Le présent dossier consacré à Raymond Ruyer s’inscrit dans le contexte d’une redécouverte de ce penseur français admiré en son temps par plusieurs de ses pairs, tels que Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem ou Deleuze, et dans la dynamique de ce qu’on peut désormais appeler les « études ruyériennes ». Plusieurs revues ont en effet consacré ces dernières années des numéros au philosophe nancéien : Les Études philosophiques, la Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger (n°1/...

Merleau-Ponty, malgre ce que peut suggerer une lecture trop rapide, a refuse de placer son entreprise sous le signe de l'anti-metaphysique. Certes, il a tenu compte des critiques anterieures adressees a la metaphysique, cependant il occupe une position originale et singuliere dans le champ philosophique contemporain. Partant des travaux de la psychologie gestaltiste de la perception, encore largement ignores en France aujourd'hui, et sur lesquels le present ouvrage s'est largement appuye, Merleau-Ponty a ete conduit a renouveler l'ontologie traditionnelle, pour elargir (...) ensuite le domaine de la metaphysique a de nouveaux objets, jusqu'a remonter au mystere de l'espace et du temps. Un certain nombre de deplacements et de reagencements sont ainsi operes, qui temoignent d'une reappropriation vivante de la metaphysique, a partir d'une finitude que Merleau-Ponty dit non pas - bornee - mais - militante -.". (shrink)

Introduction à la pensée de R. Ruyer, qui développa une philosophie générale de la biologie, à l'intersection des sciences et de la métaphysique. Interrogeant les fondements de cette science, il contestait le discours génétique comme la pertinence de l'approche darwinienne pour rendre compte de l'histoire de la vie.

Ruyer et Bachelard ont en commun de concevoir le travail de la philosophie comme essentiellement lié à la science. Toutefois, alors que Bachelard s’en tient à des positions épistémologiques, Ruyer entend tirer des conclusions métaphysiques des résultats de la physique contemporaine. Il expose ses vues à l’occasion de deux comptes rendus qu’il fait des écrits de Bachelard. Selon Ruyer, les activités structurantes originales qui caractérisent les atomes et les molécules autorisent à les comparer aux êtres biologiques des étages supérieurs et (...) à défendre une vision panpsychiste du réel. L’imagination métaphysique peut alors proposer ce que Ruyer appelle une « lecture du monde » qui en donne une vision unifiée et intensifiée. Les deux directions opposées de l’œuvre de Bachelard, le concept et l’image, ont ainsi la possibilité d’être réconciliées. (shrink)

Ruyer et Bachelard ont en commun de concevoir le travail de la philosophie comme essentiellement lié à la science. Toutefois, alors que Bachelard s’en tient à des positions épistémologiques, Ruyer entend tirer des conclusions métaphysiques des résultats de la physique contemporaine. Il expose ses vues à l’occasion de deux comptes rendus qu’il fait des écrits de Bachelard. Selon Ruyer, les activités structurantes originales qui caractérisent les atomes et les molécules autorisent à les comparer aux êtres biologiques des étages supérieurs et (...) à défendre une vision panpsychiste du réel. L’imagination métaphysique peut alors proposer ce que Ruyer appelle une « lecture du monde » qui en donne une vision unifiée et intensifiée. Les deux directions opposées de l’œuvre de Bachelard, le concept et l’image, ont ainsi la possibilité d’être réconciliées. (shrink)

In “Ruyer’s Relation to Whitehead”, Fabrice Colonna seeks to establish the exact presence of Whitehead in the French philosopher’s work. The indisputable points of connection between the two thinkers, concerning the importance of metaphysics, the critics of the materialistic scheme, the relevance of a renewed platonism, should nevertheless not obscure certain differences in emphasis, which are apparent in the problem of the compounds beings and about certain principles of speculative theology, to which both of them have found deeply (...) original ways. (shrink)

La philosophie de Raymond Ruyer se présente comme une néo-monadologie autant que comme un néo-finalisme. Cet article revient sur ce que Ruyer retient du monadisme, à savoir avant tout l’idée de panpsychisme, ainsi que sur son rejet d’un certain nombre de présupposés de Leibniz concernant l’espace, le temps, et la substance, qu’il entend corriger. Ainsi se dessine un renouvellement de la monadologie, appuyé sur une interprétation des résultats de la science contemporaine.

Il est aisé de repérer dans la pensée de Ruyer la réactivation d'un motif philosophique ancien, celui de la « grande chaîne de l'être », dont Arthur Lovejoy avait donné une étude mémorable. On étudie ici comment un certain nombre de faits scientifiques contemporains, aussi bien dans la physique que dans la biologie, ainsi que la réflexion de Ruyer en théologie rationnelle, sont venus justifier sa réécriture. It is easy to locate in Ruyer's thought the reactivation of an old philosophical (...) idea, that of the "Great Chain of Being", which had been masterfully studied by Arthur Lovejoy. We study here how a few contemporary scientific facts, both in physics and biology, as well as Ruyer's thought on rational theology, came to justify its revival. (shrink)

L’intérêt de la réflexion de Ruyer sur l’homme vient de ce qu’elle s’intègre dans une cosmologie philosophique. Elle tient ainsi compte de l’ensemble des résultats des sciences contemporaines, et permet de renouveler toutes les questions classiques, en s’orientant dans les querelles de l’humanisme et de l’anti-humanisme. L’anthropologie ruyérienne, telle qu’on peut la reconstruire, procède en quatre temps : faire de l’éthologie comparée le préalable incontournable de la réflexion sur l’homme, déterminer la différence humaine par le biais de la fonction symbolique, (...) rechercher alors les facteurs naturels du passage au symbolique, réintégrer pour finir l’homme dans la vie et le cosmos, en éliminant toute forme d’idéalisme. Le naturalisme de Ruyer débouche sur une conception élargie de la nature, qui autorise une compréhension inédite de l’ « animalrationale ».The interest of Ruyer’s reflection on man results from the fact that it becomes integrated into a philosophical cosmology. In this way, it takes into account most of the results of contemporary sciences and enables him to renew all the classic questions involved in the problem, giving orientation in the quarrels about humanism and anti-humanism. Four stages can be distinguished in the ruyerian anthropology, when reconstructed : compared ethology is first considered as the unavoidable preliminary when thought about man is concerned ; then the difference of man is settled by means of the symbolic function ; it suggests that natural factors leading to symbolism have to be looked for ; at last man is reinstated in life and cosmos, idealism being entirely excluded. From Ruyer’s naturalism emerges a broadened idea of nature, allowing an original interpretation of the « animalrationale ». (shrink)

Some of the most eminent and enduring philosophical questions concern matters of priority: what is prior to what? What 'grounds' what? Is, for instance, matter prior to mind? Recently, a vivid debate has arisen about how such questions have to be understood. Can the relevant notion or notions of priority be spelled out? And how do they relate to other metaphysical notions, such as modality, truth-making or essence? This volume of new essays, by leading figures in contemporary metaphysics, is the (...) first to address and investigate the metaphysical idea that certain facts are grounded in other facts. An introduction introduces and surveys the debate, examining its history as well as its central systematic aspects. The volume will be of wide interest to students and scholars of metaphysics. (shrink)

The purpose of the book is to clarify the notion of existential dependence and cognate notions, such as supervenience and the notion of an internal relation. I defend the view that such notions are best understood in terms of the concept of metaphysical grounding, i.e. the concept of one fact obtaining in virtue of other facts, where ‘in virtue of’ has a distinctively metaphysical meaning.

How does metaphysical grounding interact with the truth-functions? I argue that the answer varies according to whether one has a worldly conception or a conceptual conception of grounding. I then put forward a logic of worldly grounding and give it an adequate semantic characterisation.

Recent metaphysics has turned its focus to two notions that are—as well as having a common Aristotelian pedigree—widely thought to be intimately related: grounding and essence. Yet how, exactly, the two are related remains opaque. We develop a unified and uniform account of grounding and essence, one which understands them both in terms of a generalized notion of identity examined in recent work by Fabrice Correia, Cian Dorr, Agustín Rayo, and others. We argue that the account comports with antecedently (...) plausible principles governing grounding, essence, and identity taken individually, and illuminates how the three interact. We also argue that the account compares favorably to an alternative unification of grounding and essence recently proposed by Kit Fine. (shrink)

The connection between shame, guilt and morality is the topic of many recent debates. A broad tendency consists in attributing a higher moral status and a greater moral relevance to guilt, a claim motivated by arguments that tap into various areas of morality and moral psychology. The Pro-social Argument has it that guilt is, contrary to shame, morally good since it promotes pro-social behaviour. Three other arguments claim that only guilt has the requisite connection to central moral concepts: the Responsibility (...) Argument appeals to the ties between guilt and responsibility, the Autonomy Argument to the heteronomy of shame and the Social Argument to shame's link with reputation. In this paper, we scrutinize these arguments and argue that they cannot support the conclusion that they try to establish. We conclude that a narrow focus on particular criteria and a misconception of shame and guilt have obscured the important roles shame plays in our moral lives. (shrink)

The paper is structured as follows. §1 lays out the worry that the FA analysis fosters a revisionary understanding of emotional values. §2 introduces the distinction between enablers and favourers and how it is pressed into service by Toni to reply to this worry. While I agree that the reply is attractive, since casting emotions in the role of enablers chimes well with how we pre-theoretically understand the relations between emotions and values, I observe that doing so requires that we (...) tackle two connected issues. First, how do emotions function as value enablers? Second, is the resulting picture compatible with the FA analysis? The rest of the discussion is structured around these issues. §3 looks at the role of emotions within the FA analysis so as to specify the kind of enabling role they can play. On this backdrop, I explore in §4 a contrast between how belief relates to truth and how emotions relate to values, a contrast which helps uncover what we are after. A first reaction to this contrast, according to which emotions are value enablers by allowing us to access values, which differ from truth, is examined in §5. I argue that this idea cannot do justice to the key insight of the FA analysis. §6 defends an alternative idea, according to which emotions are enablers in virtue of their attitudinal shapes. (shrink)

This monograph is a detailed study, and systematic defence, of the Growing Block Theory of time (GBT), first conceived by C.D. Broad. The book offers a coherent, logically perspicuous and ideologically lean formulation of GBT, defends it against the most notorious objections to be found in the extant philosophical literature, and shows how it can be derived from a more general theory, consistent with relativistic spacetime, on the pre-relativistic assumption of an absolute and total temporal order. -/- The authors devise (...) axiomatizations of GBT and its competitors which, against the backdrop of a shared quantified tense logic, significantly improves the prospects of their comparative assessment. Importantly, neither of these axiomatizations involves commitment to properties of presentness, pastness or futurity. The authors proceed to address, and defuse, a number of objections that have been marshaled against GBT, including the so-called epistemic objection according to which the theory invites skepticism about our temporal location. The challenge posed by relativistic physics is met head-on, by replacing claims about temporal variation by claims about variation across spacetime. -/- The book aims to achieve the greatest possible rigor. The background logic is set out in detail, as are the principles governing the notions of precedence and temporal location. The authors likewise devise a novel spacetime logic suited for the articulation, and comparative assessment, of relativistic theories of time. The book comes with three technical appendices which include soundness and completeness proofs for the systems corresponding to GBT and its competitors, in both their pre-relativistic and relativistic forms. -/- The book is primarily directed at researchers and graduate students working on the philosophy of time or temporal logic, but is of interest to metaphysicians and philosophical logicians more generally. (shrink)

I assume that truth-making is to be understood in terms of grounding, and I show how, on that assumption, various general properties of truth-making follow from certain features of grounding.

In this paper, we clarify what proponents of the Growing Block Theory (GBT) should and what they should not say, and what they consistently can say. Once all the central tenets of the view are on the table, we address both David Braddon-Mitchell’s and Trenton Merricks’ recent eulogies for GBT, based on what is representative of a certain type of argument meant to show that GBT is internally incoherent. We argue that this type of argument proceeds from a mistaken assumption (...) about GBT’s core, viz. that GBT works with an untensed notion of what, in the metaphysically most fundamental sense, there is. We conclude that this type of argument accordingly misfires and that for all we know, we might be living on the brink of reality. (shrink)

La fin du marxisme en tant qu'"horizon de notre temps" a ouvert une période souvent appelée "post-moderne". Elle couvre approximativement les années 1970 à 2000 et se caractérise par la déconstruction. On observe ensuite un attrait renouvelé de la synthèse, pour diverses raisons : l'expérience totalitaire n'est plus aussi centrale, pour les nouvelles générations ; la multiplication des approches et la déconstruction généralisée a aussi fait perdre le sens global de notre époque, débouchant sur ce que certains auteurs appellent le (...) parcellitarisme ; l'émergence des anciens pays en développement sur la scène internationale apporte un regard neuf et partiellement extérieur à l'Occident, mettant en lumière ce que cette zone culturelle a de particulier et mettant à mal l'universalisme revendiqué. Cet ouvrage entend contribuer à l'effort et tenter un bilan synthétique et dialectique de la question de l'émancipation, à l'époque de la mondialisation et de la crise écologique. Il procède en trois étapes : un bilan du libéralisme, dans sa critique du conservatisme (thèse) ; un bilan des marxismes et post-marxismes, dans leur critique du libéralisme (antithèse) ; et une troisième partie de synthèse, se situant dans le prolongement théorique d'un ouvrage précédent sur l'écologisme, où l'auteur propose de réarticuler des concepts tels qu'autorité, religion, politique, science, culture et sacré, afin d'éclairer d'un jour nouveau la question de l'émancipation. La conclusion rejoint Gramsci et d'autres pour qui l'émancipation réside dans le fait d'agir en vérité. Cette affirmation apparemment simple se fonde sur un concept cosmologique de vérité élaboré principalement sur la base des travaux de Laclau, Sartre et de Whitehead. Il ouvre des pistes pour penser l'articulation de l'un et du multiple, dans une perspective résolument non relativiste."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Grounding is a hyperintensional notion: necessarily equivalent sentences need not be equivalent from a ground-theoretic perspective. How fine-grained, exactly, is grounding? There is a striking lack of consensus on this question. In this chapter, I try to systematize and review the main options that have been put forward in the literature. For reasons that have to do with both naturalness and convenience, I for the most part take the question to be about what is sometimes called, following Kit Fine’s (2012a) (...) terminology, strict full grounding, and I take for granted a conception of grounding as a relation that is many-to-one and non-factive. I discuss the consequences of making alternative assumptions only in the very last section. (shrink)

'Ontological dependence' is a term of philosophical jargon which stands for a rich family of properties and relations, often taken to be among the most fundamental ontological properties and relations. Notions of ontological dependence are usually thought of as 'carving reality at its ontological joints', and as marking certain forms of ontological 'non-self-sufficiency'. The use of notions of dependence goes back as far as Aristotle's characterization of substances, and these notions are still widely used to characterize other concepts and to (...) formulate metaphysical claims. This paper first gives an overview of the varieties of these notions, and then discusses some of their main applications. (shrink)

Is it true that all conversational implicatures are cancellable? In some recent works (Weiner Analysis 66(2):127–130, 2004, followed by Blome-Tillmann Analysis 68(2):156–160, 2008 and, most recently, by Hazlett 2012), the property of cancellability that, according to Grice (1989), conversational implicatures must possess has been called into question. The aim of this article is to show that the cases on which Weiner builds his argument—the Train Case and the Sex Pistols Case— do not really suffice to endanger Grice’s Cancellability Hypothesis. What (...) Weiner has shown with his examples is that a conversational implicature cannot be cancelled if the speaker, whose utterance gives rise to the implicature, does not intend to cancel it. To implicate is an intentional speech act and, therefore, cancelling an implicature must also be intentional and must be performed by the same speaker whose utterance gives rise to the putative implicature. (shrink)

I offer and defend an account of real definitions. I put forward two versions of the account, one formulated in terms of the notion of generalised identity and of a suitable notion of grounding, and the other one formulated in terms of the former notion and of a suitable notion of comparative joint-carvingness. Given a plausible assumption, and turn out to be equivalent. I give a sketch of a unified account of the three notions involved in and from which the (...) assumption can be derived. (shrink)

Pre-theoretically, it seems obvious that there are deep and multifarious relations between memory and emotions. On the one hand, a large chunk of our affective lives concerns the good and bad events that happened to us and that we preserve in memory. This is one amongst the many ways in which memory is relevant to the nature and causation of emotions. What does recent research teach us about these relations? § 1 surveys some key issues in this regard. On the (...) other hand, which events we happen to preserve in memory very much depends on how we affectively reacted to them when they took place. Emotions are relevant to the nature and causation of memory in this and many other ways. Key issues regarding these relations are surveyed in § 2. (shrink)

I identify a notion of logical grounding, clarify it, and show how it can be used (i) to characterise various consequence relations, and (ii) to give a precise syntactic account of the notion of “groundedness” at work in the literature on the paradoxes of truth.