Daniel Schulthess

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was one of the main exponents of evolutionary thinking in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. He gave that kind of thinking an unprecedented metaphysical turn. In consequence of his versatility he also encountered the notion of truth-making, which he connected with his ever-present concerns about time and duration. Eager to stress the dimension of radical change and of novelty in the nature of things, he rejected (in one form) what he called “the retrograde movement of the true” while championing it – with undeniable delight in the air of paradox – in a derivative form. In the paper I explain what “the retrograde movement of the true” consists in – in its two forms.

Brentano, expert et continuateur de l’ontologie aristotélicienne, traite du problème métaphysique de l’individuation dans un petit nombre d’écrits . Il retient pour ce problème une solution ordinairement rejetée, l’individuation par le lieu . À ce titre, il occupe une position originale. La notion de lieu, cependant, tout comme plus généralement la notion de l’accident, ressort tout à fait transformée des analyses de Brentano : le lieu devient une détermination substantielle, non accidentelle, des corps. Dans des écrits tardifs, Brentano étend son analyse du lieu à une cosmologie qui n’admet qu’une seule substance corporelle étendue, dont les corps particuliers sont les accidents.Brentano, both expert and continuator of the Aristotelian ontology, devotes his attention to the metaphysical problem of individuation in a small number of writings collected under the title Kategorienlehre. For this problem, he adopts a solution which gets ordinarily rejected, individuation through place . Hence he occupies an original position on this issue. The notion of place, however, as well as the notion of accident more generally, gets completely transformed in the Brentanian analysis : place becomes not an accidental but a substantial determination. In some late writings, Brentano extends his analysis of place to a cosmology which admits a unique extended bodily substance, of which particular bodies are only the accidents

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.

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 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 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 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).

In the philosophical tradition marked by Descartes and empiricism, the idea of epistemic justification was most often seen in terms of construction on foundations that would be as many immediately justified starting points. The article exposes a completely different approach to the question, due to the philosopher Keith Lehrer. In this approach the epistemic justification derives from a coherence relationship between beliefs that are never immediately justified starting points. What is then decisive for the justification of a belief is to discard or neutralize all the objections that can be raised against it. From an example, the article presents this approach to epistemic justification and exposes a difficulty that it encounters.

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 part‐whole and element‐system relations are usually not given a temporal interpretation. Taking a thesis of Father Bochenski as a starting point , the author first gives an adequate temporal interpretation of this thesis. Then, he shows that a divergence arises, in non‐static systems, between the system itself and the mereological sum corresponding to it at a certain instant. Therefore, any reductionism has to confront the generally neglected problem of this divergence. Résumé Les relations partie‐tout et élément‐système ne sont pas habituellement interprétées de manière temporelle lorsqu'elles sont approachées de manière formelle. On prend ici pour point de départ une thèse formulée par le P. Bochenski, "tout élément d'un système est une partie propre de ce système", dont on donne d'abord une interpretation temporelle adéquate. On met ensuite en évidence la divergence, pour les systèmes non statiques, du système et de la somme méréologique qui lui correspond en un instant donné. Le réductionnisme doit done affronter le problème généralement négligé de cette divergence. Zusammenfassung Gewöhnlich werden die Relationen zwischen Teil und Ganzem und zwischen Element und System nicht zeitlich interpretiert, wenn sie formal behandelt werden. Von einer These von P. Bochenski ausgehend versucht man zuerst, dieser These eine angemessene zeitliche Interpretation zu geben. Dann zeigt man, dass es bei nicht‐statischen Systemen eine Divergenz zwischen dem System und der ihm zu einer bestimmten Zeit entsprechenden mereologischen Summe gibt. Das sich daraus für den Reduktionismus ergebende Problem wird meist vernächlassigt

The question of whether the phenomenon of passionate love is a natural phenomenon, as for naturalist psychologists, or rather a cultural product of Western civilization, was asked already by Nietzsche. This article deals with Denis de Rougemont’s essay L’amour et l’occident, in which the Swiss French intellectual answers the question decidedly in the sense of the second alternative. According to Rougement, passionate love finds its source in the movement of Catharism, which developed in Southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries. Courtois love is expression of a transfigured love towards God combined with a gnostic disdain of the created world. The article also discusses the critiques that have been raised against Rougemont’s thesis, but emphasizes that Rougemont’s thesis has to be read at a higher level of explanatory abstraction than that of its critiques.

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 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.

Summary The correspondence in this issue of History of European Ideas has not previously been published. It is the surviving part of the epistolary exchange between Dugald Stewart and the Genevan professor and man of letters Pierre Prevost (1751?1839) from the 1790s to the 1820s. To this are added several closely connected letters to and from their associates. This correspondence is striking evidence of the republic of letters continuing to flourish in the aftermath of the French Revolution, illustrating the transmission of works, the role of go-betweens, the provision of letters of introduction and the formation of intellectual and personal alliances. Not least, the letters tell us much about the ideas of those involved, and about the formation, development, and relation of these ideas to published works. This is particularly significant for Stewart, most of whose letters and papers are lost

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 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 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 contrast between Thomas Reid's epistemological concerns and a common core of the classical approach to epistemology is the following one: Reid abandons the classical use for criteria of knowledge and pushes the problem of the justification of beliefs to the level of the mental faculties from which the beliefs arise. A similar shift plays various roles in Keith Lehrer's coherentist epistemology. However, this shift raises several difficulties: (i) the impact of epistemological concerns on actual intellectual inquiries gets lost; (ii) the favored model of justification lacks in generality; (iii) 'vertical justification' (which proceeds via the faculty) is not independent from 'horizontal justification' (not proceeding via the faculty).

At the end of the XVIIth century Nicholas Malebranche intervened in the «quietist dispute» in his Treatise on the Love of God (1697). This short treatise presents an anti-quietist standpoint based on the philosopher’s systematic analyses in the fields of theology and of psychology of the feelings and of the will. This article shows how Malebranche takes up the challenge of quietism, the logical heart of which, here reconstituted rigorously, is found in other moral philosophies. The requirement of impartiality produces a paradox when the agent at the same time has to define and take responsibility for his own behaviour, and potentially forget himself due to his requirement of impartiality. Finally, Malebranche avoids this paradox by attributing a very important place to the notion of order, by means of which he fits in with his own analyses on the theme of Providence.

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 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.

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.

LES APPARENCES: ANALYSES PREALABLES L'ontologie des apparences I : questions terminologiques L'ontologie des apparences II : les entia apparentia La sémantique des apparences DES APPARENCES AUX FONDEMENTS Aspects catégoriels : la substance La simplicité comme condition de la substance L'activité comme condition de la substance DES FONDEMENTS AUX APPARENCES La production des apparences I : l'étendue La production des apparences II : la diffusion La production des qualités sensibles I BILAN Dire ce qu'il en est du corps Les propositions réduplicatives

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 critique that Antoine Arnault (1612-1694) raises against Malebranche’s views on perception and the critique that Thomas Reid (1710-1796) moves against the theory of ideas defended by Berkeley and Hume. Both Arnault and Reid advocate a position according to which our perceptions allow us to have direct knowledge of material objects existing independently of us and not only of representations of them. Arnault proposes different arguments to refute Malebranche. In doing that he doesn’t completely reject the Cartesian representational account of perception. Reid is more radical: in order to refuse Berkeley and Hume he rejects the whole theory of ideas, and focuses instead on the mental powers through which we cognize reality.

The article proposes a comparison between the critique that Antoine Arnault (1612-1694) raises against Malebranche’s views on perception and the critique that Thomas Reid (1710-1796) moves against the theory of ideas defended by Berkeley and Hume. Both Arnault and Reid advocate a position according to which our perceptions allow us to have direct knowledge of material objects existing independently of us and not only of representations of them. Arnault proposes different arguments to refute Malebranche. In doing that he doesn’t completely reject the Cartesian representational account of perception. Reid is more radical: in order to refuse Berkeley and Hume he rejects the whole theory of ideas, and focuses instead on the mental powers through which we cognize reality.

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 letters published here belong to the ‘Fonds Pierre Prevost’ held by the Library of Geneva. Our presentation of the letters is modelled on that of the published correspondences of Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Our aim in transcribing the letters that follow has been to establish a clean and reliable text with minimal editorial intervention. We have made no attempt to normalise the spellings, capitalisation, and apparently aberrant usage found in the letters or to modernise the punctuation, and we have not expanded the contractions that occur in the original texts. However, Prevost’s contractions in Letters 13 and 15 are likely to provide major problems for most readers, and we have therefore added an appendix in which these contractions have been written out.