vive en los servicios públicos de España y Europa. Este trabajo analiza los resultados de una encuesta anónima (8 ítems) que sondea (...) la precepción de 30 intérpretes árabe-español en contextos de asilo acerca del impacto emocional de su oficio. (shrink)

Les textes présentés dans ce volume sont ceux des conférences prononcées en séance plénière dans le cadre du XXVIe Congrès international de Philosophie de Langue Française , consacré, pour marquer le quatrième centenaire de la naissance de Descarte, au thème général « L’esprit cartésien », et organisé du 30 août au 3 septembre 1996, en Sorbonne et au Palais de l’UNESCO, par la Société Française de Philosophie.Le volume est complété par une version en langue française des contributions à un Hommage (...) international à Descartes, prononcées, dans leurs langues respectives, lors de la séance de clôture du Congrès.Un CD-Rom présentant la version intégrale des Actes du Congrès est joint à ce volume, dont il constitue le complément nécessaire. (shrink)