The article is dedicated to an unexplored subject in the history of spiritualism in the 19th century and considers two of its prominent representatives – the famous French spiritualist Felix Ravais­son (1813–1900) and the Swiss thinker Charles Secrétan (1815–1895). The author uses not only biographical material, but also such unstudied documents as Secretan’s article on the philosophy of Ravaisson and his letter to him, accidentally discovered by Ch. Devivaise in Ch. Renouvier’s archive. The author shows that the dependence (...) of both philosophers on Schelling was not so much the direct influence of the German philosopher on their thought as an internal relationship with his thought. The article shows that Ravaisson’s emphasis on the aesthetic component of understanding the world as the self-development of the spirit contrasts with the moral optics of Secrétan’s meta­physics. In addition, the philosophy of Ravaisson was formed on the basis of the Christianly rethought metaphysics of Aristotle, while the philosophy of Secrétan has as its starting point the moral and religious thought of Kant. However, the pathos of the universal striving for the best, the highest, the excellent on the path of sacrificial service and self-giving indissolubly unites these spiritualist philosophers. In the Appendix to the article, the author gives a translation of the men­tioned letter of Secrétan to Ravaisson. (shrink)

The article focuses on the Philosophy of Freedom of the Swiss philosopher Charles Secrétan (1815-1895) and on the attempt to reconcile freedom as the fundamental experience for the human being with the alleged necessitarianism that would result from the positive sciences. The notion of “fall” as it is found in the Christian tradition allows Secrétan to rediscover an original dimension from which we can conceive the laws of nature as contingent. It is space and time that impose (...) their constraints and lead to the mismatch between the different faculties (sensitivity, imagination, intelligence, will) that is constitutive for the human experience and that prevents us from “being at any moment the whole of ourselves”. A peculiarity of Secrétan’s conception of space is that he does not see it as a condition for the numerical plurality of human beings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 77 as indicated, makes a highly convincing case, if not for his thesis, at least for his approach. We need more such research. The history of philosophy must be more than the history of philosophies. But is a method which excludes subjective elements and treats ideologies only in function of material factors really total? Refusing to admit the "idealistic" notion of a kind of freedom, of (...) human self-possession, independent not of history (of which it is a part) but of historical determinism, the materialist is driven into rationalizations as baroque as those of the idealist he fights. The substantial uses of the materialist approach, which S~ve makes clear, have been too much ignored; and ideological interpretations tend, as he says, to confuse issues too uncomfortable to face. But materialism too has its ideological confusions which cannot be discerned by autocriticism alone. For who is to see whether the tree continues to be when there's no one about in the quad? EUGEN WEBER University of California, Los Angeles THE PHILOSOPHYOF CHARLES SECRETAN 1815.1895 The philosophy of Seer&an is still important. It best illustrates the nature of the thought of Romanic French-speaking Switzerland in its perpetual attempt to keep up-to-date and to combine science (as exact knowledge) with religion (that is, Christianity). To this day Romanic Swiss thought is a strange mixture of science, speculation, civics, democracy, pedagogics, and traditional Christianity. We find all these elements in Charles Secr6tan, but his thought is also important when taken by itself. Moreover, it illustrates what some scholars call the spiritual greatness of the nineteenth century. Charles Secr6tan was born in 1815 at Lausanne. As a child he was precocious. At the age of four he read short stories fluently. In his youth he was fond of books and had a vivid sense of the beauty of nature. His father was a magistrate tending to Voltairian skepticism. His mother was a devout woman but very reserved and of few words. Charles studied law at the Academy (University) of his city. He came to accept the political liberalism of that day but also underwent the influence of the current religious Rdveil. This was an individualistic awakening of personal Christianity in opposition to the dead orthodoxy and church-conformity of the previous century. In other words, Secrdtan came to believe that adherence to a religion should involve something personally felt, rather than a mere following of the mores of the community. Between 1835 and 1840, he spent some semesters in Munich, studying under Schelling. Later he was to insist upon the originality of his philosophy and its independence of that of his early teacher. In 1837, Seer&an founded the Swiss Review. The next year he was called to teach 78 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Philosophy at the Lausanne Academy. He was suspended by the radical revolution (a sort of demagogery) of 1845. In 1850 he was called to Neuch~ttel and in 1866 recalled to Lausanne where he died in 1895--exactly eighty years old. In the Lausanne Academy, Secr6tan had as a colleague his old friend Alexander Vinet (1797-1847). He found in Vinet a religious force which uplifted his spirit. Vinet was a literary critic, a poet and a professor of the art of preaching, while Secr6tan was a philosopher. Yet Secr6tan owed to Vinet the conviction that no religious doctrine is worthy of acceptance unless it possesses a moral value in itself and in relation to man. The philosophical career of Secr6tan is characterized by three distinct stages (metaphysical, ethical, and sociological) each of which finds expression in an important work: La Philosophie de la Libertd (1849), Le Principe de la Morale (1883), and La Civilisation et la Croyance (1887). We shall therefore consider most briefly Secr~tan's metaphysics, ethics, and sociology. Metaphysics. The starting point of Secr~tan is his contrast of the domain of the conscience (wherein we find being) with the domain of external experience (phenomena). "All our ideas of being come from the fact that [when we affirm something to be] we mean that this something [which is] is analogous to that which we think of when we say 'I am' " (Philosophie de... (shrink)

The article by the Swiss author, published in translation, vividly and expressively reveals the nature of the personality and work of Charles Secretan (1815–1895), an outstanding philosopher of Switzerland of the 19th century, in the historical context in which they developed. The author of the article convincingly shows the difficulty of unambiguous historical and philosophical characteristics of Secretan’s philosophy, which is based on the religious-metaphysical doctrine of freedom and moral obligation. Maurer approaches the coverage of Secretan’s philosophy, trying to (...) understand it not only as a result of certain philosophical and religious influences, but also as a reflection of “his time and his country”. The author of the article presents the evolution of Secretan's work as a departure from the speculative-deductive method of German idealists-systematists, characteristic of its first period, which is manifested in the Swiss philosopher’s appeal to the actual moral and socio-political problems of his time. Maurer’s article can be useful not only to specialists in the history of philosophy, but also to a wider circle of readers interested in the thought of the 19th century, without knowledge of which it is impossible to understand modern Western philosophy. (shrink)

From Hegel to Engels, Sartre and Ruyer (Ruyer, 1933), to name only a few, materialism is viewed as a necropolis, or the metaphysics befitting such an abode; many speak of matter’s crudeness, bruteness, coldness or stupidity. Science or scientism, on this view, reduces the living world to ‘dead matter’, ‘brutish’, ‘mechanical, lifeless matter’, thereby also stripping it of its freedom (Crocker, 1959). Materialism is often wrongly presented as ‘mechanistic materialism’ – with ‘Death of Nature’ echoes of de-humanization and hostility to (...) the Scientific Revolution (which knew nothing of materialism!), also a powerful Christian theme in Cudworth, Clarke and beyond (Overhoff, 2000). Here I challenge this view, building on some aspects of Israel’s Radical Enlightenment concept (Israel, 2001), which has been controversial but for my purposes is a useful claim about the dissemination of a home-grown Spinozism, sometimes reformulated as an ontology of the life sciences, an aspect Israel does not address (compare Secrétan et al., eds., 2007; Citton, 2006). First, I examine some ‘moments’ of radical Enlightenment materialism such as La Mettrie and Diderot (including his Encyclopédie entry “Spinosiste”), but also anonymous, clandestine texts such as L’Âme Matérielle, to emphasize their distinctive focus on the specific existence of organic beings. Second, I show how this ‘embodied’, non-mechanistic character of Enlightenment ‘vital materialism’ makes it different from other episodes, and perhaps more of an ethics than is usually thought (also via the figure of the materialist as ‘laughing philosopher’). Third, I reflect on what this implies for our image of the Enlightenment – no longer a Frankfurt School and/or Foucaldian vision of ‘discipline’, regimentation and order (as in Mayr, 1986) – but ‘vital’, without, conversely, being a kind of holist vitalism “at odds with the universalizing discourse of Encyclopedist materialism, with its insistence on the uniformity of nature and the universality of physical laws” (Williams, 2003): vital materialism is still materialism. Its ethics tends towards hedonism, but its most radical proponents (Diderot, La Mettrie and later Sade) disagree as to what this means. (shrink)

Excerpt from L'Énigme du Monde Et Sa Solution Selon Charles Secrétan Mème qui n'ont vu que son portrait, en gardent l'impression. Il était grand par la taille, par la vigueur, par l'activité corporelle. Il savait faire honneur à un bon repas et déguster les vins exquis du canton de Vaud il était fin gourmet, en mème temps que beau mangeur. N'allez pas croire cependant qu'il bornât son horizon aux plaisirs de la table. Il fut toute sa vie un (...) mar cheur intrépide, un admirateur passionné de la nature. Il avait soixante-dix-sept ans quand j'eus le privilège de lui servir de guide dans une course de montagne à douze cents mètres d'altitude. Il marchait avec une tranquille assu rance et semblait se baigner dans l'atmosphère des hauteurs. Il a raconté lui-mème quelques unes de ses plus belles promenades dans un petit livre intitulé Paysages Vaudois. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a theory of international politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on the justice (...) of a state's domestic institutions, and a principle of international distributive justice to establish a fair division of resources and wealth among persons situated in diverse national societies. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic caused university education to transition from face-to-face contacts to virtual learning environments. Young adults were forced to live an entirely new life online, without valuable and enjoyable social interaction. We examined subjective perspectives towards life online during the pandemic. We identified four viewpoints about life mediated by computers. Two viewpoints express “struggling”: Viewpoint 1 (Angry, Depressed and Overwhelmed), and Viewpoint 3 (Restricted to and Overwhelmed by Virtuality). A third feeling-state conveys experiences of “surviving”: Viewpoint 4 (Isolated and (...) Powerless in Convenience). Surprisingly, Viewpoint 2 is about “thriving” (Comfortable and Convenient Routine with Computers). The research shows that virtualization, confinement, and anxiety are taking a toll on the mental health of some members of the younger generation, while at the same time other members feel they are thriving in a situation of limited resources, virtuality, and reduced face-to-face human interaction. (shrink)

Updated, expanded, and with a new introduction by the editor, this volume is not only a historical overview but also a dialectical analysis displaying the ...

CONSIDERATIONS of public policy often focus on individual problematic situations in an ad hoc manner without discernment of their relations to each other, to the context within which they arose, or to the consequences that might ensue from alternative responses. Needed is a coherent set of clearly articulated principles which bring to political controversies of our time a unified perspective within which questions may be asked, discriminations made, relations perceived and priorities established. If a prime concern in seeking out such (...) principles is for the reformation of the republic so that it may be assured a healthy longevity, we should heed the counsel of Machiavelli's political realism urging us first to seek the revitalization of its originary principles. Insofar as a republic derives its ideational grounding from the developing Western tradition, we can do no better than begin by repairing to the fount of that tradition. Two key passages from Aristotle provide us with an appropriate point of departure. (shrink)

This paper deals with Lacan’s reading of The visible and the invisible in his seminal Les quatres concepts fundamentaux de la psychanalyse in order to study the terms in which he reconsiders the psychoanalytical conception of instinct or drive according to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the structure of sight.

Metaknowledge may not always facilitate acquisition of knowledge or performance of complex tasks. A pigeon, for example, depending on the task, can report what it is doing even if it cannot perform the task well, and it can fail to report what it is doing when it performs the task well (Shimp 1982; 1983).