19th and 20th-century French philosophy

This paper examines the current trends in the current historiography of philosophy as a school discipline in France. It shows precisely how, despite the explicit (and documented) desire to break away with the old models, the philosophical practices today perpetuate some inventions by French philosopher Victor Cousin.

The theoretical aim of this seminar is to problematize the polemical category of “French philosophy” based on nineteenth-century philosophical debates. Particular attention is paid to the diversity of protagonists (philosophers, publicists, physicians, historians, politicians, etc.) and media (from scholarly editions of lectures to pamphlets, contributions to reviews and memoirs read in academies, etc.).
***
Ce séminaire a pour objectif théorique de problématiser la catégorie polémique de « philosophie française » à partir des débats philosophiques du dix-neuvième siècle. Une attention particulière est accordée à la diversité des protagonistes (philosophes, publicistes, médecins, historiens, hommes politiques, écrivains, artistes, etc.) et des supports (des éditions savantes de cours aux pamphlets, en passant par les contributions aux revues et les mémoires lus dans les Académies, les romans et poèmes, les œuvres d'art, etc.).

Colloque « "Les malheureux qui nous ont obligés de
parler du fond de la religion." Les classiques de l’apologétique chrétienne
(XVIIIe-XXe siècle) », ANR APOLOG, coord. Sylvio H. de Franceschi et Sylvain Milbach, Paris, École Pratique des Hautes Études, 2-3 octobre 2025.

Maine de Biran (1766-1824) was one of the most influential philosophers in France during the nineteenth century, being the principal inspiration for French spiritualism and French reflexive philosophy. He was also a significant Freemason. This article offers a translation of Biran's two surviving Freemasonry Speeches, delivered c. 1810, and an introduction to Biran's Freemasonry from the perspective of his philosophical work. The introduction gives a timeline of Biran's Freemasonry and an overview of the text of the Speeches. It then considers some principal themes in francophone Freemasonic culture of the Restoration, especially the practice of ritualized introspection, before moving onto compare, briefly, the content of the Speeches to the main philosophical essay by Biran with which the Speeches is contemporaneous. Based on this evidence, the introduction makes suggestions regarding the role played by Freemasonry in the development of French spiritualism, and indicates trajectories for future research.

One of the problems with modern philosophy in the West has been and continues to beits privileging of reason at the expense of intuition. Equally problematic, however, hasbeen an opposite tendency to elevate intuition above reason. While intuition is a second-class citizen with restricted rights in all too many aspects of modern West-led philosophy,science, and theology, attempts to reclaim intuition sometimes go too far in the oppositedirection. Intuition is sometimes elevated unduly, wheeled in as a deus ex machina. Whatexcites me about Jeffrey Bishop’s learned piece is the way it argues that if intuition is tobe reclaimed, it cannot be at the expense of reason. This is because, as Bishop shows, therelationship between reason and intuition is collaborative rather than competitive. This isnot an either-or situation, it is a both-and relationship.

[Deadline: oct. 2025] Ce colloque fait l’hypothèse qu’une genèse sur le temps long est susceptible d’éclairer les tendances et les conflits actuels portant sur la définition de l’expertise en éducation, ses modalités notamment institutionnelles d’existence et le type de savoirs sur lesquels elle repose. Il s’efforcera de faire droit tout à la fois aux poids des héritages et à la spécificité des conjonctures historiques ; aux voix institutionnelles des « experts » reconnus et mandatés ainsi qu’aux savoirs et individus qui ont de fait été écartés de ce processus ou qui l’ont subi, notamment dans un contexte de « globalisation des mondes de l’éducation » et d’histoire globale voire « décoloniale » de l’éducation. Le cadre de l’étude sera le cas de la France, dans ses relations et ses réseaux internationaux, en particulier européens et/ou (post)coloniaux. Le terme initial correspond à la création d’un État centralisé et prenant en charge à l’échelle du territoire national l’organisation de l’éducation, de la première enfance jusqu’à la formation des maîtres, à l’articulation des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Nous souhaitons prolonger l’enquête jusqu’au temps présent, afin de mettre en évidence les phénomènes de permanence ou au contraire de reconfiguration, sur le temps long, en jeu dans le recours à différentes formes d’expertise en éducation.

La proposta teorica presentata in questo volume si inserisce nel quadro dell'odierna questione antropologica che tenta di comprendere il senso dell'umano all'interno degli attuali mutamenti paradigmatici. L'intento è quello di esaminare criticamente e secondo una visione multiprospettica i principali orientamenti tematici contemporanei sul rapporto tra l'essere umano, la tecnologia e gli enti artificiali con lo scopo di controllare e verificare i contenuti e i modi del discorso antropologico. I contributi presenti nel volume, da quelli maggiormente fondativi a quelli più pertinenti ad una declinazione specifica e applicativa, delineano la cornice antropologica ed epistemologica entro cui comprendere il rapporto tra l'umano, la tecnica e gli apparati tecnologici che da essa derivano.

This volume is the first systematic study of the style of reasoning specific to the field of philosophy in nineteenth-century France. The chapters analyze the often dispersed responses to the fundamental question of the division of the sciences based on the reciprocal relationships of inclusion or exclusion, of adversity or sorority, between metaphysics and the positive sciences. In line with the arrhythmic progress of the different forms of knowledge, these responses renew the Condillacian criticisms of the Cartesian order of the relationships between metaphysics and physics. Between a pronounced divorce and a successful marriage, this volume traces the philosophical history of the various attempts at divorce or union, which, as the century progressed, resulted in original hybridizations that aspired to define a new and ever-problematic “French philosophy.”

This article tries to highlight some internal aspects of the personalist reflection of the last century, to explore its implications from a theoretical, legal and political perspectives. In the context of philosophical-juridical and political analysis, the concept of «person» has represented a tool of crucial importance to configure an intermediate way between opposing tendencies: collectivism and individualism, violence and emotional relationships, State and social bodies. This mediation capacity of the legal component
is highlighted by various authors (in particular, among others: Jean Lacroix
and Emmanuel Mounier) belonging to the aforementioned current. In this paper we attempt to enhance it, emphasizing more decisive elements.

Whether as subjects for teaching in schools or specialized areas of knowledge, disciplines are based on past productions that are elevated to the status of works, with their memory maintained by codifying the editorial and critical discourses that focus on them. In this sense, disciplinary traditions arise from inextricably linked methodological and memorial decisions. The theoretical aim of the seminar will be to explore the relationship between the production and institution of works by illuminating the logics inherent in the processes of canonization and minimization. The investigation will commence with debates on ‘Philosophy’ and ‘Literature’, analyzing the struggle between orthodoxies and heterodoxies over disputed areas such as, even today, issues of genealogies, choices of periodization, territorial delineation, and the arbitration between centers and peripheries, all from a perspective that considers the history of institutions and textual media. This year's theme is the French "agrégation" competition and its critics. Closing workshop: Tuesday, 6 May 2025.
ENS de Lyon
Salle D8.001
Bâtiment Buisson.

Organisation: Sarah Al-Matary, Delphine Antoine-Mahut, Samuel Lézé, Alessandro Taverniti et Stéphane Zékian.

Cette communication thématise l'existence d'une "politique de la mémoire" à l'œuvre dans la constitution de "listes d'auteurs" dans les programmes scolaires du XIXe siècle en France, à partir du cas "Blaise Pascal", et analyse ses effets sur les disciplines et leur distinction.

This paper explores the intellectual and the biographical relationship between Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and Max Scheler (1874-1928). This topic has been examined through correspondences, direct and indirect references, as well as investigations in the Munich Archive (Bayersiche Staatsbibliothek -BSB). Simmel and Scheler lived in Berlin in the early twentieth century, so they shared the German Jahrhundertwende "Zeitgeist" and many fascinations, anxieties, hopes, and feelings. Scheler was Simmel's pupil (Berliner Humboldt Universität) in 1895, but they were destined to meet again and again. Simmel attended some of Scheler's lectures as he searched for his theoretical path. Their roots of reciprocal influence also spanned many indirect interests and they developed personal acquaintance. There are many similarities and affinities in Simmel's and Scheler's work, that behind the reciprocal effect of their respective intellectual work hide an undeniable and unavoidable ambivalence. They converge on many topics (the cultural and moral analysis of values, the rediscovery of "emotional" issues in the foundation of social and cultural theory, the historical and anthropological interests, etc.), even though their respective philosophical and sociological findings were quite different. Scheler's "essentialist" position, in opposition to some Simmelian "functionalism" (i.e. relationalism), does not detract from the mighty importance of Simmel's unique approach, which brought a breath of novelty to both philosophical and sociological fields through its eclectic and innovative inquiry into modernity and from Scheler's new phenomenological * I am very grateful to Prof.

L’idea di una terra che sorge agli antipodi si trova anche nell’opera di Francis Bacon. La Nuova Atlantide baconiana è Bensalem, isola sperduta «al largo del Perù», sulla quale si è realizzata una felice utopia scientifica. Il nome dell’isola, evidentemente, riecheggia quello di Jerusalem. Il progetto di Bacone ha carattere ad un tempo allegorico e narrativo e si presta bene a quell’atmosfera di entusiasmo per il sapere e la sperimentazione fine a se stessi che già per il Cinquecento imperversava tra gli occidentali colti e potenti.

After decades of attempts to conceptually reduce metaphysics and an increasingly optimistic attitude towards it, causal realism has begun to attract the interest of the philosophical community. Causal realism consists of the metaphysical thesis that causal relations are legitimate and real entities in our world, one of the metaphysical building blocks that undergird our reality, such that this relation cannot be reduced to other non-causal relations. Although literature is not clear on which theses constitute the basic core of causal realism, the following characteristics are generally associated with it: productivity (or efficacy) and necessity. Productivity conveys the idea that causality is a genuine relation of our reality where causes bring about their effects into existence, and this productive relation from cause to effect must be explained. To this end, the causal realist appeals to properties endowed with this productive power capable of driving causality. Necessity, in turn, is what ensures that a certain arrangement of causes necessarily produces its effects, and it is precisely around this concept that necessitarians and anti-necessitarians diverge. On one side, the causal necessitarianist maintains that one of the distinctive characteristics of causality as a metaphysical relation is the necessity it There's no difference between causation or causality. However, some authors such as Peirce employ distinct uses for each of these words (see Hulswit 2002: xiv).

In Spiritualisme et phénoménologie, Emmanuel Falque discovers in Maine de Biran (1766-1824) resources for continuing to think the limits of phenomenology, a task that has become central to his work. Though Biran is relatively unknown today and published only three texts in his lifetime, he influenced phenomenology through figures including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and especially Michel Henry, who reads him as a thinker of interiority and autoaffection. Falque, however, finds in Biran not only the thinker of the "inner sense of effort" by which one knows oneself but also the thinker of resistance (without which effort is impossible, since effort is constituted by force and resistance) and of the alienation in which the "sentiment of the myself " is annihilated. By reading of Biran, therefore, Falque further develops his analyses of the human being who becomes foreign to himself and of the extra-phenomenal (that which breaks the very possibility of phenomenal experience). Biran influenced French spiritualism, and in chapter i, Falque, already known for crossing disciplinary boundaries, calls for a "backlash of spiritualism on phenomenology" (p. 42). For Biran, the human being is the relation between soul and body; Falque takes inspiration from this view to question the identification of the self with the flesh alone. Chapter ii presents Biran's discovery of the "lived body" (corps propre) and examines the body's resistance in Biran and Condillac (1714-1780): they, like Aristotle before them and Richard Kearney after them, emphasize the importance of touch, but for them, the body, far from being only the lived body, is also a resistance that I encounter. Chapter iii continues to examine flesh and resistance, making clear that Biran, who emphasizes the "sentiment of the myself " whereby one knows oneself to exist, also discovers the loss of the myself in alienation. Chapter iv finds in Biran an exception to Foucault's "Great Confinement": Biran, who took a great interest in medicine and psychiatry, does not exclude madness from the human condition but rather insists on the importance of studying it, since we may all become ali

Cet article explore la notion de mérite à travers une grille d’analyse affecto-cognitive, en s’appuyant sur les conceptions de Thomas d’Aquin, Emmanuel Kant et Montaigne. Il propose une méthode d’évaluation du mérite fondée sur la quantification de l’effort psychologique, révélant que les décisions humaines résultent d’un calcul affecto-cognitif complexe. L’étude met également en lumière la dimension axiologique du mérite dans la société française, confrontant différentes perspectives politiques et philosophiques.

The clinical judgments formation in nineteenth-century alienist medicine in France

The dominant historiography of nineteenth-century French alienist medicine seeks philosophical meanings to judge the emergence of a new medical specialty: (i.) scientific continuity or discontinuity of the figure of Pinel as a precursor of psychoanalysis; (ii.) negative or positive revelatory effects of Modernity; (iii.) influences or strategic transpositions of the philosophy of the time.
To determine the philosophical significance of this medicine, we need to formulate a preliminary epistemological question: how is a clinical method formed? The answer requires proof of methodological specificity regarding the history of madness, the history of psychiatry, and the problem of the division of the sciences in nineteenth-century France.
I will defend the following position: the clinical method is specific to alienist physicians because testing models of the soul's faculties shapes it. Models of the soul's faculties serve as a reference to the soul's faculties' pathological and therapeutic evaluation of possible soul imbalances. In turn, the clinical case is a framework for assessing the limits of soul faculty models.
To this end, I will focus on the corpus of alienist physicians beyond Pinel to reconstruct the gestures of the critical reception of a series of philosophical doctrines, considering the three dimensions of the problem of the division of sciences. From this perspective, the method of micro-analysis of receptions pursues the project of historical epistemology by studying cases of knowledge formation through the transformation of concepts. It remains open to comparing transformations, particularly in the history of clinical methods specific to French psychiatry.

Avant d’être des œuvres reconnues pour leur qualité littéraire, les classiques sont des ouvrages destinés aux classes. Le présent article retrace l’histoire de cette transition au regard des débats théoriques qui en constituent le cadre, depuis le premier Empire, qui fait des classiques un instrument de contrôle politique, jusqu’à la fin du XIXe siècle et la double proclamation de la liberté des professeurs et de l’existence d’une « philosophie diffuse » dans les programmes d’enseignement.

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was an economist and journalist. A member of the French Liberal School, he is best known for his free trade ideas and his philosophy of law. Mark Blaug ranks him as one of the 100 greatest economists before Keynes. Schumpeter called him a brilliant economic journalist. Haney devoted a chapter of his History of Economic Thought to Bastiat.
Although Bastiat is known for his work on free trade and the philosophy of law, he also wrote on other topics. To date, no one has examined his views on taxation. The purpose of this paper is to fill that gap in the literature.

Co-edited with Delphine Antoine-Mahut.

The first English translation of some of Victor Cousin's most important philosophical writings for over 150 years, accompanied by extensive contextual and analytic resources from a team of internationally recognized Cousin scholars. Victor Cousin was a towering philosophical figure of the nineteenth century: no French philosopher since has fully escaped his shadow. This edition of Philosophical Fragments brings together a series of Cousin's most accessible and significant texts to introduce English-language readers to his thought, along with commentaries on his relationship to Cartesianism, his role in the invention of the historiography of philosophy, as well as his lasting institutional legacy. The edition includes some of the founding texts of modern French philosophy, such as Cousin's 1826 Preface to Philosophical Fragments, the 'manifesto' by means of which he relaunched the French spiritualist project and set out his own eclectic project in the history of philosophy; his 1833 Preface to Philosophical Fragments, in which he responds to mounting criticism of his version of spiritualism by setting out definitively his relations to Descartes, eighteenth-century sensualism, German Idealism, and Catholic theology; and a selection of the Fragments themselves, charting the genesis of his philosophy from the 1810s to the 1840s.


CONTENTS

Editors' Preface: Victor Cousin, Eclectic Philosophy and its Legacies

Note on Editions, Abbreviations, and Translations

Part One: Introductions

1. Cousin and French Philosophy, Delphine Antoine-Mahut

2. Cousin and the Politics of Philosophy, Félix Barancy and Sarah Bernard-Granger

3. Cousin and the History of Philosophy, Pierre-François Moreau

4. Cousin and the Eighteenth Century, Lucie Rey

5. Cousin and the Problem of Metaphysics, Daniel Whistler

Part Two: Texts

The Three Prefaces

6. Preface to the 1826 Edition of Philosophical Fragments

7.Preface to the 1833 Edition of Philosophical Fragments

8. Prefatory Note to the 1838 Edition of Philosophical Fragments

1816-1818

9. On the Moral Law and Freedom

10. On the True Meaning of the cogito, ergo sum

11. Attempt at a Classification of Philosophical Questions and Schools

12. On the Fact of Consciousness

13. On the Clear and the Obscure in Knowledge, or On Spontaneity and Reflection

14. On Real Beauty and Ideal Beauty

1826-1830

15. The True Beginning of the History of Philosophy

16. Plato: Language of the Theory of Ideas

17. Plato

18. Prefatory Note to New Philosophical Fragments

19. Preface to the Translation of Tennemann's Manual of the History of Philosophy

20. From Review of Reiffenberg's On Eclecticism

After 1833

21. Introduction to the Posthumous Works of Maine de Biran

22. From Abelard

23. From Foreword to On Pascal's Pensées

24. Foreword to Fragments of Cartesian Philosophy

Appendix: Two Edicts Issued by the Royal Council of Public Education

The book is available here for purchase: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/victor-cousin-9780198866268

Este livro busca compreender o movimento do pensamento do filósofo francês Henri Bergson em torno da noção de inconsciente por meio de uma leitura de suas primeiras obras filosóficas e dos registros de seu ensino entre os anos de 1885 a 1896. Procuramos contextualizar tal leitura interna ao corpus bergsoniano ao remetê-la ao quadro mais amplo das diferentes tradições discursivas sobre o inconsciente estabelecidas no século XIX e ao contexto particular do espiritualismo francês. Tomamos como ponto de partida os primeiros registros do ensino de filosofia ministrado por Bergson nos quais manifesta-se uma recusa à aceitação da própria noção de fatos psicológicos inconscientes. Procuramos então mostrar que tal posição coadunava-se com a expressa nos principais manuais escolares da época. Buscamos destacar também o interesse de Bergson pelo hipnotismo e a influência que a psiquiatria dinâmica exerceu sobre seu ensino e sua filosofia. Em nossa leitura do Ensaio sobre os dados imediatos da consciência, defendemos que a obra propõe uma espécie de solução de compromisso sobre a questão da unidade do Eu, tema diretamente relacionado aos debates sobre o inconsciente da época: ao mesmo tempo em que preserva de direito essa unidade, reconhece-se de fato a sua pluralidade. Também procuramos mostrar que as teses defendidas nessa obra possibilitaram a Bergson reformular o problema do inconsciente no âmbito do seu ensino. Já em nossa leitura de Matéria e Memória, destacamos a defesa que Bergson faz da ocorrência de percepções inconscientes, comparando suas formulações com a teoria das petites perceptions de Leibniz, bem como da existência de fatos psicológicos inconscientes. Por fim, nos dedicamos a mapear os diferentes inconscientes delineados nessa obra e a indicar suas respectivas naturezas, procurando mostrar como as teses desenvolvidas por Bergson restauram a unidade do Eu.

É nas páginas de Matéria e Memória, lançado em 1896, que o filósofo francês Henri Bergson faz sua abordagem mais completa sobre o inconsciente, um dos temas centrais das discussões psicológicas e filosóficas do final do século XIX. Naquele contexto, tal noção ainda era combatida por muitos: essa oposição baseava-se, em grande parte, na concepção herdada da tradição filosófica moderna pelo qual o psicológico era identificado com a consciência. Um exemplo disso pode ser encontrado nas próprias aulas do Curso de Psicologia que Bergson ministrou quando do seu exercício docente na cidade de Clermond-Ferrant, reunidas no livro póstumo Aulas de Psicologia e de Metafísica. Neste livro, efetuamos o cotejo dos dois textos visando, primeiramente, identificar os argumentos utilizados pelo professor Bergson para se opor à noção de inconsciente; em seguida, procuramos expor as principais teses desenvolvidas em Matéria e Memória com o intuito de mostrar como essas implicam na superação daqueles argumentos; e, por fim,  intentamos tornar manifesta a teoria do inconsciente presente em Matéria e Memória.

This volume is the first systematic study of the style of reasoning specific to the field of philosophy in nineteenth-century France. The chapters analyze the often dispersed responses to the fundamental question of the division of the sciences based on the reciprocal relationships of inclusion or exclusion, of adversity or sorority, between metaphysics and the positive sciences. In line with the arrhythmic progress of the different forms of knowledge, these responses renew the Condillacian criticisms of the Cartesian order of the relationships between metaphysics and physics. Between a pronounced divorce and a successful marriage, this volume traces the philosophical history of the various attempts at divorce or union, which, as the century progressed, resulted in original hybridizations that aspired to define a new and ever-problematic “French philosophy.”

Pour décrire son approche dans cette étude, Delphine Antoine-Mahut utilise un apologue : lorsque nous retrouvons un objet du passé, par exemple la statue de Glaucus, nous reconnaissons les traits du personnage qu’elle représente, mais en même temps nous percevons ce que le temps et l’action de la mer ont déposé sur sa surface. Ce qui intéresse l’auteure n’est pas de mesurer l’écart entre ce que nous avons sous les yeux et la statue originale, mais de comprendre les événements qui l’ont rendue ce qu’elle est à présent. Hors de la métaphore, ce qui intéresse Antoine-Mahut, c’est d’analyser les différentes démarches que des auteurs contemporains, ou bien plus tardifs, ont entreprises afin de rendre canonique la philosophie de Descartes. Par rapport à d’autres travaux qui se sont penchés parfois sur les mêmes dossiers (je pense notamment au livre de Carlo Borghero, Interpretazioni, categorie, finzioni. Narrare la storia della filosofia, paru en 2017), l’approche d’Antoine-Mahut se concentre sur les enjeux philosophiques de ce processus de canonisation et établit un lien direct entre les contemporains de Descartes et le XIXe siècle français. Ce lien réside dans la présence constante de l’alternative entre un Descartes métaphysicien et un Descartes philosophe naturel, un Descartes rationaliste ou un Descartes empiriste. Derrière cette alternative se situe le problème du statut à donner à Henricus Regius, le professeur de médecine qui a introduit l’enseignement de la philosophie de Descartes à l’université d’Utrecht et qui a longtemps collaboré avec lui, avant de rompre la relation à la suite d’un différend sur la valeur de la métaphysique cartésienne.

I contributi presenti nella rivista sono stati sottoposti al processo di double blind peer review. bringing his work's militant and political stake to the forefront. With this text, I will therefore take the opportunity to dwell on the relationship of coincidence between life and concept in a Deleuzian framework, both from an ethical and epistemological perspective. Finally, I will show how the coincidence between life and thought cannot be taken seriously without a pinch of philosophical humour.

We are pleased to present in this issue a tribute to the thought of Pierre Duhem, on the occasion of the centenary of his death that occurred in 2016. Among articles and book reviews, the dossier contains 14 contributions of scholars from different places across the world, from Europe (Belgium, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Sweden) to the Americas (Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the United States). And this is something that attests to the increasing scope of influence exerted by the French physicist, philosopher and historian. It is quite true that since his passing, Duhem has been remembered in the writings of many of those who knew him directly. However, with very few exceptions (Manville et al. 1927), the comments devoted to him exhibited clear biographical and hagiographic characteristics of a generalist nature (see Jordan 1917; Picard 1921; Mentré 1922a; 1922b; Humbert 1932; Pierre-Duhem 1936; Ocagne et al. 1937). From the 1950s onwards, when the studies on his philosophical work re...

Co-edited with Mark Sinclair.

French philosophy is an internationally celebrated national philosophical tradition, and this Oxford Handbook offers a comprehensive approach to its history since 1800. The Handbook features essays written by renowned international specialists, illuminating key movements and positions, themes and thinkers in nineteenth-, twentieth- and even twenty-first-century French philosophy. The volume takes into account developments in recent historical scholarship by broadening the notion of Modern French Philosophy in two ways. Whereas recent approaches in the field have often ignored early nineteenth-century developments, this volume offers comprehensive treatment of French thought of this period in order to grasp better later developments. Moreover, the volume extends the canon at the other end of the period of Modern French Philosophy by including work on philosophers who have come to prominence only in the last ten or twenty years. The volume takes 'French philosophy' in a broad sense to include all philosophy carried out in France over the last 200 years, and it illuminates the institutional and cultural background of this national philosophical tradition in such a way as to provide a fuller and more comprehensive understanding of its unity and of its more famous moments in the twentieth century.

CONTENTS

1. Editors' Introduction, Mark Sinclair and Daniel Whistler

Part I: Movements and Positions
2. Maine de Biran and the Legacy of Ideology, Anne Dévarieux
3. Eclecticism and its Discontents, Delphine Antoine-Mahut
4. Positivisms and Spiritualisms: Quarrels and Appropriations, Annie Petit
5. Vacherot and his Circle: Philosophy and Religion in the Pantheism Controversy, Ayse Yuva
6. Spiritualism as a Philosophy of Culture: Ravaisson and Boutroux, Tullio Viola
7. Charles Renouvier on the Necessary Conditions of the Scientific Mind: Passion, Habit, and Will, Jeremy Dunham
8. Bergson after Boutroux on Freedom and Contingency, Mark Sinclair
9. Jean-Marie Guyau on Morality and Life, Keith Ansell-Pearson and Federico Testa
10. Léon Brunschwicg and the Development of French Neo-Kantianism, Pietro Terzi
11. Simone Weil's Practical Philosophy, Philip Goodchild
12. Early Existentialisms, Kate Kirkpatrick
13. Historical Epistemology: A Broader and More Complex View, Cristina Chimisso
14. Merleau-Ponty: A Bergsonian in the Making, Donald Landes
15. Frantz Fanon, Philosophising (in) the Colonial Situation, Lucie K. Mercier
16. Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch: Sociality and the Second-Person, Michael L. Morgan
17. Foucault and the Task of Philosophy, Johanna Oksala
18. Ethics and Ontology in French Hermeneutics: The Case of Ricœur, Gaëlle Fiasse
19. Deleuze or Lyotard?, Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos
20. French Phenomenology after 1961, Françoise Dastur
21. Irigaray and Feminism in French Philosophy after Beauvoir, Rachel Jones
22. Deconstruction and Forgiveness: The Final Phase of Derrida's Thought, Leonard Lawlor
23. Badiou's Being and Event Trilogy and the Pas de Deux with Deleuze, Sean Bowden and Caitlyn Lesiuk
24. The Non-Philosophy of François Laruelle, Rocco Gangle

Part II: Influences
25. Descartes in Modern French Philosophy, Andrea Gadberry
26. Spinoza in Modern French Philosophy, Knox Peden
27. Hegel in Modern French Philosophy, Andrea Bellantone
28. Marx in Modern French Philosophy, Frank Fischbach
29. Heidegger in Modern French Philosophy, François Raffoul
30. French Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Barry Dainton

Part III: Themes
31. Aesthetics in Modern French Philosophy, Carole Talon-Hugon
32. The Concrete and the Abstract in Modern French Philosophy, Giuseppe Bianco
33. The Question of Habit in Modern French Philosophy, Mark Sinclair
34. Philosophical Historiography in Modern French Philosophy, Marie Louise Krogh
35. Reason and Analysis in Modern French Philosophy, Pascal Engel
36. Desire in Modern French Philosophy, Miguel de Beistegui
37. Life: Modern French Philosophy and the Life Sciences, Giuseppe Bianco
38. Transcendence and Immanence in Modern French Philosophy, Laurent Bove
39. Structure in Modern French Philosophy, Patrice Maniglier
40. Literature and Modern French Philosophy, Eleanor Kaufman
41. French Philosophy during the First World War, Martha Hanna

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher and the authors accept no legal responsibility for any damage caused by improper use of the instructions and programs contained in this book and the CD. Although the software has been tested with extreme care, errors in the software cannot be excluded.

Topics covered include: philosophical method and philosophical tradition, metaphysics and empiricism, logical reasoning and transcendental arguments, interpretation and objectivity, theism and anti-theism, naming and reference, the existence of objects and being in general, belief and knowledge, perception and mind, system and scepticism, reason and paradox, world and things, phenomena and consciousness, realism and idealism, science and art, force and materiality, life and non-living objects, nature and the human world, pragmatism and transcendence. COURSE TEXTS Please make sure you use these editions and you must refer only to these editions during class discussion or in submitted work. If you have time you might find it useful to compare different translations from German, Danish and French, (or look at the original if you know the language) but only in addition to working on the editions below.

Victor Cousin played a leading role in the creation of the French philosophical institution. Numerous studies highlighted the intertwining philosophical and political issues involved in this institutionalisation. This paper shows that the Cousinian attempt to codify philosophical practice was rooted in the search for a new effectiveness in the age opened up by the Revolution of 1789 and what has been presented as the failure of the encyclopaedic model.

Victor Cousin a joué un rôle prépondérant dans la fabrique de l’institution philosophique française. De nombreuses études ont mis en évidence l’intrication des enjeux philosophiques et politiques de cette institutionnalisation. Cet article est destiné à présenter cette histoire à un public anglophone, en montrant que la tentative cousinienne de codification de la pratique philosophique s’ancre dans la recherche d’une nouvelle effectivité dans l’âge ouvert par la Révolution de 1789 et ce qui est présenté comme l’échec du modèle encyclopédique.

The uploaded file is merely a preliminary draft; the final published version is forthcoming.

In this essay, I investigate some of the aspects of the resurgence of the theme of
habit at the dawn of the twentieth century by touching upon a series of paradigmatic texts of the modernist canon and by investigating their debts to and consonances with the contemporary philosophies of habit. My thesis is that during those decades – seen as a mere chapter in the longer history of modernity – the philosophical and literary theme of habit served not only as a way to understand and represent the ordinary dimension of life, but also as a means to develop an idea of human subjectivity that could mediate between the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies that permeated the competing ideologies of the time. The crisis of subjectivity that characterized modernism and which has often been simplistically represented as a disintegration of the subject into irredeemably broken fragments, should rather be seen as the development of a dialectical idea of a “minor subject”, that is, an open, dynamic, multilayered subjectivity still endowed by a certain malleable consistency. Both modernist literature and its philosophical counterparts found in the “minor subject” (here in the sense of “subject matter”) of habit, the opportunity to investigate and represent the porosity between activity and passivity, volition and determinism, individual identity and social structures, that characterize this idea of subjectivity.

I focus on three different representative – though not exhaustive – facets of the issue. In the first section, relying on Virginia Woolf's work, I highlight how some of the narrative techniques developed by modernist writers can be seen as an attempt to give a plastic representation to the blurred boundaries of subjectivity as captured in the everyday existence of their characters. I then connect these innovations to the theory of habit of Samuel Butler, whom Woolf identified as one of the harbingers of modernity. In the second section I focus on Marcel Proust to discuss how modernist writers proved to be able to combine two opposed views of habit: on the one hand, the view of habit as purely mechanical and leading to inauthentic life; on the other, the idea of habit as essential to the human being's potential for self-perfecting and creativity. The third section is dedicated to addiction, seen as a form of habit in which the subject is radically torn between opposite forces. Following insights from Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I interpret Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience as a meditation on how such a torn subjectivity manifests the essential incompleteness of the human subject and life's insuppressible nostalgia for the inorganic.

Virginia Woolf’s blurred boundaries, Marcel Proust’s ambiguous authenticity, and Italo Svevo’s split selfhood are three interconnected facets of the modernists’ interest in the “minor subject” of habit. Investigating the interaction between the philosophical and the literary discourses on habit at the dawn of the twentieth century can contribute to a more nuanced reconstruction of a pivotal moment in the history of thought but also to the contemporary philosophical debate. Almost exactly one century later, the current renewed interest in the theme of habit mirrors a situation in part similar to what characterized the ideological landscape of the time, as now too it is concerned with the attempt to reimagine a “minor subject” that mediates between the postmodern pulverization of identity and the temptation of reaffirming anachronistic forms of strong subjectivities.

IT: Attraverso un dialogo sul rapporto tra opera d’arte e nichilismo, il presente contributo getta le basi per un confronto tra Ernst Jünger e Hans-Georg Gadamer, autori le cui prospettive di pensiero risultano a prima vista tra loro piuttosto distanti. A partire dall’obiettivo fondamentale rappresentato dall’interazione fra i due pensatori sui problemi in questione, il saggio, pur tenendo debitamente conto delle differenze che li separano, rintraccia dunque punti di contatto tra le due proposte speculative, e mette contestualmente in evidenza come tanto in Jünger quanto in Gadamer l’arte si attesti quale produttrice di orizzonti ermeneutici grazie al particolare legame che essa intrattiene con la verità e la temporalità.

ENG: Through a dialogue on the relationship between work of art and nihilism, this essay lays the ground for a confrontation between Ernst Jünger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, authors whose thought perspectives appear at first glance to be incompatible. Moving from the fundamental objective constituted by the interaction between the two authors on the problems in discussion, the essay, while duly taking into account the differences that separate them, thus traces points of contact between the two speculative proposals, and highlights how in both Jünger and Gadamer art is attested as a producer of hermeneutical horizons thanks to its particular relation to truth and temporality.

Once in vogue, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, although far from being forgotten, does not play a prominent role in contemporary debate. Given the originality of his contribution to key philosophical questions (freedom in relation both to the physical, and social determinism) and his fascination with the dynamic character of reality, this is both surprising and regrettable. In our workshop, we plan to address the big questions of freedom and determination (physical and social) from Bergson’s perspective.
https://bergson.ff.cuni.cz/workshops-and-conferences/international-workshop-laws-of-nature-rules-of-society-and-freedom-bergson-today/conference-programme/

This article analyzes the epistemological and logical foundations of Kohl• berg's cognitive-developmental theory of moral development Kohlberg's understanding of dialectics is criticized and an attempt is made to introduce a dialectical materialist outlook on moral development. Philosophical tendencies in the cognitive-developmental theory of moral development such as apriorism, absolutism and formalism are unfavorably contrasted with the dialectical categories of historicism, double interactionism and reflection. In logic and epistemology the cognitive-developmental.theory is shown to be based on a subjective idealist orientation.

The essay compares the views of Paul Ricoeur and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in relation to the philosophy of Maine de Biran. The first section presents Ricoeur’s interpretation of Biran’s philosophy of effort. Ricoeur argues that Biran prioritizes practical effort and movement at the expense of the epistemological category of attention. Although he initially objects that Biran introduces the existence of the world into the reflective sphere of the subject’s constitution, he also points out that Biran acknowledges the role of attention qua representational but receptive capacity of the intellect and avoids, therefore, a simplifying approach to the activity/passivity opposition.
The second section focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s recommendation of Biran for taking into account embodied experience and movement. With respect to the distinction between effort and knowledge, Merleau-Ponty underlines that there is no priority here. Biran’s “primitive fact” of subjectivity (a primordial union of ego and non-ego) successfully addresses some of the issues of Cartesian rationalism. Merleau-Ponty’s also reproaches Biran for remaining indebted to the Idéologues and their empiricism. Nonetheless, Merleau-Ponty affirms that Biran, aware of the complexity of these issues, treats conscious interiority and bodily exteriority as equiprimordial, thereby anticipating phenomenology and making progress on the way towards synthesizing intellectualism and sensualism.