Luciano Perulli

L’article reconstruit la stratégie argumentative de la reductio ad notiones communes proposée par Christian Wolff (1679-1754) dans la Philosophia prima sive Ontologia (1729-1730). Nous situons cette stratégie dans le contexte de l’interprétation wolffienne de la méthode d’Euclide : Wolff entend transposer à l’ontologie l’emploi des notions communes, qui, à son avis, constitue une partie déterminante de la méthode des Éléments d’Euclide. Notre thèse est que le projet wolffien consistant à suivre ce modèle euclidien soulève un problème lié au rôle de l’imagination dans la constitution des notions communes, comme l’analyse de l’élaboration du concept de substance permet de le montrer.

The article examines Bourdieu’s repurposing of Cassirer’s notion of symbolic forms in the context of his sociological paradigm. After outlining the meaning of ‘symbolic’ in Bourdieu’s work, I reconstruct his understanding of the concept of symbolic form. Bourdieu conceives of symbolic forms both as historically determined cognitive, practical, and evaluative dispositions and as cultural systems (e.g. myth, religion, ideology, art, sciences). I identify two moments in Bourdieu’s appropriation of this notion. In the first moment, which I associate with the idea of a “sociology of symbolic forms” and locate in the earlier phase of his reflection, he emphasizes the relation between symbolic forms and social reproduction. In the second one, which I connect with the idea of a “differential anthropology of symbolic forms” and locate in the final phase of his production, Bourdieu explores the autonomous perspective of symbolic forms and the universal and trans-historical potential of symbolic forms such as art or science. While his later understanding and use of this notion are arguably more nuanced than his earlier one, I suggest that they still raise specifically philosophical questions that transcend the standpoint of the social and human sciences. In the conclusion, I consider three such issues: the specificity of different symbolic forms; the relation between symbolic forms as historically determined subjective dispositions, on the one hand, and basic human capacities, on the other; the adequacy of the notion of ‘arbitrary’ to account for symbolic forms.

In this paper, I argue that Crusius’s criticism of Wolff’s theory of space and time relies on an underappreciated aspect of their accounts: the role of experience and common linguistic usage. Both of them claim that ontological concepts should conform to experience and to concepts of everyday use. However, in the case of space and time, Wolff departs from ordinary language, because, in his view, our everyday understanding of these concepts is imaginary and differs essentially from the philosophical one. Crusius tackles this divergence, and argues that the common notion of space and time is not imaginary and actually corresponds to the one yielded by philosophical analysis.