Aspects de la Fatigue Dans L’anthropologie Médiévale

Psychosomatic sympton of the sinful human soul, progress of natural and progressive wear of the psychic or corporeal machinery, exclusive property of the world of bodies or place of the obligatory link between the intellect and the body, fatigue crosses the philosophical and theological medieval literature. The various treatments of fatigue can, in their turn, serve as symptoms to differentiate the medieval anthropologies. This article presents four of their figures: the anthropology of danger elaborated by Augustin, greek and arabe medical diagnosis which is passed on the ^{xi th} century, and the readings of Aristotle’s psychology by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas in the xiii ^th century.     

Médecine et Discours sur L’Homme dans la Première Modernité

In the 16^th and 17^th centuries, medical knowledge was anthropological in so much as it produced a discourse on man whose ambition and legitimacy needed no justification. Underwritten by the belief that the body was an object of science, the epistemic horizons of a doctrina de homine emerged from the interaction of medical practice, particularly anatomy, with philosophy and theology in a specific framework - the reorganization of knowledge in Europe over the “long 16^th century”.     

L’épistémologie Transversale D’ettore Majorana

« Il valore delle leggi statistiche nella fisica e nelle scienze sociali » is Ettore Majorana’s only work on science. It offers a critique of classical determinism, establishing an analogy between the laws of quantum mechanics and social science and arguing that both are intrinsically linked to probability. This article first studies this argument from the standpoing of metaphysics, physics, and sociology, and then assesses the significance of this transversal epistemology.     

Délocaliser L’esprit

The cognitive sciences have breathed fresh air into the old problem of localizing mental functions, which was often laughed off. Regarding the most philosophical form of the question on the localization of the mind, authors such as Peirce, James, Wittgenstein, and most recently Descombes have imagined delocalizing the mind in order to spread the conviction that the idea itself of a location of the mental is meaningless and to criticize the localisationism of today’s cognitive scientists.     

L’Économie de la Création le Financement du Film Documentaire

The study of the financing of documentary films in France by its two main sources (TV channels and the film industry) enables us to uncover the conditions of possibility of the autonomy of filmmakers. It reveals an opposition between two patterns: a logic of “flows” within the audiovisual circuit (television) and a logic of “scarcity” within the film circuit, completed by new forms of financial support.     

L’histoire des mathématiques de l’Antiquité

Historical research, during the last half-century, has improved our knowledge of the mathematics of Antiquity. Texts from Egypt and Mesopotamia have been better understood and their elucidation has left behind the crude alternative between empricism and rationalism. The landscape offered by Greek science grew richer and became more varied: it is no longer possible to reduce it to the sole geometrical theory. The main problems which were raised by its history have been deeply discussed. Things being so, more general questions arise, from an epistemological or philosophical point of view. Does the search into some far past of a single «birth» of mathematics make any sense? What link, if any, is there between the form of mathematics in such and such a civilization and its social structure? Can cultural anthropology help to elucidate the variety and unity of mathematics among various peoples? From what time and under what conditions is it possible for a single united historical progress of mathematics to begin?     

Le Débat Wolffien Sur L’Idéalisme de Leibniz Lors de la Première Diffusion de la Monadologie Latine

This paper proposes a reconstruction of the Wolffian debate on Leibniz’s idealism arising from the initial response to Leibniz’s Monadology. This reconstruction requires us to revisit some problems central to the debate: an inaccurate translation of a term in the latin Monadology («le composé» is translated as «substantia composita»); status of body as composed substance; status of elements as simple substances from which bodies result (which goes against the Cartesian conception of substance); status of Leibnizian notions of perception, force and pre-established harmony; status of experience as a holistic and systematic process (which goes against its conception and the tabula rasa in Locke) in the Wolffian response and system. A thorough examination of the founding texts of the response (Bilfinger and Wolff) allows us to reconsider the relation between Leibniz and Wolff from a new perspective.     

Pétrarque: L’écriture Comme Philosophie

Petrarch is often considered as the founder of humanism and from then on classified in our division of knowledge on the side of literature, even though several times he claims to be in his writings on the side of philosophy. In retracing the thread of historiographic tradition to understand how Petrarch found himself to be placed outside of philosophy, we would like to examine thoroughly the interrogation on the relationship between literature and philosophy in the west of the xiv ^th century, and try to show how Petrarch tried to bring into existence a conception of philosophy as an art of living and writing, leaning on the social space of courses thus proposing an alternative to the learned constructions of the university world.     

La Découverte de L’Amérique

This article examines the significance accorded to the discovery of America in the period between 1492 and the publication of Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos in 1855. It argues that, the « discovery » of America was perceived as the « uncovering » of not merely a place, but of an epistemological challenge which both transformed, Europe’s intellectual dependence on Antiquity, and shaped its evolving perception of both space and time. It argues that, after the discovery, human history came to be seen, in terms of as series of inventions all of them related to human movement, which were projected, as more and more of the globe was « discovered » into an unpredictable future.     

L’autobiographie allemande du XVIIIe siècle,interprétée à la lumière de la sociologie de niklas Luhmann

With the help of Luhmann’s theory, this essay tries to define the connection between the boom of autobiographical writing in the late 18th century and the rise of the middle classes. Central to this, is his definition of “career”, with which he describes the individuals’ behaviour in the new functional bourgeois society. Strictly speaking, the individual gains personal and social identity, through his or her spoken or written autobiography as can be seen clearly in Jung-Stilling’s autobiography, which was published bit by bit. The individual hereby improves its prospects of social advancement. On the other hand, K. P. Moritz in hisAnton Reiser describes his hero’s life as the “career” of a failure whose hyperactive imagination interferes with the formation of his identity. Thus autobiographical writing in the 18th century shows itself as the literary autopoiesis of the authors’ concrete individuality.