Contrairement à d'autres revues représentées ici, Espaces Temps ne peut pas revendiquer le fait d'avoir participé jusqu'alors à la diffusion des travaux d'histoire des femmes ni celui d'avoir intégré dans sa réflexion sur les sciences sociales les apports de cette histoire. Pourtant l'identité de la revue, largement indiquée par son sous-titre « Réfléchir les sciences sociales », est marquée, dès sa création, par la volonté de ne pas séparer la réflexion épistémologique des recherches empiriq...

Le 20 mai 2005, Paul Ricœur nous quittait à l'âge de quatre-vingt-douze ans, après une traversée du siècle qu'il a fortement marqué. Il nous laisse une œuvre immense, véritable incitation/invitation au travail dont l'une des originalités aura été de conduire un dialogue constant de la philosophie avec son autre, notamment avec les sciences humaines. À l'heure des replis disciplinaires et des crispations institutionnelles, sa manière de faire dialoguer les savoirs semble plus nécessaire que jamais à. Le souci dont a fait (...) preuve Paul Ricœur pour éviter toute forme de rabattement, d'appauvrissement, est une leçon de méthode qui mérite d'être réfléchie. Par-delà le choc provoqué par sa disparition, les auteurs de ce livre montrent à quel point sa pensée est actuelle. Parvenant à vaincre les résistances disciplinaires, Ricœur a largement contribué à la réalisation du basculement interprétatif général que connaissent les sciences humaines. Cette ouverture vers un nouvel espace dialogique assurant une véritable humanisation des sciences humaines. Elle rend possible, au-delà des problèmes méthodologiques, le questionnement récent de celles-ci sur l'énigme jamais résolue de l'« être-ensemble ». (shrink)

Il s’agit dans cet article d’analyser le travail de désingularisation relative de l’événement que Ricœur opère par couplage avec le récit dans Temps et récit au début des années 1980, puis la reprise de la question de la singularité et de l’unicité de l’événement dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli dans le cadre théorique recomposé de la représentation historienne mise à l’épreuve de “l’événement aux limites” qu’est la Shoah. Dans Temps et récit Ricœur entend dépasser, par l’entrecroisement entre histoire et fiction (...) appliqué à des événements fondateurs d’identité collective comme la Shoah, l’aporie épistémologique de la dichotomie entre une histoire qui dissout l’événement dans l’explication et une attitude purement émotionnelle face aux événements à intensité éthique considérable. Cette narrativisation de l’événement se heurte cependant à la puissance traumatique de l’extra-textuel radical de l’événement-Shoah qui constitue ainsi un défi pour la représentation historienne du passé. C’est cette question que Ricœur reprend dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, mais cette fois-ci cet examen a été largement reconfiguré par la dialectique de la mémoire et de l’histoire contribuant à la représentation du passé. Tout en distinguant l’incomparabilité absolue au plan moral de la Shoah et l’incomparabilité relative sur le plan historiographique, Ricœur maintient que l’enchevêtrement entre jugement historiographique et jugement moral est inévitable, ouvrant ainsi sur la grande question de la responsabilité sociale, politique et éthique de l’historien. (shrink)

Après deux ouvrages remarqués, L’insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68. Essai d’histoire politique des usines paru en 2007 et Histoire des ouvriers en France au xxe siècle paru en 2012 qui ont imposé Xavier Vigna comme un spécialiste reconnu du monde ouvrier, ce dernier nous propose un ouvrage destiné à un public plus large : Les ouvriers dans la France des usines et des ateliers. Le livre est présenté comme un livre-objet, car, outre le matériel documentaire classique, il comprend éga...

Doutes, incertitudes, perte d’une référence commune, anarchie épistémologique, dispersion des références théoriques, crise : les caractérisations de la situation contemporaine de la discipline historique en France semblent toutes aller dans le même sens. La fin des années 1970 aurait inauguré une mise en crise des modèles historiographiques dominants, et en particulier de celui de ce qu’on a longtemps appelé « l’école des Annales ». Quatre ouvrages collectifs récents tentent de prendre la mes...

Doutes, incertitudes, perte d’une référence commune, anarchie épistémologique, dispersion des références théoriques, crise : les caractérisations de la situation contemporaine de la discipline historique en France semblent toutes aller dans le même sens. La fin des années 1970 aurait inauguré une mise en crise des modèles historiographiques dominants, et en particulier de celui de ce qu’on a longtemps appelé « l’école des Annales ». Quatre ouvrages collectifs récents tentent de prendre la mes...

Henri Delacroix is a French philosopher, religious scholar and psychologist, a student and follower of Bergson. He began his activity with the study of mysticism. Following the thesis “An Essay on Speculative Mysticism in Germany in the 14th Century”, where the author analyzed the teachings of Meister Eckhart and the associated intellectual movement, he published several other works where he examined other historical and national forms of mysticism. Describing different types of mystical intuition, conducting a detailed psychological analysis, (...) class='Hi'>Delacroix interpreted the higher forms of mystical experience, contrary to the opinions of some researchers, as an expression of deep inner life and not as a special type of neurosis. His work Studies in the History and Psychology of Mysticism: the Great Christian Mystics was highly appreciated by contemporaries, and the approach he proposed to this subject gradually gained recognition and became classical. In his philosophical and psychological works, Delacroix acted as an opponent of associationism and mental atomism. He developed the treatment of consciousness as an entity, considering the various forms and manifestations of consciousness and the unconscious in their interconnection and mutual influence. He paid special attention to the relationship between language and thinking as well as child psychology and the psychology of art. In his book Language and Thinking, Delacroix, relying on the concept of F. de Saussure, developed the distinction of language and speech proposed by the latter. (shrink)

1. WeimarLa recherche consacrée au droit et à la pensée juridique sous la République de Weimar accorde une place privilégiée au droit public et constitutionnel. Parmi les raisons de ce phénomène il y a la question de la continuité et des ruptures entre Weimar et le nazisme, une question qui pose dans le même temps le problème de la nouveauté radicale que représente le nazisme en matière de pensée politique et de pratique sociale d’une part, et le problème des racines (...) qu’il a trouvées dans les... (shrink)

Every day we do all sorts of intelligent things without necessarily deliberating about it. We simply do, or cope with what the environment throws at us. Some of those things are mundane. Others are...

Lady Lovelace’s notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine never refer to the concept of surprise. Having some pretension to ‘originate’ something—unlike the Analytical Engine—is neither necessary nor sufficient to being able to surprise someone. Turing nevertheless translates Lovelace’s ‘this machine is incapable of originating something’ in terms of a hypothetical ‘computers cannot take us by surprise’ objection to the idea that machines may be deemed capable of thinking. To understand the contemporary significance of what is missed in Turing’s ‘surprise’ translation of (...) Lovelace’s insight, one needs to distinguish between trivial surprises and those events, propositions or encounters that lead us to question our understanding of ourselves or what surrounds us. Only some of these non-trivial surprises are the product of originality endeavours. Not only is it uncommon for surprises to track such endeavours, the type of autonomy that would be required on the part of ‘digital computers’ for originality and surprise to intersect in that way goes far beyond the operational autonomy that can be achieved by ‘learning machines’. This paper argues that a salient translation of Lovelace’s originality insight—for contemporary and future ‘learning machines’—is an upside-down version of Turing’s surprise question: can computers be surprised by us in a non-trivial, ‘co-produced’ way? (shrink)

This book examines the epistemic function of perception and the relation between language and conceptual thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness: namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence.

The classic programme of conceptual engineering (Cappelen, Herman. 2018. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Eklund, Matti. 2021. “Conceptual Engineering.” In The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language, edited by Justin Khoo, and Rachel Sterken, 15–30. London: Routledge) envisages a two-stage ameliorating process. First, we assess ‘F’ and determine what the term should express. Second, we bring it about that ‘F’ expresses what it should express. The second stage gives rise to a (...) practical challenge: the implementation challenge. Engineering advocates need to explain by what means they can implement specific conceptual changes in the natural language shared by a community – a feat Herman Cappelen (2018. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; “Conceptual Engineering: The Master Argument.” In Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics, edited by Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen, and David Plunkett, 132–151. Oxford: Oxford University Press) argues to be beyond our understanding and control both on an externalist and on an internalist meta-semantics. I devise a new answer to the implementation challenge. Enlisting the influential theory of social norms by Cristina Bicchieri, I argue that engineering social norms in Bicchieri’s technical sense amounts to an effective, specific, and feasible means to implement specific conceptual change, at least on internalist premises. I also argue that Bicchieri’s social norms are an essential addition to the more familiar conventions and moral norms when it comes to conceptual engineering. (shrink)

How should you decide what to do when you’re uncertain about basic normative principles? A natural suggestion is to follow some "second-order:" norm: e.g., obey the most probable norm or maximize expected choiceworthiness. But what if you’re uncertain about second-order norms too—must you then invoke some third-order norm? If so, any norm-guided response to normative uncertainty appears doomed to a vicious regress. This paper aims to rescue second-order norms from the threat of regress. I first elaborate and defend the claim (...) some philosophers have made that the regress problem forces us to accept normative externalism, the view that at least one norm is incumbent on all agents regardless of their normative beliefs. But, I then argue, we need not accept externalism about first-order norms, thus closing off any question of how agents should respond to normative uncertainty. Rather, we can head off the threat of regress by ascribing external force to a single second-order norm: the enkratic principle. (shrink)

This book offers a 'genealogical' explanation of law's normativity. The term 'genealogical' conveys a commitment to a non-metaphysical type of enquiry. While it explains how law, as a normative phenomenon, comes about, it does not seek to ground law's normativity in anything but the context of social interaction giving rise to it. Legal normativity is brought about on a daily basis. Whether in revolutionary circumstances or in the quotidian need for judges, lawmakers or citizens to balance law's demands with those (...) of morality or prudence, our ability to bind ourselves through law ultimately depends on our capacity to articulate a better way of living together, and to commit ourselves to it. These efforts of assessment and articulation depend, in turn, on our conception of normative agency. Assert the need to trace the truth of ethical judgments to some independent moral 'facts' conditioning their objectivity, and you will get a different understanding of what it is we are doing when we dispute law's authority in the name of moral values. Tracing the truth of moral judgements back to our own social practices not only affects the nature of disagreement; it also dramatically increases our responsibility when, as lawmakers, judges, or citizens we 'take the law into our own hands' and confront it with our moral expectations. (shrink)

This paper maps out various options for thinking about two issues: the structural relationship between practical wisdom and the moral virtues, and the various functions of practical wisdom. With the help of a case study of the virtue of honesty, three main concerns are raised for what I call the Standard Model of practical wisdom. Two other models, the Socratic Model and the Fragmentation Model, are also critically evaluated. I end by taking seriously an eliminativist approach according to which the (...) trait of practical wisdom does not exist. (shrink)

Hart's and Kelsen's respective outlooks on the concept of normativity not only differ by the way they explain this concept but also, more importantly, in what they seek to achieve when endeavouring to account for the normative dimension of law. By examining Hart's and Kelsen's models in the light of Korsgaard's understanding of the “normativity problem,” my aim is to emphasise not only their contrasted perspectives, but also the common limit they impose on their theories by dismissing as inappropriate any (...) question regarding the emergence of legal normativity. On the basis of my previous arguments, I shall explain why I deem Raz's analysis of the contrast between Hart's and Kelsen's conceptions of normativity to be misleading. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Humean Laws for Human Agents presents cutting-edge research by leading experts on the Humean account of laws, chance, possibility, and necessity. A central question in metaphysics and philosophy of science is: What are laws of nature? Humeans hold that laws are not sui generis metaphysical entities but merely particularly effective summaries of what actually happens. The most discussed recent work on Humeanism emphasizes the laws' usefulness for limited agents and uses pragmatic considerations to address fundamental and long-standing problems. The current (...) volume develops and critically examines pragmatic Humean accounts, with innovative new work on the epistemology of laws and chance, the problem of induction, counterfactuals, special science laws, and a Humean account of essence. Taken together, the papers provide a roadmap for developing pragmatic Humeanism and connate views, setting the agenda for future research. (shrink)

How can we explain that our dreams are often not a chaotic, incoherent pile of images, but a definite, perfectly organized sequence of images? How do the sensations and images fit in dreams, what kind of logic do they obey, what is the role of emotions and ideas? Henri Delacroix formulates these questions in his article and offers his answers, delineating and examining different types of dreams. Taking into account and critically evaluating the concepts of contemporary researchers who studied (...) the problem of dreams, Delacroix puts forward his own hypothesis. From his point of view, at the basis of many dreams lies an extremely changeable and mobile basic idea which is able to direct the movement of images that are its representation. Images represent the development of a mental theme or a combination of many topics. Between a dream and a daydream, according to Delacroix, there is only a difference in complexity and systematization. Translation of the publication: Delacroix H. Sur la structure logique du rêve // Revue de métaphysique et de morale. 1904. T. 12. № 6. P. 921–934. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay aims to contribute robust grounds to question the Susskinds’ influential, consequentialist logic when it comes to the legitimacy of automation within the legal profession. It does so by questioning their minimalist understanding of the professions. If it is our commitment to moral equality that is at stake every time lawyers hail the specific vulnerability inherent in their professional relationship, the case for wholesale automation is turned on its head. One can no longer assume that, as a rule, wholesale (...) automation is both legitimate and desirable, provided it improves the quality and accessibility of legal services. The assumption, instead, is firmly in favour of designing systems that better enable legal professionals to live up to their specific responsibility. The rest of the essay outlines key challenges in the design of such profession-specific, ‘ethics aware’ decision-support systems. (shrink)