La possibilité d’une définition naturaliste de la santé et d’une distinction entre le normal et le pathologique qui ne repose pas sur des normes culturelles, sociales ou subjectives est au cœur des débats en philosophie de la médecine. Or le concept statistique de la normalité, fondamental pour une définition objective de la santé, soulève d’importantes difficultés. Christopher Boorse défend une « théorie bio-statistique » qui, en articulant ce concept à une notion non normative de fonction biologique, résoudrait ces difficultés. L’identification (...) de la santé et de la normalité au sens statistique demeure toutefois centrale dans sa définition. Après avoir précisé le rôle que joue la normalité statistique dans la BST, nous dégageons, à partir de l’épidémiologie contemporaine, un certain nombre de problèmes et questions que cette définition naturaliste soulève.The liability for a naturalist definition of health and for a value-free distinction between the normal and the pathological is at the core of discussions on health and disease in philosophy of medicine. But the statistical concept of normality, a central one for any objective definition of health, raises numerous problems. Christopher Boorse argues for a « biostatistical theory » which aims at solving these difficulties by articulating a statistical concept of normality and a non-normative concept of biological function. However the BST is still based on identifying normality and health with the most frequent. After analyzing in details the true role of statistical normality in BST, I will show how results and data from modern epidemiology can be mobilized to reveal several limits and difficulties with respect to this naturalist definition of health and disease. (shrink)

Discussion de la phénoménologie de la religion, et notamment certaines propositions de Heidegger ou Falque.

O artigo busca esclarecer a distinção fundamental entre a positividade ontológica da objetivação e da alienação segundo György Lukács e a negatividade intrínseca a estes conceitos entre uma enorme gama de pensadores. Para tanto, o artigo toma por eixo as diferenças entre o filósofo húngaro e Hegel, que postulou de forma clássica a negatividade dos momentos da alienação e da objetivação.This article aims to clarify the fundamental distinction between the ontological positivity of objectivation and alienation according to György Lukács (...) and the intrinsic negativity of these concepts among an enormous series of writers. To do so, the article focuses, on this particular, between the Hungarian philosopher and Hegel, who set the classical prototype of the negative concepts of alienation objectivation. (shrink)

The problem of inferiority, of subjectivity, of conscience, is not only a metaphysical or psychological problem; it is susceptible to objective scientific study at the neurophysiological level. This study must not stop, however, at an analysis of cerebral function but must also recognize that conscience results from the self-being of the individual at himself in certain structures of his brain and that a cerebral process is or is not conscious according to whether or not it is integrated into the structure (...) of the whole. This is best developed in man by virtue of the cerebral complexity which makes possible the verbalization of one self. The spiritual always appears as a functional, nonlocalizable aspect of the whole of the aggregate individual. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is a specific form of cosmogony—the conception of cosmogonic objectivation, interpreted as a tragedy or cosmogonic fall. This conception is examined on the basis of the evidence furnished by two sets of materials: firstly, the original texts and paraphrases of the Valentinian Gnostics of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, and secondly, the writings of the Russian philosophers Vladimir Solovyov, Lev Karsavin and Nikolay Berdyaev. The research reveals a series of specific features common to (...) both of these: in particular, the conception of cosmogonic objectivation appears to be connected with the doctrine of the absolute person’s fall, and with the motive of self-alienation. (shrink)

La recherche actuelle cherche à démontrer qu'il existe une sociologie chez Foucault et l'oeuvre foucaldienne est aussi une oeuvre sociologique. L'oeuvre de Foucault offre plusieurs avantages conceptuels à la pensée sociologique et sa pensée peut être entendue comme une expérience qui nous conduira aussi à une pratique autoréflexive de la sociologie. Mais ce qui rapproche le plus Foucault des sociologues, c'est toujours sa tentative de comprendre le sujet à travers un social qui est devenu historique et cette Histoire nous revient (...) à chaque fois en tant que forme culturelle. La question centrale de Foucault est ce social qui occupe une place considérable dans la constitution de l'individu, pourtant l'individu n'est jamais complètement contraint. Les grandes lignes de la pensée foucaldienne consistent à élaborer une pensée critique, une pensée qui est parvenue finalement à réunir l'objectivation et la subjectivation. La sociologie foucaldienne a pour objectif de mettre en lumière la question "qui sommes-nous en train de devenir?" pour construire un diagnostic sociologique d'une modernité paradoxale. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is a specific form of cosmogony—the conception of cosmogonic objectivation, interpreted as a tragedy or cosmogonic fall. This conception is examined on the basis of the evidence furnished by two sets of materials: firstly, the original texts and paraphrases of the Valentinian Gnostics of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, and secondly, the writings of the Russian philosophers Vladimir Solovyov, Lev Karsavin and Nikolay Berdyaev. The research reveals a series of specific features common to (...) both of these: in particular, the conception of cosmogonic objectivation appears to be connected with the doctrine of the absolute person’s fall, and with the motive of self-alienation. (shrink)

Aron Gurwitsch, phenomenologist and intrinsic theorist of consciousness4, contends that every objectivating mental act necessarily involves inner awareness; whenever an objectivating act occurs, it is an intentional object of unmediated apprehension. Moreover, inner awareness is literally intrinsic to every objectivating mental act, a part of its very own individual structure. Gurwitsch further argues that inner awareness is a merely concomitant part of that structure, taking place at the margin of the particular objectivating act, for the reason that the content of (...) inner awareness is not relevant to the content of the thematic process at the core of the act. However, Gurwitsch assigns an essential function to inner awareness by virtue of its content; namely, it helps to constitute the respective objectivating act as a unitary phenomenon over time. Perhaps, therefore, theoretically relegating inner awareness to the margin of an objectivating act amounts merely to an effort to allow for straightforward objectivation without falling into inconsistency. That is, some objectivating acts seem not to include inner awareness and, presumably, this would be explained by reference to intrinsic inner awareness that is no more than concomitant, as opposed to its being interwoven with outer awareness taking place in the central area of an objectivating act. (shrink)

The subject of the present work is noema and its structure in various stages of the objectivating process. Despite its great importance, this issue has never been adequately explained, neither by Husserl nor by his followers. The main objective is to provide the theory that would describe the structure of noema and its function without simplifying the case or appealing to non-phenomenological data. This has been achieved by way of analysis divided into four sections. The first provides an overview of (...) noema. The second section is devoted to analysis of the process of objectivation, i.e., how an active awareness of the object in a logical sense is constituted by a series of passive experiences. The third section refers to a noema as found at different stages of objectivation. It explains how the increasing level of activity, which turns out to be a noetic function, causes changes to the structure of a noema. The last section summarises the results and stresses the advantages of the developed theory in comparison with other interpretations, especially those offered by Drummond, Smith and McIntyre. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 213 Seiten: 91-122.

Author starts from hypothesis that Spinoza has developed ideas that are much wider than «modern project» and foresees concepts that were actualized by philosophy of the end of XXth c. Namely: 1) Spinoza opposes to desomatization of human: in modern philosophy ontological horizon of body was hardly considered. Spinoza takes ontological position of mind-body parallelism. Spinoza becomes «post-modernist» due to thinking and extension being attributes of single substance. 2) Mind-body parallelism is equivocal to contemporary problem of differences, in particular for (...) definition in self-identity through differences. The author shows theses showing Spinoza`s importance: 1) fact of the bode is rationally grounded; 2) body is unique and is not reducible; 3) mind cannot make concept of a human without hers body. Therefore, researches of XXth c. draw on Spinoza`s heritage, being with it in appreciable resonance. (shrink)

Stanford's goal is to explain the uniquely human tendency to externalize or objectify “distinctively moral” demands, norms, and obligations. I maintain that there is no clear phenomenon to explain. Stanford's account of which norms are distinctively moral relies on Turiel's problematic work. Stanford's justification of the claim that we “objectify” moral demands ignores recent studies indicating that often we do not.

The bone of contention that divides Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons in their 1940–1941 debate is that Schutz acknowledges an ontological break between the commonsense and scientific worlds whereas Parsons only considers it “a matter of refinement.” Schutz’s ontological distancing that disconnects the “world of consociates” where social reality is directly experienced in face-to-face contacts, and the “world of contemporaries” where the Other is experienced in terms of “types” has been crucial to social scientists. Implicated in the break is that (...) all intellectual attempts to understand experiences of Others must be based on the “models” constructed in the “world of contemporaries” (or “predecessors”); hence, epistemologically, to grasp the subjective point of view with a here-and-now understanding is an outright impossibility. Based on a Schutzian perspective, the author suggests that the sociologist must objectivize the Thou-orientations involved in his/her analysis in order that s/he can possibility grasp the subjective point of view in objective terms. (shrink)

Je vais reconstruire quelques aspects de la genèse naturelle de la conscience dans les écrits hégéliens d’Iéna, avec le but de montrer que cette reconstruction est essentielle pour comprendre la genèse des capacités fondamentales qui sont présupposées par l’interaction de la reconnaissance. En particulier, je vais défendre la thèse suivante: Hegel a jeté une base pour une Naturphilosophie de la reconnaissance, en esquissant une sorte d'histoire naturelle de l’évolution de la relation consciente à soi-même, relation qui commence par le soi (...) organique étant doué des capacités communicatives qui lui permettent d’interagir avec l’environnement et avec ses semblables. Avant touts, je vais suivre le fil rouge qui mène de la Differenzschrift aux leçons de philosophie de la nature et de philosophie de l’esprit dispensées par Hegel à Iéna pendant le semestre d’été deu 1803 et le semestre d’hiver du 1803-4 et qui seront le sujet principale de ma reconstruction interprétative. Cette reconstruction s’articule en cinq phases. Dans une première partie, j’aborderai la question de la reconnaissance naturelle a partir du problème de la différentiation et de l’interaction sexuelle. Dans une deuxième partie, je parlerai de la conception hégélienne du soi organique proto-intentionnel et de sa structure proprioceptive et communicative. Dans une troisième partie, j’aborderai le sujet de la structure pratique de la Begierde (de l’appétit) en tant que forme d’intentionnalité pratique et des formes d’interactions conflictuelles proto-recognitives qui surgissent de cette intentionnalité. Dans une quatrième partie je vais m’occuper de la question de la voix animale comme acte expressive expressif qui manifeste l’aspiration par l’être naturel à voir reconnue sa propre individualité.Dans une cinquième partie je vais analyser la forme de reconnaissance qui se manifeste avec la génération du fils et qui constitue la matrice naturelle de la raison en tant que première forme d’objectivation. Après avoir esquissé les aspects défectueuxifs des formes naturelles de la reconnaissance, j’avancerai enfine vais finalement avancer la thèse à laquelle ma reconstruction aboutit : les formes de conscience spirituelle réflexive qui se déploient dans l’esprit présupposent la conscience reconnaissante préréflexive et sont des réorganisations plus complexes de ses structures fondamentales. (shrink)

In this paper, we engage with Chinese diasporas research through recourse to Bourdieu’s relational, reflexive sociology. We start with the historical and recent developments of Chinese diasporas research and point out the potential of using Bourdieu to strengthen the theoretical underpinnings of this research. While we see a steady stream of Bourdieu-informed Chinese diasporas studies and acknowledge their contribution and innovation, we observe that some studies use Bourdieu’s capital and/or habitus without field. In response, we draw on Bourdieu’s relationalism to (...) highlight the significance of ‘fielding’ Chinese diasporas research. In addition, we turn field analysis onto Chinese diasporas researcher-selves through Bourdieu’s reflexive tool of participant objectivation. In this vein, we ponder over the positions and position-takings of Chinese diasporas researchers within and beyond the academic field of Chinese diasporas. To conclude the paper, we make a call to shift the intellectual landscape by developing a research agenda to sociologise Chinese diasporas challenged by complex and difficult issues of power, politics, and participation. Our critical sociological approach may have implications for doing scholarship reflexively and relationally in other research fields. (shrink)

La Philosophie du Procès est une doctrine dynamique de l’individu. Chaque individu, chaque entité actuelle exprime l’Univers tout entier, mais chaque individu vit et existe en vue de l’expression de soi d’autres individus. L’accomplissement de l’entité actuelle en elle-même est la satisfaction; le mouvement d’objectivation de soi par lequel elle se transcende pour servir à la détermination et à l’accomplissement d’une autre est la décision.

This article uses participant objectivation in sociology and philosophy as two knowledge fields to provide a reflexive comparison of their synced field effect in historical circumstances. Drawing on the philosopher and historian of science Gaston Bachelard, I theorize fielded knowledge as a social relation that combines the prior presence of folk knowledge with a socioanalytic exchange between field and folk that includes positions of either defense, replacement or critique. A comparison of post-Wittgenstein Anglophone philosophy and post-sixties American sociology describes (...) their mutual confrontation with folk psychology as an “epistemological obstacle” that generates a remarkable concern with action as a position-taking on the folk relation. A reflexive objectivation of folk knowledge is therefore necessary for a revised understanding of action that correlates with the distinction of sociology’s knowledge capital and how it fares as an explanatory resource in competitive circumstances. The article concludes by leveraging the synced field effect even further to make a recommendation that sociologists can increase the distinction of their knowledge capital by producing discourse that can recognize, legitimate and officialize experiences that otherwise remain obscure, nameless or impossible within the bounded universe of folk psychology. (shrink)

The significance of the research topic is found in the analysis of the problem of thinking, one of the most important abilities of man, which today, in combination with knowledge, appears as a means of creating a new world and man. The purpose of the study is to identify the main content load of thinking in the process of its formation and development in the system of various intellectual and cognitive practices, in the culture of communication, which determines its role (...) in the acquisition and transformation of the surrounding reality - natural, social, spiritual. Objectives of the study - to identify the main directions of development of thinking - logical, philosophical, psychological, to reveal the content of the concept of "productive thinking", its development in classical epistemology and post-classical philosophy of science, which show the polymeaningfulness of the phenomenon of thinking. Methodology of the research - analytical-historical, contaminant, rational-heuristic methods are used, which allows to carry out a systematic analysis of thinking, which acquired a variety of forms and means in the history of philosophy and culture; methods of contemporary socio-philosophical and cognitive analysis showed the relationship of theoretical foundations of thinking with practical principles. The result of the study is the conceptualization of the problem of thinking as an effective intellectual, heuristic, cognitive and theoretical tool in the development of knowledge, objectivized in concepts, principles, and laws. The establishment of the role of thinking in the development of scientific knowledge, in the creation of new paradigms of knowledge is also an important aspect. The result of the analysis is the development of scientific-theoretical and methodological approaches in identifying the heuristic, creative essence of thinking, whose influence on the objective and subjective world causes their transformation and the transition to a new quality. Conclusion - the solution of theoretical problems of intellectual and intellectual activity as a factor in the formation and development of philosophy, culture and creative activity of man. (shrink)

L'oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty est tout entiere commandee par le souci de mettre rigoureusement en oeuvre le mot d'ordre husserlien de retour aux choses memes, ce qui exige, conformement au geste amorce par Husserl dans la Krisis, de reconnaitre l'oeuvre de l'idealisation -c'est-a-dire de l'objectivation- la meme ou elle se fait oublier, afin de la neutraliser. A l'instar de Bergson, pour qui la tache de la philosophie etait d'aller chercher l'experience au-dessus du tournant ou, s'inflechissant dans le sens de l'utilite, (...) elle devient proprement l'experience humaine, pour Merleau-Ponty, la tache de la pensee est de se situer a ce tournant ou l'experience s'accomplit et se voile a la fois dans des productions ou elle se fait proprement humaine, de definir un sens de l'Etre anterieur a la bifurcation du preobjectif et de l'oeuvre idealisante. Le but des recherches est de tenter de clarifier la nature exacte du tournant de l'experience ainsi que le projet phenomenologique merleau-pontien. (shrink)

En matière de méthodologie, les juristes ont le plus souvent eu pour réflexe de se réapproprier des modèles provenant d'autres champs de savoir. Cette attitude présente plusieurs difficultés. Elles reposent tout d'abord sur une part de fiction. Les juristes ne sont ni des mathématiciens, ni des physiciens, ni des biologistes, ni des historiens, ni encore des sociologues. Tout au mieux font-ils comme s'ils Tétaient. Par ailleurs, bien que les réappropriations méthodologiques opérées visent fréquemment à ériger le savoir juridique au rang (...) de science, cette prétention n'est pas exempte d'ambiguïtés, ni de malentendus. Cela tient essentiellement au fait que, dans le domaine juridique, il existe deux niveaux de langage, à savoir le langage du droit lui-même et le langage du savant qui l'appréhende. Du point de vue d'une méthodologie analytique, ces deux niveaux devraient être rigoureusement distingués. Toutefois leur confusion est régulièrement entretenue. Pour certains, en effet, les juristes feraient d'autant plus preuve de science qu'ils se révèleraient capables de reproduire, parfois en vue de les prédire, les méthodes, les raisonnements et les solutions retenus par les autorités normatives qu'ils observent. Pour d'autres également, le métier de juriste est avant tout celui d'un bon connaisseur de la technique du droit positif. Cette proximité gardée à l'égard de l'objet analysé est mal comprise par les autres sciences humaines et sociales qui situent les efforts de distanciation et d'objectivation au rang des premiers réquisits méthodologiques du savoir scientifique. Dès lors, les réflexions méthodologiques dépassent les enjeux internes au champ juridique. Elles sont cruciales pour qui veut comprendre les déplacements épistémologiques dont sont porteuses l'évolution des techniques de connaissance et l'affirmation d'objets transverses qui défient les découpages disciplinaires hérités du siècle dernier. Cette troisième édition a été enrichie de nouveaux développements sur le pragmatisme et les méthodes de l'interdisciplinarité. (shrink)

To discover affects within Husserl’s texts designates a difficult investigation; it points to a theme of which these texts were forced to speak, even as they were explicitly speaking of regional ontologies and the foundations of sciences. For we may at first wonder: where can affection find a positive role in the rigor of a pure philosophy that seeks to account for its phenomena from within the immanence of consciousness? Does this not mean that the very passivity and foreignness of (...) affect will be overlooked; will it not be continually linked to a Vorstellung that issues as a ray of the pure ego? That is, will the phenomenological account of affect be reduced to the cognition of an object, as Emmanuel Levinas suggests? Yet there are affects in Husserl’s texts that maintain their autonomy and resist subsumption to an objectivating intentionality.We may see this in the Lectures On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time: in the longitudinal intentionality of retention, through which consciousness becomes aware of its elapsed phases without making them into objects—a passive synthesis that gives the flow of time-constituting consciousness the form of a continually deferred auto-affection.1We find it again as early as the fifth Logical Investigation, 2 providing us with the impetus to radicalize Husserlian phenomenology. (shrink)

Our purpose in this article is to explore the reasons for the continued attractiveness of Simmel's thought today and to probe the contemporary affinities to his philosophical stance towards the world. Simmel anchored the ‘philosophical attitude' in the philosopher’s particularly developed disposition for Erlebnis, i.e. the unified pre-conceptual experience of each moment of reality and life, as well as in a particular mode of objectivating this experience. We provide an illustration of such an approach and its implications through Simmel's analysis (...) of ‘remoteness from oneself’ and the restlessness it entails in The Philosophy of Money. We argue that Simmel's attempt at phenomenologically unveiling the contours and depths of life moments and fragments, as well as his emphasis on constant movement, provide much reassurance to contemporary subjectivities. But his philosophical stance is also driven by a quasi-mystical yearning for the One that lies beneath and beyond the fragments. We propose an initial assessment of the main implications of such a stance by relating it to the philosophical path it opened up and by placing it in what we understand to be the new philosophical situation today. (shrink)

The ArgumentContemporary natural sciences succeed remarkably well in ensuring a relatively continuous transmission of their cognitively relevant traditions and in creating a widely shared background consensus among their practitioners – hermeneutical ends seemingly achieved without hermeneutical awareness or explicitly acquired hermeneutical skills.It is a historically specific – emerging only in the nineteenth century – cultural organization of the Author-Text-Reader relation which endows them with such an ease of hermeneutical achievements: an institutionally fixed form of textual and intertextual practices, normatively posited (...) ways of adequate reception and criticism, etc. The same organization also explains a number of their often-discussed epistemic and cultural characteristics: their depersonalized objectivity, the social closure of their discourse and their reduced cultural significance, the shallow historical depth of their activated traditions, etc.The cognitive structure and the social function of contemporary natural sciences are intimately interwoven with a set of sui generis cultural relations that are partially fixed in the textual characteristics of their literary objectivations. A comparative hermeneutical analysis of natural sciences as a specifically constituted and institutionalized cultural genre or discourse-type brings into relief those contingent cultural conditions and relations to which some of their fundamental epistemological characteristics are bound, or at least with which they are historically closely associated. (shrink)

According to Bowden (20121), anorectics’2 bodily experiences are characterized by a “corporealization,” which has notably been described as follows: “The exchange with the environment is inhibited, excretions cease; processes of . . . shrinking, and drying up prevail” (Fuchs 2005, 99). What is described here is melancholia, but a similar characterization would be applicable to anorexia. I think, however, that the notion of ‘corporealization’ is not fine-grained enough to capture the specificity of anorexic/pathological bodily experiences. To develop this point, I (...) here propose to apply some of Heidegger’s key notions to the conceptualization of bodily experience (Caron 2008). As currently defined, the .. (shrink)

Il est désormais connu que Michel Foucault s’est intéressé à la fin de sa vie à l’ ”herméneutique du sujet.” Mais cette histoire de la constitution du sujet (ou de la subjectivité) fait étrangement l’économie d’une réflexion sur le rôle de la compréhension, alors que Foucault qualifie son travail d’ ”ontologie historique de nous-mêmes.” C'est sur ce point précis qu’est ici mis à l'épreuve le caractère médiateur de l’œuvre de Paul Ricœur, dont l’herméneutique du soi prend en charge une ontologie (...) de la compréhension. Suite à ces considérations, la seconde partie de l’article cherche à démontrer que la théorie de l’agir de Ricœur peut favoriser le passage d’une reconnaissance de type objectale à une reconnaissance des capacités du sujet à se tenir pour responsable. Ce passage sera opéré directement sur le modèle d’analyse du “dernier Foucault,” c’est-à-dire son concept-clé de “processus de subjectivation.” In his later work, Michel Foucault manifested a strong interest for the “hermeneutics of the subject.” Yet this history of the constitution of the subject (or subjectivity) does without any reflection on the role of understanding, even though Foucault characterizes his project as a historical ontology of ourselves . The power of mediation emphasized in the work of Paul Ricœur may help us redefine an ontology of understanding through a hermeneutics of the self. Following this, the second part of the article aims to show that Ricœur’s theory of action can facilitate a transition from the recognition of the self, first described as “objectivation,” to a recognition of the subject’s capacity to be held responsible. This passage will draw on the model of analysis in the later Foucault, specifically, on his key concept of the subjectivation process . . (shrink)

The paper builds on the basically Humean idea that A is a cause of B iff A and B both occur, A precedes B, and A raises the metaphysical or epistemic status of B given the obtaining circumstances. It argues that in pursuit of a theory of deterministic causation this ‘status raising’ is best explicated not in regularity or counterfactual terms, but in terms of ranking functions. On this basis, it constructs a rigorous theory of deterministic causation that successfully deals (...) with cases of overdetermination and pre-emption. It finally indicates how the account's profound epistemic relativization induced by ranking theory can be undone. Introduction Variables, propositions, time Induction first Causation Redundant causation Objectivization. (shrink)

Un des enjeux actuels du traitement sémantique des corpus textuels concerne la nécessaire tentative de contrôle et d’objectivation de l’intertexte. Les corpus réflexifs, que nous définissons dans cet article, poursuivent cette exigence d’objectivation et de mise en forme des ressources sémantiques et interprétatives, en se proposant d’être, dans la mesure du possible, des tout-textuels sémantiquement auto-suffisants – c’est-à-dire des univers interprétatifs clos, définis parmi d’autres – pour une exploitation certes pas exhaustive, mais raisonnable et raisonnée du texte.

Un des enjeux actuels du traitement sémantique des corpus textuels concerne la nécessaire tentative de contrôle et d’objectivation de l’intertexte. Les corpus réflexifs, que nous définissons dans cet article, poursuivent cette exigence d’objectivation et de mise en forme des ressources sémantiques et interprétatives, en se proposant d’être, dans la mesure du possible, des tout-textuels sémantiquement auto-suffisants – c’est-à-dire des univers interprétatifs clos, définis parmi d’autres – pour une exploitation certes pas exhaustive, mais raisonnable et raisonnée du texte.

This paper examines the psychology of existential guilt with Martin Heidegger and Rollo May’s conceptualizations as the point of departure. The concept of existential guilt describes preconditions for responsibility and accountability in life choices and the relationship to the potential given in the life of a human. It might also be used as a starting point to examine an individual’s relationship to the potential offered in their life and life context and, in this way, the hitherto unlived life of an (...) individual. The following questions are discussed in contexts of identity development, perfectionism, and current cultural shifts in conceptualizations of selfhood: How can humans relate to the fact that only limited parts of who they might be can ever be actualized? Moreover, how can they relate to the fundamental ambiguity and “groundlessness” in the contexts of life where choices are made? There are striking parallels between the role of exploration in the Eriksonian approaches to healthy identity development and the ontological groundlessness that stands out as a premise for existential guilt. There are also parallels between identity fore-closure and normative identity styles and “falling” into das Man in the existential framework. Perfectionistic ideals easily become an objectivization – and closure – of possible alternatives and choices. In contemporary theories of constructions of selfhood, the dangers of alienation from the community on the one hand and escape into what might become totalitarian collectivism on the other is pointed out. The contextualization of personal responsibility offered through the concept of existential guilt might address both dangers. It provides a perspective on how personal responsibility is embedded in contexts of human relationships, relationships to nature, and the finitude, freedom, uncertainties, and suffering that is given through human existence. Existential guilt can wake sorrow and regret over opportunities overlooked and lost. However, most of all, it can be seen as a drive toward repair in the relationship toward both oneself and the other. It takes the form of receptivity, an openness to a life not yet lived, and creative use of imagination. (shrink)

Why does a journal that intends to »bring out reason into culture« give so much space to the question of mysticism? The contemporary rise of extra-ecclesial reli- giosity is well known. A critique of culture that questions the significance of its given forms must problematize the enthusiasm for mysticism. But in its claim for immediacy, mystical experience constitutes a kind of impossible object for the phi- losophy of culture. I interpret the reflection on mysticism as a test for the capacity (...) of the philosophy of culture to account for cultural life and not only its objectified forms. This reflection reveals a structural tension of the Logos program as an effort to recover the link between life and its objectivations. (shrink)

Philosophe de la culture et non seulement essayiste et critique de la modernité, Georg Simmel a voulu proposer une idée de la culture en temps de crise, susceptible de servir d'horizon pour une " vie moderne " fragmentée et déchirée entre processus d'objectivation et dissolution des formes. Cette entreprise a un nom : " relativisme ", ou plutôt " relationnisme " – une " philosophie dans son concept cosmique ", mais sans l'artifice du système. Le relationnisme s'installe d'emblée dans (...) le concret de la vie socio-historique, il commence par le milieu : la relation. Après avoir interrogé la valeur et l'" esprit objectif " des produits de la culture, il analyse les conditions de leur appropriation par la vie individuelle et sociale. Si la discordance entre subjectivités et objectivités peut être surmontée, ce sera au moyen d'une nouvelle description, relationniste, des formes de l'individualité. En reconstruisant ce programme philosophique, ce livre redonne à Simmel sa place dans la tradition allemande et parmi les grands auteurs de son temps. (shrink)