Marc-Olivier Tremblay

Cet article examine les voyages lunaires dans l’oeuvre de Lucien de Samosate afin de montrer qu’ils servent un double objectif : d’une part, exercer la « liberté pure » du poète et, d’autre part, à partir de ce nouvel espace fictionnel, réévaluer la tradition littéraire dont Lucien est issu dans le but d’éduquer ses lecteurs à travers l’imitation et la création. J’argumente que Lucien utilise le pseudos (le faux, le mensonge) comme une méthode complémentaire permettant de parvenir à la vérité. L’analyse de Comment écrire l’histoire permet de relever quelques principes distinguant l’histoire de la poésie (le « vrai » du « faux »). Le voyage lunaire de l’Icaroménippe permet d’acquérir une vue perçante sur les affaires humaines et d’exercer son jugement plus sagement grâce au recul conféré par la distance. Finalement, à l’aide des Histoires vraies, je montre comment la fiction et le pseudos sont utilisés comme de véritables lieux d’éducation par Lucien.

While the enumeration of potential sources of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics, X,10,1179b20-25 seems to set nature aside as a factor that does not depend on us, Aristotle mentions it again in the Politics. In book VII 13, Aristotle answers the question, “how does an individual become virtuous?” by saying that virtue is acquired through three elements: nature, habit and reason (φύσις, ἔθος, λόγος). The aim of this article is to clarify the importance of nature in the acquisition and development of virtue in Aristotle’s ethics through the study of the concepts of natural virtue (ἀρετὴ φυσική) and good nature (εὐφυΐα), which will allow us to show how Aristotle affirms the existence of a natural virtue, which is not the same for everyone and which, from birth, places human beings more or less far along in their ethical path towards virtue. I argue that εὐφυΐαis the highest form of natural virtue because it closely resembles virtue in the proper sense (ἀρετὴ κυρία).

This article is part of the discussion aimed at establishing the relationship that Nietzsche had with the Greek sophists. A three-step periodization allows us to show that he has indeed valued the Greek sophists since the time of his rhetoric courses in 1870 (section I), particularly through considerations on language and agôn. The sophists, who have spread a higher education, are associated with the free spirit. Between 1876 and 1886, Nietzsche again qualifies them as free spirits and unites them under the figure of Thucydide (section II). At the very end of his life, he took a keen interest in their realism and immoralism (section III), which foreshadowed his own critique of morality. Section IV analyzes Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Protagorean thesis of man-measure.