Normal 0 21 Minha intenção é a de mostrar como uma leitura cética dos diálogos socráticos de Platão permite explicar alguns impasses nos quais resulta a interpretação dogmática desses diálogos. Enumero aqui, de maneira programática, os elementos que permitirão sustentar que, nos diálogos de juventude, Platão desenvolveu uma lógica que conduz a uma posição forte sobre os limites do conhecimento e do intelectualismo. Essa interpretação se inspira em traços dominantes do ceticismo de Arcesilau (séc. III a.C.). Mostrarei como os diálogos (...) de Platão podem ser lidos como a inspiração por trás da posição de Arcesilau quando este afirma que seria preciso suspender o julgamento e, na falta de certeza, seguir o que é razoável ( eulogon ). De uma parte, o estudo do estatuto paradoxal da ignorância socrática e do papel do oráculo na Apologia permite discernir o funcionamento de uma lógica propícia a gerar aporias. De outra parte, a análise do problema da virtude-ciência no Protágoras e no Laques permite exibir os mecanismos de uma argumentação cuja conclusão é a impossibilidade de defender hic e nunc uma ética estritamente intelectualista. (shrink)

Minha intenção é a de mostrar como uma leitura cética dos diálogos socráticos de Platão permite explicar alguns impasses nos quais resulta a interpretação dogmática desses diálogos. Enumero aqui, de maneira programática, os elementos que permitirão sustentar que, nos diálogos de juventude, Platão desenvolveu uma lógica que conduz a uma posição forte sobre os limites do conhecimento e do intelectualismo. Essa interpretação se inspira em traços dominantes do ceticismo de Arcesilau (séc. III a.C.). Mostrarei como os diálogos de Platão podem (...) ser lidos como a inspiração por trás da posição de Arcesilau quando este afirma que seria preciso suspender o julgamento e, na falta de certeza, seguir o que é razoável (eulogon). De uma parte, o estudo do estatuto paradoxal da ignorância socrática e do papel do oráculo na Apologia permite discernir o funcionamento de uma lógica propícia a gerar aporias. De outra parte, a análise do problema da virtude-ciência no Protágoras e no Laques permite exibir os mecanismos de uma argumentação cuja conclusão é a impossibilidade de defender hic e nunc uma ética estritamente intelectualista. (shrink)

This paper deals with the philosophical purpose of the Gorgias. I argue that this dialogue, both in its form and content, yields a dramatic demonstration that the success of the Socratic inquiry depends on the character of his interlocutors and their sense of what is shameful or not. To read the Gorgias is to inquire whether Socrates’ refutations have demonstrated anything. Although there is no definition of justice, happiness or the art of rhetoric, the dialogue nevertheless shows that justice and (...) trustworthiness concern both the practitioners of rhetoric and those of dialectic. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to the Parmenides’ methodological preamble, in which Parmenides teaches how one is to lead a dialectical inquiry. The method presented there recalls the goddess’s advice, as presented by the historical Parmenides in his Poem, to think “the way of being and the way of non-being.” In Plato’s Parmenides, these two ways are seen as manners of examining a hypothesis. I explain that the method is exhaustive insofar as it requires repeatedly asking what the consequences are if (...) a thing does exist, or does not. Lastly, I suggest that the method should be distinguished from other dialectical practices found in Plato’s work. (shrink)

Les recompositions familiales touchent l’ensemble des liens familiaux et des liens intergénérationnels. Or, si l’on observe, tant sur le plan juridique que dans les pratiques des familles conjugales, une acception plus complexe et plus riche de la parentalité, les grands-parents restent souvent méconnus. Comment construisent-ils leurs rapports à leurs « beaux-petits-enfants »? Nous avons examiné la littérature et interrogé des « belles-grands-mères » pour tenter d’y voir plus clair. Quelles représentations le champ social offre-t-il des beaux-grands-parents? Et quelles sont concrètement (...) les conditions et les étapes qui rendent possible une identité « beau-grand-parentale »? (shrink)

Si la philosophie du droit a une très longue histoire, le bouleversement des conditions techniques, économiques, sociales et politiques nous impose aujourd'hui de renouveler en profondeur le traitement des questions qu'elle pose traditionnellement ainsi que les réponses qui y sont données. La définition de la justice, le partage des biens et des charges de la vie en société, les rôles respectifs de l'État, du marché et de la société civile, la mission des juges et l'application des lois, ou encore le (...) contenu et l'importance des droits de l'homme, doivent être réexaminés dans une perspective instruite par l'éclairage historique, mais résolument tournée vers les problèmes du présent et les choix qui engagent l'avenir. C'est dans une telle optique qu'a été conçu cet ouvrage. (shrink)

My main aim in this paper is to contribute to the elucidation of the nature of non-religious faith. I start by summarising several well-known arguments that belief is neither necessary nor sufficient for faith. I then try to identify the nature of the positive cognitive attitude towards p that is involved in having faith that p. After dismissing some candidates for the role, I explore the idea that faith and hope are similar attitudes. On this basis, I then advance a (...) new characterisation of faith. Finally, I turn to the question of the rationality of faith. I argue that faith is intrinsically irrational because it is an intrinsically incoherent propositional attitude, but that there is nonetheless a sense in which faith is neither intrinsically epistemically irrational nor intrinsically practically irrational. (shrink)

Theories of knowledge as credit for true belief, or as cognitive achievement, have to face the following objection: in the famous Barn façades case, it seems that the truth of Barney's belief that he is in front of a barn is to be explained by the correct functioning of his cognitive capacities, although we are reluctant to say that he knows he is in front of a barn. Duncan Pritchard concludes from this that a safety clause, irreducible to the conditions (...) a true belief must satisfy in order to be credited to the believer, constitutes a necessary condition of knowledge. Because those who define knowledge as a cognitive achievement have not convincingly answered this objection, I intend, in the first section of this paper, to refute it by showing how practical and doxastic achievements differ. Then I defend the idea that we should also distinguish two kinds of environmental epistemic luck, and, correlatively, two kinds of safety, that are not equally incompatible with knowledge. Finally, I argue that this distinction is inevitably vague and I indicate some consequences of this vagueness for our knowledge‐intuitions. (shrink)

We are naturally inclined to judge that it is better to know that p than to merely truly believe that p. How to account for this intuition? In this paper, I examine Williamson, Goldman and Olsson, and Pritchard's answers, and agree with Pritchard that it cannot be consistently claimed that knowledge is epistemically superior to mere true belief, and that truth is the only finally valuable epistemic good. Contrary to Pritchard, I argue that the latter claim is deeply mistaken. I (...) do so by showing that mere true beliefs have no epistemic value at all. I sketch the consequences of this point concerning the epistemic value of knowledge, and answer some objections to the thesis that mere true beliefs do not possess epistemic value. (shrink)

My main intention in this article is to settle the question whether having the ability to \ is, as Ryleans think, necessary for knowing how to \, and to determine the kind of role played by procedural knowledge in knowing how to \ and in acquiring and possessing the ability to \. I shall argue, in a seemingly anti-Rylean fashion, that when it comes to know-hows that are ordinarily categorised as physical skills, or—to be, for the moment, philosophically neutral—as enabling (...) one to possess such skills, it is necessary to have procedural knowledge of how to \ in order to possess those know-hows. However, I shall contend that this knowledge cannot be acquired without acquiring the kind of ability to \ in which having the skill to \ consists. And that having acquired the ability to \ is not only necessary but also sufficient for having acquired procedural knowledge of how to succeed in \-ing. (shrink)

We regularly intentionally expose ourselves to fictions we take to be likely to elicit in us emotions we generally find unpleasant when prompted by actual states of affairs. This is the so-called “paradox of tragedy”. We contribute to solving the paradox of tragedy by denying that, when fiction-directed, most of these emotions are in themselves unpleasant. We first provide strong evidence that these emotions, such as fear, sadness, or pity, are often enjoyed when fiction-directed. We then advance an explanation of (...) what makes these fiction-directed emotions often not unpleasant, while their reality-directed counterparts are generally so. In the last section, we advance an explanation of what makes fiction-directed emotions often enjoyable, and argue that a complete solution to the paradox of tragedy should be pluralist. (shrink)

When one tries to determine what the iconic dimension of thought consists in for Peirce and what its range is, one might have the impression that his remarks on this matter are inconsistent. For instance, on the one hand he writes the following: Remember it is by icons only that we really reason, and abstract statements are valueless in reasoning except so far as they aid us to construct diagrams. The sectaries of the opinion I am combating seem, on the (...) contrary, to suppose that reasoning is performed with abstract "judgments," and that an icon is of use only as enabling me to frame abstract statements as premisses. In an apparently similar fashion, Peirce argues that the predicate of a... (shrink)

La présente étude rassemble les passages de l’Ab Vrbe condita de Tite-Live où un terme lié au rire est associé à un discours ou à une parole rapportée, afin de les confronter aux vues exprimées par Cicéron et Quintilien sur le rire en contexte rhétorique. Si tous les passages étudiés s’insèrent très bien dans la conception rhétorique du rire, l’historien latin s’appuie sur celle-ci pour offrir une répartition originale entre usages acceptables et formes abusives du rire qui participe à la (...) construction des portraits personnages et de l’œuvre. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce holds some views about science and inquiry whose exact significance and ratio essendi are notoriously hard to grasp. One of these is particularly intriguing, namely, his frequently inferring from the intuitive ideas that science consists “in diligent inquiry into truth for truth’s sake”, and that the greatest threat to science is to “block the way of inquiry”, the conclusions that “belief […] has no place in science” and that the “scientific man”, when inquiring, has only “provisional” opinions. (...) In this article, I examine the ground and validity of the infamous and, arguably, strongly counterintuitive thesis that “belief has... (shrink)

The reception of René Girard’s work in France deserves book-length treatment to fully describe the heated debates, conflicting expectations, and controversy that it inspired before its lasting importance was eventually recognized. We must keep in mind that, although he lived in the US and became a citizen in 1956, he always kept his sights on his native land. He watched the transformations of French thought from the other side of the ocean; he forged his own writing strategies in response to (...) French thought; and it was within the context of French debates that he chose to formulate, through the conjoined hypotheses concerning mimetic desire, the scapegoat, and Judeo-Christian writing, the founding event of his... (shrink)

For F. P. Ramsey, “there is no separate problem of truth,” but, rather, substantive problems about the nature of belief and judgment and the place and function of truth in these propositional attitudes. In this paper, I expound and defend an important but largely overlooked aspect of Ramsey’s view of belief and inquiry: his thesis that truth does not intervene at all in one’s ordinary beliefs, nor in one’s ordinarily inquiring into—in the sense of wondering, or reflecting on—whether or not (...) something obtains. More specifically, I show that this thesis can solve a particularly perplexing problem that Davidson helped to bring into focus: that of explaining how it is possible for one to inquire into any empirical issue, and to form any empirical beliefs, if one takes truth to be objective. (shrink)

There clearly seems to be something problematic with certain forms of epistemic dependence. However, it has proved surprisingly difficult to articulate what this problem is exactly. My aim in this paper is to make clear when it is problematic to rely on others or on artefacts and technologies that are external to us for the acquisition and maintenance of our beliefs, and why. In order to do so, I focus on the neuromedia thought experiment. After having rejected different ways in (...) which one might want to capture the intuition in question, I argue that this device deprives us of understanding and therefore of the most valuable epistemic good. I then address the question of whether the moral of the story is that we should not develop, be equipped with, or use devices such as the neuromedia. (shrink)

Imagine you are an agnostic who wants to maximise your chances of getting the right answer to the question whether God exists. I show that theism and atheism are not on an epistemic par with one another because, under certain possible epistemically neutral conditions, the rational thing for you to do from a purely epistemic point of view would be to bet on the atheist’s judgement that God doesn’t exist rather than on the theist’s judgement that God does exist.

Le pragmatisme semble etre devenu la chose du monde la mieux partagee. A la fois revolution philosophique et rehabilitation du sens commun, il est en tout cas difficile aujourd'hui de se declarer anti-pragmatiste sans apparaitre vouloir defendre une forme depassee de ratiocination scolastique. Cet etat de fait necessite qu'une reponse claire soit apportee a la question Qu'est-ce que le pragmatisme?. La these qui se trouve defendue dans cet ouvrage est que le coeur, a la fois historique et conceptuel, du pragmatisme (...) consiste dans une theorie de la rationalite epistemique dont suit une theorie de la verite et, plus particulierement, de son role dans la croyance et l'enquete. Le commentaire du texte de Peirce permet d'aborder la question de la nature du faillibilisme et de la maniere dont l'enquete scientifique doit etre regulee. (shrink)

According to Timothy Williamson, philosophy is not a mere conceptual investigation and does not involve a specific cognitive ability, different in nature from those involved in acquiring scientific or ordinary knowledge of the world. The author holds that Williamson does not succeed in explaining how it is possible for us to acquire, through thought experiments, the type of knowledge that, according to him, philosophy predominantly aims to acquire—namely, knowledge of metaphysical modality. More specifically, the author considers in detail Russell’s stopped (...) clock and Locke’s prince and the cobbler thought experiments, and argues that Williamson has not shown how the kind of thought experiment of which they are instances, and which is typically encountered in philosophy, can be the instrument of knowledge of metaphysical modality that he takes this kind of thought experiment to be. More positively, the author advances that the modal conclusions of such thought experiments are drawn through conceptual investigation. (shrink)

Benoit Delbecq reflects upon the conditions under which his creative activity, as a pianist, a composer and an improviser, has to take place within the French context. Status of the copyrights, contribution of public funding, new modes of distribution, ambiguous irruptions of the show business mega-machine, fictions of freedom generated within the creative moment, polymorphous collective structures: this concrete work of knitting a new autonomous artistic network sheds light, beyond the microcosm of jazz, on the production of sociality in (...) today’s France. (shrink)

This article argues for the need to recover the concept of political myth in order to understand the crucial phenomena of our epoch. By drawing on Blumenberg’s philosophical reflections on myth, it proposes to understand political myth as the continual process of work on a common narrative by which the members of a social group can provide significance to their political conditions and experience. In order to show how this understanding of political myth can throw light on important aspects of (...) contemporary politics, the article analyses the work on one of the most conspicuous political myths of our time: the clash of civilizations. By reconstructing the mechanisms through which this myth works, the article shows how a paradigm that has been strongly criticized as too simplistic and scientifically inadequate could have turned into a successful political myth, i.e. into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (shrink)

La réception de la théologie politique de Johann Baptist Metz est un fait d’interprétation. Cette contribution présente tout d’abord la périodisation, apparue dans les années 1980, de l’oeuvre de Metz en trois phases: la période de la théologie transcendantale; la première phase de la théologie politique ainsi que sa deuxième phase. Décrire deux phases de la théologie politique délimitées par la formulation de la thèse centrale de l’oeuvre de Metz, selon laquelle la foi est mémoire de la souffrance de l’humanité, (...) permet de mettre en lumière la signification et les enjeux de la théologie politique. La deuxième partie de l’article s’intéresse à un aspect encore sujet à discussions de la réception de l’oeuvre de Metz: en réponse au refus postmoderne des grands récits, Metz et ses disciples présentent la théologie politique comme une théologie négative. Cependant, une telle réponse peut-elle être séparée d’autres affirmations déterminantes pour la théologie politique, en particulier celle selon laquelle le temps a une fin? (shrink)