Renowned philosopher and prominent French critic François Noudelmann engages the musicality of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes, all of whom were amateur piano players and acute lovers of the medium. Though piano playing was a crucial art for these thinkers, their musings on the subject are largely scant, implicit, or discordant with each philosopher's oeuvre. Noudelmann both recovers and integrates these perspectives, showing that the manner in which these philosophers played, the composers they adored, and the (...) music they chose reveals uncommon insight into their thinking styles and patterns. Noudelmann positions the physical and theoretical practice of music as a dimension underpinning and resonating with Sartre's, Nietzsche's, and Barthes's unique philosophical outlook. By reading their thought against their music, he introduces new critical formulations and reorients their trajectories, adding invaluable richness to these philosophers' lived and embodied experiences. The result heightens the multiple registers of being and the relationship between philosophy and the senses that informed so much of their work. A careful reader of music, Noudelmann maintains an elegant command of the texts under his gaze and appreciates the discursive points of musical and philosophical scholarship they involve, especially with regard to recent research and cutting-edge critique. (shrink)

Sartre's thought and practice cannot be separated from the experience of the Second World War. Emerging from the war, Sartre formed the idea that the human comes forth out of the subhuman. This paper analyses aspects of Sartre's humanism from the point of view of his political commitment, and presents Sartre's work as an antidote to contemporary economic and scientific determinism. Sartre credit was always given to the growth of freedom in action out of the most unexpected subjectivization. He firmly (...) supported the founding idea of democracy – the power of everyman – and projected the intellectual's mission into each of us once we try to rethink critically our actions in the light of human purposes. (shrink)

La disparition spectaculaire des tours jumelles qui ponctuaient le sud de Manhattan a suscité les sentiments divers de la fascination : l’épouvante devant des milliers de vies soudain englouties, l’effroi face à la puissance de la terreur, mais parfois la satisfaction de la haine, ou le sublime de l’horreur. La diffusion compulsive de cet effondrement nous a maintenus dans une stupeur..

Thinking involves many elements of sound that philosophical tradition has repressed. Breathing, rhythms and collateral noises participate in the making of idealities, even the most abstract. In order to hear them, the voice needs to be considered as one sound among others and as multiple, even when it comes from the same speaker, following different protocols of enunciation. Listening to the recordings of seminars and studying the role played by modern sound technologies make it possible to hear subterranean meanings and (...) tensions at the heart of mental elaboration. Thinkers and writers could be defined by the way they handle the acoustic environments favourable to the way they speak and write, whether by selection, mixing or silence. An ‘acousmatic’ reading aims to listen to this sonic investment in texts and to hear the complex vibrations of their thought. (shrink)

Affirmer une théorie et vivre le contraire, est-ce une contradiction, un mensonge, une folie, une liberté? Rousseau écrit un traité d'éducation grâce à l'abandon de ses cinq enfants, Kierkegaard compose des textes religieux quand il vit en libertin, Beauvoir fonde la philosophie du féminisme tout en jouissant d'une relation servile à son amant américain, Foucault exalte le courage de la vérité et organise le secret sur son Sida, Deleuze hait les voyages et devient le philosophe du nomadisme... Qui sommes-nous lorsque (...) nous pensons? Plusieurs, sans doute, comme le montrent les penseurs qui s'inventent des personnalités multiples à travers leurs théories. Au lieu de dénoncer leurs erreurs ou leur hypocrisie, François Noudelmann étudie le plus complexe des mensonges, celui envers soi-même, à travers les angoisses, les fugues et les métamorphoses de ces philosophes au double je. (shrink)

La pensée fait du bruit, non seulement lorsqu'elle parle, mais aussi dans ses textes. La voix, le ton, l'accent, l'intensité, le volume font partie des idées. Une pensée doit s'écouter, déclarait Nietzsche qui se vantait d'avoir les oreilles les plus petites mais les meilleures de la philosophie. L'attention récente portée aux voix de philosophes, grâce aux enregistrements audio-visuels de penseurs tels que Arendt, Sartre, Beauvoir, Deleuze, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva... a influencé la façon de les lire et de les comprendre. (...) A l'oral, mais aussi à l'écrit, des souffles, des vitesses, des rythmes particuliers inspirent le développement de leur pensée. Parfois ce sont des accents régionaux qu'un philosophe exprime, comme le bourguignon Bachelard, ou qu'il veut réprimer, comme Derrida, honteux de son accent juif algérien, ou encore le béarnais Bourdieu... Ausculter les textes, c'est écouter aussi les silences, les sons inarticulés - hurlements ou murmures - qui se logent dans la pensée : Deleuze entendait des cris dans les concepts de Spinoza. Et si nous écoutions les oeuvres philosophiques comme des paysages sonores? Les sound studies se sont développées en Amérique du Nord depuis une dizaine d'années et enrichissent peu à peu l'histoire, la littérature, la sociologie, l'écologie. Cet essai propose d'en montrer la puissance pour une toute nouvelle approche de la philosophie : il observe les dispositifs acoustiques de la parole et de l'écriture philosophiques, dès l'Antiquité, lorsque Pythagore se cachait derrière un rideau pour enseigner à ses disciples, jusqu'aux théoriciens de l'écologie sonore qui montrent les enjeux politiques du son. Apprendre à lire avec les oreilles, tel est le programme d'une nouvelle écoute qui découvre les significations inouïes de la philosophie. Et si nous enlevions les bouchons de nos oreilles pour entendre enfin le son des idées? La pensée fait du bruit, nous l'avons oublié : de grands vacarmes ou de légers bruissements. La voix des philosophes, leurs accents, font partie de leur pensée. Même dans leurs écrits nous entendons des cris et murmures. Depuis les dispositifs acoustiques de l'Antiquité jusqu'à l'utilisation du microphone aujourd'hui, François Noudelmann pose son stéthoscope sur la philosophie. Il étudie les milieux sonores les plus favorables à la réflexion et propose une écologie sonore de la pensée. (shrink)

A l'epoque hellenistique, la reflexion morale s'engage sur des voies nouvelles.

Il est assez rare qu’un concept philosophique s’échappe de l’arène académique. C’est pourtant le cas du concept de spécisme, qui a fait une entrée remarquée dans la sphère publique au cours de la dernière décennie. Il est désormais au cœur du débat de société sur nos devoirs envers les animaux non humains. Hélas, ce concept et les enjeux qu’il soulève sont souvent mal compris. Nombreux sont les auteurs qui contestent sa légitimité alors qu’ils le maitrisent mal. D’autres l’utilisent plus volontiers (...) sans toutefois mieux le comprendre. Les confusions qui entourent cette notion l’empêche de contribuer à la discussion autant qu’elle le pourrait. Le présent ouvrage entend remédier à cet état de faits en donnant de la notion de spécisme une présentation à la fois assez précise pour rendre justice aux discussions philosophiques dont elle fait l’objet et suffisamment claire pour être accessible à quiconque s’intéresse au statut moral des animaux. Il se divise en deux parties. La première aborde des questions ontologiques : Qu’est-ce exactement que le spécisme ? À quelles conditions existe-t-il ? Ces conditions sont-elles remplies dans les faits ? Quant à la seconde, elle porte sur des questions éthiques : Le spécisme peut-il être justifié ? Faut-il au contraire le condamner au même titre que le racisme et le sexisme ? (shrink)

Animal ethicists often distinguish between direct and indirect defenses of speciesism, where the former appeal to species membership and the latter invoke other features that are simply associated with it. The main extant charge against indirect defenses rests on the empirical claim that any feature other than membership in our species is either absent in some humans or present in some nonhumans. This paper challenges indirect defenses with a new argument, which presupposes no such empirical claim. Instead, the argument from (...) discordance resorts to the following principle: a certain feature can only justify discriminating on the basis of that feature. (shrink)

At the end of World War II, F. A. Hayek denounced the then-popular idea of central planning by arguing that, if pursued to its logical conclusion, it would entail totalitarianism. But there were at least two problems. First, judging by his example of Nazi Germany, state control over the economy appears to be a consequence, not a cause, of the monopolization of political power. Second, he conflated socialism and mere interference in the market with central planning. Therefore, history did not (...) so much falsify Hayek's prediction as bypass it: Once the vogue for central planning faded in the West, Hayek's book became irrelevant—except, ironically, in Germany. There, it was read as a manifesto for “good planning” through the rule of law. Alongside other “neoliberal” writers, Hayek had a profound (if little acknowledged) influence on the shape of the emerging Federal Republic and, through it, on the whole European institutional framework. (shrink)

A defence of the 'pragmatic' theory of anaphora (which stresses the analogy between anaphora and deixis) against an argument put forward by Gareth Evans.

Я интерпретирую философские взгляды Вернера Гайзенберга как прагматизм и неметафизический реализм виттгенштайновского типа. «Замкнутая теория» – виттгенштайновское правило/концепт. В отличие от Бокулич, предпочитающей позицию Дирака относительно природы связей между различными физическими теориями, я отдаю предпочтение позиции Гайзенберга. Моя позиция, интерпретирующая Гайзенберга, также прямо противоположна позиции Поппера: критерием устоявшейся научной (замкнутой) теории является её нефальсифицируемость. -/- I interpret philosophical views of Werner Heisenberg as a pragmatism and non-metaphysical realism of a Wittgensteinian kind. The “closed theory” is a Wittgensteinian rule/concept. Unlike Alisa (...) Bokulich, favouring Dirac’s position about inter-theoretical relations, I favour Heisenberg’s one. My position, interpreting Heisenberg’s notion of a closed theory, is also in direct opposition to Popper’s one: the criterion of an established scientific (closed) theory is its non-falsifiability. (shrink)

Response to Alex Byrne's paper 'Knowing what I see'.

ABSTRACTWhat does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of (...) the representational practice within which the thought or utterance is located. In thus favoring a “relational model” in metasemantics, we share Ronald Dworkin's goal of explaining fundamental legal disagreements, and also his reliance on constructive interpretation. But what we delineate is a far more general and explanatorily resourceful metasemantics than what Dworkin articulated, which also bypasses some controversial implications for the nature of law that Dworkin alleged. (shrink)

In this book it explores science and technology, makes connections between these epistemic, cultural, and political trends, and develops profound insights into the nature of our postmodernity.

Cumulative technological culture (CTC) refers to the increase in the efficiency and complexity of tools and techniques in human populations over generations. A fascinating question is to understand the cognitive origins of this phenomenon. Because CTC is definitely a social phenomenon, most accounts have suggested a series of cognitive mechanisms oriented toward the social dimension (e.g., teaching, imitation, theory of mind, and metacognition), thereby minimizing the technical dimension and the potential influence of non-social, cognitive skills. What if we have failed (...) to see the elephant in the room? What if social cognitive mechanisms were only catalyzing factors and not thesufficient and necessaryconditions for the emergence of CTC? In this article, we offer an alternative, unified cognitive approach to this phenomenon by assuming that CTC originates in non-social cognitive skills, namely technical-reasoning skills which enable humans to develop the technical potential necessary to constantly acquire and improve technical information. This leads us to discuss how theory of mind and metacognition, in concert with technical reasoning, can help boost CTC. The cognitive approach developed here opens up promising new avenues for reinterpreting classical issues (e.g., innovation, emulation vs. imitation, social vs. asocial learning, cooperation, teaching, and overimitation) in a field that has so far been largely dominated by other disciplines, such as evolutionary biology, mathematics, anthropology, archeology, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

Long undervalued in France, philosophical anthropology has played an essential role in Germany, helping to address some of the most important issues straddling philosophy and the social sciences: humanity's place in nature and in history; the individual and others; and relations between human groups.

Illusionism about phenomenal consciousness is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, even though it seems to exist. This thesis is widely judged to be uniquely counterintuitive: the idea that consciousness is an illusion strikes most people as absurd, and seems almost impossible to contemplate in earnest. Defenders of illusionism should be able to explain the apparent absurdity of their own thesis, within their own framework. However, this is no trivial task: arguably, none of the illusionist theories currently on (...) the market is able to do this. I present a new theory of phenomenal introspection and argue that it might deal with the task at hand. (shrink)