http://devoir-de-philosophie.com Les derniers sujets corrigés disponible sur Devoir-de-philosophie.com Rss by Imagin'air for Devoir-de-philosophie.com fr © Devoir-de-philosophie.com http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chisholm-roderick-milton-116969.html Chisholm is an important analytic philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. His work in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics is characterized by scrupulous attention to detail, the use of a few basic, undefined or primitive terms, and extraordinary clarity. One of the first Anglo-American philosophers to make fruitful use of Brentano and Meinong, Chisholm translated many of Brentano's philosophical writings. As one of the great teachers, Chisholm is widely known for the three editions of Theory of Knowledge, a short book and the standard text in US graduate epistemology courses. An ontological Platonist, Chisholm defends human free will and a strict sense of personal identity. Roderick Milton Chisholm (born in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, USA) has come as close as any philosopher ever does to actually living the good life: marrying happily, teaching graduate philosophy at his Alma Mater and, in later years, living by the ocean. Upon completing an undergraduate philosophy major at Brown University, Chisholm entered the doctoral programme at Harvard, finishing in 1942. The subsequent three years of military experience, administering psychological tests to recruits, had little influence on his philosophy, nor did his brief stint at the Barnes Foundation lecturing on the philosophy of art. Chisholm returned to Brown in 1947 where he taught for the next forty years, heavily influencing Anglo-American epistemology and metaphysics. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chisholm-roderick-milton-116969.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chinul-116968.html Chinul was the founder of the Korean Chogye school of Buddhism. He sought to reconcile the bifurcation between Kyo (doctrinal) thought and Sôn (Zen) practice that rent the Korean Buddhist tradition of his time, by showing the symbiotic connection between Buddhist philosophy and meditation. He also advocated a distinctive program of soteriology that became emblematic of Korean Buddhism from that time forward: an initial sudden awakening to the nature of the mind followed by gradual cultivation of that awakening until full enlightenment was achieved. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chinul-116968.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chinese-room-argument-116967.html John Searle's 'Chinese room' argument aims to refute 'strong AI' (artificial intelligence), the view that instantiating a computer program is sufficient for having contentful mental states. Imagine a program that produces conversationally appropriate Chinese responses to Chinese utterances. Suppose Searle, who understands no Chinese, sits in a room and is passed slips of paper bearing strings of shapes which, unbeknown to him, are Chinese sentences. Searle performs the formal manipulations of the program and passes back slips bearing conversationally appropriate Chinese responses. Searle seems to instantiate the program, but understands no Chinese. So, Searle concludes, strong AI is false. Searle (1980) argues that, since in the imaginary case he does everything the computer would do and he still does not understand a word of Chinese, it follows that a computer successfully programmed to pass a Chinese Turing test (Turing, A.M. §3) would not understand Chinese either. The problem, according to Searle, is that computer programs, whether executed by electronic devices or by Searle inside the room, concern only syntax, or strings of symbols characterized only by spelling, not meaning, while thought and understanding require meaning and semantics. And he claims you cannot get semantics from mere syntax, no matter how subtle or complicated it may be. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chinese-room-argument-116967.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chinese-philosophy-116966.html Any attempt to survey an intellectual tradition which encompasses more than four thousand years would be a daunting task even if it could be presumed that the reader shares, at least tacitly, many of the assumptions underlying that tradition. However, no such commonalities can be assumed in attempting to introduce Asian thinking to Western readers. Until the first Jesuit incursions in the late sixteenth century, China had developed in virtual independence of the Indo-European cultural experience and China and the Western world remained in almost complete ignorance of one another. The dramatic contrast between Chinese and Western modes of philosophic thinking may be illustrated by the fact that the tendency of European philosophers to seek out the being of things, the essential reality lying behind appearances, would meet with little sympathy among Chinese thinkers, whose principal interests lie in the establishment and cultivation of harmonious relationships within their social ambiance. Contrasted with Anglo-European philosophic traditions, the thinking of the Chinese is far more concrete, this-worldly and, above all, practical. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chinese-philosophy-116966.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chillingworth-william-116965.html Chillingworth was one of the most notable English-speaking contributors to debates between Protestants and Catholics in the seventeenth century. His use of a distinction between metaphysical and moral certainty proved extremely influential, as did his rationalist and fallibilist approach to issues of faith and authority. William Chillingworth was born in England at Oxford, and was educated there at Trinity College, where he became a fellow in 1628. In the same year he renounced his allegiance to the Church of England, resigned his fellowship and became a Roman Catholic. He travelled abroad to a Catholic seminary in the Netherlands, probably at Douai, possibly at St Omer, but soon found the life uncongenial and returned to England. In the early 1630s he had no clear religious allegiance, but was reconciled to the Church of England by 1635. From 1634 he lived at Viscount Falkland's house at Great Tew in Oxfordshire; Falkland's posthumously published Discourse of Infallibility (1645) owes much to Chillingworth's arguments. In the autumn of 1637 Chillingworth published his chief work, The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation, directed against the Jesuit Edward Knott. When the Civil War broke out he sided with the King, and died as a prisoner of war in January 1644, following his capture at Arundel. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chillingworth-william-116965.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chernyshevskii-nikolai-gavrilovich-116964.html Nikolai Chernyshevskii was the main theorist of the Russian democratic radicalism of 'the 1860s' or, more precisely, of the period of political 'thaw' and liberal reforms which followed Russian defeat in the Crimean War and the enthronement (in 1855) of Alexander II. He was also the best representative of the non-conformist elements among the raznochintsy, that is, the educated commoners, who at that time began to figure prominently in Russian intellectual and social life. As such, he exerted a powerful formative influence on the Russian intelligentsia. In 1862 Chernyshevskii was arrested, brought to trial and, despite insufficient evidence, condemned to lifetime banishment in Siberia. In exile, preserving his integrity to the end, he stoutly refused to ask for clemency (as a result, he remained in a remote Siberian village until 1883). In prison, waiting for trial, he wrote the novel Chto Delat' (What Is To Be Done?) in which he showed the 'new men' of Russia - 'rational egoists', devoted to the cause of progress, and even a type of ascetic, self-sacrificing revolutionist. Thanks to a strange oversight of the censor the novel was serialized in the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary) and, despite lack of literary distinction, became a powerful source of inspiration for several generations of Russian progressive youth. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chernyshevskii-nikolai-gavrilovich-116964.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cheng-hao-116963.html Cheng Hao was a pivotal figure in the creation of a Confucian tradition that was to become the basis for intellectual and state orthodoxy in China from the thirteenth century to the twentieth century. His decision to seek the Confucian Way (dao) through a direct and personalized reading of the classics was later projected as the beginning of this movement. From a new perspective, he redirected Confucian discourse on such cardinal concepts as humaneness and human nature. Born into a family which for three generations had distinguished itself in high offices, Cheng Hao accompanied his father to a succession of posts in central China. At the age of twenty he passed the national civil service examination and, for most of the years until 1180, had a notable official career which culminated in 1169-70 with service at the emperor's court. During audiences with the emperor and in written memorials, he followed the example of Mencius in admonishing his ruler to follow benevolence and refusing even to discuss what would bring profit and advantages. So critical was he of Wang Anshi's utilitarian obsession with maximizing advantages and the happiness of the greatest number of people that Cheng was demoted to a local post and eventually dismissed entirely. The last five years of his life he devoted to teaching an increasing number of disciples, drawn in part by his exceptionally gracious and warm disposition. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cheng-hao-116963.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cheng-116962.html In early Confucian writings, cheng describes the quality of authentically realizing or 'completing' a given thing's true nature. It appears together with xin (trustworthiness), a character to which it is related in sense. Cheng refers primarily to the fulfilment of a thing's true nature, while xin refers to the quality resulting from this. With regard to human beings, cheng is the authentic realization of ones nature. In texts such as the Xunzi and Zhongyong, the idea is related to the role human beings are believed to play in realizing or 'completing' a greater universal pattern. This development becomes centrally important for later neo-Confucian thinkers, who see these as different aspects of a single project. Cheng ('integrity' or 'sincerity') is not a central term of art for Confucius, but it takes on greater significance in the thought of Mencius and Xunzi. According to the Mengzi (4A12), cheng requires an understanding of the good. One cannot be cheng unless one understands why one is acting as one does. To be cheng is to be true to one's self, that is, one's true nature (hence 'sincerity'). Thus cheng is necessary for the cultivation of genuine virtue. Since such self-cultivation results in the most satisfying of lives (Self-cultivation, Chinese theories of), there is no greater joy than to find that one is cheng. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cheng-116962.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chemistry-philosophical-aspects-116961.html Chemistry, like all theoretical sciences, is deeply rooted in philosophical inquiry. Early Greek atomism was a response to Parmenides' argument that the very concept of change is unintelligible. Aristotle in turn argued that a vacuum is impossible and proposed that qualitative change could be better understood in terms of four elements and an underlying prime matter. During the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages, philosophical commentaries on the nature of materials were brought into juxtaposition with the practical arts of the alchemist, miner and pharmacist. As chemical speculations became more closely connected to observations during the time of the Scientific Revolution, natural philosophers became more and more interested in the methodological aspects of chemistry. Galileo and Locke tried to clarify the relationship between primary and secondary qualities. Boyle struggled to understand how the selective affinities so characteristic of chemical reagents could be explained within the framework of Descartes' mechanical philosophy. Lavoisier's textbook was organized around principles drawn from philosophes such as Condillac. As chemistry became an autonomous science, chemists turned less often to philosophy as a source of theoretical inspiration. However, they frequently appealed to philosophies of science in order to defend their own theories or criticize those of their opponents. The so-called 'atomic debates' amongst chemists in the British Association during the 1860s were primarily disputes about the epistemological legitimacy of appeals to unobservable entities. Many of the same issues were taken up at the end of the century by Ostwald, Mach and Duhem. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chemistry-philosophical-aspects-116961.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chatton-walter-116960.html Chatton was an English philosopher and theologian who developed a detailed critique of the work of William of Ockham, causing the latter to revise some of his earlier writings. Chatton was also at times an opponent of Peter Aureol and Richard of Campsall; he generally, though not always, followed John Duns Scotus and responded to his critics. He is known also for his writings on physics, where he held views in line with those of Pythagoras and Plato, and on the Trinity, where he was strongly attacked by Adam Wodeham. The English Franciscan philosopher and theologian Walter Chatton was born in the village of Catton, near Durham, around 1290. He was a contemporary of William of Ockham and Adam Wodeham at the Franciscan custodial school in London from 1321 to 1323. There he delivered his Reportatio lectures on all four Books of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, in preparation for his later Lectura on the Sentences at Oxford sometime between 1324 and 1330 (most likely in 1328-30). He was one of the examiners of the works of Durandus of Saint-Pourçain and Thomas Waleys at the papal court in Avignon, and is believed to have died there in 1343. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chatton-walter-116960.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chartres-school-116959.html In the first half of the twelfth century, the most advanced work in teaching and discussion of logic, philosophy and theology took place in the schools attached to the great cathedrals. Chartres was undoubtedly one of the more important of these schools, and Gilbert of Poitiers and Thierry of Chartres were certainly connected with it. To some historians, Chartres was the great intellectual centre of the period, and the greatest achievement of early twelfth-century thought was a brand of Platonism distinctive of this school. However, this view has been challenged by scholars who stress the pre-eminence of Paris, where the schools emphasized logic. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chartres-school-116959.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-charron-pierre-116958.html Pierre Charron was a French Catholic priest of the late sixteenth century who used Montaigne's sceptical thought, which he presented in didactic form, in order to refute Calvinists, non-Christians, and atheists. He advanced a fideistic defence of religious thought which was based on accepting complete scepticism while appealing to faith alone as the source of religious knowledge. His De la Sagesse (On Wisdom) (1601) is one of the first significant philosophical works to be written in a modern language. It is also one of the first modern works to set forth a naturalistic moral theory independent of religious considerations, and based primarily on Stoic ideas. Charron's views were extremely popular in the seventeenth century, and they influenced many sceptically inclined thinkers in France and England. His sceptical 'defence' of religion was regarded as insincere by some of the orthodox theologians, but other important religious thinkers defended him. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-charron-pierre-116958.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-charleton-walter-116957.html The physician Walter Charleton was the first to introduce Epicurean atomism into England in the form advocated in France by Gassendi. Charleton's version of atomism, although largely derivative, was nevertheless influential. Together with his advocacy of a Christian hedonism, it helped to make both atomism in natural philosophy (with its associated mechanistic account of nature) and utilitarian theories in ethics acceptable to such thinkers as Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, John Locke and others associated with the foundation of the Royal Society, of which Charleton was himself an active early member. Walter Charleton was a physician who served both Charles I and Charles II, but his interests were always broader than medicine. He entered practice after studying at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, under John Wilkins, also one of the founders of the Royal Society. Charleton's quick rise to fame made him enemies, which in part explains his sad decline to poverty in later years after serving as President of the College of Physicians from 1689-91. Charleton's major philosophical writings were two books on the philosophy of Epicurus and two on central religious themes (the absurdity of atheism and the immortality of the soul). But it is important to appreciate that although he clearly saw himself as an exponent of a modified Christian version of the philosophy of Epicurus, in which he substantially followed in the footsteps of Gassendi, he was also almost equally influenced by the philosophy of Descartes. In each of them he found a commitment to mechanism as the basic explanatory concept for an understanding of nature, together with a theism which rejected a materialist account of the mind. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-charleton-walter-116957.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-principle-charity-116956.html The principle of charity governs the interpretation of the beliefs and utterances of others. It urges charitable interpretation, meaning interpretation that maximizes the truth or rationality of what others think and say. Some formulations of the principle concern primarily rationality, recommending attributions of rational belief or assertion. Others concern primarily truth, recommending attributions of true belief or assertion. Versions of the principle differ in strength. The weakest urge charity as one consideration among many. The strongest hold that interpretation is impossible without the assumption of rationality or truth. The principle has been put to various philosophical uses. Students are typically instructed to follow the principle when interpreting passages and formulating the arguments they contain. The principle also plays a role in philosophy of mind and language and in epistemology. Philosophers have argued that the principle of charity plays an essential role in characterizing the nature of belief and intentionality, with some philosophers contending that beliefs must be mostly true. A version of the principle has even served as a key premise in a widely discussed argument against epistemological scepticism. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-principle-charity-116956.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-charity-116955.html Within at least some branches of Christianity, the term 'charity' has been used to mean the love mandated by Jesus. In recent theological writings, however, there has been a tendency to replace it with the Greek word agapē. There has been some disagreement in the twentieth century concerning the precise nature and functioning of Christian love, a major catalyst for debate having been Anders Nygren's book Agapē and Eros (1930-6). Numerous scholars have complained that charity does not have a high profile nowadays and have noted that, in common parlance, the word usually has the meaning of benevolence or beneficence. Some attempts have been made to place greater emphasis on Christian love and relationships within Christian ethics. Of some interest in this regard is the notion of an ethic of care, which is not confined to Christian circles but has been the subject of some debate in recent times. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-charity-116955.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chaos-theory-116954.html Chaos theory is the name given to the scientific investigation of mathematically simple systems that exhibit complex and unpredictable behaviour. Since the 1970s these systems have been used to model experimental situations ranging from the early stages of fluid turbulence to the fluctuations of brain wave activity. This complex behaviour does not arise as a result of the interaction of numerous sub-systems or from intrinsically probabilistic equations. Instead, chaotic behaviour involves the rapid growth of any inaccuracy. The slightest vagueness in specifying the initial state of such a system makes long-term predictions impossible, yielding behaviour that is effectively random. The existence of such behaviour raises questions about the extent to which predictability and determinism apply in the physical world. Chaos theory addresses the questions of how such behaviour arises and how it changes as the system is modified. Its new analytical techniques invite a reconsideration of scientific methodology. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chaos-theory-116954.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-change-116953.html Change in general may be defined as the variation of properties (whether of things or of regions of space) over time. But this definition is incomplete in a number of respects. The reference to properties and time raises two important questions. The first concerns whether we need to specify further the kinds of properties which are involved in change. If we define change in an object as temporal variation of its properties we are faced with the problem that some properties of an object may alter without there being a consequent change in the object itself. The second question concerns the passage of time: does temporal variation constitute change only in virtue of some feature of time itself, namely the fact (or putative fact) that time passes? Some philosophers have wished to reject the notion of time's passage. Are they thereby committed to a picture of the world as unchanging? Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-change-116953.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chaldaean-oracles-116952.html The Chaldaean Oracles were a collection of revelatory verses purportedly compiled in the second century AD. Along with the Orphic texts, Neoplatonists regarded them as divine words. When the Oracles appear in philosophical works, they lend support to select cosmological, metaphysical or psychological propositions which have already been formulated. According to Neoplatonists, the Chaldaika logia, or Chaldaean Oracles, originated with a certain Julianus, a late second-century AD ex-soldier in the eastern Roman army, and with his son, also named Julianus, who was their author. The father, surnamed 'Chaldaean' and a 'philosopher', may have collected handed-down material which he passed on to his son, a 'theurgist', who was 'divinely inspired' to write new oracles. This origin, some seventy years before Porphyry, by whom they are first mentioned, is by no means certain. However, it may be corroborated by similar material in Numenius, an important Neo-Pythagorean. Numenius flourished at that time in Apamea (Syria), where later Plotinus' theurgic-minded follower Amelius went to teach, as did Iamblichus, who was a major proponent of theurgy and the Oracles. Both Porphyry and Iamblichus had Syrian parentage. Moreover, in a unique fragment preserved by Proclus (Commentary on Plato's Parmenides, 594-5), 'the true theologians' used Syriac terms. Yet the question remains, how much was handed down and how much made up in a culture where Greek and Oriental had mixed since the third century BC and religions had absorbed Platonic ideas. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chaldaean-oracles-116952.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chaadaev-petr-iakovlevich-116951.html Pëtr Chaadaev was the first Russian thinker for whom his own country became a philosophical problem. His works initiated the powerful Russian tradition of reflecting on Russia's whence and whither: that is to say, the meaning of Russian history, the character of Russian national identity, and the possible, or necessary, paths of Russian historical development in the future. However, Chaadaev's answer to these questions was mostly negative: he defined Russia not by what it was, but by what it was not. A paradoxical feature of Chaadaev's s position was that his general philosophical views did not apply to his native country. He was a convinced Westernizer, identifying Western development with universal human history, but Russia was in his view the opposite of the West, an exception to the general rules. His general social philosophy, deeply influenced by the French theocratic traditionalists, was inherently conservative, stressing the importance of supra-individual unity and of continuous historical traditions; in contrast with this, his philosophy of Russian history defined Russia as a country without unity and without history, thus lacking the basic conditions for a genuine conservatism. This view provoked a strong reaction among Russian Romantic conservatives: they accepted some aspects of Chaadaev's conservative critique of atomistic individualism but tried to refute his pessimistic view of Russia, by arguing that, in fact, not Russia but the West represented atomistic disintegration and incapacity for organic development. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-chaadaev-petr-iakovlevich-116951.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-certeau-michel-116950.html Michel de Certeau, a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America. His thought has inflected four areas of philosophy. He studied how mysticism informs late-medieval epistemology and social practice. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, the affinities the mystic shares with nature and the cosmos become, like religion itself, repressed or concealed. An adjunct discipline, heterology, thus constitutes an anthropology of alterity, studying the 'other' and the destiny of religion since the sixteenth century. De Certeau opens the hidden agendas that make representations of the past a function of social pressures, so that sometime histories are rearticulated in mirrored or subversive forms. This subversion makes accessible a general philosophy of invention that works within and against the strategic policies of official institutions. De Certeau's writings also belong to activism, the history of ideological structures, psychoanalysis, and post-1968 theories of writing (écriture) as defined by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard. For de Certeau, mystics are those strange beings who claim to have left the material and sensory world and encountered an unnameable being, or an unearthly experience, but have returned with visible marks - scars or mutilations - that attest to the truth of what they say. They eagerly tell of their visions to others. They are creatures of passage who invent places in which they disappear, and whose words convey to their listeners the supraterrestrial qualities of the world and language. They liberate those whom they meet, inspiring them to cognizance of areas that cannot be controlled by rational or symbolic means. Mystics are frequently female, often rootless, sometimes grimy and occasionally without formal education. The mystic belongs to all religions but appears on the European horizon at the time major edifices of belief slowly crumble under the pressure of science, oceanic travel, schematic reason (Ramus, Descartes) and pre-capitalist economy. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-certeau-michel-116950.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-certainty-116949.html 'Certainty' is not a univocal term. It is predicated of people, and it is predicated of propositions. When certainty is predicated of a person, as in 'Sally is certain that she parked her car in lot 359', we are ascribing an attitude to Sally. We can say that a person, S, is psychologically certain of a proposition, p, just in case S believes p without any doubts. In general, psychological certainty has not been a topic which philosophers have found problematic. On the other hand, certainty as a property of propositions, as in 'The proposition that Sally parked her car in lot 359 is certain for Sally', has been discussed widely by philosophers. Roughly, we can say that a proposition, p, is propositionally certain for a person, S, just in case S is fully warranted in believing that p and there are no legitimate grounds whatsoever to doubt that p. The philosophical issue, of course, is whether there are any such propositions and, if so, what makes them certain. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-certainty-116949.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-celsus-116948.html The Greek philosopher Celsus of Alexandria was a Middle Platonist, known only for his anti-Christian work The True Account. The work is lost, but we have Origen's reply to it, Against Celsus. In it Celsus defends a version of Platonist theology. Celsus is known only as the author of a polemical work against the Christians entitled Alēthēs logos, which may be translated The True Account, although other connotations of logos are also present in the title (Logos). We know of this work only through the reply (Against Celsus) composed to it in AD 248 by the Church Father Origen, who does not in fact know who Celsus is (Origen §1). We too know nothing about Celsus, but can date his work fairly closely from references in it to a persecution of Christians under a joint rulership which must be that Marcus Aurelius and Commodus (AD 177-80). The title of Celsus' book may also refer to a passage of Plato's Meno (81a), where Socrates speaks of the ancient doctrine he has heard concerning the immortality of the soul as a 'true account' (Plato §11). One of Celsus' polemical points certainly is that Platonic philosophy is in accord with the wisdom of the most ancient authorities, such as Orpheus and Homer - a common enough view among the Neoplatonists. As regards his own philosophical position, it is hard to pin him to any particular tendency within contemporary Platonism. He shows the expected contempt for a notion like the resurrection of the body (Origen, Against Celsus V 14), or the idea that god made man in his own image (VI 63), there being nothing that could resemble god. At VII 42, he gives a basic account of the Platonist view of the supreme god, which is incompatible with the notion of his involving himself too closely with matter. He alludes, indeed, to the notion of the supreme god being 'beyond being' (Plato, Republic 509b), and the title of his work may indicate his adoption of the logos as a secondary god, but we cannot be sure. He mentions three ways of attaining a conception of god - synthesis, analysis and analogy, which correspond approximately to the three ways distinguished by Alcinous in his Didaskalikos, chapter 10, although there is no indication that Celsus knows that work. Contact between man and god is effected, of course, through the agency of daemons, whom the Christians are criticized for disdaining (VIII 28, 33, 35). Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-celsus-116948.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cavendish-margaret-lucas-116947.html Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, made contact with Hobbes, tutor to the Cavendish family, during the English Civil War. She became a member of the 'Newcastle Circle', which included Hobbes, Charleton and Digby, and which was influenced by interaction with Mersenne and Gassendi. While exiled in Paris, Rotterdam and Antwerp, she met Descartes and Roberval. In 1667, she became the first woman to attend a session of the Royal Society of London. She corresponded with Christian Huygens about 'Rupert's exploding drops', and with Glanvill about witchcraft and Neoplatonic notions such as 'plastic faculties' and the 'soul of the world'. She was one of the first Englishwomen to gain recognition for her publications. In additional to writing treatises such as Philosophical Fancies (1653) and Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655, 1663) she experimented with a wide range of genres to express her views: poetry, orations, plays, autobiobraphy ( Nature's Pictures…, 1656), biography (The Life of … William Cavindishe…, 1667), allegories (The World's Olio, 1655), epistolary narrative (CCXI Sociable Letters, 1664a) and fiction (The Description of a New World, called the Blazing-World, 1668). Introduced to twentieth-century readers by Henry Ten Eyck Perry (1918) and Virginia Woolf (1925), her philosophy only came in for serious, sustained evaluation beginning in the 1980s. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cavendish-margaret-lucas-116947.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cavell-stanley-116946.html Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Stanley Cavell has held the Walter M. Cabot Chair in Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University since 1963. The range, diversity and distinctiveness of his writings are unparalleled in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. As well as publishing essays on modernist painting and music, he has created a substantial body of work in film studies, literary theory and literary criticism; he has introduced new and fruitful ways of thinking about psychoanalysis and its relationship with philosophy; and his work on Heidegger and Derrida, taken together with his attempts to revitalize the tradition of Emersonian Transcendentalism, have defined new possibilities for a distinctively American contribution to philosophical culture. This complex oeuvre is unified by a set of thematic concerns - relating to scepticism and moral perfectionism - which are rooted in Cavell's commitment to the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, as represented in the work of J.L. Austin and Wittgenstein. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cavell-stanley-116946.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-causality-and-necessity-islamic-thought-116945.html Discussions of causality and necessity in Islamic thought were the result of attempts to incorporate the wisdom of the Greeks into the legacy of the QurČamp;lsquo;'an, and specifically to find a philosophical way of expressing faith in the free creation of the universe by one God. Moreover, that article of faith was itself a result of the revelation of God's ways in the free bestowal of the QurČamp;rsquo;'an on a humanity otherwise locked in ignorance, which a purportedly Aristotelian account of the necessary connection of cause and effect might be taken to rule out. Thus free creation of the universe and free gift of the Qur'an formed a logical unit. The challenge, therefore, was to compose an account of metaphysical and ethical matters which permits rational discourse about them, without obscuring their ultimate source or precluding divine action in the course of world events and human actions. The scheme of emanation elaborated by al-Farabi sought to give 'the First' the place of pre-eminence which the Qur'an demanded for the Creator, but did so by modelling creation on a logical system whereby all things emanated necessarily from this One. It was this necessity, further articulated by Ibn Sina, which al-Ghazalii took to jeopardize the freedom of God as Creator and as giver of the Qur'an. al-Ghazali's objections were honed by a previous debate among Muslim theologians (mutakallimun), who had elaborated diverse views on human freedom in an effort to reconcile the obvious demand for free acceptance of the Qur'an with its claims regarding God's utter sovereignty as Creator over all that is. Natural philosophy was also affected by these debates, specifically with regard to the ultimate constitution of bodies as well as accounts that could be given of their interaction. However, the primary focus was on human actions in the face of a free Creator. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-causality-and-necessity-islamic-thought-116945.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cattaneo-carlo-116944.html The figurehead of the Italian democratic movement prior to the unification of Italy, Carlo Cattaneo developed a theory of federalism as a practice of self-government, envisaging a United States of Italy. He identified the bourgeoisie as the most dynamic force in contemporary history and regarded scientific culture as the engine of progress. Often dubbed the first Italian positivist, he perceived empirical philosophy as a kind of synthesis of all the sciences, but also stressed its anthropological and psychological dimensions and above all its character as a methodology of knowledge; his objective was to study human thought. The great themes of Cattaneo's philosophy are nature, the individual and society; particularly the last. Cattaneo represents the most progressive trends in Italian thought in the first half of the nineteenth century. He aimed to encourage the propagation of technical and scientific knowledge in his native Lombardy in order to equip the entrepreneurial class with the expertise necessary for economic development; and to this end he founded the journal, Il Politecnico (1839-44; 1851-63). Until 1848, Cattaneo had formed part of the legal opposition to the regime, but when Milan rose against the Austrians on 18 March of that year, Cattaneo took an active, leading role in the Five Days' Uprising. He was critical of the provisional government, however, and when the Austrians returned, left for Paris, where he published L'Insurrection de Milan en 1848 (The Milan Uprising of 1848). Shortly afterwards, he left Paris for Switzerland, where he settled permanently in Castagnola, near Lugano. From his exile in Switzerland, Cattaneo voiced his often fierce opposition to the principal political currents in Italy, and forged a role for himself as the great 'prompter' and moving spirit of the Italian democrats, and the leading proponent of federalism against unitary solutions. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cattaneo-carlo-116944.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-categories-116943.html Categories are hard to describe, and even harder to define. This is in part a consequence of their complicated history, and in part because category theory must grapple with vexed questions concerning the relation between linguistic or conceptual categories on the one hand, and objective reality on the other. In the mid-fourth century BC,Aristotle initiates discussion of categories as a central enterprise of philosophy. In the Categories he presents an 'ontological' scheme which classifies all being into ten ultimate types, but in the Topics introduces the categories as different kinds of predication, that is, of items such as 'goodness' or 'length of a tennis court' or 'red', which can be 'predicated of' subjects. He nowhere attempts either to justify what he includes in his list of categories or to establish its completeness, and relies throughout on the unargued conviction that language faithfully represents the most basic features of reality. In the twentieth century, a test for category membership was recommended by Ryle, that of absurdity: concepts or expressions differ in logical type when their combination produces sentences which are palpable nonsense.Kant, working in the eighteenth century, derives his categories from a consideration of aspects of judgments, hoping in this manner to ensure that his scheme will consist exclusively of a priori concepts which might constitute an objective world. The Sinologist Graham argues that the categories familiar in the West mirror Indo-European linguistic structure, and that an experimental Chinese scheme exhibits suggestively different properties, but his relativism is highly contentious. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-categories-116943.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-casuistry-116942.html Casuistry, from the Latin casus (cases), has been understood in three separate yet related senses. In its first sense casuistry is defined as a style of ethical reasoning associated closely with the tradition of practical philosophy influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas. In its second sense it is reasoning about 'cases of conscience' (casus conscientiae). The third sense, moral laxism, arose out of Pascal's famous critique of casuistry, which did much to diminish its influence. In recent years, however, a renewed interest in the first and second senses of casuistry has been witnessed in the areas of practical reasoning and applied philosophy. In its widest sense, casuistry can be described as a method of ethical reasoning which, drawing on the tradition of practical philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas, aims to construct a 'dialectic' between the facts of particular cases and the antecedent assumptions, evaluations and convictions which individual agents bring to bear in their consideration of such cases. The purpose of the dialectic is to enable agents to arrive at informed decisions as to what is morally possible and impossible for them to do in particular cases. In a narrower sense, the term casuistry has been employed to characterize different systems of moral theology within the Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions, in which all-inclusive norms are derived from judgments in particular cases, instead of being laid down in advance by absolute moral codes. In its narrowest sense, casuistry refers to the use of subtle definitional distinctions in the handling of the problems of moral theology, with the aim of drawing fine dividing lines between what is and is not permissible at the level of action. The technique has at times been used to excuse crimes and sins, thereby exculpating the immoral, and such is the extent of the modern association of casuistry with all varieties of obfuscation, quibbling and laxism, that a pejorative connotation of the word itself is now established in most European languages. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-casuistry-116942.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cassirer-ernst-116941.html Ernst Cassirer was born in the German city of Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) on 28 July 1874; he died suddenly, of a heart attack, on the Columbia University campus in New York on 13 April 1945. His life was a personal and intellectual 'odyssey' that took him from Europe to the USA, and led him from the Marburg Neo-Kantianism of his teacher, Hermann Cohen, to his own broad vision of human culture and a critique of the modern state. Cassirer lectured as Privatdozent at the University of Berlin from 1906 until 1919, when he accepted a professorship at the newly founded University of Hamburg; he served as its rector in 1929-30. After Hitler's assumption of the chancellorship of Germany in January 1933, Cassirer left Germany. He taught from 1933 to 1935 at All Souls College, Oxford and then accepted a professorship at the University of Göteborg, Sweden. In 1941 he moved to Yale University in the USA, and then went to Columbia University for the academic year 1944-5. Cassirer published nearly 125 books, essays and reviews and left a number of unpublished papers. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cassirer-ernst-116941.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-carolingian-renaissance-116940.html The 'Carolingian renaissance' is the name given to the cultural revival in northern Europe during the late eighth and ninth centuries, instigated by Charlemagne and his court scholars. Carolingian intellectual life centred around the recovery of classical Latin texts and learning, though in a strictly Christian setting. The only celebrated philosopher of the time is Johannes Scottus Eriugena, but the daring Neoplatonic speculations of his masterpiece, the Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature) are not at all characteristic of the time and are based on Greek sources (Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor) generally unknown to his contemporaries. The mainstream of Carolingian thought is important for the history of philosophy in three particular ways. First, it was at this time that logic first started to take the fundamental role it would have throughout the Middle Ages. Second, scholars began to consider how ideas they found in late antique Latin Neoplatonic texts could be interpreted in a way compatible with Christianity. Third (as would so often again be the case in the Middle Ages), controversies over Christian doctrine led thinkers to analyse some of the concepts they involved: for instance, the dispute in the mid-ninth century over predestination led to discussion about free will and punishment. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-carolingian-renaissance-116940.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-carneades-116939.html The Greek philosopher Carneades was head of the Academy from 167 to 137 BC. Born in North Africa he migrated to Athens, where he studied logic with the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon; but he was soon seduced by the Academy, to which his allegiance was thereafter lifelong. He was a celebrated figure; and in 155 BC he was sent by Athens to Rome as a political ambassador, where he astounded the youth by his rhetorical powers and outraged their elders by his arguments against justice. Under Carneades' direction the Academy remained sceptical. But he enlarged the sceptical armoury - in particular, he deployed sorites arguments against various dogmatic positions. He also broadened the target of sceptical attack: thus he showed an especial interest in ethics, where his 'division' of possible ethical theories served later as a standard framework for thought on the subject. But his major innovation concerned the notion of 'the plausible' (to pithanon). Even if we cannot determine which appearances are true and which false, we are able to distinguish the plausible from the implausible - and further to distinguish among several grades of plausibility. It is disputed - and it was disputed among his immediate followers - how, if at all, Carneades' remarks on the plausible are to be reconciled with his scepticism. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-carneades-116939.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-carnap-rudolf-116938.html Carnap was one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, and made important contributions to logic, philosophy of science, semantics, modal theory and probability. Viewed as an enfant terrible when he achieved fame in the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, Carnap is more accurately seen as one who held together its widely varying viewpoints as a coherent movement. In the 1930s he developed a daring pragmatic conventionalism according to which many traditional philosophical disputes are viewed as the expression of different linguistic frameworks, not genuine disagreements. This distinction between a language (framework) and what can be said within it was central to Carnap's philosophy, reconciling the apparently a priori domains such as logic and mathematics with a thoroughgoing empiricism: basic logical and mathematical commitments partially constitute the choice of language. There is no uniquely correct choice among alternative logics or foundations for mathematics; it is a question of practical expedience, not truth. Thereafter, the logic and mathematics may be taken as true in virtue of that language. The remaining substantive questions, those not settled by the language alone, should be addressed only by empirical means. There is no other source of news. Beyond pure logic and mathematics, Carnap's approach recognized within the sciences commitments aptly called a priori - those not tested straightforwardly by observable evidence, but, rather, presupposed in the gathering and manipulation of evidence. This a priori, too, is relativized to a framework and thus comports well with empiricism. The appropriate attitude towards alternative frameworks would be tolerance, and the appropriate mode of philosophizing the patient task of explicating and working out in detail the consequences of adopting this or that framework. While Carnap worked at this tirelessly and remained tolerant of alternative frameworks, his tolerance was not much imitated nor were his principles well understood and adopted. By the time of his death, philosophers were widely rejecting what they saw as logical empiricism, though often both their arguments and the views offered as improvements had been pioneered by Carnap and his associates. By his centenary, however, there emerged a new and fuller understanding of his ideas and of their importance for twentieth-century philosophy. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-carnap-rudolf-116938.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-carmichael-gershom-116937.html Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer of pivotal importance for the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, predecessor of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Carmichael introduced the natural law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke to the moral philosophy courses he taught at the University of Glasgow (1694-1729). His commentaries on Samuel Pufendorf's work on the duty of man and citizen (1718 and 1724) made his teaching available to a wider readership in Great Britain and in Europe. He also composed an introduction to logic, Breviuscula Introductio ad Logicam, (1720 and 1722) and a brief system of natural theology, Synopsis Theologiae Naturalis (1729). Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-carmichael-gershom-116937.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-carlyle-thomas-116936.html Although widely influential as a historian, moralist and social critic, Carlyle has no real claim to be considered a philosopher. He does have some importance as one of the transmitters of the ideas of the German Idealists, such as Kant and Fichte, to Britain, and as one of the chief British spokesmen for the Romantic exaltation of the imagination above the understanding; but his grasp of philosophical issues is vague. His later writings are dominated by the idea, derived from his childhood Calvinism, of a divine justice working in history through the medium of great men ('heroes') who are its conscious or unconscious instruments. Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, Scotland, the eldest son of James Carlyle, a farmer and stonemason, and his wife Margaret. Educated at Annan Academy and Edinburgh University, he eked out a meagre living by private tutoring and journalism until leaving Scotland and moving to London in 1834. His first major work, Sartor Resartus, was published in 1833: the most significant of his later writings were The French Revolution (1837), Past and Present (1843), Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845) and The History of Frederick the Great (1858-65). Carlyle is important as a literary figure, a moralist, a historian and a social critic, but has little serious claim to be considered a philosopher, though he was sometimes regarded as such by his contemporaries. His chief interest in this regard is as one of the transmitters of German Idealism to Britain in the 1820s. The tradition of Scottish Calvinism in which he had been brought up had been shaken by his encounter with the ideas of the Enlightenment at Edinburgh University, and he found in the German Idealist tradition a resolution of the problems this caused him. His enthusiasm for this tradition was expressed in a series of review articles from the 1820s which first brought his name before the public - notably on the 'State of German Literature' (1827) and 'Novalis' (1829) (see also 'Voltaire' (1829) and 'Diderot' (1833) for his repudiation of the rationalism of the Enlightenment). Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-carlyle-thomas-116936.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cardano-girolamo-116935.html The Renaissance Italian Girolamo Cardano is famous for his colourful personality, as well as for his work in medicine and mathematics, and indeed in almost all the arts and sciences. He was an eclectic philosopher, and one of the founders of the so-called new philosophy of nature developed in the sixteenth century. He used both the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic traditions as starting points, and following the medical paradigm of organic being, he transformed the traditional Aristotelian universe into an animated universe in which, thanks to their organic functional order, all individual parts strive towards the conservation both of themselves and of the whole universe. As a result, they can be subjected to a functional analysis. In his more casual writings on moral philosophy, Cardano showed his orientation to be basically Stoic. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cardano-girolamo-116935.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-capreolus-johannes-116934.html Thomist philosopher and theologian, Capreolus composed a lengthy commentary on Aquinas' work on Peter Lombard's Sentences, known as Defensiones theologiae divi Thomae Aquinatis (Defences of the Theology of Thomas Aquinas) (first printed in 1483-4). He sought to refute the criticisms of Thomism by competing scholastic traditions during the fourteenth century. The Thomistic school was so impressed with Capreolus' achievement that it came to refer to him as Princeps Thomistarum (leader of the Thomists). Twentieth-century Thomists have, generally, considered him more faithful to the teachings of Aquinas than later commentators such as Cajetan. His philosophical opinions which have received most attention concern analogy, the formal ontological constituent of the person and the individuation of material substances. Capreolus was born in Rodez, France, around 1380 and entered the Dominican Order there. In 1407 he was assigned to the University of Paris as bachelor of the Sentences. He was licensed to graduate as master of theology in 1411. He subsequently taught in Dominican convents in Toulouse and Rodez. He died in Rodez on 6 April 1444. Capreolus' reflections on analogy appear in his attack on Duns Scotus' affirmation that the concept of being is predicated univocally of God and creatures. He does not present a systematic theory of analogy but solely a tentative clarification of the analogy of being. He accepts as paradigmatic Aquinas' threefold division of analogy. It is the third part of the division that deals with the analogy between God and creatures: the analogical concept is predicated of things which have neither a proper notion nor their manner of being in common. To explain it, he uses the distinction between the formal and the objective concept thereafter adopted almost unanimously by the Thomistic school. The formal concept is the subjective, mental representation of a common nature produced by the possible intellect after it has been actualized by an impressed intelligible species abstracted by the agent intellect from a phantasm. The objective concept is the extramental common nature considered precisely in so far as it is the object of an act of understanding. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-capreolus-johannes-116934.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-camus-albert-116933.html Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957 for having 'illuminated the problems of the human conscience in our times'. By mythologizing the experiences of a secular age struggling with an increasingly contested religious tradition, he dramatized the human effort to 'live and create without the aid of eternal values which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary Europe'(1943). Thus the challenge posed by 'the absurd' with which he is so universally identified. Camus' most celebrated work is L'Étranger (The Stranger) (1942). Depicting the 'metaphysical' awakening of an ordinary Algerian worker, Camus concretizes the Pindarian injunction, provided as life's answer to 'the absurd' in an epigram to Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) (1943): 'Oh my soul do not aspire to immortal heights but exhaust the field of the possible.' But if the 'absurd' defines our world, it was never treated by Camus as a conclusion, only 'a point of departure'. What else have I done except reason about an idea I discovered in the streets of my time? That I have nourished this idea (and a part of me nourishes it still) along with my whole generation goes without saying. I simply set it far enough away so that I could deal with it and decide on its logic. (1954) How and what morality is still possible, then, in view of the experience of 'the death of God' which has given birth to the experience of absurdity? While the absurd leaves humans without justification and direction, rebellion bears witness to the refusal of human beings to accept this incipient despair. By demanding an end to oppression, rebellion seeks to transform - by revolution if necessary - the conditions that gave rise to it. Rebellion thus testifies to the human being's incessant demand for dignity. But it is often a vain yearning without a revolutionary transformation of the institutional structures of exploitation and oppression. Yet that transformation only promises further and even greater humiliation if it is not continually guided by the spirit and concerns of rebellion. Appalled by the totalitarian direction of many modern revolutionary movements, Camus thought he detected a messianic nostalgia lurking at the core of Western rebellions. He saw them driven by an often unexpressed need to replace the failed vertical transcendence of Judaeo-Christianity with a new horizontal transcendence. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-camus-albert-116933.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-campbell-norman-robert-116932.html Campbell made important contributions to philosophy of science in the 1920s, influenced by Poincaré, Russell and his own work in physics. He produced pioneering analyses of the nature of physical theories and of measurement, but is mainly remembered for requiring a theory, for example, the kinetic theory of gases, to have an 'analogy', that is, an independent interpretation, for example, as laws of motion of a swarm of microscopic particles. The British philosopher of science Norman Robert Campbell, who became a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge in 1904, was also an experimental physicist, and worked on the research staff of the British General Electric Company from 1919 to 1944. His main contribution to philosophy, published in 1920, is his account of how physical theories explain laws. It maintains an absolute distinction between laws relating observable properties of objects, on which agreement can be achieved, and theories used to explain them. It could allow a weaker distinction, letting accepted theories come to state laws needing further explanation. But only an implausible view of the significance of the distinction can save its claim that theories need analogies. Campbell's account of theories credits them with three components, illustrated by a simplified version of the kinetic theory of gases. First there is a theory's 'hypothesis', its mathematical propositions, empirically uninterpreted. Then there is a 'dictionary', linking terms of the hypothesis to observable terms used to state the laws the theory explains. Thus in his example the dictionary identifies the volume V, mass M, pressure P and absolute temperature T of a gas with combinations of constants and variables postulated by the hypothesis: for example, V = l 3, where l is a constant, M = nm, where m is a constant and 3n the number of variables dependent on the independent variable t (time). This hypothesis and dictionary entail the perfect gas law, PV / T . Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-campbell-norman-robert-116932.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-campbell-george-116931.html George Campbell, Scottish minister, professor and religious thinker, is now remembered primarily for The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). Here he employed the Scottish Enlightenment's developing science of human nature to explain the effectiveness of the classical rules of rhetoric. He did this by relating the various ends of persuasive discourse to the natural faculties and propensities of the human mind. In his own time Campbell was better known as a religious apologist, using an enlightened theory of evidence in A Dissertation on Miracles (1762) to defend the believability of Christian miracles against the sceptical attack of David Hume. George Campbell was born in Aberdeen and educated at the town's Marischal College. He was ordained in the established Church of Scotland in 1748 and was minister of a country parish for nearly a decade. Upon returning to Aberdeen, he helped found the influential Aberdeen Philosophical Society, whose members included Thomas Reid, Alexander Gerard and James Beattie (Aberdeen Philosophical Society). He was appointed to the posts of Principal and Professor of Divinity in Marischal College in 1759 and 1771 respectively, which he held jointly until the year before his death. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-campbell-george-116931.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-campanella-tommaso-116930.html Tommaso Campanella was a Counter-Reformation theologian, a Renaissance magus, a prophet, a poet and an astrologer, as well as a philosopher whose speculations assumed encyclopedic proportions. As a late Renaissance philosopher of nature, Campanella is notable for his early, and continuous, opposition to Aristotle. He rejected the fundamental Aristotelian principle of hylomorphism, namely the understanding of all physical substance in terms of form and matter. In its place he appropriated Telesio's understanding of reality in terms of the dialectical principles of heat and cold; and he adopted a form of empiricism found in Telesio's work that included pansensism, the doctrine that all things in nature are endowed with sense. Especially after 1602, Campanella's exposure to Renaissance Platonism also involved him in panpsychism, the view that all reality has a mental aspect. Thus his empiricism came to show a distinctly metaphysical and spiritualistic dimension that transformed his philosophy. At the same time his epistemology embraced a universal doubt and an emphasis on individual self-consciousness that are suggestive of Descartes' views. Campanella's career as a religious dissident, radical reformer and leader of an apocalyptic movement presents a political radicalism that was oddly associated with more traditional notions of universal monarchy and the need for theocracy. The only one of his numerous writings that receives attention today, La Città del Sole (The City of the Sun) (composed 1602, but not published until 1623), has come to occupy a prominent place in the literature of utopias though Campanella himself seems to have expected some form of astronomical/apocalyptic realization. Campanella's naturalism, especially its pansensism and panpsychism, enjoyed some currency in Germany and France during the 1620s, but in the last five years of his life it was emphatically rejected by the intellectual communities headed by Mersenne and Descartes, as well as by Galileo. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-campanella-tommaso-116930.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cambridge-platonism-116929.html The term 'Cambridge Platonism' has been used to refer to a group of thinkers active in Cambridge from the late 1630s to the 1680s, who were in one form or another inspired by the Platonic tradition of philosophy. Most of them were either fellows or students of two colleges, Emmanuel and Christ's. Their inner circle consisted of Henry More (1614-87), Ralph Cudworth (1617-88), John Smith (1618-52) and Benjamin Whichcote (1609-83), who was its leading figure. Their outer circle of associates within Cambridge comprised John Sherman (d. 1666), John Worthington (1618-80), Peter Sterry (1613-72), George Rust (1626-70) and Nathaniel Culverwell (1618-51). There were also thinkers outside Cambridge who were closely connected with, and often shared the views of, the Cambridge Platonists: John Norris (1657-1711), Joseph Glanvill (1636-80) and Richard Burthogge (c.1638-c.1704). Among the disciples of the Cambridge school were some important latitudinarian divines: Simon Patrick (1626-1707), Edward Fowler (1632-1714), John Tillotson (1630-94), John Moore (1646-1714), Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), Edward Stillingfleet (1635-99) and Thomas Tenison (1636-1715). Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cambridge-platonism-116929.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-calvin-john-116928.html John Calvin, French Protestant reformer and theologian, was a minister among Reformed Christians in Geneva and Strasbourg. His Institutes of the Christian Religion (first edition 1536) - which follows the broad outline of the Apostles' Creed and is shaped by biblical and patristic thought - is the cornerstone of Reformed theology. Calvin's religious epistemology links self-knowledge and knowledge of God. He identifies in humans an innate awareness of God, which is supported by the general revelation of God in creation and providence. Because sin has corrupted this innate awareness, Scripture - confirmed by the Holy Spirit - is needed for genuine knowledge of God. Scripture teaches that God created the world out of nothing and sustains every part of it. Humanity, which was created good and with free will, has defaced itself and lost significant freedom due to its fall into sin. Calvin sees Christ the mediator as the fulfilment of the Old Testament offices of prophet, priest and king. Calvin insists that God justifies sinners on the basis of grace and not works, forgiving their sins and imputing Christ's righteousness to them. Such justification, received by faith, glorifies God and relieves believers' anxiety about their status before God. On the basis of his will alone, God predestines some individuals to eternal life and others to eternal damnation. Calvin dignifies even ordinary occupations by seeing them as service to God. He recognizes the distinction between civil government and the Church, although he says that government should protect true worship of God and Christians should obey and support their government. Calvin's thought was dominant in non-Lutheran Protestant churches until the eighteenth century and has enjoyed a resurgence since the mid nineteenth century. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-calvin-john-116928.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-callicles-116927.html Callicles, although known only as a character in Plato's Gorgias (the dramatic date of which is somewhere between 430 and 405 BC), was probably an actual historical person. Employing a distinction between nature (physis) and convention (nomos), he argues eloquently that the naturally superior should seize both political power and a greater share of material goods: it is only a convention of the weak majority which labels such behaviour unjust. In private life the superior should indulge their desires freely: excess and licence are true virtue and happiness. Callicles is a wealthy and aristocratic young Athenian with ambitions to be a democratic leader, and the detail that Plato bestows on his portrait strongly suggests that he did in fact exist. Plato may have deliberately selected someone whose youthful promise was known to have come to nothing, as a warning against moral and intellectual indiscipline (there is a hint that Callicles was later arrested). Despite his proclaimed contempt for Sophists, his views appear indebted to those of Gorgias and may consequently be distorted by Plato's anti-Sophistic bias. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-callicles-116927.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-calcidius-116926.html The Platonist Calcidius (sometimes less correctly spelt Chalcidius) was the author of a Latin work containing a partial translation of, and partial commentary on, Plato's Timaeus. Although of uncertain date, the doctrinal content of his commentary reflects the thought of the Middle Platonist era (c.50 BC-AD 200). Calcidius' date and place of operation are uncertain, the only clue residing in his dedication of his work to one Osius, who has been taken, following identifications in a number of manuscripts, to be the Bishop of Corduba (AD 256-357) and spiritual advisor of Constantine. This identification has been challenged, mainly on the grounds that Isidore of Seville makes no mention of Calcidius in his enumeration of all the Spanish writers that he knows, but this is not conclusive. It is also true that his language is more consistent with a fifth-century than a fourth-century date, but even this is not conclusive when weighed against considerations of content. The main issue is whether Calcidius is to be regarded as exclusively dependent on Middle Platonist sources or as influenced also by the Timaeus commentary of Porphyry. In fact, there are sufficient indications that, unless Calcidius was being very selective (which does not seem to be his method), he knows nothing of Porphyry. His work seems primarily to be a translation of a number of Middle Platonist or Peripatetic Greek sources (or even of a single such source). Identifiable sources include the second century Peripatetic Adrastus of Aphrodisias, who wrote a commentary on the Timaeus concentrating on the mathematical and 'scientific' aspects, and the Neo-Pythagorean Numenius. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-calcidius-116926.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cajetan-thomas-vio-116925.html Thomas de Vio, better known as Cajetan, has long been considered to be the outstanding commentator on the philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas. He has had a great influence not only on discussions about Aquinas' theory of analogical predication regarding God and creatures but also on discussions about Aquinas' fundamental notions of essence and existence. On both counts his interpretations are at variance with Aquinas himself. He also set himself in opposition to Aquinas when he denied in his later writings that the immortality of the human soul could be demonstrated, arguing that it is a doctrine that must be accepted simply on faith, like the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. His explication of Aquinas' cognitive psychology is an interesting development that goes beyond Aquinas. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cajetan-thomas-vio-116925.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cabral-amilcar-116924.html Amílcar Cabral was founder and leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), which led a war of liberation in the Portuguese colonies of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde that ended with the recognition of their joint independence by the Portuguese government in October 1974. Cabral was assassinated in 1973, the victim of an attempted coup aimed at taking over the PAIGC leadership. Thus he did not live to see the independence for which he had struggled. Cabral's importance for African political philosophy lies in his having developed an undogmatic left-wing analysis of the situation of the Guinean peasantry. While familiar with Marxist analysis, Cabral was always willing to adapt it to the empirical realities of the Guinean situation. His writings on the role of culture in the nationalist struggle, which have important affinities with Gramsci, combine theoretical ingenuity with detailed local knowledge. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cabral-amilcar-116924.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cabanis-pierre-jean-116923.html Cabanis was born in Cosnac in the Limousin. He was registered as a medical doctor in Reims in 1784, after seven years' study in Paris (during which he had already become a protégé of Mme d'Helvétius, encountering Condillac, Condorcet, Benjamin Franklin, Mirabeau and Theodore Roosevelt in her circle). His radical ideas about the reform of medical practice and education would perhaps have made it difficult for him to be accepted by the medical establishment in Paris at the time. However, he did not make his profession as a doctor (though he treated Mirabeau, and published an account of Mirabeau's illness and death in 1791). Instead, he put his medical knowledge to political and philosophical use. In 1790, he wrote his Observations sur les hôpitaux (Observations on Hospitals) and this led to public office, including membership of the Commission on Hospitals, under the revolutionary régime. He also took an active interest in educational reform. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cabanis-pierre-jean-116923.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-banez-domingo-116922.html Domingo Báñez, once spiritual advisor to St Teresa of Avila, was a prominent Spanish theologian. In his commentaries on the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, he challenged an essentialist reading of Aquinas, and insisted that esse (being) was an act. He is best known for his opposition to Molina's attempt to reconcile human free choice with divine foreknowledge, providence and grace. He also wrote on logic, and commented on Aristotle's On Generation and Corruption. Báñez studied at Salamanca, where he entered the Dominican Order in 1546. He held a series of teaching and administrative posts in Avila, Alcalá, Valladolid and Toro. In 1577 he returned to the University of Salamanca where he taught theology until he retired in 1600. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-banez-domingo-116922.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-byzantine-philosophy-116921.html Although early Christian writers on the ascetic theory of life had adopted the term philosophia, the earliest manifestations of autonomous philosophical thought in Byzantium appeared in the ninth and tenth centuries with the ‘Christian humanists' such as Photios, Patriarch of Constantinople, Arethas of Patras, Bishop of Caesarea, and Leo the Mathematician (or Philosopher). Photios elaborated the doctrine of the Trinity in the dispute over the procession of the Holy Spirit (the filioque dispute) using the armoury of Aristotle's theory of substances (the distinction between ‘first substance' and ‘second substance'). He was keenly interested in Aristotelian logic, rejecting Plato's self-existent ‘ideas', and he collected works by many ancient writers. Arethas copied and commented on works by Plato and Aristotle and wrote critical notes on logic, ontology and psychology. In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, the growing study of philosophy reflects the great boost given to higher education and learning by the foundation in 1045 of the ‘University' of Constantinople. Among the teachers known as hypatoi tōn philosophōn (first among philosophers) were Michael Psellos, undoubtedly the most important and most prolific of the Byzantine polymaths, Ioannes Italos, Theodoros of Smyrna, Eustratios of Nicaea and Michael of Ephesos. The last two are better known as commentators on Aristotle. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-byzantine-philosophy-116921.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-butler-joseph-116920.html For more than a century following the death of Thomas Hobbes in 1679, philosophers, theologians, and thinking men generally felt obliged to address his alleged reduction of morality to self-interest and his alleged banishment of God from the universe. Both views represent misreadings of Hobbes, but both quickly settled into received interpretations of him. The first view provoked an outpouring of moral philosophy that today, still, we associate with the work of the Cambridge Platonists, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, Francis Hutcheson and, eventually, David Hume and Adam Smith. The second became allied with the claims of the British deists and so with the writings of men such as Herbert of Cherbury, John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb, and, later, Hume, Edward Gibbon and Thomas Paine. The two views were connected, since religious scepticism was widely thought to be destructive of morality. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-butler-joseph-116920.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-enseignement-civilisation-116919.html xxx ?||L'enseignement de la civilisation, ou plutôt la découverte d'une culture étrangère par les apprenants, occupe une place particulièrement importante dans l'enseignement d'une langue étrangère puisque l'on ne peut pas traiter une langue uniquement comme corps de structures et de règles grammaticales. C'est un organisme vivant qui bouge, qui se développe et qui change au fur et à mesure du temps, en présentant l'intérêt non négligeable d'une approche culturelle en classe de langues.    D'une manière générale, on remarque actuellement un grand engouement pour l'enseignement de la civilisation en didactique des langues alors que, dans les méthodes structurales, elle était considérée comme secondaire par rapport à la langue française qu'il fallait enseigner avant tout. Cette période d'ignorance ou d'isolation étant passée, on l'associe aujourd'hui intégralement aux cours de langues vivantes. Les trois raisons suivantes nous convainquent :  - la culture est à la fois le principe, la finalité et le moteur de l'apprentissage puisqu'on apprend pour communiquer avec les locuteurs et, sans culture, la langue resterait lettre morte,  - la linguistique prouve que la communication dépasse largement le cadre des mots ou la structure des phrases, et la civilisation nous permet d'accéder à ces sous-entendus, connotations, etc.  - les relations internationales exigent non seulement des compétences linguistiques mais aussi culturelles pour rapprocher les personnes, les peuples, afin de favoriser la paix dans le monde. || Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-enseignement-civilisation-116919.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-desir-chez-rousseau-nouvelle-heloise-116918.html Rousseau affirme que l'attente d'un bonheur procure plus de bonheur que la réalisation de cette attente. Cela grâce à l'imagination de l'Homme qui est très développée et qui nous permet de jouir de ce que l'on crée virtuellement. Nous verrons que différentes idées de Rousseau sont ici réfutables. Tout d'abord le désir n'apporte selon lui que le bonheur, puis le bonheur est dans le désir et non dans l'acquisition, ensuite il envisage le bonheur d'un point de vu uniquement psychique et enfin il considère que le monde des illusions est le seul digne d'être habité. Selon Rousseau le désir n'apporte que du bonheur. Or le désir est la conséquence d'un manque, d'un désir d'échapper à une souffrance, cela naît donc d'une chose négative. L'homme qui désire est insatisfait, il manque de quelque chose qui lui apporterait un bonheur. Il ne sait pas s'il l'obtiendra, il doute, a peur, comment ces sentiments pourraient apporter un état de bonheur ? En outre c'est une envie tournée vers le futur, on désire quelque chose qu'on obtiendra peut être. Or penser uniquement à un plaisir futur et incertain nous fait oublier les plaisirs présents, nous ne vivons pas notre vie pleinement. Par exemple comme l'affirme D'Holbach les hommes désirent que leur âme soit immortelle car ils ne veulent pas cesser d'exister, ils croient donc en l'au delà et l'attendent avec enthousiasme. Or ce désir les empêchent de profiter de leur vie présente car ils ne désirent que la vie après la mort. C'est un plaisir incertain, cela signifie que certains hommes oublient des plaisirs qui sont devant aux et dont ils pourraient jouir pour se consacrer à des plaisirs qui peut être ne s'accompliront jamais. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-desir-chez-rousseau-nouvelle-heloise-116918.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-comment-choses-estimes-bonnes-peuvent-nous-tromper-116917.html xxx ? Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-comment-choses-estimes-bonnes-peuvent-nous-tromper-116917.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-faut-craindre-developpement-raison-affaiblisse-liens-sociaux-116916.html xxx ? Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-faut-craindre-developpement-raison-affaiblisse-liens-sociaux-116916.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-art-exprime-epoque-116915.html Dans l'esprit des premiers hommes, nous semble-t-il, deux ordres de possibilités s'opposèrent. D'un côté une série d'activités efficaces, en quelque sorte raisonnées, s'offrait à celui qui chassait à l'aide d'armes fabriquées, pourvoyant de cette manière à sa subsistance. Il disposait de haches de pierre, d'épieux à la pointe de pierre. Il façonnait en outre en forme de boules des pierres destinées au jet. Ses outils lui permettaient de dépecer méthodiquement les animaux, d'en prélever la fourrure. [...] Mais comme tous ceux qui l'ont suivi, le Moustérien se heurta à la seule puissance qui décidément l'humiliait : il lui fallut comme nous s'incliner devant la mort; devant la mort échouait décidément son effort industrieux. Le domaine de l'activité efficace s'était ouvert à son intelligence naissante. Le domaine de la mort en était la limite, c'est comme tel qu'il se révéla à l'esprit de ces premiers hommes: tout à coup la mort introduisait ce qui dément la valeur de l'activité humaine, ce qui bouscule le sentiment de capacité lié aux premières lueurs de l'intelligence. L'animal n'attend rien et la mort ne le surprend pas, la mort échappe en quelque sorte à l'animal. Mais l'homme, qui travaille, attend le résultat de son travail, et la mort détruit la tranquille attente qui est le fondement de toute pensée. La pensée est d'abord une attente : la mort répond à cette attente en l'anéantissant, la mort se révèle à nous par l'anéantissement de cette attente qui est la base de notre vie. C'est de cette manière que l'activité intelligente de l'homme le mit en présence de la mort, en présence de la négation radicale, terrifiante, de ce qu'il est essentiellement. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-art-exprime-epoque-116915.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-vient-incomprehension-entre-cultures-116914.html xxx ? Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-vient-incomprehension-entre-cultures-116914.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-satisfaction-nos-desirs-faut-attendre-bonheur-116913.html Toutefois, le plaisir et le bonheur ne peuvent être absolument séparés. L'homme, en tant que vivant, est fortement incliné à poursuivre des buts premiers, ceux qui sont induits par son corps : manger, boire, jouir de son corps sexué. Tout le pousse à chercher son bien-être, à désirer ce qui le favorise, à fuir ce qui lui apporte désagrément et douleur. C'est ce que l'hédonisme antique, qui affirmait que l'accès au bonheur passait nécessairement par le plaisir, avait compris. Ainsi pour Epicure, le plaisir ou la satisfaction du désir est un bien. Mais s'il affirme que l'homme doit s'employer à rechercher le plaisir pour être heureux, il ne doit pas en faire la visée ultime ou le but de toutes ses actions. Le plaisir ne doit pas être recherché pour lui-même, mais seulement pour éviter la souffrance et avoir la paix de l'âme. Le bonheur n'est pas le fruit de la luxure : « Ce ne sont pas les beuveries et les orgies continuelles, les jouissances des jeunes garçons et des femmes, les poissons et autres mets qu'offrent une table de luxueuse qui engendrent une vie heureuse, mais la raison vigilante qui recherche minutieusement les motifs de ce qu'il faut choisir et de ce qu'il faut éviter et qui rejette les vaines opinions, grâce auxquelles le plus grande trouble s'empare des âmes » (« Lettre à Ménécée »). Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-satisfaction-nos-desirs-faut-attendre-bonheur-116913.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-arraisonnement-homme-par-technique-116912.html Pour Heidegger, l'ère moderne réalise le projet cartésien de maîtrise et de domination de la nature. Elle est l'ère où se manifeste dans toute son ampleur la technique, la mobilisation de toutes les forces en vue d'une exploitation. Toute la nature est devenue, non plus objet de contemplation ou de pensée, mais un fonds exploitable et calculable, y compris l'homme lui-même qui n'en est que le gérant. Ainsi, le Rhin, dont le poète savait dire le mystère, n'est plus qu'une énergie électrique potentielle, qu'une source d'énergie sommée de se livrer (La Question de la technique). Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-arraisonnement-homme-par-technique-116912.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-religion-obstacle-liberte-116911.html « Le dernier acte est sanglant quelque belle que soit la comédie en tout le reste. On jette enfin de la terre sur la tête et en voilà pour jamais » (Pensée §165). Cette image pascalienne doit nous renvoyer à deux choses. Premièrement, à ce que nous n'avons de cesse de fuir, notre condition marquée entre autre par ce destin auquel nous sommes tous conviés: la mort. Deuxièmement, à ce manque en nous d'un discours qui ne s'adresse pas seulement à la raison (philosophie) mais aussi et surtout au coeur (religion). Comment être libre lorsque notre vie est entièrement basée sur une fuite, celle de cette condition qui est la notre et qui nous effraie à chaque fois que notre pensée s'y attarde? Comment être libre quand quelque chose se joue en nous, des mécanisme affectifs devant lesquels la philosophie est peu bavarde? Ce que nous sommes, ce que nous ressentons, ne trouve son sens qu'en dehors d'une philosophie pétrie d'orgueil et qui ne jure que par la raison: à savoir, dans la sphère religieuse qui traite de ce qui nous préoccupe Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-religion-obstacle-liberte-116911.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-philosophie-nous-detache-realite-116910.html - Le monde, dans le quotidien, nous apparaît à travers des manifestations sensibles caractérisées par leur variété, mais aussi par leur fugacité. Il concerne en priorité la perception. — Or il est incontestable que la philosophie, depuis Platon, se méfie de la perception, n'y trouvant que source d'erreurs et défilé d'apparences inconsistantes (on peut faire une référence — mais rapide — à l'allégorie de la caverne). Elle privilégie le concept qui, en tant qu'universel et séparé des apparences, est bien abstrait: détaché de tout «accident», de toute «qualité», du monde immédiat. — Toute la bibliothèque philosophique et la pensée qu'elle transmet va dans ce sens: la réflexion, au moins dans un premier temps, met le monde à distance — te qui suppose qu'elle s'en détache — et substitue à l'immédiateté du sensible un ensemble d'idées, de concepts qui, en se prétendant universellement applicables, commencent par négliger chaque cas particulier. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-philosophie-nous-detache-realite-116910.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-peut-parler-modele-civilisation-116909.html Ce principe, si on l'appliquait rétrospectivement, disqualifierait presque toutes les civilisations passées, qui ont recouru à l'esclavage et qui ont généralement sacrifié l'individu au profit de la collectivité. Or ce dernier point justement mérite réflexion. Deux grandes options s'opposent ici : l'une, la nôtre, privilégie l'individu, la personne, l'autre, plus ancienne mais encore présente, vise avant tout un bien supérieur, dépassant absolument le bien propre de chacun : ce peut être la prospérité de la cité ou le service d'un dieu ou de l'incarnation d'un dieu. On peut penser que ces options différentes ont chacune leur logique et leur cohérence, sans quoi les civilisations qui les ont adoptées ne dureraient pas ou n'auraient pas duré longtemps. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-peut-parler-modele-civilisation-116909.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-contradiction-constitue-handicap-philosophie-116908.html L'entendement distingue sa réflexion subjective de la vérité même, il ne se voit pas lui-même dans le phénomène, dans l'objectalité qui pour lui a sa dynamique propre. C'est grâce à l'erreur que la conscience naturelle, ou naïve, en arrive à réfléchir sur ses observations. Cette conscience établit des déterminations universelles au regard de la vie multiforme et infiniment variée qu'elle observe dans ces particularités. La conscience empirique s'attribue l'erreur, puisque son but, sa satisfaction, est de conserver la positivité abstraite des êtres, leur égalité à soi. L'objet étant toujours déjà là dans le monde, c'est au sujet qu'il revient d'abolir la contradiction qui menace la positivité. Le sujet tient ainsi déjà une réflexion sur lui-même, puisqu'en tant qu'engagé dans un monde, il se tient pour seul responsable des illusions qui peuvent l'affecter. Dès lors, il constatera rapidement, en observant un bâton dans l'eau, que celui-ci est brisé ; mais il déterminera qu'il n'est brisé que pour lui-même, et non en soi. Il faut abolir la contradiction, et cette expérience est à l'origine de ce principe formel qui est le principe de non-contradiction. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-contradiction-constitue-handicap-philosophie-116908.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-religion-asile-pour-pauvres-116907.html xxx ? Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-religion-asile-pour-pauvres-116907.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-ignorance-source-connaissance-116906.html xxx ? Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-ignorance-source-connaissance-116906.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cru-excluent-ils-116905.html Une croyance plus radicale est au fondement de la possibilité du savoir, et peut-être dans les deux acceptions de ce dernier (intellectuel et pratique). Il s'agit simplement de la croyance en la réalité du monde extérieur. Pour connaître les choses, il faut d'abord croire à leur existence, serait-elle abstraite et uniquement rationnelle. En douter conduit d'abord au scepticisme pyrrhonien (qui doute de tout, et même du fait de douter), puis au solipsisme absolu, fruit de l'hypothèse cartésienne du rêve généralisé. La réalité de l'existence des choses à connaître est peut-être impossible à prouver, mais uniquement susceptible d'adhésion par un acte de croyance. Moore, pourtant, proposa une preuve logique de l'existence du monde extérieur monde au sujet qui le pense, mais celle-ci apparaît d'une trivialité sans grande conséquence philosophique, pour ne pas dire affligeante. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-cru-excluent-ils-116905.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-science-repond-besoin-verite-116904.html La science n'apportera qu'un type de réponse. • Les sciences ne satisfont pas notre désir de vérité unitaire : non seulement les sciences n'apportent pas une authentique, stable et totale satisfaction à l'homme souffrant et désirant, s'interrogeant sur sa mort et sur sa destinée, sur le sens de sa vie, mais elles nous laissent devant un champ théorique éparpillé, fragmenté, décevant, malgré un effort de communication que nul ne peut nier. Que faire de cette science en morceaux, de cette fragmentation du champ des savoirs ? Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-science-repond-besoin-verite-116904.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-etat-garantit-interet-general-116903.html Effectivement, par bien des aspects, il semble que l'on puisse suivre Marx & Engels dans L'Idéologie allemande lorsqu'ils parlent de l'Etat comme d'une communauté illusoire dont l'intérêt général ne serait que le reflet de la classe dominante. Or à l'aune d'une lutte des classes, il apparaît alors évident pour eux qu'un intérêt commun à l'ensemble d'une société est impossible en l'état : […] La division du travail implique du même coup la contradiction entre l'intérêt de l'individu singulier ou de la famille singulière [la société civile] et l'intérêt collectif de tous les individus qui sont en relation entre eux ; qui plus est, cet intérêt collectif n'existe pas seulement, mettons dans la représentation, en tant qu'« intérêt universel », mais d'abord dans la réalité comme dépendance réciproque des individus entre lesquels se partage le travail. C'est justement cette contradiction entre l'intérêt particulier et l'intérêt collectif qui amène l'intérêt collectif à prendre, en qualité d'État, une forme indépendante, séparée des intérêts réels de l'individu et de l'ensemble et à faire en même temps figure de communauté illusoire, mais toujours sur la base concrète des liens existant dans chaque conglomérat de famille et de tribu, tels que les liens du sang, langage, division du travail à une vaste échelle et autres intérêts ; et parmi ces intérêts nous trouvons en particulier, comme nous le développerons plus loin, les intérêts des classes déjà conditionnées par la division du travail, qui se différencient dans tout groupement de ce genre et dont l'un domine les autres. Il s'ensuit que toutes les luttes à l'intérieur de l'État, la lutte entre la démocratie, l'aristocratie et la monarchie, la lutte pour le droit de vote, etc., etc., ne sont que les formes illusoires sous lesquelles dont menées ces luttes effectives des différentes classes entre elles […] et il s'ensuit également que toute classe qui aspire à la domination […] doit conquérir d'abord le pouvoir politique pour représenter à son tour son intérêt propre comme étant l'intérêt universel […] ».? Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-etat-garantit-interet-general-116903.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-quoi-lois-nature-peuvent-elles-pas-appliquer-societe-humaine-116902.html xxx ? Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-quoi-lois-nature-peuvent-elles-pas-appliquer-societe-humaine-116902.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-langage-parvient-tout-exprimer-116901.html L'inexprimable for intérieur. C'est donc l'ensemble de nos émotions, de nos sentiments qui échapperaient à l'expression. Certes, les passions se manifestent par des symptômes extérieurs, elles s'expriment donc d'une certaine façon. Mais ces signes révèlent la présence des sentiments et non réellement leur essence ou leur contenu exact, qui demeureraient le secret de l'âme. Inexprimable ou confus ? Mais Hegel nous met en garde contre cette représentation : ce qui ne peut s'exprimer, dit-il, n'est pas une réalité trop singulière ou subtile pour être manifestée au dehors, mais un ensemble confus, évanescent. Doué de conscience, l'homme doit pouvoir tout exprimer - du moins tout ce qu'il a pris la peine d'humaniser, de hisser des méandres de son psychisme jusqu'à la conscience. Il n'est donc guère étonnant que ce soit à l'occasion d'une critique de l'ineffable que Hegel ait écrit : « C'est dans les mots que nous pensons ». Dire que nous pensons en mots, comme on paye en francs ou en dollars, c'est définir le mot comme l'unité de la pensée. Loin d'être deux mondes radicalement extérieurs, « incommensurables » comme le disait Bergson, le langage et la pensée apparaissent ici comme absolument consubstantiels. ? Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-langage-parvient-tout-exprimer-116901.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-business-ethics-116900.html Business ethics is the application of theories of right and wrong to activity within and between commercial enterprises, and between commercial enterprises and their broader environment. It is a wide range of activity, and no brief list can be made of the issues it raises. The safety of working practices; the fairness of recruitment; the transparency of financial accounting; the promptness of payments to suppliers; the degree of permissible aggression between competitors: all come within the range of the subject. So do relations between businesses and consumers, local communities, national governments and ecosystems. Many, but not all, of these issues can be understood to bear on distinct, recognized groups with their own stakes in a business: employees, shareholders, consumers, and so on. The literature of business ethics tends to concentrate on 'stakeholders' - anyone who occupies a role within the business or who belongs to a recognized group outside the business that is affected by its activity - but not in every sort of business. Corporations are often discussed to the exclusion of medium-sized and small enterprises. Theories of right and wrong in business ethics come from a number of sources. Academic moral philosophy has contributed utilitarianism, Kantianism and Aristotelianism, as well as egoism and social contract theory. There are also theories that originate in organized religion, in the manifestos of political activists, in the thoughts of certain tycoons with an interest in social engineering, and in the writings of management 'gurus'. Recently, business ethics has been affected by the ending of the Cold War, and the breakdown of what were once command economies. These developments have encouraged enthusiasts for the market economy to advocate moral and political ideas consistent with capitalism, and the handing over to private companies of activity in certain countries that has long been reserved for the state. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-business-ethics-116900.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-bushi-philosophy-116899.html Bushi is one of several terms for the warrior of premodern Japan; samurai is another. The 'way of the warrior' - that is, the beliefs, attitudes and patterns of behaviour of the premodern Japanese warrior - is commonly called bushidō (literally, the 'way of the bushi'). However, bushidō is actually a phrase of rather late derivation, and in premodern times was never exclusively used to describe the warrior way. Two of the earliest and most enduring phrases for the way of the warriors who rose in the provinces of Japan in the late ninth and tenth centuries were the 'way of the bow and arrow' and the 'way of the bow and horse'. These phrases, however, referred to little more than prowess in the military arts, the most important of which, as the second phrase clearly specifies, were horse riding and archery. For many centuries no one in Japan undertook to define systematically what the way of the warrior in a larger sense was or should be. Warrior beliefs, ideals and aspirations - including loyalty, courage, the yearning for battlefield fame, fear of shame and an acute sense of honour and 'face' - were widely recognized, but neither warriors nor others apparently felt the need to codify them in writing. Not until the establishment of the Tokugawa military government (shogunate) in 1600, which brought two and a half centuries of nearly uninterrupted peace to Japan, did philosophers begin to study and write about the warrior way (bushidō). Concerned about the meaning and proper role of a ruling warrior class during an age of peace, philosophers posited that warriors should not only maintain military preparedness to deal with fighting that might occur, but should also develop themselves, through education based primarily on Confucianism, to serve as models and moral exemplars for all classes of Japanese society. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-bushi-philosophy-116899.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-burthogge-richard-116898.html Richard Burthogge, perhaps the first but certainly not the least interesting modern idealist, was a minor philosopher who responded to a variety of English and Dutch influences. His epistemology, constructed as an undogmatic framework within which to debate theological and metaphysical issues, contains remarkable resemblances to later, even recent idealism. He argued that, since our faculties help to shape their objects, we never know things as they are in themselves: all the immediate objects of thought are appearances. 'Metaphysical truth' is therefore beyond us, but we approach 'logical truth' in so far as our notions harmonize or cohere with one another and with experience. In this spirit, Burthogge advocated a tolerant reasonableness in religion, while in metaphysics he postulated a universal mind, united with matter, of which individual minds are local manifestations. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-burthogge-richard-116898.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-burley-walter-116897.html Active in the first half of the fourteenth century, Burley received his arts degree from Oxford before 1301 and his doctorate in theology from Paris before 1324. At one time a fellow of Merton College, he - along with Thomas Bradwardine, Richard Kilvington and others - became a member of the household of Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and served several times as envoy of the King of England to the papal court. Despite his extra-university activities, Burley continued to compose Aristotelian commentaries and to engage in disputations to the end of his life. A clear and prolific writer, Burley has been labelled an 'Averroist' and a 'realist' because of his arguments against Ockham, but it would perhaps be more accurate to see him as a middle-of-the-road Aristotelian whose intellectual activity coincided with the transition between the approaches of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus on the one hand and those of William of Ockham and the Oxford Calculators on the other. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-burley-walter-116897.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-burke-edmund-116896.html Edmund Burke's philosophical importance lies in two fields, aesthetics and political theory. His early work on aesthetics, the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), explored the experiential sources of these two, as he claimed, fundamental responses, relating them respectively to terror at the fear of death and to the love of society. Active in politics from 1759, and Member of Parliament from 1765, he wrote and delivered a number of famous political pamphlets and speeches, on party in politics - Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (1770), on the crisis with the American colonies - On Conciliation with America (1775), on financial reform and on the reform of British India - Speech on Mr Fox's East India Bill (1783). While clearly informed by a reflective political mind, these are, however, pièces d'occasion, not political philosophy, and their party political provenance has rendered them suspect to many commentators. His most powerful and philosophically influential works were written in opposition to the ideas of the French Revolution, in particular Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which has come to be seen as a definitive articulation of anglophone political conservatism. Here Burke considered the sources and desirability of social continuity, locating these in a suspicion of abstract reason, a disposition to follow custom, and certain institutions - hereditary monarchy, inheritance of property, and social corporations such as an established Church. His Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) insisted on the distinction between the French and Britain's revolution of 1688; while his final works, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795), urged an uncompromising crusade on behalf of European Christian civilization against its atheist, Jacobin antithesis. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-burke-edmund-116896.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-buridan-john-116895.html Unlike most other important philosophers of the scholastic period, John Buridan never entered the theology faculty but spent his entire career as an arts master at the University of Paris. There he distinguished himself primarily as a logician who made numerous additions and refinements to the Parisian tradition of propositional logic. These included the development of a genuinely nominalist semantics, as well as techniques for analyzing propositions containing intentional verbs and paradoxes of self-reference. Even in his writings on metaphysics and natural philosophy, logic is Buridan's preferred vehicle for his nominalistic and naturalistic vision. Buridan's nominalism is concerned not merely with denying the existence of real universals, but with a commitment to economize on entities, of which real universals are but one superfluous type. Likewise, his representationalist epistemology accounts for the difference between universal and singular cognition by focusing on how the intellect cognizes its object, rather than by looking for some difference in the objects themselves. He differs from other nominalists of the period, however, in his willingness to embrace realism about modes of things to explain certain kinds of physical change. Underlying Buridan's natural philosophy is his confidence that the world is knowable by us (although not with absolute certainty). His approach to natural science is empirical in the sense that it emphasizes the evidentness of appearances, the reliability of a posteriori modes of reasoning and the application of certain naturalistic models of explanation to a wide range of phenomena. In similar fashion, he locates the will's freedom in our evident ability to defer choice in the face of alternatives whose goodness appears dubious or uncertain. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-buridan-john-116895.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-bultmann-rudolf-116894.html Rudolf Bultmann was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the period that immediately followed the Second World War. A founding member of the school of dialectical theology in the 1920s, he was a major New Testament scholar, who refined the method of form criticism. He argued that the Synoptic Gospels reveal not the historical Jesus, but the Christ of faith, the Christ-myth developed by the early church. The existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger was a major influence, and he adapted it to the needs of Christian theology, devising an existential access to faith. He contrasted Historie - objective, factual accounts of historical events - with Geschichte - the meaning that people choose to give to those events. One must demythologize the New Testament - strip it of its prescientific imagery - before one can interpret its significance for oneself. Bultmann defined biblical hermeneutics as an inquiry into the reality of human existence and proposed a new understanding of the person and teaching of Christ. Central to this is the concept of the kerygma, the proclamation of the salvation-event focused on Christ. It is in response to the kerygma that a human being can actively opt for faith. Bultmann reinterpreted the Lutheran doctrine of justification and the theology of the cross in the light of this. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-bultmann-rudolf-116894.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-bulgakov-sergei-nikolaevich-116893.html A luminary of the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance, Bulgakov moved from Marxism, to idealism, to Christianity in the early twentieth century. He rejected historical determinism, class struggle and all theories of progress that accept the suffering of one generation as a bridge to the happiness of another. He regarded the abolition of poverty as a moral imperative, insisted that Christianity mandates political and social reform, and wanted to create a new culture in which Orthodox Christianity would permeate every area of Russian life. His most important philosophical works, Filosofiia khoziaistva, chast' pervaia (The Philosophy of the Economy, Part I) (1912) and Svet nevechernyi (Unfading Light) (1917), reflect his turn to a Solov'ëvian mysticism which apotheosized transfiguration, Sophia and Godmanhood (Bogochelovechestvo). Bulgakov saw the cosmos as an organic whole, animated and structured by a World Soul, an entelechy that he called Sophia, Divine Wisdom. Sophia mediates between God and his creation, working mysteriously through human beings. In emigration, Bulgakov developed new interpretations of Orthodox dogmatics and participated in the ecumenical movement. His lifelong concerns were the Church in the world and the interconnection of religion and life. His writings on contemporary political, social and cultural issues helped inspire the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-bulgakov-sergei-nikolaevich-116893.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-buffon-georges-louis-leclerc-comte-116892.html Both as a scientist and as a writer, Buffon was one of the most highly esteemed figures of the European Enlightenment. In depicting the perpetual flux of the dynamic forces of Nature, he portrayed the varieties of animal and vegetable species as subject to continual change, in contrast with Linnaeus, whose system of classification based on physical descriptions alone appeared timeless. But Buffon's definition of a species in terms of procreative power excluded the evolutionary hypothesis that any species could become transformed into another. Hybrids, as imperfect copies of their prototypes, were in his scheme ultimately destined to become sterile rather than to generate fresh species. By virtue of the same definition, he judged that the different races of mankind formed family members of a single species, since the mating of humans of all varieties was equally fertile. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-buffon-georges-louis-leclerc-comte-116892.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-buffier-claude-116891.html A French Jesuit who flourished in the early eighteenth century, Buffier developed an outlook that he referred to as common-sense philosophy. While deeply influenced by the philosophies of Descartes and Locke, he saw their reliance on the testimony of inner experience to be conducive to scepticism concerning the external world. In reaction to this, he sought to establish the irrevocable claims of various 'first truths', which pointed towards external reality and qualified it in various respects. His work anticipates certain themes that surfaced later in the common-sense philosophy of Thomas Reid. Buffier was born in Poland to French parents. He pursued his studies in the Jesuit college at Rouen, and entered there as a novitiate at the age of 18. His career was spent almost entirely at the college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris, first as a teacher then, after 1699, as 'scriptor', a position that enabled him to devote all his energies to writing. He wrote extensively on philosophy, geography, history, and grammar (often in verse, to facilitate memorization) and made important contributions to the Dictionnaire de Trévoux and the Mémoires de Trévoux. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-buffier-claude-116891.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-buchner-friedrich-karl-christian-ludwig-louis-116890.html Ludwig Büchner wrote one of the most popular and polemical books of the strong materialist movement in later nineteenth century Germany, his Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter) (1855). He tried to develop a comprehensive worldview, which was based solely on the findings of empirical science and did not take refuge in religion or any other transcendent categories in explaining nature and its development, including human beings. When Büchner tried to expose the backwardness of traditional philosophical and religious views in scientific matters, his arguments had some force, but the positive part of his programme was not free of superficiality and naivety. Büchner's writings helped to strengthen progressive and rational traditions inside and outside philosophy, but they can also serve as the prime example of the uncritical nineteenth-century belief in science's capacity to redeem humankind from all evil. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-buchner-friedrich-karl-christian-ludwig-louis-116890.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-buddha-116889.html The title of Buddha is usually given to the historical founder of the Buddhist religion, Siddhārtha Gautama, although it has been applied to other historical figures, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, and to many who may be mythological. The religion which he founded was enormously successful and for a long period was probably the most widespread world religion. It is sometimes argued that it is not so much a religion as a kind of philosophy. Indeed, Buddhism bears close comparison with some of the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic world in this respect. The Buddha himself does not seem to have known the concept of a transcendent God and most schools of Buddhism have repudiated it on the grounds, among others, that it undermines personal responsibility for action. Buddhism could be considered as a kind of 'metareligion', open to many religious practices and tolerating others, but not identifiable with religious activity as such - more a kind of philosophical structuring of religion together with a methodology for self-development. Associated with this latter is an elaborate and sophisticated account of mental states and the functioning of consciousness. Characteristic of earlier Buddhist thought is a positive emphasis upon balanced states and a strong rejection of any form of underlying substance and most types of changelessness. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-buddha-116889.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-buber-martin-116888.html Martin Buber covered a range of fields in his writings, from Jewish folklore and fiction, to biblical scholarship and translation, to philosophical anthropology and theology. Above all, however, Buber was a philosopher, in the lay-person's sense of the term sense: someone who devoted his intellectual energies to contemplating the meaning of life. Buber's passionate interest in mysticism was reflected in his early philosophical work. However, he later rejected the view that mystical union is the ultimate goal of relation, and developed a philosophy of relation. In the short but enormously influential work, Ich und Du (I and Thou). Buber argued that the I emerges only through encountering others, and that the very nature of the I depends on the quality of the relationship with the Other. He described two fundamentally different ways of relating to others: the common mode of 'I-It', in which people and things are experienced as objects, or, in Kantian terms, as 'means to an end'; and the 'I-Thou' mode, in which I do not 'experience' the Other, rather, the Other and I enter into a mutually affirming relation, which is simultaneously a relation with another and a relation with God, the 'eternal Thou'. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-buber-martin-116888.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-bryce-james-116887.html James Bryce, British statesman and writer, combined a distinguished public life with scholarship in history, politics and law. As a jurist his interest lay in historical jurisprudence, but he is best remembered for his comparative politics. He contributed significantly to democratic political theory and to a liberal-historicist approach in philosophy of law. Bryce was born in Belfast in 1838, of Ulster Scottish descent. He was educated at Glasgow University and Oxford University. Although called to the Bar in 1867, he preferred scholarship, travel and public service. As Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford (1870-93), he reinvigorated the study of Roman law in Britain and helped to reform legal education. He entered Parliament as a Liberal MP in 1880 and held several ministerial offices between 1886 and 1906. He was Ambassador to the USA (1907-13), was elevated to the peerage as Viscount Bryce of Dechmont in 1914, and remained active in public life until his death. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-bryce-james-116887.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brunschvicg-leon-116886.html Brunschvicg occupied a central place in French philosophy during the first part of the twentieth century. In 1909 he became a professor at the Sorbonne, teaching there and at the École Normale Supérieure for the next thirty years. His indefatigable activity, wide curiosity and erudition made him a leading figure of French philosophy. His influence is manifest in the work of Bachelard, Piaget, Guéroult, Nabert, Koyré and Sartre. His most important work lay in the field of the philosophy of mathematics, where (among other things) he introduced French philosophers to the work of Frege and Russell. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brunschvicg-leon-116886.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-bruno-giordano-116885.html Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher of nature and proponent of artificial memory systems who abandoned the Dominican Order and, after a turbulent career in many parts of Europe, was burned to death as a heretic in 1600. Because of his unhappy end, his support for the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis, and his pronounced anti-Aristotelianism, Bruno has often been hailed as the proponent of a scientific worldview against supposed medieval obscurantism. In fact, he is better interpreted in terms of Neoplatonism and, to a lesser extent, Hermeticism (also called Hermetism). Several of Bruno's later works were devoted to magic; and magic may play some role in his many books on the art of memory. His best-known works are the Italian dialogues he wrote while in England. In these Bruno describes the universe as an animate and infinitely extended unity containing innumerable worlds, each like a great animal with a life of its own. His support of Copernicus in La Cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper) was related to his belief that a living earth must move, and he specifically rejected any appeal to mere mathematics to prove cosmological hypotheses. His view that the physical world was a union of two substances, Matter and Form, had the consequence that apparent individuals were merely collections of accidents. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-bruno-giordano-116885.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brunner-emil-116884.html Emil Brunner was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. He was a minister of the Swiss Reformed Church, a professor at the University of Zurich, and held distinguished lectureships in England, the USA and Japan. He joined the 'dialectical school' early in his career, but tried to rehabilitate natural theology, which led to a rift with Barth. His works were widely read and often served as basic texts in Reformed and Presbyterian seminaries. He rejected the historicist reduction of Christ to a wise teacher figure that was characteristic of neo-Protestantism. He was also critical of modern philosophical anthropologies - as propounded by Marx or Nietzsche, for example - because he felt that they reduced human essence to a single dimension. Only theological anthropology can fully interpret human essence; and of central importance here is the 'I-Thou encounter', whereby the fulfilment of the human 'I' is achieved through a relationship with the divine 'Thou'. Brunner also unfolded an original view on the relation of theology to philosophy. Reason, he argued, is essential for the elucidation and communication of faith. Philosophy, in so far as it indicates the limitations of reason, can serve to prepare us for the revelation of the Absolute. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brunner-emil-116884.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-browne-peter-116883.html Peter Browne, an Irish bishop, was a critic of Locke's theory of ideas. His chief philosophical concern was to explain how human beings can conceive of God. He proposed that God's existence and attributes can be understood analogically, by their real - though inevitably partial - resemblance to human things. He distinguished between analogy, which turns on a 'real resemblance', and metaphor, which turns on a merely imagined one. Browne entered Trinity College Dublin in 1682 and became a fellow in 1692. He served as provost of Trinity from 1699 until 1710, when he became Bishop of Cork and Ross in the south of Ireland. George Berkeley was a student and fellow at the college during Browne's tenure as provost. Years later, in the Fourth Dialogue of Alciphron, Berkeley, without naming Browne, attacked his analogical theology (Berkeley, G. §11). He took Browne to be denying that we have any notion at all of God's attributes. Browne's angry reply occupies the long final chapter of his Things Divine and Supernatural (1733). Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-browne-peter-116883.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brown-thomas-116882.html Thomas Brown was the last prominent figure in the Scottish philosophical tradition deriving from David Hume and Thomas Reid. Like Reid, he took the mind's knowledge about itself to be a datum it is pointless to challenge or try to justify, since no other grounds can be more certain for us. But he defended Hume's account of causation as nothing more than invariable succession. The mind, therefore, is a simple substance, whose successive states are affected by and affect the states of physical objects: the laws according to which these changes take place are no harder to grasp than the effects of gravitation. Brown's lectures, published as delivered daily to Edinburgh students, seek to classify the laws of the mind so that we can conveniently understand ourselves, and direct our lives accordingly; the last quarter of his course draws conclusions for ethics and natural religion. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brown-thomas-116882.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-broad-charlie-dunbar-116881.html A Cambridge contemporary of Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, C.D. Broad wrote on an exceptional range of topics, including causation, perception, the philosophy of space and time, probability and induction, mind and body, ethics and the history of philosophy. He typically set out a number of received positions on a topic, explored their consequences with great clarity, and then came to a cautious estimate of where the truth probably lay. However, Broad made some notable contributions of his own, especially on perception (he defended a representative theory), induction (he argued that our inductive practices require the existence of natural kinds), and time (he argued that tensed facts cannot be analysed away). Although his talents lay in very careful analysis, Broad insisted that there was a proper place in philosophy for metaphysical speculation; he particularly admired McTaggart, and his monumental Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy (1933, 1938) contains some of Broad's best work. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-broad-charlie-dunbar-116881.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brito-radulphus-116880.html Radulphus Brito was a prominent master of arts at the University of Paris around 1300. In order to secure the foundation of concepts in extramental reality, he devised a system of four types of 'intentions', first and second, abstract and concrete. As a philosopher of language, similar concerns made him claim a formal identity between the modes of signifying (of words) and the modes of being signified (of things). Probably a native of Brittany, Radulphus Brito (Ralph the Breton) must have been born about 1270, as he became a master of arts in Paris no later than 1296 and doctor of theology, also in Paris, about 1311-2. He died in 1320 or later. The extant body of Radulphus' work is mainly unedited. Most of it relates to his activity as a master of arts, and comprises questions on the Aristotelian Organon, including Porphyry's Isagōgē, the anonymous Six Principles and Boethius' De differentiis topicis (On Topical Differences), and on Aristotle's De anima, Physics, Meteorology and Metaphysics, as well as on some mathematical and astronomical textbooks. There are also sophismata (investigations of particular logical problems), and a work on grammatical theory, Quaestiones super Priscianum Minorem (Questions on Priscian Minor), also called Modi significandi (Modes of Signifying). From Radulphus' career in theology we have questions on Peter Lombard's Sentences, a Quodlibet and Quaestiones in Vesperis (Evening Questions). Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brito-radulphus-116880.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brinkley-richard-116879.html Richard Brinkley was a Franciscan theologian at the University of Oxford in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Probably at the request of his superiors, he undertook an attack on nominalism and conceptualism, resulting in his best-known work, Summa logicae (Synopsis of Logic). Other works include a commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, which survives only fragmentarily and in a student's shortened version. Brinkley had a significant influence on several generations of Oxford logicians and Parisian theologians. Brinkley was active at Oxford University sometime between 1350 and 1373. His successors called him Doctor Bonus or Doctor Valens (the 'Good Doctor' or 'Capable Doctor'). His principal surviving philosophical work is the lengthy Summa logicae (Synopsis of Logic) comprising over one hundred manuscript folia (roughly equivalent to 500 ordinary printed pages). Brinkley's extant theological works include fragments of his Commentum super Sententias, a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which also survives in a shortened version (abbreviatio) by Stephen Gaudet, who delivered his own commentary on the Sentences in 1361-2 (Kaluza 1989: 181-88). The same manuscript in which Gaudet's abbreviatio is found also contains Quaestiones magnae and Quaestiones breves (Long Questions and Short Questions) on various philosophical issues in theological contexts, probably also by Brinkley. Lost works by Brinkley include a Distinctiones scholasticae (Scholastic Distinctions) listed by John Bale in the sixteenth century, and a Quaestiones theologicales Biligam et Brinkel (Theological Questions of Brinkley and [Richard] Billingham) (probably a student's compilation), mentioned in an old Prague University library catalogue. The Lectura super Sententias (Lecture on the Sentences) mentioned by Bale is very likely identical with the Commentum. Bale also mentions a Determinationes (Determinations), but this work is probably by William of Foville, a Franciscan of Cambridge University. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brinkley-richard-116879.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-bridgman-percy-william-116878.html Bridgman founded high-pressure experimental physics and was committed to a classical empiricist view of science - a view challenged by twentieth-century developments in relativistic and quantum mechanics. He argued that developments in special relativity showed the experimental operations scientists performed were suitable substitutes for basic constituents of matter, thus founding operationalism, a methodological position which influenced logical positivism and, transformed beyond his recognition, was expropriated by the behaviourist school in the social sciences. As Bridgman grappled with the challenges of general relativity and quantum mechanics, he increasingly parted company with his positivistic and behaviourist followers by moving more towards subjectivist views of science and knowledge. These later views led him to see and explore intimate connections between foundations of scientific knowledge and human freedom. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-bridgman-percy-william-116878.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brentano-franz-clemens-116877.html Brentano was a philosopher and psychologist who taught at the Universities of Würzburg and Vienna. He made significant contributions to almost every branch of philosophy, notably psychology and philosophy of mind, ontology, ethics and the philosophy of language. He also published several books on the history of philosophy, especially Aristotle, and contended that philosophy proceeds in cycles of advance and decline. He is best known for reintroducing the scholastic concept of intentionality into philosophy and proclaiming it as the characteristic mark of the mental. His teachings, especially those on what he called descriptive psychology, influenced the phenomenological movement in the twentieth century, but because of his concern for precise statement and his sensitivity to the dangers of the undisciplined use of philosophical language, his work also bears affinities to analytic philosophy. His anti-speculative conception of philosophy as a rigorous discipline was furthered by his many brilliant students. Late in life Brentano's philosophy radically changed: he advocated a sparse ontology of physical and mental things (reism), coupled with a linguistic fictionalism stating that all language purportedly referring to non-things can be replaced by language referring only to things. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brentano-franz-clemens-116877.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-philosophy-brazil-116876.html It is possible to distinguish between European philosophy in Brazil and Brazilian philosophy. The former refers to Brazilians who participate in discussions of issues occurring in the European philosophic tradition without any reference to Brazilian reality and its problems; the latter to those Brazilian intellectuals who respond to the problems growing out of situations which have confronted the nation historically whether their philosophical orientations have originated in Europe or elsewhere. This entry focuses on the latter and generally follows a historical progression. This progression spans from the precabralian Tupi-Guarani speaking societies of eastern South America to the healthy development of Brazilian philosophy since 1950 after the founding of the Institute of Brazilian Philosophy. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-philosophy-brazil-116876.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-severite-vous-semble-necessaire-bonne-education-116875.html .../...   [Les sanctions n'ont jamais empêché de commettre  des fautes. Elles ne sont pas nécessaires. Les sanctions n'ont jamais empêché les criminels d'accomplir leurs forfaits. Elles ne sont pas dissuasives. Au contraire, elles renforcent le sentiment d'injustice. L'éducation ne doit pas  reposer sur l'idée de contrainte et la peur du châtiment.]||Ce document reprend les analyses du sujet: Les sanctions sont-elles nécessaires ?|| Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-severite-vous-semble-necessaire-bonne-education-116875.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-faut-entendre-par-vains-desirs-116874.html xxx ? Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-faut-entendre-par-vains-desirs-116874.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-pouvons-nous-dire-seul-aujourd-hui-compte-116873.html .../...    a. Le principal caractère du temps est son ordre qui s’impose à l’attention, et plus précisément, l’irréversibilité de cet ordre. On peut ainsi tout inverser, sauf le temps. On peut mettre les choses la tête en bas, mettre « la charrue avant les bœufs » même si c’est difficile, dangereux, ce n’est pas impossible. Mais on aura beau retourner sur ses pas, rien ne défera l’aller. Lavelle dira que « L’irréversibilité constitue pourtant le caractère le plus essentiel du temps, le plus émouvant, et celui qui donne à notre vie tant de gravité » (Du temps et de l’éternité). Jankélévitch affirmera : « Le voyageur revient à son point de départ, mais il a vieilli entre-temps ! » (L’irréversible et la nostalgie). Ainsi l’irrémédiable réside en ceci qu’une fois qu’on est parti d’un point du temps, celui-ci ne peut plus jamais être retrouvé, puisqu’il est toujours déjà passé.  .../...||Ce document reprend les analyses de la problématique: N'y a-t-il que le présent qui soit digne d'estime ?|| Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-pouvons-nous-dire-seul-aujourd-hui-compte-116873.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-comment-passe-mythe-mythos-raison-logos-116872.html Le mythe est une représentation culturelle qui a généralement pour objet un acte fondateur d'une civilisation ou permettant de l'expliquer. Plus exactement, le problème du mythe et du logos doit se saisir dans ce mouvement entre la connaissance scientifique et véritable c'est-à-dire l'avènement de la raison et de la science et la pré-connaissance de l'homme dans cette représentation imagée du vraisemblable. Mais comme le dit Lévi-Strauss dans Anthropologie structurale : « Pour comprendre ce qu'est un mythe, n'avons-nous donc le choix qu'entre la platitude et le sophisme ? Certains prétendent que chaque société exprime, dans ses mythes, des sentiments fondamentaux tels que l'amour, la haine ou la vengeance, qui sont communs à l'humanité tout entière. Pour d'autres, les mythes constituent des tentatives d'explication de phénomènes difficilement compréhensibles; astronomiques, météorologiques, etc. Quelle que soit la situation réelle, une dialectique qui gagne à tous coups trouvera le moyen d'atteindre à la signification ». Si le mythe représentation une connaissance préscientifique devant amener vers le logos (1ère partie), il n'en reste pas moins que le logos ne peut se faire d'après épuration du mythe (2nd partie), bien qu'il soit constitutif des sociétés humaines nous permettant alors de nous interroger sur la notion même de vérité (3ème partie). Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-comment-passe-mythe-mythos-raison-logos-116872.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-preuve-plus-forte-prejuge-116871.html Le terme préjugé est souvent employé dans un sens péjoratif, pour dénoncer l'erreur ou au moins l'absence de réflexion qui conduit un individu à adhérer à une idée fausse (dont il n'a pas pris la peine de contrôler le bien-fondé) voire à la défendre contre des idées justes, ou à condamner des individus au nom de cette idée. Une preuve peut se définir comme étant une démarche , une procédure qui amène l'esprit à admettre la vérité d'une affirmation tandis qu'un préjugé est considéré comme un fait admis sans pour autant être fondé . Face à ces définitions, il semble qu'on ne peut que s'incliner devant une preuve. Elle est le fruit d'un raisonnement, d'une instruction et de recherches, tandis que le préjugé ne s'appuie sur rien, si ce n'est de vagues impressions qui n'ont pas la solidité des fondements de la preuve. Or, bien souvent, une preuve présentée reste impuissante devant un préjugé malgré sa force démonstrative , alors même qu'elle semblerait la plus apte à le combattre, elle qui se définit comme un jugement réfléchi appuyé sur un raisonnement cohérent ou sur une vérification expérimentale. La preuve ne semble donc pas avoir toujours une efficacité réelle contre le préjugé car on s'accroche à nos préjugés, ils sont tenaces. Doit-on en conclure qu'une preuve est inefficace face à un préjugé ? Le problème n'est pas ici de savoir si la preuve est supérieure au préjugé, mais si elle peut détruire les préjugés en comprenant leurs mécanismes ou bien si elle reste impuissante face à eux. Est-ce qu'une preuve ne peut-elle pas éliminer un préjugé ? Peut-elle pourtant rester inefficace face à un préjugé ? A quel niveau une preuve aura-t-elle alors un pouvoir contre un préjugé ? Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-preuve-plus-forte-prejuge-116871.html http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brahmo-samaj-116870.html The Brahmo (or Brahma) Samaj (‘Society of Brahma') is the name of a theistic society founded by Raja Rammohun Roy in Calcutta in 1828. It advocated reform, and eventually abolition, of the traditional caste system, as well as legislation aimed at improving the social status of women and greater protection of children. Also dedicated to Hindu religious reform, the Brahmo Samaj stressed a monotheistic doctrine with a policy of tolerance and respect for all major religions of the world. The society split into two factions in 1866, largely over the issue of the speed of reform. Another split occurred in 1878 over whether the society's constitution was to be fully democratic. The democratic wing, called the Sadhāra􀊔 Brahmo Samaj (‘Universal Brahma Society'), is still active in India. Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT http://www.devoir-de-philosophie.com/dissertation-brahmo-samaj-116870.html