Daniel Schulthess

The article confronts one of the ἄποpοι λόγοι discussed in ancient Eristic-Stoic logic: the famous “cuckold” (κερατίνης), where an interrogator has his respondent to admit to have been or still be cuckolded. The source of the problem is a principle of dialectics related to the principle of the excluded-middle according to which a question admits only a positive or a negative answer. To the question “Have you ceased to be cuckolded?” both answers seem to presuppose that the respondent has been cuckolded. To solve the problem one can either deny the dialectical principle of the excluded-middle or (as Stoic logic does) introduce the idea that negation refers not simply to the predicate (as in Aristotelian logic) but to the entire proposition (by denying the existence of the subject, for example).

The article reconstructs Leibniz’s theory of the relation between perceptions and reality. Leibniz’s position is different both from that of Descartes, according to whom the perceptions of the senses, unlike those of the mind, are never perceptions of reality, and from that of Locke, according to whom only the perceptions of primary qualities have a resemblance to reality, whereas secondary qualities do not correspond to anything real. The author shows that, according to Leibniz, the expressive link between perception and reality can be pursued in both directions: the analysis of ordinary perception allows us, on the one hand, to arrive at distinct perceptions of reality; on the other hand, Leibniz shows against Locke that even secondary qualities express a certain reality, namely that of the constitution of our body and of our sensory apparatus.

Starting from the recognition of the difficulty of establishing peace and the observation that several attempts to terminate conflicts end in failure, the author puts forward the argument that peace is a state that is essentially a by-product, according to the definition given by Jon Elster in his homonymous paper of 1981. Such states are characterized by the fact that they can only be brought about by actions aimed at other ends, i.e. non-intentionally. According to the author it is in the light of this notion that we must consider the strategies implemented by the pacifying power in a so-called pacification war. In fact, what follows from such a war is rarely peace. The question arises to know how much the pacifying power is conscious of this fact and what follows from it both politically and morally.

The article takes into consideration the opposition between Lifeworld and world of science in the analytic tradition (going back to Descartes and Locke) on the one hand, and in continental authors such as Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger on the other. The two approaches aim at a surpassing of the opposition between Lifeworld and world of science, by different strategies that the author eviscerates. In the last part of the article the author develops a personal theory of the relationship between Lifeworld and world of science: in the wake of the analytic tradition, he denies to the lived world a transcendental autonomy that could ground science; it is rather science that, starting from the positional nature of our relation to the world, should account for our experiences. At the same time the author stresses the limits of à la Quine naturalism in accommodating intentionality and “self-transcendence” (T. Nagel).

The article proposes an interpretation of the role of practical reason in Hume. The starting point is the distinction between strong practical reason and weak practical reason. The distinction concerns the assignment of values to states of affairs: strong practical reason is itself involved in this assignment of values, whereas weak practical reason only deliberates on the basis of given assignments. According to the author of the article Hume, showing how our choices are produced from a mechanics of passions, refutes not only strong but also weak practical reason. In the last part of the article the author, relying on the distinction that Hume makes between calm and violent passions, attempts to defend a rationalist conception of the deliberative dynamic, which reserves for reason an arbiter role on the passions.

The article considers the questions posed by environmental ethics in the light of the work of Hans Jonas, especially his work Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Jonas centers his ethic on the concept of responsibility, which finds its expression in the categorical imperative that enjoins us to take into account the future effects of our actions. The specification of this imperative generates a series of problems: 1) given that the specification rests on complex causal chains, it has an hypothetical character; 2) the effects that are the object of imperatives are external to our intentions (externality); 3) the complexity of the causal chains involved generates threshold effects; 4) the complexity of the causal chains prevents us from having a complete knowledge of it. The author then considers the possibilities and limits of Jonas' ethics to solve these problems.

The article deals with the issue of public items (objects, processes, events) in the philosophy of Leibniz. Starting from the famous passage of the Monadology which illustrates his conception of the substance by the image of a city perceived from different perspectives, the author shows how Leibniz conceives the public character of certain items, i.e. the reality of the phenomena that express them, not only in disagreement with the causal model, according to which public items would be the causal source of shared perceptions, but in disagreement even with the correspondence model, according to which shared perceptions would correspond to external objects. The key to understand the position of Leibniz is rather to look at his concept of the compossible, which makes it possible to explain the congruence between shared perceptions without having to resort to the concept of correspondence.

Starting from an anecdote reported by Ernst Mach in the Analysis of Sensations, the author shows how the distinction between intentionality de re and intentionality de se can contribute to solving the individuation problem, at least for those individuals who are capable of self-referentiality. Intentionality is expressed linguistically in the form of the oratio obliqua, in the context of which the subordinate can be false even when the whole is true. The analysis of the conditions of falsity of the subordinate tells us that this can be false either because the predicate does not fit to the subject or by a failure of reference, conceived according to the descriptive theory of reference. The intentionality de se is peculiar precisely by the fact that in this case the reference cannot fail and uniquely individuates the haecceitas of the intentional subject.

The article proposes a comparison between certain aspects of Samuel Pufendorf's (1632-1694) conception of natural law and certain aspects of John Searle's social ontology. As in Pufendorf the entia moralia are superimposed on the entia physica, of which they constitute modes that ground systems of norms (natural or positive), so in Searle the institutional facts that are created by certain speech acts of the performative type are superimposed on the physical facts. The difference between Pufendorf and Searle is that the latter understands all institutional facts as extrinsic to the physical facts (as a consequence of the peculiarity of their self-referentiality). For Pufendorf, on the other hand, moral modes are intrinsic to certain entia physica endowed with reason and will, whereas certain legal relations, like property, are extrinsic.

The text shortly introduces Rousseau’s De l’imitation théatrale (1764). Rousseau’s writing is basically a translation of the first pages of Book X of Plato’s Republic. On the one hand, Rousseau shares with Plato the ethical rigor that, in view of a certain political project, leads to the moral condemnation of theatrical practices. On the other hand, the metaphysical assumptions on which Plato’s critique relies are much heavier than those of Rousseau, whose sensualistic nominalism is incompatible with the metaphysical realism about universals that underlies the arguments of Book X of the Republic. In this respect, it is surprising that Rousseau refers to Book X rather than Book III, in which the same critique of theatrical spectacles is developed from a psychological and moral point of view.

The article compares David Humes’ and John Searle’s positions concerning the relation between descriptive and evaluative statements. Although the two positions seem to be just opposite in that Hume denies the derivability of the ought from the is, while Seale accepts it, the author shows that Hume and Searle have many similarities, for for both obligations rely upon the institution of promising. The difference is that for Hume the speech act of promising as such does not have intrinsic evaluative impact. Only in the civil state can the calm passions emerge which give to the motivation to act its ought-character. For Searle, on the contrary, the evaluative character is intrinsically linked to the speech act of promising, so that it becomes possible to derive the ought from the is. At the end the question of the relation between institutional and moral institutions is addressed.

Among the salient aspects of laughter; I retain its aptitude to administer a kind of punishment – albeit of a relatively mild character. Henri Bergson did not hesitate to adopt for himself the traditional formula that "laughter chastises the ways of life" (Laughter, I.2). I maintain that laughter, seen under this angle, simultaneously conveys an evaluation (commonly a depreciative one) and an immediately implemented punishment. This twofold nature makes of laughter a very specific kind of behavior. The starting point of our approach is the following: as human behavior generally, laughter is itself susceptible of an evaluation. It is of the kind that can be applied to acts of evaluation, and also of the kind that may be applied to punishments. Under the light of this second-order evaluation, laughter may be considered as appropriate or not, as acceptable or not, as deserved or not. This depends principally on the object of laughter. I try to describe some of the norms that are relevant at this second-order level. I also expect such norms to extend their relevance to humor, insofar as it sets out to bring about laughter. The norms that appear at this second-order level (mostly restrictive norms) have a strong social and contextual character. We may describe them without recognizing them as binding. Nevertheless, they do not lack an authority of their own. This is not to say that they are above criticism. There is much to say about humor in ethical and juridical terms. I describe summarily some conflicts of norms that may appear at this second-order level, and claim that there is a dialectical arrangement that best permits to understand how these norms work together.

The article deals with Kierkegaard's conception of the comic and the role it plays in his thought. The background against which the issue must be tackled is Kierkegaard's critique of modernity: according to Kierkegaard, modernity is characterized by its objectifying tendencies, to which we must oppose the rediscovery of interiority. These two registers correspond to two different linguistic regimes: objectivity to direct communication, interiority to indirect communication. The latter can express itself in the form of the incongruity that grounds the comic, for example when an interlocutor answers a rhetorical question. Such an answer cannot be apprehended literally (objectively) but only by an internal exercise. In the last part of the article the author highlights the different functions that have irony and humour in Kierkegaard’s conception of the stages of existence.

The article deals with the role of questions in the process of acquiring knowledge. Starting from the classical definition of knowledge as true and justified opinion, the author shows how the justification of our opinions is based on an epistemic practice in which questions play a fundamental role. Before knowledge we have the stages of ignorance and uncertainty. The latter shows a disjunctive structure that is similar to that of questions. In order for questions to be asked a dimension of libido sciendi or at least a wish to know is necessary. The author concludes, relying on Johannes Daubert, with considerations on questioned states of affairs (Fragverhalte) that can generate knowledge in the form of known states of affairs (Erkenntnisverhalte).

The authors begins with the observation that jokes can have a different moral import: some may even be edifying. Is humor therefore to be integrated into an overall moral perspective? One of the leading philosophers of the 19th century, S. Kierkegaard, pleaded for such an integration. The best way to understand why he took such a stand is to articulate the edifying jokes - or rather the humor that underlies them - in terms of Kierkegaard's notion of indirect communication. However, this pushes the problem one step further: the main challange being to understand why indirect communication should be expected to have a positive moral import.

Conference Proceedings (ASPLF Conference “Le Beau” in Iaşi, Romania, August 23-27, 2016). Sections: 1. Le beau dans l'histoire de la philosophie; 2. Le beau à travers les cultures; 3. Beauté de la pensée et beauté du langage; 4. Ontologie et métaphysique du beau; 5. Le beau dans la nature et dans la société; 6. Beauté, éthique, politique; 7. Les catégories esthétiques; 8. L'esthétique et la vie quotidienne; 9. Renouvellement et perspectives de l'esthétique. Conference sections: 1. The Beautiful in the History of Philosophy; 2. The Beautiful across Cultures; 3. Beauty in Thought and Beauty in Language; 4. Ontology and Metaphysics of the Beautiful; 5. The Beautiful in Nature and in Society; 6. Beauty, Ethics, Politics; 7. Aesthetic Categories; 8. Aesthetics and Everyday-Life; 9. New Perspectives in Aesthetics.

The article proposes a comparison between the “retrograde” conception that Bergson has of truth and his atypical interpretation of the concept of possibility. These conceptions are developed in two articles collected in La pensée et le mouvant. The “retrograde” conception of truth starts from the observation of the temporal gap between an event and the formulation of the judgment that relates it and finds its condition of truth in it. The retrograde movement consists in putting aside the temporality proper to the judgment and to “eternalize” it, so that the truth precedes the event. With respects to the possible Bergson has a similar conception: the events that are realized in the present are conceived by language as realization of previous possibilities. According to Bergson, language has thus the “magic power” of influencing the past retroactively.

The article deals with the aesthetic dimension of humour. The author starts with Hannah Arendt’s distinction between labour as a set of tasks necessary for the reproduction of biological life and praxis as an expression of freedom. In the same way the humour would be detached from the “working communication” of everyday life. Humour represents a “break” with ordinary modes of communication. This is done through “transpositions”, which can take the form of objectual transpositions (which play on the equivocal references of a term), verbal transpositions (which contrast the uttered hypertext with a more usual hypotext; self-deprecation is a special case of verbal transposition) or metacognitive transpositions (like the “lapalissade”). The aesthetic value of humour is increased by the simplicity of the means used to obtain the contrast.

The author gives an account of how a set of themes that we nowadays call metaethics contributes to shaping Nietzsche’s approach to morality. Initially, moral judgement, or value judgement, in order to be acceptable for the philosopher, should be similar to a judgement made in the field of natural sciences. The impossibility of moral judgement to satisfy such a requirement precipitates the loss of morality, at least in Nietzsche’s “first way” (in Human too Human). The position thus joined comes with a great disadvantage: it removes action. Faced with such a disadvantage, Nietzsche is forced to change his way of understanding the nature of moral judgement. At this point, in his “second way”, he embarks in experiments engaging a completely different approach to moral judgement. It is as such that he becomes almost a “metaethician”, while ultimately leaving the status of moral judgement in indecision.

The article deals with the question of the relationship between physical modes and moral modes in Samuel Pufendorf’s theory of natural law. By distinguishing these two kinds of modes (which are both modes of natural substances) Pufendorf anticipates the “law of Hume”, according to which the is and the ought are incommensurable. According to Pufendorf, Grotius and Hobbes’ conception of the state of nature is at fault because these authors make natural law a fact that would not be accompanied by imposition and from which deontological notions would thus flow in a natural way. According to Pufendorf, on the contrary, deontological modes go hand in hand with the moral modes which are attached to certain natural substances only because of a divine imposition which wanted to make man a naturally sociable being.

The article reconstructs the diffusion of the ideas of the Scottish philosophical school (Reid, Smith, Stewart) in France in the early nineteenth century and the role played by the Geneva philosopher Pierre Prevost. Prevost emphasizes the originality of the Scottish school compared with the French and German school in his writing “Reflections after my translation of the posthumous works of Adam Smith” of 1797. From at least 1792 already Prevost had begun a correspondence with Dugald Stewart, which lasted until the death of the latter in 1828. About twenty letters of Stewart to Prevost are preserved in Geneva. Through the mediation of Prevost the Scottish Enlighteners influenced the development of French philosophy from Ideology towards Eclecticism (Degérando, Pictet, Royer-Collard, Cousin).

The article deals with the concept of “justness” as it is treated by the Genevan psychologist Henri-Fréderic Amiel (1821-1881) in his Journal. Justness has its seat in the domain of “doing” rather than in the domain of “saying” or “thinking”: its non-propositional nature entails that one can “do just” while having false beliefs and vice-versa. The virtue of justness concerns the sphere of interpersonal interactions and goes hand in hand with moderation as virtue concerning the sphere of personal action. In both cases, it is an excess of effort on the part of the will vis-à-vis the intelligence that keeps one away from virtue. This “Taoist moment” in Amiel also implies a critique of the activism of modern Western civilization and of the overweight of rules (“categorical imperatives”) that accompany it.

The article focuses on the Philosophy of Freedom of the Swiss philosopher Charles Secrétan (1815-1895) and on the attempt to reconcile freedom as the fundamental experience for the human being with the alleged necessitarianism that would result from the positive sciences. The notion of “fall” as it is found in the Christian tradition allows Secrétan to rediscover an original dimension from which we can conceive the laws of nature as contingent. It is space and time that impose their constraints and lead to the mismatch between the different faculties (sensitivity, imagination, intelligence, will) that is constitutive for the human experience and that prevents us from “being at any moment the whole of ourselves”. A peculiarity of Secrétan’s conception of space is that he does not see it as a condition for the numerical plurality of human beings.

The article is about Adam Smith’s short account of J. J. Rousseau’s Deuxième Discours in a Letter to the Edinburgh Review (1756). Special attention is payed to how the report deals with its subject. Smith proposes a surprising rapprochement between Rousseau and Mandeville. Both deny the natural sociability of man (while recognizing his aptitude to pity others) and show the biased nature of the principles of civil life. The difference would be only “stylistic”: whereas the “aristocrat” Mandeville makes the apologue of the civil life in the commercial society the “republican” Rousseau criticizes it and affirms the superiority of the state of nature. In his own TMS Smith develops a theory of “sympathy” that can be understood as a critique of the negation of natural sociability common to both Mandeville and Rousseau.

The article focuses on the relationship between the psychology of Maine de Biran and the work of Thomas Reid. Maine de Biran confronts especially with the Inquiry of Reid, by adopting some central aspects of it but by criticizing and radicalizing it. Continuity is to be found in the distinction, adopted by Maine de Biran, that Reid makes between sensations and perceptions, the latter being the basis of judgements of externality. But according to Maine de Biran Reid’s analysis of the notions of externality and the self is insufficient. These notions are complementary concepts and originate in the “original fact” of the duality of effort and resistance: by actively moving our bodies, our sense of touch comes up against the resistance of external objects. Effort and resistance base the experiences of “Self” and “Not-Self”.

The article deals with Plato’s analysis of the phenomenon of comedy in the Philebus (48a-50e). The laughter aroused by comic spectacles is an example of a purely psychic pleasure mixed with pain. The analysis is articulated in three stages: a) 48b-c: starting from envy (φθόνος) as a form of pain of the soul, it is shown that one can experience pleasure in the face of the ills of those whom we envy; b) 48c-49c: the ridicule (γελοῖον) of the comic characters stems from the fact that they don’t know themselves (against the Delphic precept); c) 49c-50a: even when it is the turn of our friends to be ridiculous, a pain close to envy is mixed to the pleasure of laughter. The article ends by showing the two registers of Plato’s argumentation: to the “hedonist” argument that condemns comedy as a source of pain is interweaved the condemnation of “anti-Delphic” self-ignorance.

The article explores the relationship between the (etymologically related) notions of haphazardness and happiness in the history of Western philosophy. Although a certain popular wisdom sees in happiness a product of the vagaries of life, philosophers have rather tried to decouple the pursuit of happiness from the haphazard. We can distinguish two ways: the way of the Ancients tries to redefine the parameters of a happy life so as to remove it from haphazardness as much as possible (Aristotle) or even totally (Plato, the Stoics); the way of the Moderns tries instead to subjugate the haphazard either by making us “masters and possessors of nature” by the technique (Descartes) or by setting up mechanisms of compensation based on the calculus of probability (insurances). The question of the sometimes conflicting relationship between the two paths is finally raised.

The article is about a course of dialectic in Latin language that Pierre Prevost (1751-1839) had prepared for the use of the students of the Académie de Genève. This document testifies to the reception of the Scottish philosophy, especially of Reid, by Prevost. On the model of the Logique de Port-Royal the course is articulated in a part on the art of exposing truths already reached (the dialectic properly speaking: ideas, judgements, reasoning) and in a part on the discovery of new truths (the logic: truth, error and method). It is especially in this second part, under the rubrics of truth and error, that Reid’s influence is to be found: the criterion of truth is common sense, which bases certainty and recognizes the evidence; errors stem from the limits of common sense.

The article confronts one of the ἄποpοι λόγοι discussed in ancient Eristic-Stoic logic: the famous “cuckold” (κερατίνης), where an interrogator has his respondent to admit to have been or still be cuckolded. The source of the problem is a principle of dialectics related to the principle of the excluded-middle according to which a question admits only a positive or a negative answer. To the question “Have you ceased to be cuckolded?” both answers seem to presuppose that the respondent has been cuckolded. To solve the problem one can either deny the dialectical principle of the excluded-middle or (as Stoic logic does) introduce the idea that negation refers not simply to the predicate (as in Aristotelian logic) but to the entire proposition (by denying the existence of the subject, for example).