Claudine Tiercelin

Le but de l’article est de proposer de suivre en métaphysique la voie de l’analyse conceptuelle par intuition de cas possibles. Pour une part empirique et a posteriori, reposant sur des intuitions dont elle exploite autant les contradictions que les points communs, avant de les tester dans une perspective faillibiliste, l’analyse conceptuelle comporte aussi une partie a priori qu’elle élabore en recourant à la méthode des cas possibles, permettant ainsi de repenser les liens entre nécessité conceptuelle et nécessité métaphysique. Ainsi entendue, la démarche renoue avec l’inspiration propre à la méthode scotiste des possibles-réels qui fut à l’origine de la constitution de la métaphysique comme science.

Après avoir dégagé quelques incarnations du rationalisme dont Bouveresse se démarque, j’indique quelques aspects qui ancrent son œuvre dans la tradition de l’Aufklärung (mais en la renouvelant), avant d’insister sur ce qui me semble plus distinctif de ce rationalisme dans lequel parviennent miraculeusement à cohabiter des sources philosophiques, littéraires et scientifiques : Cournot, Vuillemin, Carnap, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Russell, Frege, Sellars, Bolzano, Boltzmann ou Helmholtz, mais aussi Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Husserl, Cavaillès, Canguilhem, les pragmatistes James, Putnam, ou encore des écrivains comme Valéry, T.S. Eliot, et, plus que tout peut-être, Lichtenberg, Kraus et Musil. Puis je me concentre particulièrement sur l’examen de ce rationalisme à l’aune des liens de Bouveresse avec la tradition « analytique », et avec Wittgenstein en particulier

The aim of the paper is to present some important insights of C. Hookway's pragmatist analysis of knowledge viewed less in the standard way, as justified true belief, than as a dynamic natural and normative question-answer process of inquiry, a reliable and successful agent-based enterprise, consisting in virtuous dispositions explaining how we can be held responsible for our beliefs and investigations. Despite the merits of such an approach, the paper shows that it may be inefficient in accounting for some challenges posed by scepticism or by the nature of epistemic normativity. In which case it might be premature to propose it as a new conception of knowledge against the standard one and worth considering a different, though still pragmatist, strategy, in which inquiry would aim at the fixation of knowledge, still viewed as justified true beliefs, i.e critical commonsensical, warrantedly assertible, intellectual and sentimental dispositions for which the epistemic agent, viewed less as an individual person than as a scientific community of inquirers, should be taken as a knowing and reliable agent, both answerable and responsible for her assertions

Peirce's realism is a sophisticated realism inherited from the Avicennian Scotistic tradition, which may be briefly characterized by its opposition to metaphysical realism (Platonism) and various forms of nominalism. In this chapter, I consider how Peirce's realism fits his approach to mathematics, which is often presented as a somewhat incoherent mixture of Platonistic and conceptualistic elements. Without denying these, I claim that Peirce's subtle position not only helps to clear up some of these so-called inconsistencies but offers many insights for contemporary ways of dealing with the mathematical aspects of the problem of universals.

For C.S. Peirce, who had a well‐known influence on many aspects of Ramsey's thought, pragmatism was viewed as inseparable from realism. The aim of this paper is to challenge the view according to which Ramsey's reflexions on universals are of a mere linguistic and logical nature. Not only is this view controversial, but it may be argued that some elements in Ramsey's analyses suggest a possibly realist answer to the problem of universals. By drawing comparisons with Peirce's own position, it is suggested that Ramsey's views might not be inconsistent with many aspects of Peirce's scholastic and even Scotistic version of realism

Part of the obvious revival of pragmatism, at least in Europe is linked with the present success or "boom" of moral philosophy and the increasing tendency to identify the classical pragmatists as a common group of writers who, much better than any philosophers from other traditions, knew how to define scientific inquiry as an inquiry submitted to norms and principels, and realized that "what applies to investigation in general equally applies to ethical investigation ". The paper examines such claims and focuses, in particular on Peirce's arguments against any form of moral rationalism and in favor of a normative conception of rationality, closer to a conception of the possible objectivity of ethics as may appear at first sight.