Daniel Schulthess

The numerous contributions presented here constitute the proceedings of the 39th Congress of the Association of French-Language Philosophy Societies (ASPLF), held in Neuchâtel (Switzerland) in August 2023 on the general theme of ‘Movement’. In its multiple uses, the term can be applied to both the objective world and all human, political, social, intellectual, spiritual or artistic activities. No field of philosophy can seriously do without this fundamental concept. Philosophers from five continents, speaking in French, had the opportunity to present their thoughts and analyses during five days of study and discussion. The plenary lectures, round tables and workshop presentations were divided into the following eight categories: ontology, philosophy of science, moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of art and culture, ancient philosophy, modern philosophy and philosophy of the social contract.

Leibniz presented himself, especially in his late correspondence with Remond, as a concordist: in other philosophical views, even distant and ancient ones, he sets out to discover «traces of truth» that are already present there. According to the con- cordist programme, Leibniz claims, philosophers are right in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny. This paradoxical asymmetry is given a logical explanation in the paper, in connection with the topic of «reduplication», i. e. the introduction of qualifications in otherwise simple categorical propositions. In order to be right in affirming a complex disjunctive proposition, it is enough for one of the disjuncts to be true; but in order to be right in negating a complex disjunctive proposition, it is required for all of them to be false. Meanwhile, if one may «qualify» propositions by different reduplications of their terms, in principle one of those qualified propositions is bound to be true. On such presuppositions concordism can be expected to be quite effective as a philosophical perspective.

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith does not deal only with interpersonal moral issues. He also addresses some economic and political consequences that tie with his analysis of ‘sympathy’. Interestingly, these socially relevant outcomes do not feature as products of sympathy proper, but rather as by-products of certain ‘irregularities’ or biases which affect the way sympathy actually works. The stability of a political society through a system of ‘ranks’ which are spontaneously granted a share of authority thus gets projected beyond the reach of a rational approach, e.g. of a contractarian character. Although the idea of a spontaneous order certainly attracts Adam Smith here as elsewhere, his approach to the economic and political sphere in the Theory of Moral Sentiments is nevertheless tinged with a tone of moral criticism which must be taken seriously.

The author begins with the observation that jokes can have a different moral import: some may even be edifying. Is humour 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 humour that underlies them – in terms of Kierkegaard’s notion of indirect communication. However this pushes the problem one step further: the main challenge being to understand why indirect communication should be expected to have a positive moral import.

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.

In this presentation, we focus on the duality of the lived world and the world of science, as well as the dynamics of their relationship. We first examine different ways of explaining this duality and setting its trajectory, on the one hand in analytical philosophy, and on the other hand in Heidegger, Husserl and Bergson. We note the historical effectiveness of the analytical approach, in which science brings about a kind of “disenchantment” of the lived world – which goes hand in hand with the Aufklärung, the Enlightenment movement. In this respect, from a historical perspective, even the Heidegger-Husserl-Bergson-style explanation of the lived world is closely dependent on the analytical explanation. We then outline a causal reconstruction of the lived world and its conditioning factors. However, we would like to emphasise the radical inadequacy of the attitude generally referred to as “naturalism”: it can only teach constraints, a certain negative shaping of the lived world, and the restrictions that go with it. It does not teach in a positive way how the world is understood, against the backdrop of these conditioning factors but, above all, beyond them. We conclude that there is a need for a higher form of naturalism, the point of insertion of which we endeavour to show. (The volume provides a Russian translation of the paper, p. 75-92.)

In his work Love in the Western World (L’Amour et l’Occident, 1939), Denis de Rougemont examines the theme of courtly love expressed in the poetry of the 12th century troubadours and found later in the novels of the 13th century. According to Rougemont, the new and deeply influential definition of love originated from religious dissidents, the Cathars, transposing the contours of this religious movement into the lived experience of the lover facing his beloved. Rougemont sees in this medieval creation the origin of many facets of the “passion” which has since become familiar in the West. Relying on previously undisclosed archival documents (Marrou, Gilson, Massignon), the present article sheds light on the beginnings of the polemic sparked by the book. It distinguishes two levels in this debate, on the historical method as well as on the permeability between the religious and profane strata in society.

Ethics is operative in politics even if its role is sometimes difficult to perceive. The article notes the desire of the drafters of constitutions to force the holders of political offices to live up to some ethical requirements, by the establishment of the most diverse institutional mechanisms pursuing this end (such as elections and the limitation in time of political mandates). The article also highlights the role of a normative, "Aristotelian" vision of politics, in which ethics and politics converge entirely. This normative vision is a welcome stimulus for any society and any government. It is also a factor of opacity in the conduct of the affairs of the community, insofar as it impedes the disclosure of anything that does not reach its high level. Ethical demands, by making people reluctant to such opacity, constitute a factor of crisis for politics.

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.

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

Table des Matières: Introduction; Chapitre Premier: La conception de la philosophie chez Thomas Reid; Chapitre 2: Le Rôle épistémologique du sens commun; Chapitre 3: La justification des principes du sens commun; Chapitre 4: La perception sensible; Chapitre 5: La perception sensible (suite); Chapitre 6: Les facultés intellectuelles autres que la perception sensible; Chapitre 7: Les facultés actives; Chapitre 8: Le "common sense" chez Reid et quelques conceptions antérieures de la raison naturelle; Conclusion

The text shortly introduces Rousseau’s Lettres Morales, which result from the conversations he had with Mme Houdetot in the years 1757-1758. It is interesting to notice that in contrast to other important philosophical works based on a love relationship (one can think of Plato’s Symposium and the role of Diotima, but also of Boethius’s Philosophia in the Consolatio or Dante’s Beatrice in the Divine Comedy), in Rousseau’s letters it is the man who has the leading role, whereas the woman figure, Sophie, is characterized by youthful spontaneity and even a certain naivety.

The article criticizes the interpretation of Thomas Reid’s philosophy as a form of coherentism put forward by Lehrer and Smith. In the author’s view Reid’s “first principles”, which govern the activities of our faculties, rely on a correspondence theory of truth. At the same time the rightness of our first principles in conjunction with the fact that the world is structured in such a way that true judgements about it do not lead to contradiction entails that our “doxastic system” (i.e. the system of our common sense believes) is itself coherent or at least consistent. Although consistence seems to play an important role in respect to some of the first principles recognized by Reid (such as the principle of credulity), on the overall coherence has a rather derivative function in Reid’s philosophy.

The article deals with the problem of how works indexical reference to temporal moments (especially to the present) in the philosophy of Leibniz. Leibniz refutes Newton's and Clarke’s theory of absolute time: since there is no sufficient reason to consider the universe as having being created at one absolute moment rather than at another, temporal moments can be individuated only through their reciprocal relation. What then distinguishes reference to the present from reference to the past and to the future? There is a dilemma here: either the difference is real and the principle of sufficient reason seems to fail (given that the relational theory gives only the relational position of temporal moments), or the difference is only ideal. The author shows that the so-called “causal theory” of time does not solve the dilemma and concludes thus that the Leibnizian theory of time might have been better grounded.

Alphonse Guillebert (1792-1861), pastor, teacher and politician, was one of the leading figures of the Academy of Neuchâtel, founded in 1838 and opened to students in the autumn of 1840. In this article, we will first offer a brief biography, then indications on the various facets of the written work of our author. We have used only a part of the available sources and we are therefore aware that further study would be worthwhile. In the following, we describe the philosophy course of Guillebert, and finally we look at an essay – the Dissertation sur l’unité en philosophie – in which he was more personal than in his teaching. Marked by the French intellectual climate of the first half of the nineteenth century, our author was able, by opening himself to Germany, to introduce his listeners to the main philosophical doctrines of his time.

The article provides a critical overview of the main theses contained in the book The First Person by Roderick Chisholm. Chisholm's main thesis is that of the priority of the reference de se over reference de re. Chisholm develops firstly a theory of properties according to which these must be able to remain unexemplified. This excludes from the outset that we can reinterpret the indexical term “I” (the first person) in the sense of a property, since an indexical term always refers to an existing particular object, so that the property in question would necessarily be exemplified. The sentences relating to the first person (de se) are not propositions but attributions, from which one can derive both the sentences de re as well as sentences de dicto (intentional attitudes). These sentences can have as subjects persons other than the “I”.

The author focuses on the role that the epistemic practice of questioning, as it is presented in the Platonic dialogues, plays by Socrates. A comparison with Hintikka’s theory of questioning in proposed: in Hintikka’s account it is the questioner who endeavours to obtain new knowledge by asking someone who presumptively possesses that knowledge, whereas Socrates questions his interlocutors to wake in them the awareness of a knowledge they don’t know to possess. The origin of this knowledge is to be searched in the ideal “vision” that pertains to the immortal soul. But the dialogic practice aims also to the propositional articulation of the knowledge we become aware of: we must become able to “give reasons” (λόγον διδόναι) for our beliefs. This is the source of the Aristotelian theory of argumentation developed in the Topics.

The article sketches a possible argument for the objectivity of the evil. In a first stage the author deals with the emotivist thesis according to which evaluative judgments are nothing other than the expression of our positive or negative emotions toward an object. Although this thesis is rejected, the idea that emotions play a central role by the uttering of an evaluative judgement is retained. It is only by critically examining such judgments that one can eviscerate the objective core they contain. The author proposes a conception of the objectivity of the evil that relies on the notion of social agreement, on which every human society is based. According to this conception, which draws on the philosophical tradition, objective evil is a privation of social agreement, which can take the form of legal or moral faults.

The article discusses in detail Nicholas Rescher’s book Scientific Progess: A Philosophical Essay on the Economics of Research in Natural Science (1978). Rescher discusses the possibilities of further progress for science. According to Rescher there are no limits by principles to scientific progress. Among the positions which postulate an end of scientific progress there are some which see the reason in the finiteness of nature, others in the finitude of our intellectual resources. According to Rescher science arises from the interaction between nature and our intellectual instruments, and the combinatory of these interactions in infinite. On the other hand, there is an economic limit to scientific progress, due to the growth of the marginal costs of the scientific enterprise: the costs grow exponentially, that is to say that the yields grow only logarithmically compared to the investments.

When we deal with the concept of identity in political sociology (e.g. national identity, regional identity, etc.) we have first to ask some general question about the concept of identity and distinguish between numerical identity (which encompasses identity through time) and specific or type identity. Some theses can be advanced about identity in political sociology: 1) The identity in question is type identity; 2) This type identity is an artefact; 3) This artefactual identity concerns only those traits that are accidental, i.e. not essential for their bearer; 4) The concerned traits should be either non-relational or relational but implying non-relational traits; 5) in order to define the identity of a group, the traits should be choose not only so that all the group members possess them (weak identity) but also so that only the group members possess them (strong identity).

The articles critically discusses K. Lehrer’s book Thomas Reid (1989). In particular, the author criticizes some central aspects of Reid’s epistemology of common sense. Two points are particularly problematic: 1) the identification of common sense beliefs: how are the contents of common sense beliefs specified or individuated? The author shows that there are two possibilities for the identification of common sense beliefs – on one understandings these beliefs are explicit, on the other they are implicit and have to be made explicit by philosophers – and that both are problematic. 2) The authority of common sense beliefs: according to Reid the source of their authority is their innate character, but this is problematic. The author concludes that the actuality of Reid lies less in his epistemology than in his psychology, which will be continued by Brentano and Husserl.