Sébastien Motta

Introduit par Aristote, le vocabulaire des « catégories » joue un rôle central en philosophie, et figure en bonne place en tant que terme de l’art dans l’artillerie philosophique. Pour autant, ce vocabulaire est l’objet d’interminables débats et soumis à des acceptions fort différentes, à tel point qu’on peut se demander s’il y a, derrière ce vocabulaire, un concept unitaire et opérant de « catégorie ». Révélatrices de l’ameublement du monde, formes a priori de la pensée par concepts, bornes de distinctions logiques saillantes, le statut des catégories est des plus incertains. L’embarras est que ce vocabulaire est toutefois très précieux pour l’argumentation : faire une « erreur de catégorie » semble être un des péchés capitaux de la pensée. L’objet de ce petit livre est de comprendre cette tension, et son objectif de commencer à la décrisper.

After a critical presentation of the debate between absolutists and relativists regarding generality where I show that the debate is framed in a way that is bound to be harmful to the relativist’s position, I examine critically one of the customary arguments advanced against the relativist: the expressibility objection (according to which the relativist would be logically unable to express her own position). I then propose a radical way out of this debate-usually centered on semantic paradoxes-by arguing that it rests on an unintelligible notion of “object”. I finally introduce a useful distinction between omnis and totus to elucidate the notions in play.

In this paper, I explore several issues surrounding what is called “telepathy” in the context of the problem of other minds. I begin with a quick review of the conditions in which this notion arose and the difficulties to which it gave rise upon its introduction. This review will allow me, after having shown that the notion of telepathy provides no path to the problem's solution, to draw a distinction between two discursive levels: an epistemological or ontological level, on the one hand, and a semantic or logical level, on the other. I maintain that it is at the second level that the deepest and most intractable difficulties relating to the “powers of the mind” arise. These difficulties occupy a blind spot in discussions involving the notion of telepathy (Alan Turing will provide a striking illustration of this). Finally, I suggest that this pseudo‐solution (telepathy) is at root a response to a pseudo‐problem—the inaccessibility of other minds—since the difficulties with the intelligibility of telepathy are parallel to those with which the problem of “other minds” is freighted.

After a critical presentation of the debate between absolutists and relativists regarding generality where I show that the debate is framed in a way that is bound to be harmful to the relativist’s position, I examine critically one of the customary arguments advanced against the relativist: the expressibility objection (according to which the relativist would be logically unable to express her own position). I then propose a radical way out of this debate-usually centered on semantic paradoxes-by arguing that it rests on an unintelligible notion of “object”. I finally introduce a useful distinction between omnis and totus to elucidate the notions in play.