La categoria de passivitat és tan nuclear en la filosofia d’Emmanuel Levinas com en la de Paul Ricoeur. Aquesta categoria està intrínsecament vinculada a una altra que també és crucial: la d’alteritat. Per entendre la proximitat entre aquests dos autors, alhora que per veure’n la distància que els separa, resulta molt revelador prestar atenció, primer, a la manera com cadascun d’ells concep les dues categories i, després, al motiu pel qual mentre en el cas de Levinas el lloc de (...) la passivitat és exclusivament un —la relació amb l’altre—, en el de Ricoeur és triple: la carn o el cos propi, l’altre i la consciència. (shrink)

En este artículo se defiende que el sentido esencial del habla, antes que en la enunciacióndel mundo y antes también que en el intercambio informativo, reside en su función deamparo y de acogida. Para la argumentación se atiende tanto a algunos giros del lenguajecoloquial como a reflexiones filosóficas sobre el lenguaje como la de Emmanuel Lévinas.

First, this article summarizes the way Jan Patocˇka thinks and updates the classic theme of philosophy as care for the soul. Then goes on to show Jacques Derrida’s significant and unexpected interest in the Czech thinker, and the manner as sharp and respectful as he reads it. Derrida argues that the core of Patocˇka’s approach, under the term “responsibility”, coincides in some sense with that of Emmanuel Levinas; nucleus that has to do, in both authors, with the essence of (...) “religion”. (shrink)

Wiredu’s call for democracy by consensus is illustrated by his description of traditional African consensual rationality. This description contains the attribution of immanence to African consensual rationality. This paper objects to this doctrine of immanence. More importantly, the doctrine of immanence has led to the attribution of pure rationality to traditional African consensual practices. With reference to Aristotle’s three components of persuasion, I object to deliberation as purely rational and impervious to extraneous factors. I further argue that it is because (...) deliberation is not always perfectly rational that the process of consensus can suffer three forms of social conformity: conformity to dominant players, to numerical opinion majority, and to group-centrism. These forms of conformity mean that a consensus task order could lead to decisions of more inclusive value, but not necessarily decisions of more epistemic value. The concept of agonistic inquiry is employed to tackle what I see as the dangers of conformity and complacency in the project of inclusivity, and this is to strike a crucial balance between too-consensual and purely adversarial forms of deliberation. (shrink)

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This paper contrasts the Hegelianism of contemporary neo-pragmatism and the Hegelianism of classical pragmatism as it has been reassessed in contemporary Deweyan scholarship. Drawing on Dewey’s interpretation of Hegel, this paper argues that Hegel’s theory of the spirit is in many aspects more akin to Dewey’s pragmatism than Brandom’s. The first part compares Dewey’s pragmatism with Hegel’s conceptions of experience and the theory/practice relation. The second part compares Dewey’s naturalism with Hegel’s theory of the relation between nature and spirit.

Preoccupation with multiparty aggregative democracy in Africa has produced superficial forms of political/electoral choice-making by subjects that deepen pre-existing ethnic and primordial cleavages. This is because the principles of the multiparty system presuppose that decision-making through voting should be the result of a mere aggregation of pre-existing, fixed preferences. To this kind of decision-making, I propose deliberative democracy as a supplementary approach. My reason is that deliberation, beyond mere voting, should be central to decisionmaking and that, for a decision to (...) be legitimate, it must be preceded by deliberation, not merely the aggregation of pre-existing fixed preferences. I agree with arguments that when adequate justifications are made for claims/demands/conclusions, deliberation has the potential to have a salutary effect on people’s opinions, transform/evolve preferences, better inform judgments/voting, lead to increasingly ‘common good’ decisions, have moral educative power, place more burden of account-giving on public officers, and furnish subjects/losers/outvoted with justifications for collectively binding decisions. I argue that a deliberative turn in politics in Africa will have a mitigating effect on tribal and money politics. (shrink)

La question de Dieu dans la pensée de Husserl fut très tôt un objet d'attention pour la recherche phénoménologique, mais la diversité des textes est telle qu'il était nécessaire d'établir le dossier historique relatif à cette question. Bien évidemment, la mise en lumière de l'unité et de la continuité des analyses de Husserl sur Dieu est animée par une interrogation proprement spéculative : quelle place pour Dieu dans une philosophie descriptive qui se veut méthodologiquement athée? A partir du "je" transcendantal, (...) quel est l'accès possible à la pure phénoménalité de Dieu? Si Husserl décrit la transcendance de Dieu comme celle d'une Idée théorique, éthique et téléologique, il ne s'agit pas pour lui de s'en tenir aux reconstructions abstraites de la métaphysique, niais de revenir à l'expérience originaire de Dieu. La réduction phénoménologique ne demande pas de cesser de croire, mais elle rend possible une purification éthique de l'expérience religieuse qui permet d'élucider son sens. En cela, tout le projet contemporain d'un concept non ontologique de Dieu est redevable à Husserl d'avoir fait le premier pas décisif en affranchissant de tout en soi " et en montrant que la transcendance de Dieu ne peut être séparée de la vie intentionnelle dans laquelle elle s'annonce. Husserl ne confond pas pour autant philosophie et théologie, et la compréhension de Dieu comme évidence d'une Idée pratique infinie laisse ouverte la possibilité de la Révélation sans vouloir parler pour elle. (shrink)

The demand for more transparency is hardly ever questioned. When it is, it is generally questioned in the name of a protection of privacy. In a traditional liberal understanding, there is a non-alienable “right to privacy” (Warren/Brandeis, 1890). Many political struggles, however, involved ignoring such boundaries, and making public things that were meant to remain private (domestic violence, gender oppression, child abuse etc.). While holding that the distinction between private and public is necessary, it must remain mobile and subject to (...) renegotiation. Civil inattention highlights the importance of disregarding: disregarding what others we share the same public space with do, as long as it is not of public relevance; and disregarding such rules of privacy if a violation of basic human rights is taking place, in order to make such behaviour public. In some cases, disregard and ignorance can thus be a moral virtue. (shrink)

Dans le "Manifeste au Service du Personnalisme" d'Emmanuel Mounier, le philosophe français expose les principes fondamentaux du personnalisme. L'ouvrage défend la primauté de la personne humaine dans la société et explore comment le personnalisme peut influencer la politique, l'économie et la culture. Mounier appelle à une réflexion approfondie sur la dignité et la responsabilité individuelles, cherchant à promouvoir une société où chaque personne est reconnue et respectée dans sa singularité. Ce manifeste offre une vision philosophique engagée en faveur de (...) la place centrale de l'individu au sein de la communauté. (shrink)

In recent years, the claim of the unrepresentability of the Shoah has stirred vivid debates, especially following the strong positions taken by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann and author of Shoah (1986). This claim of unrepresentability, it can be shown, draws part of its attraction from the fact that it oscillates undecidedly between a claim of logical impossibility (“the Shoah can’t be represented”) and a normative demand (“the Shoah shouldn’t be represented”). This essay analyzes the argumentative structure of the advocates (...) of the unrepresentability and shows why the often made connection to Kant is flawed. Although his Critique of the Power of Judgment affirms indeed that the prohibition of representation is the “perhaps most sublime passage in the Jewish Law”, turning the prohibition of representation into a supposedly Kantian claim does not hold grounds. The essay reconstructs the political framework of the debate, situates the Kantian passage in its precise philosophical context and then successively assesses the main arguments put forward by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman in their critique of Lanzmann’s categorical imperative. While showing why the rhetoric of the “unrepresentable” bear troubling structural analogies to what they want to fight (i.e. the politics of erasure, which always also include the erasure of the traces of erasure), a certain notion of the “unrepresentable” is rescued nevertheless at the end of the essay. Representation, so it is argued by returning to a Kantian distinction, is not a matter of Kanon, but a matter of Organon, which then puts the debate about the Sublime (which took place between Lyotard and Rancière in the 90’s) into a new perspective. (shrink)

La personne comme question est un sujet qui n'a cessé d'alimenter la réflexion de l'auteur, ceci en s'appuyant sur Husserl. De la préhistoire du concept de personne à son épanouissement médiéval puis jusqu'à sa réactivation phénoménologique, la personne est un combat pour le soi. La perspective généalogique adoptée dans ce livre vise à montrer que c'est la genèse du concept biblique de personne qui montre le véritable sens d'être de la personne, alors que le concept juridique en est dérivé. Citant (...) les auteurs clé de ce concept de personne, ce livre en retrace l'histoire. (shrink)

Aunque fueron muchos los intentos en la modernidad de superar el dualismo cuerpo y mente, las teorías filosóficas del lenguaje en muchos casos lo reintrodujeron de manera sutil pero no menos eficaz. El artículo discute varios teoremas para pensar la materialidad del signo y muestra la preponderancia, desde Kierkegaard hasta el estructuralismo post-Saussuriano, de pensar la materialización como algo necesario, pero arbitrario en su modalidad. En esta concepción, el cuerpo del lenguaje no es solamente aquello que se puede sino aquello (...) que se debe poder modificar: la corporalidad de la expresión es lo que debe poder ser absolutamente sustituible para conservar la unidad del sentido. Sin embargo, en muchos casos, el sentido emerge precisamente de la singularidad insustituible, de la configuración de los signos en la poesía o de la gestualidad inimitable del actor. El articulo argumenta en favor de introducir, en esta discusión, la distinción fenomenológica entre Kó'rper y Leib, que - como Husserl sugirió - también puede pueden pensarse según la diferencia entre lo representable y lo irrepresentable, entre lo que no tiene papel constituyente y que desde luego puede ser sustituido, y lo que permite ser representado por otro porque es insustituible. Although in the modern age there were plenty of attempts to overcome the mind-body dualism, its philosophical theories of languages reintroduced it in a subtle but not less effective way. In this article several theorems to think on the materiality of the sign are discussed, and the preponderance, from Kierkegaard to the post-Saussurean structuralism, of thinking the materialization as something necessary but arbitrary in its modality, is shown. The body of language under this understanding is not only that which can be modified, but that which must be modifiable: the corporeality of the utterance must be substitutable in order to preserve the unit of meaning. Nevertheless, in many cases, the meaning comes precisely from the unsubstitutable singularity, from the configuration of the signs in poetry or from the inimitable actor's gestures. The article argues for introducing in this discussion the phenomenological distinction between Kórper and Leib, which - as Husserl suggested - may also be thought from the difference between the representable and the irrepresentable, between what does not have a constituent role and hence can be substituted, and what allows to be represented by another because it is unsubstitutable. (shrink)

A simplistic image of twentieth century French philosophy sees Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961 as the line that divides two irreconcilable moments in its history: existentialism and phenomenology, on the one hand, and structuralism on the other. The structuralist generation claimed to recapture the dimension of objectivity and impersonality, which the previous generation was supposedly incapable of. As a matter of fact, in 1962, Derrida’s edition of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry was taken to be a turning point that announced the (...) structuralist revolution by introducing a reflection on the historicity and the materiality of impersonal idealities. And yet, the 1998 publication of Merleau-Ponty’s notes from his Collège de France lecture course on the same topic make manifest that he was already taking phenomenology in another direction. His 1959 reading of The Origin of Geometry shows how unexpectedly close the early Derrida is to the late Merleau-Ponty. By identifying the tension between archaeology and teleology as the basic problem of Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida each disclose the fundamental importance of history and of writing. Comparing the two readings in their specific context not only brings about a more complex picture of the intellectual debates of the time, but also shows how, with Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of The Origin of Geometry, Derrida’s “différance” predates itself and receives another genealogy. (shrink)

Dass Bilder zwischen dem Regime der Dinge und dem Regime der Zeichen niemals einen angestammten Platz erhielten und nicht Gegenstand einer eigenen Wissenschaft wurden, ist keinem wiedergutzumachenden Vergessen geschuldet, sondern Ausdruck eines anfänglichen Skandalons, das historisch auch die Geburtsstunde der Philosophie einläutete. Bilder lassen sich nicht einmal als reine Erscheinungen absondern, weil in ihnen als Wasserzeichen stets durchscheint, was sie sichtbar werden ließ. An Husserls Grundlegung einer Phänomenologie des Bildes lässt sich das obstinate Unterfangen verfolgen, die Bilderscheinung von jeder medialen (...) Kontamination freizuhalten. Emmanuel Alloas Archäologie der Medienvergessenheit legt jenes Doppelparadigma frei, das die westliche Tradition seit Anbeginn begleitet – Transparenz und Opazität – und sich vor jenen Begriff schiebt, den es zu übersetzen beanspruchte: In der aristotelischen Wahrnehmungstheorie bezeichnet das Diaphane die Fähigkeit eines Mediums, die Form von etwas anzunehmen, ohne es zu sein. Auf unerwartete Weise wird durch Aristoteles’ Lehre vom Diaphanen erhellt, worin die Macht von Bildern liegt. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The recent publication of his lecture courses and posthumous working notes has opened new avenues for both the interpretation of his thought and philosophy in general. These works confirm that, with a surprising premonition, Merleau-Ponty addressed many of the issues that concern philosophy today. With the benefit of this fuller picture of his thought, Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy undertakes an assessment of the philosopher's relevance for contemporary (...) thinking. Covering a diverse range of topics, including ontology, epistemology, anthropology, embodiment, animality, politics, language, aesthetics, and art, the editors gather representative voices from North America and Europe, including both Merleau-Ponty specialists and thinkers who have come to the philosopher's work through their own thematic interest. (shrink)

Guizot aprendió el oficio de historiador preparando con su esposa,Pauline de Meulan, una edición crítica en francés de _Decline and Fall_ de Gibbon. Las personalidades históricas de Gibbon y Guizot fueron muy distintas. También sus respectivos “estilos de historia”. Pero en las obras de Guizot, en especial en su _Historia de la civilización en Europa_, es reconocible el legado de Gibbon. Así, en la eliminación de la barrera entre historia civil y historia religiosa, en la amplitud temática, en la ambición (...) cronológica y en una idea de Europa concebida como algo más que la suma de sus partes. Asimismo en la adopción de la misma palabra _civilización_ y en el hecho de que la interpretación guizotiana de la historia europea hunda sus raíces en tres factores presentes en Gibbon: lo que sobrevivió de las instituciones romanas, el impacto del cristianismo y el aporte germánico. (shrink)

Ce volume des Cahiers de philosophie de l’Université de Caen, qui contient le dossier de la soutenance de thèse d’Emmanuel Levinas ainsi que des études sur les deux volumes d’inédits, tient à marquer l’importance historique du lancement des Œuvres complètes non seulement pour la diffusion et l’étude de la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas dans le monde, mais également pour cet avenir qu’est la phénoménologie. Ce projet n’aurait pas pu avoir lieu...

In the early 1990s, W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm independently proclaimed that the humanities were witnessing a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic turn’. Twenty years later, we may wonder whether this announcement was describing an event that had already taken place or whether it was rather calling forth for it to happen. The contemporary world is, more than ever, determined by visual artefacts. Still, our conceptual arsenal, forged during centuries of logocentrism, still falls behind the complexity of pictorial meaning. The essay has (...) two parts. In the first, it tries to assess the exact meaning of the ‘pictorial’/’iconic turn’, and (re)places it into the context of Anglo-American visual studies and German Bildwissenschaften. It the second, it addresses the famous claim by the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius that ‘image sciences are easy’ by advocating for three ‘turns of the screw’ to make visual studies more difficult: a shift from iconology to symptomatology, a shift from extensive to intensive and a shift from the indicative to the subjunctive. (shrink)

In 20th century thinking, few concepts have provoked as many misunderstandings as Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘Flesh’. Such misunderstandings (of which the article sketches the outline of an archaeology) rest on the initial assumption that the Flesh has to be derived from the body. The article suggests that the dominant readings of the Flesh can be organized along what could respectively be called the scenario of propriety and the scenario of expansion, beyond which a third way comes into view which does (...) not think Flesh as plenitude, but as an interstitial fabric. In this sense, the genesis of the last ontology of the Flesh is neither to be found in Husserl or in a simple anti-Sartrianism, but in a fecund and still underestimated reading of Saussure’s notion of the diacritics. The ontological turn of the last writings can thus only be understood on the grounds of the expressive turn from the intermediate period. (shrink)

The paper takes heed of the fact that, when evaluating normative issues through the semantics of visibility and invisibility, a transfer takes place from optical to political semantics which is not without consequences. The paper attempts a typology of the extremely diverse functions (in)visibility takes in current discourses, moving from the characterization of situations of discrimination to that of the resistance to it. In a first step, it analyses the affirmative uses of the notion of political visibilisation, whether of individuals, (...) groups or concerns, that fashion themselves as targeted answers to discrimination. In a second step, it looks at the politics of invisibilisation, stealth, and opaqueness, claiming emancipatory and critical potential in resisting the limelight of public space. Specifically, it assesses whether the traditional connect of politicization and public visibility still holds true in all cases. In a third part, the paper suggests a possible reorganization of the polarity of visibility and invisibility as one that runs along the continuum between determinacy and indeterminacy, indicating its effects for patterns of discrimination as well as for practices of resistance. (shrink)

Introduction: Return to the obvious -- Perception -- Language -- Ontology of the visible -- Conclusion: Toward dia-phenomenology.

This article seeks to question the relationship between “Political”, “Life” and “Action”, returning to the reading of Hannah Arendt’s concept of “ vita active ” in The Human Condition. Particularly, going back to the subject of “action” as a condition of possibility of “political life”. To do this, this analysis will focus on the thought of Philo, especially in a strange text in his corpus: The contemplative life or supplicants. The aim of the paper is to reflect on the place (...) where philosophical reflection and theological reflection as a political forms are installed and what implications does this has: what happens when the foundation of teaching does not pass through the “ vita activa ” but by a passive life under consecration to the task of reflection and study: can we raise from there a communal manner that constitutes politics as in-action? (shrink)

Albert Lautman,.philosophe, juif, fusillé par les Nazis pour faits de Résistance comme son ami et collègue Jean Cavaillès, a laissé inachevée une œuvre puissante et dont l'influence s'est fait sentir au-delà de son domaine. Lautman est une figure rare : un philosophe souverain, capable de mobiliser les grands noms de la tradition philosophique, de Platon à Heidegger, et suffisamment averti des mathématiques pour proposer une intelligence de leur développement acceptée des savants. Les membres du groupe Bourbaki ont reconnu en Lautman (...) un auteur exposant adéquatement les mathématiques auxquelles ils contribuaient ; Deleuze se réfère à lui de manière élogieuse ; Badiou, Petitot et Salanskis, notamment, lui font écho ou tentent de le prolonger. On examine ici cette œuvre dense, depuis Essai sur les notions de structure et d'existence en mathématiques et Essai sur l'unité des sciences mathématiques dans leur développement actuel aux textes posthumes, Symétrie et dissymétrie en mathématiques et en physique suivi du Problème du temps, après l'avoir située dans son contexte historique-scientifique. On espère ainsi montrer la profondeur et l'actualité d'une pensée singulière, celle d'un grand rationaliste qui était aussi un métaphysicien. (shrink)

In contemporary social epistemology, the claim has been made that there is a traditional “neglect of testimonial knowledge,” and that in the history of epistemology, first-hand self-knowledge was invariably prioritised over secondary knowledge. While this paper acknowledges some truth in these statements, it challenges the given explanations: the mentioned neglect of testimonial knowledge is based not so much on a primacy of self-knowledge, but that of self-agency. This article retraces some crucial chapters of this ‘do-it-yourself’ paradigm: it considers the imperative (...) of autopsia in early Greek epistemology, history and medicine, and the early modern refashioning of the privilege of self-generated and self-taught (autodidactic) knowledge. A new picture emerges of how the emphasis on (self-)agency progressively shifted towards a focus on the self as the source of ultimate knowledge. (shrink)