Philosophie et sciences: voila un theme difficile, central, de notre temps, ou il est necessairement question de son sens. C'est ce sens qu'interrogent, d'une facon a la fois historique et problematique, les essais du present volume. J. Merleau-Ponty questionne les rapports entre sciences et vulgarisation scientifique. J. Ladriere pose le probleme de La normativite de la pensee scientifique. J. Lambert met en evidence le probleme du Livre de la Nature chez Galilee et Kepler. P. Kerszberg confronte les structures internes de (...) la philosophie critique kantienne et de la theorie de la relativite sur la question cosmologique. M. Richir analyse L'illusion transcendantale dans la theorie cantorienne des ensembles. B. d'Espagnat et G. Hottois evoquent le problemes des rapports difficiles, aujourd'hui, entre science et philosophie. (shrink)

Les malentendus qui ont pu exister à propos des rapports entre science et théologie ont été dissipés depuis longtemps déjà grâce au travail de critique épistémologique qui a été accompli tant du côté de la science que du côté de la théologie. Non seulement il est reconnu qu’il n’y a aucune incompatibilité entre science et théologie, mais on peut dire que ces deux disciplines se reconnaissent mutuellement comme dimensions authentiques de la vie de l’esprit. Mais il y a un vœu (...) d’unité qui souhaite la recherche, au-delà de la simple coexistence, d’une compréhension mutuelle, et donc du dialogue. La question des rapports entre science et théologie peut être posée comme question du dialogue entre ces deux dimensions de l’esprit. Le texte que voici s’interroge essentiellement sur les conditions de possibilité d’un tel dialogue. Pour qu’il y ait dialogue il faut une instance médiatrice. On suggère ici que ce pourrait être l’idée de rationalité. L’argumentation en faveur de cette hypothèse s’accompagne d’une mise en évidence de la différence fondamentale qui sépare science et théologie, interprétée comme différence entre le constitué et l’événementiel. La différence étant ainsi reconnue, on peut analyser la rencontre entre science et théologie en trois moments : la compréhension mutuelle , les emprunts conceptuels , et enfin la complémentarité. (shrink)

L'originalite du present recueil reside surtout dans le fait qu'il reflete dans toute sa diversite le champ mondial de l'attention philosophique au langage. Au lieu de se confiner dans un territoire particulier - que ce soit celui de l'hermeneutique allemande ou celui de l'analytisme anglo-saxon par exemple - il s'offre, tout au contraire, comme espace de confrontation authentiquement philosophique (et non de debat technique a l'interieur d'une ecole ou d'une tendance) dans lequel des pensees des langages se cotoient et se (...) rencontrent venues des horizons les plus heterogenes (informatique, theologique, hermeneutique, analytique, pragmatique, ideologique,...). Cette riche diversite manifeste aussi l'extraordinaire interet de la pensee contemporaine pour le langage, interet qui fonde peut-etre la veritable specificite de la philosophie du XXe siecle. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Should we regard Jennifer Lackey’s ‘Creationist Teacher’ as understanding evolution, even though she does not, given her religious convictions, believe its central claims? We think this question raises a range of important and unexplored questions about the relationship between understanding, factivity and belief. Our aim will be to diagnose this case in a principled way, and in doing so, to make some progress toward appreciating what objectual understanding—i.e., understanding a subject matter or body of information—demands of us. Here is the (...) plan. After some ground clearing in §1, §2 outlines and motivates a plausible working model—moderate factivity—for characterising the sense in which objectual understanding should be regarded as factive. §3 shows how the datum that we can understand false theories can, despite initial suggestions to the contrary, be assimilated straightforwardly within the moderate factivity model. §4 highlights how the inverse kind of case to that explored in §3—viz., a variant of Lackey’s creationist teacher case—poses special problems for moderate factivity. With reference to recent work on moral understanding by Hills, §5 proposes a solution to the problem, and §6 attempts to diagnose why it is that we might originally have been led to draw the wrong conclusion. (shrink)

Protagoras, of all the ancient philosophers, has perhaps attracted the most interest in modern times. His saying ‘Man is the measure of all things’ caused Schiller to adopt him as the patron of the Oxford pragmatists, and has generally earned him the title of the first humanist. Yet the exact delineation of his philosophcal position remains a baffling task. Neumann, writing on Die Problematik des ‘Homo-mensura’ Satzes in 1938,2 concludes that no certainty whatever can be reached on the meaning of (...) the dictum, since ‘man’, ‘measure’, and ‘things’ are all ambiguous, nor can we tell which of the three is the predicate. The time is past when it was believed that a man's philosophy could be understood apart from the events of his life and the circumstances of his age: yet in the case of Protagoras the historical method of approach has hardly been attempted, although the impact of environment was perhaps more decisive in the formation of philosophical concepts in the Greek world than anywhere else. The reality about which the Greek philosopher spoke had three aspects: it was either the one universe of physics, or the political unity, or God. For example, the book of Heracleitus Περ φσεως was divided into three chapters or logoi, About the Whole, a political, and a theological. Neither physics nor theology supplies from its own subject-matter the form in which this reality was described. (shrink)

In this article I try to refute the so-called "libertarian" theory of free will, and to examine how our conclusion ought to modify our common attitudes of praise and blame. In attacking the libertarian view, I shall try to show that it cannot be consistently stated. That is, my dscussion will be an "analytic-philosophic" one. I shall neglect what I think is in practice an equally powerful method of attack on the libertarian: a challenge to state his theory in such (...) a way that it will fit in the modern biology and psychology, which are becoming increasingly physicalistic. (shrink)