La mondialisation économique, le cosmopolitisme et le multiculturalisme qui caractérisent de plus en plus les sociétés modernes remettent en cause les allégeances nationales traditionnelles. Reste à savoir si c'est un bien ou non, s'il faut accélérer le pas ou non. Les arguments en faveur d'une ouverture décidée sont forts et nombreux, mais, para-doxalement, il apparaît qu'elle n'est pas sans danger pour l'autonomie des personnes. Entre le particularisme et l'universalisme, une troisième voie est souhaitable.

i n br e ve ha pos t o l e f ondament a del l ’ e di f i ci o logico-matematico contemporaneo» (R. Blanché, La logica e la sua storia da Aristotele a Russell, Ubaldini, Roma 1973, p. 311).

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If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference between specific (...) individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated. (shrink)

The self as the identification of the self with itself is a product of the dynamic transformation of European culture beginning in the Renaissance. The self, or absolute ego, was an outgrowth of the consciously rationalist spirit. However, modernity's Faustian drive was conscious paradoxically without being self conscious of itself or its cultural creations. Modernism deconstructed the values and assumptions of modernity. A casualty was the problematization of the self that had been banished and/or erased by formalism, structuralism and deconstruction. (...) The modernist self erases the absolute ego reconstructing it with a rich, complex, narrative idea of a self‐conscious relational self encompassing memory, repression, autobiography and history. This paper explores the modernist conception of self in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Proust demolishes the absolute ego in favor of the paradoxical self which knows itself only in relation to otherness actualized in persons and culture in the sacred time of existence. (shrink)

As a survey included in an issue devoted to W.V. Quine this article contains a list of sixteen distinctively Quinean theses and a brief discussion of the influence of several of them on contemporary philosophy. In particular, I mention how Quine's views have had a profound influence on contemporary discussions of the nature of logic, the theory of meaning and on realism. Many who explicitly reject some of his more controversial doctrines may not have worked out the interconnections of theses (...) on the list and so can still be said to do philosophy in the manner of, or "after," Quine. (shrink)

Initial demarcations i This study is an exercise in political philosophy. Though no concise, comprehensive definition of political philosophy is readily ...

The Logic of Port-Royal, first published in 1662 by the Jansenists Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, is a work that underlines the inadequacies of the traditional logic. Traditional logic, which included the texts of Aristotle's Organon and the works of the scholastics, was experiencing a mild renaissance in the seventeenth century following its outright and brutal discrediting by the humanists of the previous two centuries. Arnauld and Nicole introduce a fairly original system of logic that attempts to remedy the shortcomings (...) of the revived tradition; they dismiss the Aristotelian "Categories", "Predicables", and "Topics", ignore the scholastic "Doctrine of Terms and Consequence", and suggest a single "General Principle" by means of which the validity of all arguments can be decided. The Principle is based on a notion of containment, divided into entendue and comprehension , which applies to all terms. Because the notion of containment is linked to the objective reality of Cartesian ideas, the authors can claim that their system of logic properly describes reality. The General Principle also suggests that terminist logic is logically and epistemologically prior to sentential logic because, Arnauld and Nicole claim, it governs the Dictum de Omni et Nullo and the Nota Notae. The self-evidence of the two dicta confirmed the validity of all syllogisms of the first figure; furthermore, all syllogisms of other figures could be reduced to one of the first figure. With the General Principle, however, there is no need for such reduction to the first figure. This additional result makes the theorem of sentential logic, "$\supset$r)$\approx$$\supset$-q)", which was needed for the reductions of Baroco and Bocardo, unnecessary. The fact that no theorem of sentential logic is needed to underline term logic guarantees the autonomy of the latter. (shrink)