C'est au croisement des personnalités et des événements que se structure progressivement une culture stratégique. Qu'en est-il de celle de la France, nation bâtie "à coups d'épée"? Quelles expériences l'ont forgée, quelles philosophies la sous-tendent? Telles sont les questions fondamentales auxquelles répond cet ouvrage. Car la stratégie militaire française constitue un objet d'étude à la fois bien et mal connu. Connu puisqu'inscrit dans une histoire intimement liée à la construction d'une identité nationale et internationale dont on constate aujourd'hui encore sur (...) les champs de guerre toute la vivacité. Mal connu cependant lorsqu'il s'agit d'en examiner les fondements idéels et culturels. Cette méconnaissance est liée à la complexité même de toute stratégie. Loin d'être un simple art des moyens, elle produit des concepts, doctrines ou représentations de la guerre qui résultent d'expériences militaires spécifiques mais qui trouvent leurs racines dans des conditions philosophiques à l'oeuvre dans la construction de toute stratégie. La stratégie militaire française constitue un fascinant terrain d'étude : cette indispensable histoire philosophique de la pensée stratégique française — du XVIIIème siècle à nos jours — en est le reflet. Ce premier tome traite de la stratégie continentale. Un second tome à paraître traitera de la stratégie africaine. (shrink)

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965.

I. Sens du monisme Généalogie du terme et disparition ultérieure du « monisme ontologique » La critique formulée contre le monisme ontologique apparaît comme l’un des points majeurs constituant la grande originalité de L’essence de la manifestation, originalité qui se retrouve déjà dans la formation de l’expression en question (le syntagme « monisme ontologique »). Celle-ci semble ne pas avoir d’équivalent dans la tradition philosophique. Christian Wolff avait en premier élaboré ce terme (« m...

Le problème du temps chez Michel Henry n’a pas encore fait l’objet d’une étude séparée. Le rejet abrupt de cette question chez l’auteur n’a certainement pas favorisé l’intérêt des critiques pour ce sujet. Dans un premier temps, en 1963 dans L’Essence de la manifestation , Michel Henry considère le problème du temps (à travers le filtre du Kantbuch de Heidegger) comme étant le « même » que celui de la récepti­vité, soit en le renvoyant à l’auto-affection. Celle-ci étant comprise comme (...) opposée ou, mieux encore, comme « étrangère » au kantisme, en tant qu’elle est affection pathétique de soi à soi. Puis, en 2000, dans Incarnation , Michel Henry conteste au « flux temporel » des Leçons pour une conscience intime du temps de Husserl la volonté néantisante du moment présent, tout en l’utilisant subrepticement dans des moments clés de son argumentation ; il lui oppose le sens de l’ « apparaître » s’auto-fondant. Enfin, nous proposons de reprendre les concepts henryens d’ « effort » et de « pouvoir-toucher », présents dans la deuxième partie d’ Incarnation , pour penser une « origine de l’espacement » préalable à la pensée de la tempora­lité ek-statique comme à celle de l’espace. (shrink)

_Retraces the history of postmodern philosophy and proposes solutions to overcome its impasses._.

In recent decades, the analysis of phraseology has made use of the exploration of large corpora as a source of quantitative information about language. This paper intends to present the main lines of work in progress based on this empirical approach to linguistic analysis. In particular, we focus our attention on some problems relating to the morpho-syntactic annotation of corpora. The CORIS/CODIS corpus of contemporary written Italian, developed at CILTA – University of Bologna (Rossini Favretti 2000; Rossini Favretti, Tamburini, De (...) Santis in press), is a synchronic 100-million-word corpus and is being lemmatised and annotated with part-of-speech (POS) tags, in order to increase the quantity of information and improve data retrieval procedures (Tamburini 2000). The aim of POS tagging is to assign each lexical unit to the appropriate word class. Usually the set of tags is pre-established by the linguist, who uses his/her competence to identify the different word classes. The very first experiments we made revealed how the traditional part-of-speech distinctions in Italian (generally based on morphological and semantic criteria) are often inadequate to represent the syntactic features of words in context. It is worth noting that the uncertainties in categorisation contained in Italian grammars and dictionaries reflect a growing difficulty as they move from fundamental linguistic classes, such as nouns and verbs, to more complex classes, such as adverbs, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions. This latter class, that groups together elements traditionally used to express connections between sentences, appears inadequate when describing cohesive relations in Italian. This phenomenon actually seems to involve other elements traditionally assigned to different classes, such as adverbs, pronouns and interjections. Recent studies proposed the class of ‘connectives’, grouping all words that, apart from their traditional word class, have the function of connecting phrases and contributing to textual cohesion. From this point of view, conjunctions can be considered as part of phrasal connectives, that can in turn be included in the wider category of textual connectives. The aim of this study is to identify elements that can be included in the class of phrasal connectives, using quantitative methods. According to Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) observation that words are linked by dependent probabilities, corroborated by Halliday’s (1991) argument that the grammatical “system” (in Firth’s sense of the term) is essentially probabilistic, quantitative data are introduced in order to provide evidence of relative frequencies. Section 2 presents a description of word-class categorisation from the point of view of grammars and dictionaries arguing that the traditional category of conjunctions is inadequate for capturing the notion of phrasal connective. Section 3 examines the notion of ‘connective’ and suggests a truth-function interpretation of connective behaviour. Section 4 describes the quantitative methods proposed for analysing the distributional properties of lexical units, and section 5 comments on the results obtained by applying such methods drawing some provisional conclusions. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to provide an overview of New Realism in its opposition and reaction to Postmodernism. An analysis of the implications of both philosophical approaches in diverse fields will be offered, from epistemology, to politics, to ethics. Ethical new realism is presented as particularly promising and important to the future of philosophy.

For the past thirty years postmodernism has been the major philosophical trend. Starting as a potentially emancipatory tool, though, it has virtually resolved into an acceptance of any kind of position, in the name of a very politically correct relativism. The aim of this essay is to provide an overview of New Realism in its opposition and reaction to Postmodernism, showing that it does not imply a return to a ‘traditional’ or ‘strong’ realism but that, on the contrary, it involves (...) a kind of ‘weak realism’: a blend between realism and constructivism. An analysis of the implications of both philosophical approaches in diverse fields will be offered, from epistemology, to politics, to ethics. Where postmodern epistemological claims will be proved to be quite easily confutable, its ethical implications will be faced more carefully. Ethical new realism will, therefore, be presented as particularly challenging, but also promising and important to the future of philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to analyse a passage of the pseudoepigraphic Carmen de resurrectione which relates to insipientes, interpreted as those who do not accept that the rational observation of nature proves the existence of a unique creator God. Such a refusal is believed to make them worthy of eternal damnation. The resulting concept of sapientia involves both ratio and voluntas; it is also connected with gnoseology and soteriology. A similar concept can be found in the Aquitanian poetry (...) of the fifth century and in the theology of the so-called Semipelagians. This similarity calls into question the traditional dating and the supposed area of origin of the Carmen. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to determine the historical and cultural context of the pseudoepigraphic Carmen de resurrectione. The Carmen treats poetically many subjects of Christian eschatology: the second coming of Christ, the final judgement, heaven and hell, the universal conflagration. The author believes that the end time is imminent. This perception is common to all the Christians who experienced tribulations: persecutions, natural calamities, barbarian invasions. These painful events urged the Christians to undertake a path of true conversion, in (...) the religious and moral sense. Unlike other poets, the Anonymous author emphasises the virtuous value of the hope of divine reward rather than the fear of divine punishment. The same perspective can be found in the poets and in the monks of early fifth-century Gaul, who suffered the barbarian invasion of 406. (shrink)

The central concern of this book is to demonstrate how Puritanism was a theme which ran through all Green's biography and political philosophy. It thereby reveals how Green’s connections with Evangelicalism and his known affinities with religious dissent came from his way of conceiving Puritanism. In Green’s eyes, its anti-formalist viewpoint made Puritanism the most suitable tool for avoiding the drawbacks of democracy. The key objective of the book is to illustrate how the philosophy elaborated by Green aimed to encapsulate (...) the best of Puritanism whilst eschewing the dangerous abstractions of both Puritan philosophy and German idealism. It follows that Green’s conception of positive and negative freedom, and his vision of political obligation, stemmed from his effort to revive the Puritan heritage rather than from an ambiguous flirtation with idealism. The book purports to show how the influence of Puritanism in Green’s political thought is an element which can help to integrate the literature in the area, contributing to a better comprehension of a philosopher who, despite being unanimously considered as the founder of the so-called Oxford idealist school, had a very difficult and sometimes obscure connection with idealism. It has been widely argued that Green’s relationship with idealism seemed to be infected by a religious germ which, because it was unrelated to German idealism, gave it a bad taste. This study aims to encourage further investigation into the nature and propagation of that germ in the British idealist School. (shrink)