Nous traduisons, pour la première fois en langue française, l’essai célèbre de Clarence Irving Lewis (1883-1964), « A pragmatic conception of the a priori » (1923). Cette traduction est précédée d’une introduction revenant sur les deux moments argumentatifs clés de la refonte par Lewis des notions d’a priori et de catégorie : (1) la critique des conceptions traditionnelles de l’a priori et de la manière dont elles comprennent les deux éléments constitutifs du concept d’a priori, à savoir la nécessité et (...) l’indépendance à l’égard de l’expérience ; (2) l’alternative que C. I. Lewis élabore en lieu et place de ces conceptions et qui peut être entendue comme une conception tout à la fois pratique et pragmatique de l’a priori et des catégories. C’est la pièce angulaire du pragmatisme conceptuel élaboré dans le maître ouvrage de C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order (1929) qui se trouve ainsi élucidée. (shrink)

Arthur Pap worked in analytic philosophy while maintaining a strong Kantian or neo-Kantian element throughout his career, stemming from his studying with Ernst Cassirer. I present these elements in the different periods of Pap’s works, showing him to be a consistent critic of logical empiricism, which Pap shows to be incapable of superseding the Kantian framework. Nevertheless, Pap’s work is definitely analytic philosophy, both in terms of the content and the style. According to Pap, the central topics of analytic philosophy (...) concern meaning, modality, and analysis. Pap was also influenced by pragmatism, especially in his dissertation, although he does not fully embrace it in either its classical or its Quinean form. (shrink)

An influential strand in philosophy of science claims that scientific paradigms can be understood as relativized a priori frameworks. Here, Kant’s constitutive a priori principles are no longer held to establish conditions of possibility for knowledge which are unchanging and universally true, but are restricted only to a given scientific domain. Yet it is unclear how exactly a relativized a priori can be construed as both stable and dynamical, establishing foundations for current scientific claims while simultaneously making intelligible the transition (...) to a subsequent framework. In this article, I show that important resources for this problem have been overlooked in Kant’s theory of reflective judgement in the third Critique. I argue that Kant accorded the task of formulating new scientific laws to reflective judgement, which is charged with forming new ‘universals’ that guide the experience of nature. I show that this is the very task attributed to the relativized a priori: the constitution of a given conceptual framework, not of the conditions for object-reference as such. I conclude that Kant’s considered conception of science encompasses the operations of both reflective and determining judgement. Relativizations of the a priori should follow Kant’s lead. (shrink)