Paul Ricoeur, dans «Soi-même comme un autre», porte une attention particulière à l'éthique de l'amitié chez Aristote. Gaëlle Fiasse expose dans son livre quels sont les enjeux éthiques et métaphysiques d'une telle lecture du philosophie grec. Elle montre comment Ricoeur s'approprie et se sépare des différents sens de l'être, puisque il rejette la substance au bénéfice de l'être selon la puissance et l'acte. Elle revient ensuite aux textes d'Aristote pour répondre aux objections de Paul Ricoeur tout en dialoguant avec lui. (...) Ce livre offre donc à la fois une nouvelle lecture d'Aristote et de Paul Ricoeur et une analyse du statut éthique et ontologique de l'autre à la lumière de l'amitié. (shrink)

Le texte dont nous traduisons et commentons ici des passages choisis est inédit en français, et n'est traduit que partiellement en anglais. Ce n'est pas un hasard : la théorie qu'Althusius y développe, au début du XVIIe siècle, est à l'opposé de la centralisation des pouvoirs caractérisant l'institution étatique française. Considérant la théorie bodinienne de la souveraineté, qui cristallise entre les mains du souverain la compétence absolue, perpétuelle et indivisible de commander, Althusius soutient que sa conséquence inéluctable est de priver (...) la société de son dynamisme en la rendant intrinsèquement dépendante du pouvoir. Il entreprend alors d'en inverser la logique en conférant les droits de souveraineté au peuple organisé. Partageant la souveraineté entre l'ensemble des multiples associations sociopolitiques créées par les hommes pour subvenir à leurs besoins, Althusius fonde une théorie politique qui donne à la société la puissance nécessaire à son auto-organisation. A l'heure où la République représentative connaît un déclin de légitimité, l'accès à ce texte permet de présenter une pensée politique atypique, dont l'une des vertus est de décentrer la plupart des concepts modernes en mettant à distance nos certitudes sédimentées. (shrink)

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain's greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section. From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book's contents come from a wide variety (...) of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references. Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates. (shrink)

This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

Editor James Fetzer presents an analytical and historical introduction and a comprehensive bibliography together with selections of many of Carl G. Hempel's most important studies to give students and scholars an ideal opportunity to appreciate the enduring contributions of one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century.

This entirely new work guides the reader through the most basic systems of modal propositional logic up to systems of modal predicate with identity, dealing with both technical developments and discussing philosophical applications.

Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phe- notypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evo- lution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law entailed dynamics. Our considerations depend upon dis- cussing the variability of the very ”contexts of life”: the in- teractions between organisms, biological niches and ecosys- tems. These are ever changing, intrinsically indeterminate and even unprestatable: we do not know ahead of (...) time the ”niches” which constitute the boundary conditions on selec- tion. More generally, by the mathematical unprestatability of the ”phase space”, no laws of mo- tion can be formulated for evolution. We call this radical emergence, from life to life. The purpose of this paper is the integration of variation and diversity in a sound concep- tual frame and situate unpredictability at a novel theoretical level, that of the very phase space. Our argument will be carried on in close comparisons with physics and the mathematical constructions of phase spaces in that discipline. The role of symmetries as invariant preserving transformations will allow us to under- stand the nature of physical phase spaces and to stress the differences required for a sound biological theoretizing. In this frame, we discuss the novel notion of ”enablement”. Life lives in a web of enablement and radical emergence. This will restrict causal analyses to differential cases. Mutations or other causal differ- ences will allow us to stress that ”non conservation princi- ples” are at the core of evolution, in contrast to physical dynamics, largely based on conservation principles as sym- metries. Critical transitions, the main locus of symmetry changes in physics, will be discussed, and lead to ”extended criticality” as a conceptual frame for a better understanding of the living state of matter. (shrink)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Second, there is a form of ampliative inference that has come to be called ‘inference to the best explanation,’ or more briefly ‘explanatory inference.’ Roughly: From the fact that a certain hypothesis would explain the data at hand better than any other available hypothesis, we infer with some degree of confidence that that leading hypothesis is correct. There is no question but that this inference is often performed. Arguably, every human being performs it many times in a day, perhaps without (...) letup. (shrink)

The first English translation of Fichte’s second set of 1804 lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre.