De La Philosophie Research Articles

The Interrelation of Dialectic and Hermeneutics in Paul Ricœur’s Early Philosophy of the Self

While Ricœur's œuvre is commonly known as hermeneutic philosophy, it is evident that he also deals with major problems dialectically - a discipline often put in opposition to hermeneutics. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of the relationship between dialectic and hermeneutic regarding Ricœur's early theory of the self, which he developed in the 1960s, beginning with the second volume of his Philosophie de la volonté, Finitude et Culpabilité. I argue that hermeneutic and dialectic refer to each other by combining a structural model of reflexive self-consciousness and a mediation of consciousness with a transcendent other. Only their interrelation allows for a sufficient theory of concrete reflexion.

Диалектическое движение философской мысли: генезис Системы Знания в философии Александра Кожева. Статья первая: диалектика и дедогматизация

This work explores the main outline of the historical and philosophical conception of the French neo-Hegelian Alexandre Kojève, which is positioned within the Knowledge System as the culmination of sequential dialectics of philosophical discourse, concluded in the Hegelian philosophy. This representation is found in A. Kojève’s “Essai d’une histoire raisonnée de la philosophie païenne”, which is not only an analysis of ancient thought, going back to G. Hegel’s “Lectures on the History of Philosophy”, but also the author’s interpretation of the ge-nealogy of philosophical thought as such. After a series of incomplete resolutions of discursive antitheses by two philosophical doctrines in different historical periods the decisive role is attributed to I. Kant, whose philo-sophical system is a product, according to A. Kojève, of Judeo-Christianity and is its paradigmatic exponent. By crossing the eternal and the temporal through the dogma of the Incarnation, Christianity not only contributed to the emergence of Modern science, but also provided the opportunity for the emergence of Kantian philosophy, which established a “Christian” balance between the Lord and the Bondsman. Heterogeneous discursive com-ponents opposed ancient philosophical doctrines, thereby preparing the necessary ground for their merger, as well as for transforming oneself in this way into a Knowledge System. The research consists of two parts pub-lished in two separate articles. The first part is devoted to the beginning of the analysis of the Knowledge Sys-tem’s genesis in the context of A. Kojève’s historical-philosophical concept.

Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France. By Nina Rattner Gelbart

A detail of Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s searching portrait of Mademoiselle Ferrand méditant sur Newton (1752) stares out at the reader from the jacket of the book. The artfully posed sitter in her beribboned and lace-edged toilette du matin is shown in front of an impressive tome, its size swollen to denote its importance. The running headline ‘DE NEWTON’ allows us to identify the volume as a copy of an Enlightenment bestseller: Voltaire’s Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, dedicated to the most famous ‘woman of science’ of the French Enlightenment, Émilie Du Châtelet, ‘France’s ­Minerva’, herself the first translator into French of the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. The cover illustration is a perfect choice for this series of short monographic chapters on six remarkable Frenchwomen, born between 1700 and 1740, who all deserve to be remembered for their practice of and contribution to scientific research. Along with the ‘celebrated Mlle Ferrand’, the author deals with Nicole-Reine Lepaute, ‘astronomer and “learned calculator”’; botanists Madeleine Françoise Basseporte and Jeanne Barret; the anatomist Marie Marguerite Biheron; and the chemist Marie Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville. Nina Rattner Gelbart draws on a wide variety of sources — some of them unpublished — from academic memoirs to letters, legal documents, and traces of more or less scurrilous gossip. Some of the six figures she presents are a little better known than others but all are fascinating. Many of them had to fight prejudice to be allowed to acquire an education and pursue their scientific activity. All too often their discoveries were attributed to male figures. The main merit of Gelbart’s study lies in granting them a degree of visibility often denied them by traditional historiography. This is without a doubt a worthy ambition. It is however legitimate to question whether it is served by the book’s strange hesitation between academic prose and ‘interludes’ composed of chirpy letters purporting to be written directly to the subjects. The latter are called by their first names in a practice reminiscent (presumably unintentionally) of the bracketing of women and children as minors. Whilst one can understand the essayist’s engagement with her subjects, the quasi-identification she sometimes appears to feel as she speculates about their reactions to having streets named after them or articles dedicated to them sits uncomfortably at times with a scholarly approach. One struggles to imagine a book with similar intentions dedicated, say, to eighteenth-century male scientists, oscillating between straightforward biographical sketches and pseudo-epistolary chit-chat: ‘Hey René-Antoine, you who were so interested in measuring the temperature right, how do you feel about global warming?’ might be an opening gambit for a chapter about Réaumur in a similarly conversational vein to the one adopted here. Such an angle is certainly imaginative but this reader at least is, alas, far from convinced that there was no better way to serve the intended (and once again admirable) purpose.

Warding Off the Ghosts of Race in the Historiography of Philosophy

Abstract This article contends that an adequate investigation of the role and effects of race in the history of philosophy requires an elucidation of the ways in which the history of philosophy functions as a “territorial” structure. This argument is developed through an extensive cross-examination of Peter Park's Africa, Asia and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon 1780–1830 (2013) and Catherine König-Pralong's La colonie philosophique. Écrire l'histoire de la philosophie aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (2019). I show that although the two studies inquire into the fixation of the history of philosophy on Europe that took place in German and French philosophy at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, they do so via different explanatory frameworks, highlighting diverging critical strategies in the dismantling of Eurocentrism in the discipline. In the final part I contrast three broad critical strategies against the Eurocentric orientation of the historiography of philosophy based on opposite problematizations of the territoriality of the history of philosophy: the territory as (1) jurisdiction, (2) relational field, and (3) space of address.

Verteidigbares Leben, betrauerbares Leben: Neue Ansätze zur Vulnerabilität bei Elsa Dorlin und Judith Butler

This essay reviews (the German translations of) Elsa Dorlin's book Se defendre: Une philosophie de la violence (2017) and Judith Butler's volume The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020). While Butler envisages a new understanding of nonviolence, Dorlin emphasizes subaltern practices of counterviolence. The review shows that despite the different aims of Butler and Dorlin, their accounts can be read as largely complementary reflections on the problem of political vulnerability.

Uma apresentação dos conceitos de atitude e categoria em Eric Weil

O objetivo do presente trabalho é oferecer uma via de acesso ao pensamento de Eric Weil por meio de uma apresentação de alguns dos seus principais conceitos. Trata-se dos conceitos de atitude, categoria e retomada, elementos que constituem o léxico próprio do pensamento weiliano e cuja compreensão é capital para o enfrentamento de sua principal obra, a Lógica da filosofia. Oferece-se no presente artigo uma explanação introdutória sobre algumas das ferramentas conceituais fundamentais para a pesquisa na filosofia weiliana. Para tanto, dividiu-se o artigo em três seções. Na primeira, introduziu-se a discussão weiliana a respeito da filosofia e do seu outro, a violência, bem como de uma lógica da filosofia. Encerra-se essa etapa apresentando informações importantes sobre as categorias weilianas. Na segunda seção discute-se de modo mais detido as categorias e atitudes, sua dinâmica e a passagem entre elas. Diferenciam-se atitudes reais das atitudes puras, aquelas que geram as categorias. Na terceira seção, tratamos do conceito de retomada. Concluí-se essa seção com as categorias formais que esquematizam a lógica da filosofia e realizam a transição do formal para o concreto: sentido e sabedoria.

Donation, gratuité, louange. La possibilité d’un rapport libre à Dieu dans la philosophie de Jean-Luc Marion

Francesca Peruzzotti, “Donation, gratuité, louange. La possibilité d’un rapport libre à Dieu dans la philosophie de Jean-Luc Marion,” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 76, no. 2–3 (2020): 761–88, https://doi.org/10.17990/RPF/2020_76_2_0761.

Genèse du Dieu souverain (Archéologie de la puissance II) by Gwenaëlle Aubry

Reviewed by: Genèse du Dieu souverain (Archéologie de la puissance II) by Gwenaëlle Aubry Martin Pickavé Gwenaëlle Aubry. Genèse du Dieu souverain (Archéologie de la puissance II). Bibliothèque d'Histoire de la Philosophie. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2018. Pp. 320. Paper, €36.00. As the subtitle indicates, and the introduction explains in more detail, this is a sequel to Aubry's 2006 book, Dieu sans la puissance. Dunamis et energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin. In the present as well as in the previous studies, the author traces the developments and transformations undergone by the notion of power (dunamis, potentia) and in particular how these transformations affect the understanding of God. Whereas the first study follows the development from Aristotle's account of the divine being to Plotinus, the present volume covers, in five densely written chapters, medieval philosophers from Augustine to John Duns Scotus. According to the author, the history of the notion of power reflects two broad shifts, which she sets out to explore in her overall project: one from an Aristotelian ontology based on the act-potency distinction to an ontology relying on the distinction between power and action, and another from a God of pure actuality to an omnipotent God. Despite the overall ambition, it is best to approach this book as a set of almost independent studies around the problem of divine omnipotence. In the first chapter, the author examines Augustine's views on divine omnipotence. As Aubry points out, divine omnipotence goes hand in hand with divine goodness for Augustine. That God is good does not mean that God's omnipotence is restricted, nor can God's omnipotence be a reason for abandoning what is good. She points to Augustine's struggle with Manicheanism as one of the motives behind the strong link between goodness and omnipotence, and deals with some of the problems Augustine's account seems to face. For why is there evil and damnation if God is not only good but also all powerful? This is an incredibly rich chapter, which also covers Augustine's views on powers in creatures. Not all medieval authors managed to maintain the delicate balance between divine goodness and omnipotence. In the second chapter, Aubry contrasts two thinkers, Peter Damian and Peter Abelard, who drew completely opposing consequences from divine [End Page 814] omnipotence. Whereas for Peter Damian it guarantees the radical contingency of the creation, for Abelard it means that the existing created world is the best possible world, which also means that it was necessary for God to create it as it is. As Aubry shows convincingly, their differences in how they understand and prioritize divine goodness lead them to their diverging conclusions. The third (and shortest) chapter examines how the understanding of divine omnipotence changes during the thirteenth century up to the condemnations of 1277 and contrasts this development with the emergence of the famous distinction between God's absolute and ordained power. The author makes a good case for what she calls the autonomisation of divine omnipotence during this period. The last two chapters deal with two main figures in medieval philosophy: Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus. Aquinas provides Aubry with a good case study for how the Aristotelian idea of God as pure actuality is thought to be compatible with a conception of God as omnipotent. Although the main preoccupations of the previous chapters take a back seat here, this compact section does a good job elucidating Aquinas's conception of the first being and how the latter can shed light on Aquinas's ontology of created beings. Not surprisingly, the chapter on Duns Scotus takes up his novel account of the will and contingency, which has major implications for how Duns Scotus conceives of divine omnipotence; for it is here, as the author argues, that we can find contingency transferred from what is in potency to the omnipotence of the first cause. Unlike other books covering ambitious topics over a period of almost nine hundred years, Aubry's study avoids hopping from one canonical figure to the next. In this very erudite book, she gives voice not only to Augustine, Aquinas...

Think, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human. Jean-Michel Rabaté. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. v+240.

<i>Think, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human</i>. Jean-Michel Rabaté. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. v+240.

Марго Валь о значении эмоции в концепции Бергсона

In the book by M. Wahl “La portee metaphysique de l’emotion dans la philosophie de Henri Bergson”(“The Metaphysical Significance of Emotion in the Philosophy of Henri Bergson”) (2018) thetheme of emotion in the concept of Bergson discusses in a broad historical and philosophicalcontext. Using the method of parallel reading of works by Bergson and other thinkers fromdifferent eras, including his contemporaries, the author seeks to more accurately identify thegenesis of a number of philosophical ideas characteristic of the 20th century, and to analyze theoriginal features of the teachings of the French thinker. The monograph examines the main pointsof the concept of emotion, set out by Bergson in “Two sources of morality and religion”. The valueof emotion in Bergson’s metaphysics is determined, in the opinion of M. Wahl, by itsinterpretation as a requirement for creativity, as a source of free action, as an important componentof the experience of Christian mystics, representatives of dynamic morality and religion.

O mal, a liberdade e o paradoxo ético em Paul Ricoeur

O presente artigo pretende apresentar a visão do mal, da liberdade e do paradoxo ético no homem em Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005). Para empreender tal busca partiremos dos textos mais notórios do filosofo francês, a saber: Philosophie de la Volonté: 1) Finitude et Culpabilité 2) La Symbolique du Mal (1960) e O Conflito das Interpretações (1969). Portanto, a metodologia desse artigo é de caráter bibliográfico

Bedeutungswandel der Zivilgesellschaft oder das Elend der Ideengeschichte: Eine kommentierte Übersetzung von Hirata Kiyoakis Aufsatz zum Begriff shimin shakai bei Antonio Gramsci (Teil 1)

Abstract Anmerkungen zu Übersetzung und Zitationsweise: Namen werden mit dem Vornamen voran wiedergegeben. Die Umschrift japanischer Begriffe in lateinischen Lettern (romaji) erfolgt nach dem Hepburn-System. Von den Übersetzern hinzugefügte Umschriften sowie Übersetzungen von Titeln im Original erwähnter Publikationen sind durch eckige Klammern gekennzeichnet. Runde Klammern außerhalb von eckigen Klammern entsprechen der Setzung des Autors im Original. Alle anderen typografischen Sonderzeichen innerhalb der Übersetzung entsprechen Hervorhebungen des Autors im Original. Anmerkungen und Kommentare der Übersetzer befinden sich in den Fußnoten. The history of ideas is a history of translations and interpretations, of finding new words for old phenomena and attributing new phenomena to old words. In this commented translation from a Japanese source text, this historical process is demonstrated for the term civil society and the languages German, French, Italian and Japanese. In his 1989 article “On Gramsci’s notion of civil society”, Japanese Marxist Kiyoaki Hirata compared the use of the term by Georg W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, while translating it to Japanese as shimin shakai 市民社会, today a highly popular term in Japan. We have translated the first part of Hirata’s article, in which he endeavors on the connections and differences between Hegel and Marx. His major finding is that Karl Marx in Misère de la philosophie (1847) has taken Hegel’s concept of civil society or civic community (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), splitting it in two and so differentiating between civil society (société civile) and bourgeois society (société bourgeoise). However, as Hirata noticed, when Misère de la philosophie was translated to German as Das Elend der Philosophie in 1888 this differentiation was lost. The German version, just like Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts only spoke of bürgerliche Gesellschaft. When Hirata translated the text to Japanese, however, he opted for using the French original as source text, thus distinguishing between shimin shakai and burujoa shakai. What Hirata does not mention though, is that by translating the French société bourgeoise to German as bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky and Friedrich Engels have cut off the German discussion on bürgerliche Gesellschaft from the global discussion of civil society for more than a century. Only in the late 1980s, German speaking Marxist intellectuals engaging with the works of Antonio Gramsci began to realize that there is more to bürgerliche Gesellschaft than being a translation for société bourgeoise. This inspired them even to invent the new word Zivilgesellschaft as a translation for the Gramscian società civile – a linguistic trick that is peculiar to the German language, and became necessary because the German language had lacked a marker for the difference between bourgeois and citoyen. In the following years however, Zivilgesellschaft became such a popular term that has by now replaced Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft as a translation for civil society in many contexts and has been attributed many contested meanings – way beyond the realm of Marxist theory. These processes of translations and transformation are usually invisible in our daily use of language, and become only apparent when we actively compare and interpret sources from different epochs and languages.

Preface to the French Edition

russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 37 (summer 2017): 252–4 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036–01631; online 1913–8032 c:\users\ken\documents\type3701\red\rj 3701 132 red.docx 2017-08-18 10:38 PREFACE TO THE FRENCH EDITION1 Bertrand Russell Nicholas Griffin, Introduction Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4l6 ngriffin@mcmaster.ca n 1908 a French translation of Russell’s book on Leibniz was published for which Russell wrote a short preface, published here for the first time in English. Russell's early philosophical work initially attracted more professional attention in France than in England. An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897) was widely reviewed and commented upon in France, and a French translation appeared in 1901. In this Russell had the enthusiastic help of Louis Couturat, who had energetically promoted Russell’s work on geometry and, later, on the principles of mathematics in France. But Couturat, rather surprisingly, does not seem to have played a role in having Russell’s book on Leibniz translated. The person who was instrumental in that was Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939). It was he who persuaded French publisher , Félix Alcan, to publish an English translation of Russell’s book and who encouraged Jean Ray (1884–1943), then a student at the Sorbonne, to translate it. He also contributed a preface of his own to the work. Although Lévy-Bruhl is now bestknown for his work on the mentality of “primitive” peoples, he was at the time professor of the history of modern philosophy at the Sorbonne and had written a book on Comte and a history of philosophy in France, as well as L’Allemagne depuis Leibniz (1890). But as a historian of philosophy he fell very much on the historical side of the division between historical and philosophical histories of philosophy that Russell laid out in his preface to the English edition of the Leibniz book. Lévy-Bruhl had consistently argued that philosophical systems should not be studied in isolation from the social, political and intellectual milieu in which they arose, to some degree prefiguring his later socio-anthropological work on “primitive mentality”. All of which makes it the more surprising that he should have taken such an interest in Russell’s book, which places itself firmly on the other side. Russell himself seems to have been unclear about Lévy-Bruhl’s involvement for he asked Ray how he should acknowledge Lévy-Bruhl. In reply Ray provided the wording that Russell used. 1 [La Philosophie de Leibniz, exposé critique par Bertrand Russell, m.a.-f.r.s. Traduit de l’Anglais par Jean Ray and Renée Ray. Avec une Préface de l’Auteur et un AvantPropos par L. Lévy-Bruhl, Professor à la Sorbonne. Paris: Alcan. 1908. Pp. 4, xvi, 233. Reprinted Paris, London and New York: Gordon & Breach, 1970.] f= Preface to the French Edition 253 (Ray also asked Russell to acknowledge his wife as co-translator.) Russell did not take the opportunity the French edition afforded to make changes to the text, as he had done with the French translation of his Foundations of Geometry. His excuse, that he could not take the time away from “another task”, was legitimate enough: he was just beginning to prepare Principia Mathematica for the press. But, as became habitual with him when his book on Leibniz was discussed, he did mention Couturat’s two works on Leibniz which had appeared shortly after his own and which he regarded as confirming his main claim about the centrality of Leibniz’s logic to his philosophy but which, at the same time, led him to accept, what he had denied in his book, that for Leibniz all truths, including contingent ones, are analytic . This is the one substantive matter discussed in the French preface. It is explained in more detail in his review of Couturat’s La Logique de Leibniz (Papers 4: 24) and in the preface to the second English edition (1937) of A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. No manuscript of the preface is known. he present...

The Subject-Object Of Commodity Fetishism, Biopolitics, Immortality, Sacrifice, and Bioracism

The Subject-Object Of Commodity Fetishism, Biopolitics, Immortality, Sacrifice, and Bioracism A. Kiarina Kordela (bio) PREFACE As the editors of the present volume state in their introduction, the "what" in their title aims at preventing the latent anthropomorphism entailed in the question "Who comes after the subject?" Both questions share the assumption that the advent of postmodernism amounts to the death of the subject as had been gradually conceived since early modernity up until and including modernism. Yet the editors' shift from "who" to "what" is instrumental in reflecting the fact that, whatever it is that recent theories may propose as the postmodern successor of the subject, they unanimously conceive it as transcending human-centered models and their entailed dichotomies, such as subject-object, individual-collective, human-animal, or human-machine. This is why that which "comes after the subject" is often also referred to as the posthuman. Here I am embarking on a double project. On the one hand, I shall argue that the subject of all secular capitalist modernity, since roughly the seventeenth century, has essentially always already come after itself—that is, it has always been posthuman—even as it is first the postmodern discourse that becomes acutely aware of the posthuman character of subjectivity and advances it as what is increasingly becoming a point of no contention, at least among certain theoretical circles. As I shall show, the fact that the subject of secular capitalist modernity has always been the posthuman subject-object is due to the two central, and concomitant, processes that define modernity: the development of the capitalist mode of production and the secularization of thought. As for the belated self-consciousness of the [End Page 37] posthuman character of humanity in the postmodern era of advanced global capitalism, this owes to the general tardiness of consciousness, which can grasp the structures and logic of its own conditions—in this case, capitalism and secularization—only once the latter's potential approximates, if it has not reached, its fullest actualization. On the other hand, I shall turn to another postmodern concept, biopolitics, to redefine it according to the posthuman character of subjectivity. Both lines of thought will eventually lead us to examine the biopolitical reappropriation of certain Judeo-Christian, which is also to say strictly speaking premodern, concepts, specifically: eternity, immortality, Jubilee, and sacrifice. I shall conclude by briefly hinting to the consequences of this reappropriation of religious categories for understanding contemporary racism.1 THE SUBJECT-OBJECT OF COMMODITY FETISHISM If today we speak of the posthuman condition or the subject qua subject-object, and if bodies of knowledge and science become possible that enable the existence of humans as living organisms with intraspecies biological and machinic components, it is because in the capitalist mode of production humans become inseparable from the means and the products of production,2 which by now range from plants and animals to machines and biogenetically produced life, to information, language, and affects. When Jacques Lacan says that "man thinks with his object," we must take him literally—man thinks with his product (1981, 62). Karl Marx spells out more clearly Lacan's point in his notorious theory of commodity fetishism. The radically new and, as Marx calls it, "mysterious" "character of the product of labour—as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity"—lies in "the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things" (1990, 164–65). While struggling to grasp this mysterious phenomenon in Capital, Volume 1, Marx can barely believe his own words when he writes that "the fetishism of the commodity" designates the fact that a "definite social relation between men themselves … assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things," or that "to the producers … the [End Page 38] social relations between their private labours appear … as material [dinglich—thingly] relations between persons and social relations between things" (165–66). As Étienne Balibar comments in his La Philosophie de Marx (1993), this fetishistic inversion is paradoxically possible not because of the thingliness or materiality of the commodities, but...

An Unidentified French Quotation in Wilde’s Essay on ‘Historical Criticism’

At the beginning of the sixth paragraph of ‘The Rise of Historical Criticism’ (1879), written for the Chancellor’s Essay Prize at Oxford, Wilde gives a phrase in French: ‘L’esprit d’un siècle ne naît pas et ne meurt pas à jour fixé.’1 In the editorial commentary to her recent Oxford edition of Wilde’s critical essays, Josephine M. Guy translates the sentence, but comments that she had been ‘unable to find a source for this phrase’.2 The source is Victor Cousin, coming from the twelfth lesson of his Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie (1829): ‘L’esprit d’un siècle, Messieurs, ne meurt pas et ne naît pas à jour fixe.’3 Cousin is cited by name on two other occasions elsewhere in the essay and in one of these, the Cours is again quoted, in a passage which Wilde copied out in his Oxford Notebook during the period.4

Beyond Diels-Kranz: The New Loeb Early Greek Philosophy

Beyond Diels-Kranz: The New Loeb Early Greek Philosophy JOHN PALMER The publication of a Loeb Classical Library edition of the evidence for early Greek philosophy is a major event in classical scholarship.* In these nine volumes, running to well over 4,000 pages, André Laks and Glenn Most undertake to present in an accessible format the principal evidence for the Greek philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries BC. They have been assisted in this massive project by Gérard Journée, Leopoldo Iribarren, and David Lévystone, who receive special credit on the title page; by several scholars who have provided special assistance in the preparation and translation of texts in Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, and Hebrew; and by numerous others who have provided comments on individual chapters or who have been consulted on particular points. The editors and their assistants are to be commended for their exemplary execution of such a vast and difficult task. They have succeeded in producing what is far and away the best available edition of the texts of the early Greek philosophers with accompanying English translation. (With the simultaneous publication of Les débuts de la philosophie: Des premiers penseurs grecs à Socrate [Paris: Éditions Fayard, 2016], they have also produced the best edition with accompanying French translation.) More than that, their edition effectively supersedes Hermann Diels and Walter Kranz’s Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, which has long held sway as the standard edition of the Presocratics, *André Laks and Glenn W. Most (eds. and trans.), Early Greek Philosophy. 9 volumes. Loeb Classical Library 524–32. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. arion 25.3 winter 2018 but it only does so because Laks and Most have respectfully taken Diels-Kranz as their model. The collection is not without its flaws, some of which will be addressed here, but these are mostly negligible in comparison with its innumerable merits. Laks and Most have set such a high standard with this work that it is hard to imagine that we will see a better general collection on early Greek philosophy in our lifetimes. Laks and Most generally avoid referring to their subject as “Presocratic” philosophy. The term “Vorsokratiker,” first employed in Johann August Eberhard’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie (Halle, 1788), was eventually used by Hermann Diels to demarcate, not a chronological period of philosophy prior to Socrates, but that constellation of early thinkers whose mode of philosophical activity was not influenced by Socrates and the changes he wrought to philosophy’s self-conception. “Presocratic” philosophy for Diels was thus roughly equivalent to the phase of ancient philosophy prior to the rise of the philosophical schools. Nonetheless, the term is awkward and has unwelcome temporal and historiographic connotations, rightly noted by Laks and Most. Not all the figures in these volumes were active before Socrates, nor is it historically accurate to contrast them all with a “Socratic” approach to philosophy, despite Cicero’s famously influential characterization of Socrates as having brought philosophy down from the heavens to earth (Cic. Tusc. V 4.10–11). Laks has very usefully discussed both the ancient antecedents and modern deployment of the notion of “Presocratic” philosophy in his Introduction à la “philosophie présocratique” (Paris 2006), now translated by Glenn Most as The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy (Princeton 2018). Laks’s conclusion there that the common history of the transmission and survival of their writings is one of the least contestable criteria of an otherwise problematic identity serves as background to the editors ’ characterization of the object of the present volumes as the philosophers prior to Plato “who are transmitted in the form of fragments” (vol. i, p. 7). The collection’s entire first volume is devoted to introduc188 beyond diels-kranz tory and reference materials. Included are a preface explaining the organizational and editorial principles governing the presentation; a list of abbreviations; a more general bibliography than the ones provided in the introductions to individual chapters; a two-way concordance between Laks and Most’s set of textual identifiers and those employed in DielsKranz ; a useful index of references in the collection to the early Greek philosophers outside the chapters devoted to them, followed by a more...

Escaping History: Benjamin Fondane's "Mal des Fantomes" and Interiority

The author of Mal des has something of the revenant. Until recently, Benjamin Fondane's problematic posterity has relegated him to the fragile margins of the canon, partly due to the relative scarcity of his works. Most of these works only reappeared in the early eighties, almost forty years after Fondane's death at Auschwitz in 1944. The publishers Plasma, which went bankrupt in 1983, and Paris-Mediterranee, which ceased activity in 2009, both helped republish Fondane's most essential works, but with little publicity. In 1989, Monique Jutrin published the second monograph on the work of this poet, existentialist philosopher, and polemist, Benjamin Fondane ou le periple d'Ulysse. (1) In 1997, Jutrin founded the Cahiers Benjamin Fondane, now in their 17th annual issue; Fondane's works have reappeared, this time through the well-established Editions Verdier; and monographs are being produced at the remarkable rate of close to one per year. (2) Alluding to Stendhal's famous remark, Fondane once claimed he might find a readership in 1980; history seems to be bearing out his claim. (3) Born Benjamin Wechsler in Jassy, Moldavia in 1898, the future Fondane began publishing at fourteen, and soon adopted the pseudonym Benjamin Fundoianu. Emigrating to France in 1923 and gallicizing his pseudonym to Fondane, he became one of Andre Breton's most ferocious critics and a disciple of the anti-rationalist philosopher Lev Shestov. His subtle, original, and deeply sophisticated polemical essays include the Faux Traite d'esthetique (1938), a philosophical pamphlet critiquing Surrealism and Roger Caillois. Fondane is often read in light of philosophers, as in Bruce Baugh's recent dual study of Fondane and Jean Wahl (Baugh 33-51). But where Levinas is concerned, the most convincing resonances begin, not between the philosophies of the two thinkers, but between Levinas's philosophy and Fondane's poetry. (4) I have elsewhere studied the points of contact between Fondane's most iconic poem, called the Preface en prose, and Levinas's conception of ethical speech, a kind of discourse that recognizes the authority and fragility of the Other without coercion. Here, I focus instead on Fondane's elegiac long poem Le Mal des fantomes (1943). (5) In this powerful elegy, history appears as an oppressive, violent force of erasure. And while the poem cannot itself preserve the singularity of an individual existence, it nonetheless bears witness to that existence, provoking an awareness of the reader's own fragile and transient inner life. That inner life, and human interiority in general, necessarily lie outside of History, according to both Levinas and Fondane. This position opposes, as both Levinas and Fondane consistently do, Hegel's totalizing conception of History. Yet this conception of interiority as extrinsic to History represents a game of qui perd gagne. Levinas and Fondane intend to preserve interiority as a space of infinite possibility or pure potentiality, to safeguard interiority from the closure and fixity of History. Yet in excluding interiority from History, these thinkers also define it as necessarily lost or missing, as perpetually unrecorded and unrecordable. I argue, in short, that for both Fondane and Levinas, interiority constitutes the elegiac object par excellence. Fondane discusses Hegel's conception of history at length in his last philosophical essay, Le Lundi existentiel et le dimanche de l'histoire (1945, posthumous). Fondane critiques Hegel's notion that History is utterly rational, because it requires that Hegel maintain, for instance, that war can be necessaire (Le Lundi existentiel 66). In other words, a rational history implies rationalizing all the evils of history. To make matters worse, for Hegel as Fondane reads him, the finite is inauthentic, a kind of unreality in the face of the infinite Spirit: [L]'idealisme de la philosophie consiste en la non-reconnaissance du fini comme etre veritable [Hegel]; le fini, le dechire, le meurtri existent, sans doute, mais ne saurait avoir voix au chapitre; si, pourtant, ils elevent leur voix, on la tiendra pour une lamentation sterile, une plainte sentimentale, un pur reflet de besoins et d'appetits. …

Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey by Riccardo Saccenti

Reviewed by: Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey by Riccardo Saccenti Andrew J. Cuff Riccardo Saccenti, Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2016) xiii + 155 pp. Few areas of inquiry require a road map to the secondary scholarship as desperately as the history of human rights and natural law jurisprudence. Thankfully, Riccardo Saccenti's new literature review of numerous legal historians restrains itself to a highly readable eighty pages, and maintains a careful balance among numerous historiographies. In addition, copious notes and lengthy citations from primary and secondary sources make this text extremely useful for the researcher who wishes to focus on a specific angle of medieval natural law. Saccenti is as conversant with the historical sources and their philosophical contexts as he is with the long history of their interpretation in the modern period. His excellent monograph can handily bring any scholar up to speed on all three as well. The basic question at issue in Saccenti's investigation is the following: how have scholars of jurisprudence typically connected the idea of ius in the Middle Ages to its instantiations in the enlightenment era of liberal democracy? In other words, did thinkers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes originate the jurisprudence of human rights (like life, liberty, and property), or were they simply building on some kind of ancient and medieval tradition? Scholars conversant with this line of inquiry may note that Nicholas Wolterstorff's 2008 book Justice: Rights and Wrongs focused a great deal on this question as well, extending the history of natural law even further back, to the Byzantines, ancient Greeks, and Hebrew scriptures. Unfortunately, Saccenti's book does not interact with or even acknowledge the existence of Wolterstorff's. This is likely a result of the lack of communication between the fields of philosophy and medieval law. Wolterstorff's Justice is mainly aimed at creating a systematic apologetic for his understanding of natural law, with history serving as a backdrop. Saccenti, on the other hand, is providing a full review of secondary literature for historians. Debating Medieval Natural Law presents three major interpretations of the history of subjective rights as a conversation about ius and its various meanings. The first is that medieval canonists such as Gratian, Huguccio, Bernard of Pavia, and Raymond of Penyafort (to name some of the most famous) originated a jurisprudence that set the stage for a radical shift in the [End Page 261] modern period toward individual rights. The second, a view popular with Thomists, argues that it was William of Ockham (d. 1347) whose nominalism and divine voluntarism led to legal positivism and the modern notion of human rights as individual powers (such as habeas corpus, power of attorney, or other "constitutional protections"). The third view is almost whiggish in its outlook, namely that the entire history of ius is a slow evolution from the ancient Roman sense of dominium to the birth of inherent subjective rights in the twelfth century, to the flowering of those rights in the modern period. Saccenti gives each perspective its due and exhaustively covers the history of scholarship in support of each. The view that turns William of Ockham into the radical legal iconoclast Saccenti assigns to Michel Villey, a French legal historian of the post-war period. Villey's model, offered in his Leçons d'histoire de la philosophie du droit (1957) and several other books and articles, argued that the medieval Thomistic conception of ius sharply contrasts with that of Locke and other modernists, in the sense that medieval philosophy centered ius around the dignity of human nature and what is owed to it, rather than the faculty of individual humans to justly claim the power to act in certain ways. He identified Ockham's metaphysics as the central underpinning of this development, given that the nominalist Ockhamist school did not hold to any metaphysics of human nature, making all faculties and powers individual, and based on the subjective properties of the individual. Other historians followed Villey, such as Francis Oakley and Richard Tuck, to add that Ockham's extreme voluntarism rendered the human and divine will free from the dictates of natural...

Édouard Glissant : l'extension poétique

ABSTRACTFrom its very title, Édouard Glissant's last essay, Philosophie de la Relation. Poésie en étendue, rekindles the age-old debate between poetry and philosophy, and retraces a hesitation that ran through his work from its beginning. Starting from the notion of “poésie en étendue” (extended poetry), this article explores how Glissant ties and unties the bonds between the poem, poetry, thought, and philosophy. By examining the different strata of his work, it searches for the signs of progression in Glissant's thought about this divide between the temptation of philosophy and poetry's call.

General introduction to a philosophy of action in Caguilhem: concept, context ans the works

Esse artigo é uma introdução geral à filosofia da ação nos trabalhos de Georges Canguilhem. O conceito canguilhemiano de ação define precisamente a superação do livre agir contra as normas abstratas e rígidas. Baseados em 1) diversos manuscritos não publicados (como "Qu'est-ce qu'agir?" ou "Objet et nature de la philosophie") e 2) uma análise geral dos campos metodológicos (estética, filosofia, história da ciência etc.) que caracteriza a produção filosófica de Canguilhem, pretendemos esclarecer o alcance teórica desse conceito à luz do contextos histórico e filosófico no qual ele se desenvolveu.