The exchange between the philosopher Pierre Maine de Biran and the psychiatrist Antoine-Athanase Royer-Collard has been read either as an exemplary case of the influence of philosophy on medicine o...

v. 1. La pensée et l'être. Vérité et activité de juger. Philosophie et religion. Philosophie et sciences. Questions historiques.--v. 2. Instruction et éducation. Le civisme suisse, sa nature et son idéal. Philosophie chrétienne.

The contemporary debate between religion and science has its roots in seventeenth century debates on the implications of the new sciences. While Hobbes’ materialism rests on the implications of the new physics, Descartes’ spiritualism focuses on the radically new character of scientific thinking itself. Two opposed conceptions of God, externalist and internalist, correspond to these trends. Kant reconciles Descartes focus on free subjectivity with materialist determinism by regarding the latter as a pragmatically useful construction of subjectivity itself. For Descartes, (...) Kant, and Sartre, science itself rests on human cooperation in an endless pursuit of an ideal of divine perfection. (shrink)

Henri Bergson (1859–1940), the most prominent member of nineteenth-century French spiritualism, is the first philosopher who explicitly defined philosophy as a practice which consists in posing problems anew and in creating concepts. In this article, I will try to reconstruct the progressive importance acquired by the terms ‘problem’ and ‘concept’ in nineteenth-century French philosophy and how they combined in Bergson’s theories about creativity, invention and novelty. I will argue that Bergson’s conception of philosophy as a creative (...) intellectual practice was the result of a negotiation, inside a pre-existent spiritualist framework, between, on the one hand, neo-Kantianism and, on the other hand, evolutionism which strongly influenced empirical psychology and the emerging social sciences. Bergson’s solution, influenced by the evolution of mathematics and literary theory, was just one of the possible options, and the main alternative to a new form of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Like other philosophical traditions, what we call French spiritualism is a complicated constellation of thinkers who developed partially divergent answers to shared themes or concerns. In order to avoid easy generalizations and artificial labels, this article aims to explore the many-voiced character of this tradition by focusing on a debate on the notion of ‘liberté morale’ that took place in 1903 at the Société française de philosophie. Given the number and the calibre of the participants, as well as (...) the centrality of the discussed notion, this episode sets the perfect stage for an in-situ assessment of the inner fault lines underlying any superficial unity in the French spiritualist tradition. (shrink)

Of the many literary forms philosophy has taken, the survey is undoubtedly among the least likely to elicit excitement. Understood as the enumeration and summary of a series of positions, one could...

Focusing on the reception of Maine de Biran by Alexis Bertrand in his thesis, L’aperception du corps humain par la conscience (1880), I will demonstrate how the “corps propre” (one’s own body) becomes a key concept in order to re-orientate the French spiritualist movement. To do so, Bertrand’s neo-Biranism uses a new methodology with phenomenological issues. The image of the body, the primitive space or the engagement within the world becomes new research themes for spiritualism. His interpretation of Biran’s (...) philosophy leads him to criticize mechanistic epistemology, and especially the concept of reflex. In this context, Bertrand proposes an animist metaphysics, aiming to reconcile his Biranism with the advances of science. As a consequence, the history of the concept of one’s own body must take into account metaphysical perspectives and not only scientific and experimental researches. (shrink)

This volume contains three of Conan Doyle's shorter Spiritualist works, one a record of family seances and the other two in defence of the evidence for the religion.

This article examines the cameraless negatives revealing the imprints of four fingers obtained in Turin in February 1907 during the second of two séances with renowned medium Eusapia Palladino organized by physiologists Alberto Aggazzotti, Carlo Foà and Amedeo Hertlizka. By looking at the material and performative components of the séance, it presents spiritualist cameraless photography as a productive tool for rethinking and reframing the photographic medium from a cross-disciplinary perspective questioning medium specific histories and dominant genealogies.

This paper studies Francisque Bouillier’s contribution to cousinian Spiritualism, from his first text on the History of Cartesian Philosophy from 1839 to the publication of Du principe vital et de l’âme pensante, a work which was likewise considerably amended as a result of the polemics it gave rise to. The paper is concerned with the reception of Leibniz in a double sense. In a positive sense, Bouillier managed to reintegrate in the caricature of the Cartesian soul conceived by (...) the Cousinians, a force that was criticized by the latter. In a negative sense to the extent that, for Bouillier, the direct re-appropriation of Leibniz’s dynamic ontology was impossible without completely breaking with Cousin himself. Hence, Bouillier’s reception of Leibniz took the form of a progressive suppression of a monadological tendency in favor of a rehabilitation of a theory of minute perceptions. The primacy of the interior sense that results from this allowed him to construct a Descar.. (shrink)

Spiritualism designates a philosophy that lays claim to the separation of mind and body and the ontological and epistemological primacy of the former. In France, it is associated with the names of Victor Cousin and René Descartes, or more precisely with what Cousin made of Descartes as the founding father of a brittle rational psychology, closed off from the positive sciences, and as a critic in respect to the empiricist legacy of the idéologues. Moreover, by considering merely the (...) end result, severed from its polemical genesis, we are prevented from understanding how the category of experience constituted a crucial question for spiritualism itself. Through returning to the origin of these discussions in the 1826 preface to Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques, this essay pursues a threefold path: to show that the public birth of Cousinian spiritualism coincides with the affirmation of applying the experimental method, issuing from Bacon, to the study of facts of consciousness; that Cousin’s later evolution follows a process of radicalization—that is, in this context, of ontologization and of reduction; and that by recovering this genesis, we can distinguish many forms of spiritualisms committed to the experimental method, both in alliance with the early Cousin and against the later Cousin. In this way, we can rediscover the interwoven philosophical links, lost in the process of institutionalization, between metaphysical demands and empiricist concerns, or between “French” philosophy and the legacy of Condillac. (shrink)

This paper traces how the dualism of body and soul, cosmic and human, is bridged in philosophical and religious traditions through appeal to the notion of ‘breath’ (πνεῦμα). It pursues this project by way of a genealogy of pneumatic cosmology and anthropology, covering a wide range of sources, including the Pythagoreans of the fifth century BCE (in particular, Philolaus of Croton); the Stoics of the third and second centuries BCE (especially Posidonius); the Jews writing in Hellenistic Alexandria in the first (...) century BCE (Philo); and the Christians of the first century CE (the gospel writers and Paul). Starting from the early Pythagoreans, ‘breath’ and ‘breathing’ function to draw analogies between cosmogony and anthropogony – a notion ultimately rejected by Plato in the Timaeus and Aristotle in his cosmological works, but taken up by the Posidonius (perhaps following the early Stoa) and expanded into a rich and challenging corporeal metaphysics. Similarly, the Post-Hellenistic philosopher and biblical exegete Philo of Alexandria, who was deeply influenced by both Platonist and Stoic physics, approaches the cosmogony and anthropogony described in Genesis (1:1–3 and 1:7) through Platonist-Stoic philosophy, in his attempt to provide a philosophically rigorous explanation for why Moses employed certain terms or phrases when writing his book of creation. Finally, the chapter sees a determined shift in the direction of rejecting pneumatic cosmology for a revised pneumatic anthropogony in the writings of the New Testament: by appeal to the ‘Holy Spirit’ or ‘Holy Breath’ (πνεῦμα ἅγιον), early Christians effectively adapted the Stoic metaphysics of ‘breath’, with its notions of divine intelligence and bonding, to the prophetic and ecclesiastical project of building a Christian community conceived of as the ‘body of Christ’. Hence, the spiritual cosmogony of the Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Philo is effectively subordinated to the spiritual anthropogony that facilitates the construction of the Christian kosmopolis, only fully realised in the form of New Jerusalem, the ‘bride’ which, in tandem with the Holy Spirit, calls to the anointed. At the end of the Christian worldview, the kosmos of Greek philosophy is supplanted by the pneumatic kosmopolis. (shrink)

The integration of the ‘experimental method’ into the field of psychology in nineteenth-century France was fostered by the work of Théodule Ribot and his attempt to found a scientific, non-metaphysical psychology. In this respect, the birth of French scientific psychology seems to amount to a rejection of the longstanding paradigms in French spiritualism. Ribot was vocally opposed to spiritualism, and was concerned to ground psychology in the natural sciences. However, this article brings to light common ground underlying, and (...) interactions between, his work and that of the French spiritualists. In so doing, the aim is not only to investigate some little known sources of Ribot’s thought, but also to foster reconsideration of spiritualism as a philosophical doctrine. Through the comparison with Ribot, spiritualism appears as a composite doctrine, able to promote crucial epistemological revolutions (such as the birth of scientific psychology) and to relate metaphysical assumptions to empirical and experimental observations. (shrink)

Volume 28, Issue 5, September 2020, Page 944-965.

With respect to the several giants of post-Kantian German philosophy – Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche – developments elsewhere in Europe have often seemed to pale into insignific...

"I...brought out my wife to see this silhouette... made on the clean concrete by the oil dropping out of the engine... and we all remarked that this was 'the Christ'." But when the newspapers took their pictures, Mr. Baillie remarked it was a pity that the picture had not been taken the day before, when it had been so perfect.--R. F. T.

This article is a reflection on the relation between two currents of classical philosophy, postkantian idealism and cartesian spiritualism, as they are found in the work of J. Lachelier. It studies why it was expected that postkantian idealism would bring strong evidence in support of the spiritualist affirmations, even though the kantian critique placed the method that traditionaly justified those affirmations in a state of crisis, and even though ideas as important as those of an afterlife and of (...) a transcendant God where excluded from this new system and taken over by religious belief. However, the analysis of the concept of idealism invites us to think that, even as beliefs, such ideas will always remain redhibitory for a system that begins with the negation of anything beyond thought. (shrink)

This study takes as its starting point CousinCousin, Victor’s HegelianHegelianism-sounding claim in his 1828 lectures that the history of philosophy is identical to philosophy itself—and it does so in order to interrogate the various resemblances and divergences between CousinCousin, Victor and Hegel when it comes to determining the relationship between philosophy and the history of philosophy. In particular, the study investigates the difference between the “official” position CousinCousin, Victor takes up in 1833 in which spiritualistSpiritualism (...) class='Hi'>philosophy grounds eclectic history of philosophy and his earlier more experimental and provisional positions, which map roughly onto Hegel’s own various ways of articulating the philosophy-history of philosophy relationship. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introductory Remarks: Not a “Philosopher of Science” “Positive Metaphysics” “Confrontation” Bergson's Epistemology and Philosophy of Science.

When the moon is in the Seventh HouseAnd Jupiter aligns with MarsThen peace will guide the planetsAnd love will steer the starsThis is the dawning of the age of Aquarius–‘The Age of Aquarius’, 5th...

Despite his commitment to universal explicability, a case can be made that Hegel is better labelled an idealist than a naturalist. As an analysis of his three syllogisms of philosophy reveals, he strictly differentiates between the domains of nature and Geist, suggesting in sequence that Geist replaces nature, Geist comprehends nature and that Geist and nature are comprehended as forms of the metaphysical idea and determine and mediate each other. Since Hegel grounds his accounts of the metaphysical idea and (...) its forms nature and Geist in concept-metaphysics and these include a supernatural notion of undetermined, self-positing universality, Hegel’s entire ontological edifice is ultimately supernatural. This stands in stark contrast to the metaphysics of naturalism, which are based on categories Hegel associates with the logics of being and essence or which fail to sufficiently emancipate universality from its immediate connection to particularity. (shrink)

Calligraphy has been used to preserve significant writings and texts in a beautiful form and to make the different styles of writing enjoyable. It is not only the art of beautiful handwriting but also a cultural heritage and tradition that reflects the culture and history of a society, a race, a nation, and a country. Hence, it has very great educational value. In China calligraphy is done with a brush, which was a common writing implement in ancient times. In addition (...) to its utilitarian function, calligraphy is the most fundamental element in other types of art, such as painting and seal-carving, and is closely connected to many subject disciplines, such as literature, history, and philosophy. Brush calligraphy .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aestheticism and SpiritualismA Narrative Study of the Exploration of Self through the Practice of Chinese CalligraphyMing-Tak Hue (bio)IntroductionCalligraphy has been used to preserve significant writings and texts in a beautiful form and to make the different styles of writing enjoyable. It is not only the art of beautiful handwriting but also a cultural heritage and tradition that reflects the culture and history of a society, a race, a nation, (...) and a country. Hence, it has very great educational value. In China calligraphy is done with a brush, which was a common writing implement in ancient times. In addition to its utilitarian function, calligraphy is the most fundamental element in other types of art, such as painting and seal-carving, and is closely connected to many subject disciplines, such as literature, history, and philosophy. Brush calligraphy is still popular in Chinese society and is frequently used in different forms of publication, such as banners and newspapers; however, it is becoming more popular for these publications to be created mechanically or in electronic form with computers rather than by hand. In the context of schooling, a similar phenomenon can be seen. Many teachers in Hong Kong, as elsewhere, are concerned that fewer and fewer students have the chance to write with a pen and enjoy the beauty of writing, as the use of computers and different types of electronic devices for writing become more popular with the general public.The aim of this article is to examine the meaning of the practice of Chinese calligraphy from a cultural perspective and to draw school practitioners' attention to the importance of calligraphy education in the promotion of the whole-person growth of students and of multicultural education. Relevant literature on Western and Chinese calligraphy will be reviewed. Then an explanation will be given on how a narrative approach to the personal experience method and textual analysis were adopted for the data analysis. The article argues that calligraphy serves more than a utilitarian function. It [End Page 18] has also been used as an aesthetic practice and spiritual discipline. Hence, it is suggested that the calligraphy of brushwork is not only delightful to the eye but also an inspiration to the spirit. It is a practice of mindfulness for promoting self-reflection and self-cultivation, which leads calligraphy practitioners to reflect in their mind and heart, and so brings them into a harmonious relationship with others and the natural world.Literature ReviewIn Western societies for the last one hundred years, calligraphy has been rediscovered and relearned.1 Knight pointed out that the heritage and traditions of calligraphy have not been properly addressed and inherited in Western societies. Uyehara further suggested that calligraphy had been basically restudied and relearned in Europe and the United States up until the end of World War II. Edward Johnston (1872-1944) could be the most influential scholar who attempted to rediscover the art of Western calligraphy, lettering, and illuminating. In his study of ancient inscriptions and old manuscripts, three essential qualities of calligraphy were identified: "legibility," "beauty," and "character."2 When creating a piece of artwork, calligraphers have to ensure the legibility of the letter forms, the mastery of the skills of creating beautiful writing, and the readability of their works. As he explained,To make good letters and to arrange them well. To make good letters is not necessarily to "design" them—they have been designed long ago—but it is to take the best letters we can find, and to acquire them and make them our own. To arrange letters well requires no great art, but it requires a working knowledge of letter-forms and of the reasonable methods of grouping these forms to suit every circumstance.3Similarly, Knight highlighted the essential qualities of "legibility" and "beauty." Further, he stressed that the "creativity" of calligraphy should be imposed upon the tradition and cultural heritage of ancient manuscripts. As he said,[M]any of the conventions we use today in letter design and typography were established during the manuscript age. To know the classic work of this period is to know more about the ground we stand upon. If we grasp the... (shrink)

is it possible to have a first-person experience of our own agency? In nineteenth-century France, this question was subject to intense philosophical debate. The two figures primarily associated with each side of the debate were Maine de Biran and Charles Renouvier. Biran developed powerful objections to Hume's arguments that purported to prove the impossibility of the experience of one's inner causal force. These objections were the match that lit this philosophical fire, and formed the foundation of the philosophy of (...) the French spiritualist school; a school that included Félix Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier, Émile Boutroux, and Henri Bergson.1... (shrink)

This book is a rediscovery and examination of the thinking of Vasile Băncilă, a philosopher forbidden by the totalitarian regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu. The philosopher Lucian Blaga saw Băncilă as a threat to the spirit of the highest Romanian culture. It is estimated that Băncilă's work extends to 32 volumes, 17 of which have been published so far. With such a significant opus, Vasile Băncilă is, indisputably, a key figure in contemporary Romanian culture, particularly in the sphere of philosophy. (...) The book has eleven chapters and is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the hermeneutics of the author's youthful works. His reflections on the purpose of philosophy for life are important, about the role of this discipline in the education of adolescents and students, the relationship between irony and education, his thoughts of one of the greatest Romanian poets, Mihai Eminescu, and the philosophy of Descartes and of Schopenhauer. In the second part, the book looks at Băncilă's aim of structuring a possible system of philosophy; more precisely, an ethnic-spiritualist metaphysics which, when it was elaborated, contradicted the official ideology of the totalitarian regime. Finally, the book covers the philosopher's work, analysing step-by-step the relation between the part and the whole (pars pro toto), as well as between existence and metaphysics, and the philosopher's conclusions about Romanian existence. (shrink)

There is a paradox in the fate of nineteenth-century French philosophy: the ‘eclecticism' or ‘spiritualism' that was university philosophy, championed by Victor Cousin – ‘the king of the philosophe...

: In the context of nineteenth-century philosophical reflection, Francesco Bonatelli set himself the following goal: to defend the pillars of Spiritualism and ontology through an careful examination of psychic contents and consciousness, while closely contesting both the psychology and the psychophysiology of Positivism and Spiritualism itself, La coscienza e il meccanesimo interiore and Percezione e pensiero Bonatelli puts forward his “critical experience-grounded philosophy” and proposes an original solution to the problem of the nature of the subject, consciousness (...) and its unity, using an analysis of “sentiments” to reveal the inseparable tangle of the cognitive and ontological dimensions of the self. Keywords : Positivism; Consciousness; Self-consciousness; Actus essendi ; Substance; Gnoseology Francesco Bonatelli: un approccio critico alla coscienza e al soggetto umano tra spiritualismo e positivismo Riassunto : Nel contesto della riflessione filosofica dell’Ottocento, Francesco Bonatelli scelse come proprio ufficio la difesa dei capisaldi dello spiritualismo e dell’ontologia, mediante un attento esame dei contenuti psichici e della coscienza stessa, in un serrato confronto con la psicologia e psicofisiologia del positivismo e con lo spiritualismo stesso. In opere come Pensiero e conoscenza, La coscienza e il meccanesimo interiore e Percezione e pensiero, Bonatelli espose la propria “filosofia critica a base sperimentale” e propose una soluzione originale al problema della natura del soggetto, della coscienza e della sua unità, mostrando come nell’analisi dei sentimenti si riveli l’inscindibile intreccio delle due dimensioni, cognitiva e ontologica, dell’io. Parole chiave : Positivismo; Coscienza; Autocoscienza; Actus essendi ; Sostanza; Gnoseologia. (shrink)