Une longue introduction précède les contributions de ces trois philosophes et théologiens à la querelle sur la distinction entre l'être et l'essence qui anima la Faculté de théologie de l'Université de Paris dans les années 1280.

Résumé — II s’agit ici de montrer que la mimèsis tragique chez Aristote a un sens éthique, dans la mesure où elle donne à réfléchir sur les conditions du bonheur humain. En effet, en montrant des personnages soumis aux vicissitudes de la fortune, elle donne à réfléchir sur la contingence du bonheur, que la vertu ne suffit pas à assurer. En ce sens, la mimèsis tragique est le pendant de l’Éthique à Nicomaque qui définit les conditions morales du bonheur. (...) Ce sens éthique de la tragédie peut déboucher sur une portée éthique, dans la mesure où la connaissance qu’elle procure de la condition humaine et du hasard qui règne sur la vie des hommes s’oppose à toute hubris en faisant prendre conscience au spectateur de la fragilité du bonheur. Dès lors, on peut dire que le sens éthique de la tragédie selon Aristote est d’abord intellectuel, mais qu’il peut avoir du coup une portée pratique. La différence entre Platon et Aristote sur ce point vient de la différence de leurs conceptions éthiques : pour Platon en effet, et contrairement à son disciple, la condition nécessaire et suffisante du bonheur est la vertu, de telle sorte que la mimèsis tragique, en tant qu’elle présente des hommes soumis à des malheurs sans pour autant avoir nécessairement commis une faute, donne une fausse idée du bonheur. C’est pourquoi chez Platon la tragédie ne peut donner un enseignement éthique, contrairement à ce qui se passe chez Aristote. (shrink)

Generally in agreement with the stoic doctrin of causality, Seneca’s primary concern is not conceptual precision, but rather the way the problem of causality is perceived and understood by the human mind, which is unable to comprehend immediately the world’s absolute rationality. The relative vagueness surrounding the notion of cause, and particularly that of Primary Cause, implies the use of a pedagogical device which prepares the progrediens to grasp the ambiguity existing between necessity and contingency. Seneca dramatizes causality, creates a (...) play, and provides the deus with masks, so as to allow the progressing student of wisdom to comprehend the various facets of the god, as perceived by man, wise or not : necessity, contingency, Fortune, providence. The Roman philosopher’s favourite tools in this dramatization of causality are on one hand the personification of Fortune, and on the other the symbolical hypotyposis which allows the conceptualization of the Primary Cause, governing the world, through an analogy with a concrete figure, particularly that of the ideal princeps. So, through this theatrical depiction of causality, the philosopher provides the „spectator” with a distanciation, a catharsis and a comprehension of the world. (shrink)

Quel est le statut des lois de la nature ? Telle est la question posée dans ce livre d’André Charrak. L’auteur montre que la philosophie des Lumières envisage le problème de la connaissance sous l’angle de « l’application des principes aux phénomènes et des sciences les unes aux autres » (p. 199) et qu’il existe un lien direct entre la possibilité de l’application de la mathématique à la physique dans les savoirs positifs et les partis pris explicites sur le statut (...) modal des lois du mouvement.. (shrink)

In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense (...) of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike. (shrink)

According to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (‘PSR’), every fact has an explanation for why it obtains. If the PSR is true, there must be a sufficient reason for why God chose to create our world. But a sufficient reason for God’s choice plausibly necessitates that choice. It thus seems that God could not have done otherwise, and that our world exists necessarily. We therefore appear forced to pick between the PSR, and the contingency of creation and divine choice. I (...) show that a third option remains open, and thus that it is possible to preserve the contingency of creation and divine choice even while endorsing the PSR. My solution depends on the coherence of a restricted modal realism. On this modal realism, there is more than one possible morally optimal created world, and for each such world there is an existing possibility in which God creates that world. (shrink)

At least since Aristotle’s famous 'sea-battle' passages in On Interpretation 9, some substantial minority of philosophers has been attracted to the doctrine of the open future--the doctrine that future contingent statements are not true. But, prima facie, such views seem inconsistent with the following intuition: if something has happened, then (looking back) it was the case that it would happen. How can it be that, looking forwards, it isn’t true that there will be a sea battle, while also being true (...) that, looking backwards, it was the case that there would be a sea battle? This tension forms, in large part, what might be called the problem of future contingents. A dominant trend in temporal logic and semantic theorizing about future contingents seeks to validate both intuitions. Theorists in this tradition--including some interpretations of Aristotle, but paradigmatically, Thomason (1970), as well as more recent developments in Belnap, et. al (2001) and MacFarlane (2003, 2014)--have argued that the apparent tension between the intuitions is in fact merely apparent. In short, such theorists seek to maintain both of the following two theses: (i) the open future: Future contingents are not true, and (ii) retro-closure: From the fact that something is true, it follows that it was the case that it would be true. It is well-known that reflection on the problem of future contingents has in many ways been inspired by importantly parallel issues regarding divine foreknowledge and indeterminism. In this paper, we take up this perspective, and ask what accepting both the open future and retro-closure predicts about omniscience. When we theorize about a perfect knower, we are theorizing about what an ideal agent ought to believe. Our contention is that there isn’t an acceptable view of ideally rational belief given the assumptions of the open future and retro-closure, and thus this casts doubt on the conjunction of those assumptions. (shrink)

There is a familiar debate between Russell and Strawson concerning bivalence and ‘the present King of France’. According to the Strawsonian view, ‘The present King of France is bald’ is neither true nor false, whereas, on the Russellian view, that proposition is simply false. In this paper, I develop what I take to be a crucial connection between this debate and a different domain where bivalence has been at stake: future contingents. On the familiar ‘Aristotelian’ view, future contingent propositions are (...) neither true nor false. However, I argue that, just as there is a Russellian alternative to the Strawsonian view concerning ‘the present King of France’, according to which the relevant class of propositions all turn out false, so there is a Russellian alternative to the Aristotelian view, according to which future contingents all turn out false, not neither true nor false. The result: contrary to millennia of philosophical tradition, we can be open futurists without denying bivalence. (shrink)

Avicenna’s discussion of future contingent propositions is sometimes considered to entail metaphysical indeterminism. In this paper, I argue that his logical analysis of future contingent statements is best understood in terms of the epistemic modality of those statements, which has no consequences for modal metaphysics. This interpretation is corroborated by hitherto neglected material concerning the question of God’s knowledge of particulars. In the Taʿlīqāt, Avicenna argues that God knows particulars by knowing their complete causes, and when contrasted with the human (...) knowledge of particulars, this epistemically superior access shows that the contingency of statements about future particulars is not due to the modal properties of real particulars but to the nature of human access to them. (shrink)

It is a philosophical truism that we must think of others as moral agents, not merely as causal or statistical objects. But why? I argue that this follows from the best resolution of an antinomy between our experience of morality as necessarily binding on the will and our knowledge that all moral beliefs originate in contingent histories. We can address this antinomy only by understanding moral deliberation via interpersonal relationships, which simultaneously vindicate and constrains morality’s bind on the will. This (...) means that moral agency is fundamentally social. I model an attitude toward our causal nature on sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘civil inattention’; our social practice of agency requires that we give minimal attention to the contingent origins of moral judgments in ourselves and others. Understood this way, seeing ourselves as moral agents requires avoiding appeal to causal aetiology to settle substantive moral disagreement. (shrink)

According to an influential line of thought, from the assumption that indeterminism makes future contingents neither true nor false, one can conclude that assertions of future contingents are never permissible. This conclusion, however, fails to recognize that we ordinarily assert future contingents even when we take the future to be unsettled. Several attempts have been made to solve this puzzle, either by arguing that, albeit truth-valueless, future contingents can be correctly assertable, or by rejecting the claim that future contingents are (...) truth-valueless. The paper examines three of most representative accounts in line with the first attempt, and concludes that none of them succeed in providing a persuasive answer as to why we felicitously assert future contingents. (shrink)

Hardly anyone denies that (nearly) all human beings have equal moral status and therefore should be considered and treated as equals. Yet, if humans possess the property that confers moral status upon them to an unequal degree, how come they should be considered and treated as equals? It has been argued that this is because the variations in the degree to which the status‐conferring property is held above a relevant threshold are contingencies that do not generate differences in degrees of (...) moral status. Call this the contingency argument for the basis of moral equality. In this paper, I reject the contingency argument. Instead, I develop an attitude‐based account of the basis of moral equality: according to this account, the basis of moral equality lies in a fitting, basic, and independent moral attitude which is owed to human beings qua moral status‐holders, and provides a coherent and plausible explanation for why the variations above the threshold for moral status do not matter. (shrink)

The argument is not, however, problem-free. First: while the meaning of s might not guarantee a verifying state of affairs, mightn’t the fact of one’s believing that s is true guarantee a verifying state of affairs? And mightn’t this fact be exploited to secure knowledge of truths that are deeply contingent? Second: the argument seems to rely on the principle that if I can conceive that not P is actually the case, then I do not know that P. But it (...) is generally agreed that a knowledge-conferring warrant for some P need not offer a watertight guarantee of P and thus need not render it inconceivable that the actual world falsifies P. Why then require such a guarantee when it comes to priori warrant? The first objection is that a guarantee of truth need not come from semantics. The second is that no such guarantee is required for a priori knowledge. I shall be exploring both of these ideas in what follows. (shrink)