Une Lecture Matérielle d’un Poète Japonais: Kenji Miyazawa

This article offers an interpretation of Kenji Miyazawa’s fairy tales using the theory of material imagination proposed by Gaston Bachelard. Putting Bachelard’s theoretical framework to the test in a totally different culture, the article focuses on the way Japanese fairy tales make use of the four elements of Empedocles. These four elements in turn help to uncover an unconscious source of creative inspiration for Miyazawa, revealing the predominant role of earth in his work.     

Présence de Ferdinand Gonseth dans la pensée de Gaston Bachelard

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the influence of Ferdinand Gonseth's epistemological and philosophical reflection on Gaston Bachelard. This will be done on at least two levels: on the one hand, on the level of direct quotations of Gonseth's texts and notions made by Bachelard; on the other, on the level of an agreement between the two conceptions concerning some central issues— agreement that lets one suppose an influence of Gonseth on Bachelard or an identity between their views. One concludes recalling the notion of «subjectivité quelconque», suggested to Bachelard by the gonsethean idea of «logique comme physique de l'objet quelconque», and seeking to grasp the differences between Bachelard's notion of «sujet quelconque», and Gonseth's one ofhomo phenomenologicus. One could define Bachelard's and Gonseth's epistemologies as two phenomenologies of the man of science: this is their main common feature.     

Que Veut Dire Bachelard par « Rationalisme Appliqué »?

Bachelard was concerned with the processes whereby scientific knowledge is acquired, including the activity of knowing subjects. He did not equate reasoning with logic but rather argued that reasoning resulted from the use of mathematics in organizing both thought and experimental practices, which is why he conceived science as applied mathematics. This had material and technical implications, for Bachelard was concerned with the element of reason inherent in technical materialism as well as the concrete reality inherent in applied rationalism.     

Vasile Tonoiu et l’Esprit Scientifique Moderne une Approche Roumaine de Gaston Bachelard

One of the Romanian scholars who studied extensively the work of Bachelard in Romania is Professor Vasile Tonoiu from the University of Bucharest. We analyze in this article some of his thoughts regarding the epistemology of the French philosopher. Even though he lacks a historical vision of the epistemological works of Bachelard, Tonoiu did not fail to understand the spirit of the French neo-rationalism, which he compared to the field of Anglo-American epistemology.     

Gaston Bachelard et Albert Flocon la Rencontre d’un Philosophe Avec un Graveur

The paper focuses on the collaboration between the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard and the copper engraver Albert Flocon during the first decade after World War II. The exchange resulted in a number of books whose content is discussed.     

La réflexion Benthamienne sur les mathématiques

In 1814, Jeremy Bentham began to writeChrestomathia; this work is a presentation of what is useful to learn. However this text is, more generally, an entire organization of the knowledge of his time, through developing a «theory of fictions», which is a reflexion on concepts and a critics of nomenclatures. The following essay focuses on the fifty pages refering to mathematics in a work that considers the integrality of sciences at the beginning of the xix^th century and criticizes the FrenchEncyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert. A most singular idea expressed by the author, indirectly echoed by Gaston Bachelard through some books, is the conflict between concepts and their being designated by words. Signified, signifying entities and concepts are reciprocally adrift so that nobody, even the scholar, can keep control of these motions; what makes education unceasingly difficult.     

Heidegger and Cassirer on Science after the Cassirer and Heidegger of Davos

Summary

The paper exposes the views of Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger on the dynamics of the sciences of their day, as both developed them in the two decades after the encounter of the two philosophers in Davos in 1928. It emphasizes points of common concern, and it compares their positions to those of contemporary philosophers of science Gaston Bachelard and Edgar Wind.     

Ettore Majorana et la Philosophie

This article seeks to “take on” Ettore Majorana by establishing his “philosophical profile.” Doing so, one not only finds that the question of “fiction” was central to his work, but one also discovers the important superationalist — and European — dimension of his elective affinities with Giovanni Gentile Junior. Indeed their work was part of a constructive and inductive mathematism (Gaston Bachelard, later Robert Blanché) that was in opposition to classical geometricism (Emile Meyerson), and spiritualist Pythagoreanism (Arthur Eddington).     

Causalité Historique et Contemporanéité Relative: De la Relativité Einsteinienne aux Sciences Historiques

The construction of historical frame of reference based on the distinction between and articulation of phenomenological and chronological times. As it relativises the notion of simultaneity and inverts its relation to causality, the special theory of relativity can induce analogous modes of reflection on the themes of “contemporaneity” in the history of art (Panofsky) and in epistemology (Bachelard). This “relativist” method, often misunderstood, sheds light on both historical and presentist methods.     

Federigo Enriques,Gaston Bachelard et Ferdinand Gonseth

The development and complexity of the debate about the conceptual structure of science in the XX^th century gave birth to a new discipline, the history of epistemology, with the aim of giving a critical history of our «epistemological heritage» with suitable methodologies of a historical and theoretical nature. A critical history of the philosophy of science on more «Wenden», besides the neo-positivistic and post-neo-positivistic ones; in Italy and France, in the first period of the XX^th century, developed a tradition of epistemological research in a neo-rationalistic sense with specific theoretical characteristics, particularly for the relevance assigned to the historicity of science. The Italian-French epistemology favored the study of the relationship between mathematical and physical thought, such as can be characterized as a really autonomous physical-mathematical epistemology; this different historical and epistemological approach, first elaborate by Federigo Enriques and then by Gaston Bachelard, Albert Lautman and Ferdinand Gonseth, allowed us to understand in the 30's the «implicit philosophy» in the works of Kurt Gödel and Hermann Weyl.     

Relativités et puissances spectrales chez Gaston Bachelard

La Valeur inductive de la relativité is undoubtedly the least known «philosophical» work of Gaston Bachelard. Before an almost total silence, with the absence of readings, the replies are only «first type» interpretations supported by a certain discursive hearsay, but which have the authority of pseudo-standards. The Bachelardian positions are here confronted byLa Déduction relativiste of Émile Meyerson. The weight of the analysis will essentially rest upon a display of the Bachelardian device ofinduction and ofconstruction. The «inductive» preparation must be thought out on the electromagnetic model and the «constructivist» position is always linked to the effort of synthesis. In short, it is a veritablemeta-physics which seemingly must generate this «thought of the sciences».     

Resistance politics of non-violence: Jean Paulhan’s ’Fautrier the Enraged’ (1943)

ABSTRACT

The idea of adequately ‘representing’ violence was an important point of discussion amongst Resistance artists and intellectuals at the time of the French Occupation. In particular, intellectual resistant Jean Paulhan had written on the subject in his text introducing Jean Fautrier’s retrospective exhibition of November and December 1943 in occupied Paris, ‘Fautrier the Enraged’. While the thematic of the exhibition proposed an academic and traditional subject matter, Paulhan demonstrated that Fautrier’s typically matierist and anti-naturalistic approach was instrumental in ‘suggesting reality’. Fautrier’s individual creative process, Paulhan argued, led to a transparent experience to be shared between viewer and artist not only on an aesthetic level, but also from a political point of view. At the time of ‘Fautrier the Enraged”s writing, Paulhan had indeed been concerned with issues of political engagement, as is evident from his essay ‘The Flowers of Tarbes or Terror in Literature’ (1941), which reflects upon the human condition and is concerned with reconciling poetry, politics and ethics. The author believes that such questions were being addressed in Paulhan’s text on Fautrier and by Fautrier’s art and that an aesthetic reading of Paulhan’s text is inseparable from a political interpretation of Fautrier’s art within the context of the Occupation. Indeed, the aesthetic criteria used in Paulhan’s text as framework to his argument were then loaded with political meaning. For instance, Paulhan considered virtuosity as an essential artistic characteristic to be opposed to the art of imitation based on the technical ability to observe and simulate ‘nature’ as imposed by the occupants. With excerpts from Paulhan’s essay and exchange of letters with Fautrier as well as visual analysis of some of the artworks presented in the exhibition, this paper deals with the wider issues of ‘representation’ in the historical and cultural context of the Second World War in France.     

Épistémologie 1900 la tradition Française

The paper reviews the French tradition on epistemology and the reaction of the philosophical milieu in the early XX^th century against the crisis of philosophical concepts induced by the development of science. The 1^st International Congress on Philosophy of 1900 in Paris shows that philosophy tries to confirm her hegemony on sciences, but for this, philosophers have to embark into history of science. History of science becomes for philosophy the means to keep the highest place in the whole realm of knowledge: philosophers become historians of science and supervise historical institutes. It is still possible to show quite a continuity between the philosophical questions of 1900 and some similar problems raised in the years between the two world wars, especially by Gaston Bachelard.     

How Chinese scholars think about Chinese foreign policy

China’s assertive diplomacy in recent years has ignited intense debates among international relations (IR) scholars. Some argue that China’s assertive behaviour is rooted in its perception of increasing power and capabilities. Others suggest that it is US policies that triggered China’s assertive reactions. Relying on an original survey of China’s IR scholars conducted in Beijing in 2013 and using structural equation modelling, we empirically examine Chinese IR scholars’ attitude towards Chinese power versus the United States, their perceptions of US policy in Asia, and their preference for an assertive Chinese foreign policy. We find that both the power perception and policy reaction arguments make sense in accounting for Chinese IR scholars’ attitude regarding China’s assertive diplomacy. However, our research suggests that a more pessimistic view on Chinese power is more likely to be associated with a preference for an assertive foreign policy.     

L'«École de l'ETH» dans l'œuvre de Gaston Bachelard

We retrace here spectral presence in the work of Gaston Bachelard which we call «The School of the ETH». We have chosen three fundamental figures: hermann Weyl, Wolfgang Pauli and Gustave Juvet. For the first one, we consider his central and permanent place in the Bachelardian constitution of a philosophy which seeks to be at the height of the new «physical geometry» rigorously constructed in a Riemannian spirit. As for Pauli, we show an unsuspected affinity which is backed up by the remarkable analyses brought to it by philosophy: from the urgent construction of a «quantic metaphysics», founded on the implications of aPauli principle well understood, to the idea of a «metaphysical particle», going on to the decisive and so promising stakes of the «postulate of non-analysis». In the framework of this convergent polyconstruction of the «surrationalist», enterprise, we treat the third figure, less known but equally important, of the mathematician-philosopher Gustave Juvet.     

Martin Amis,neo-Orientalism,and hubris

This article puts forward a reading of Martin Amis’s 2008 book The Second Plane with an emphasis on its cultural politics. It reconsiders Amis’s book from a distance of almost a decade in light of recent global developments, including the rise of ISIS in the Middle East, the resurgence of acute Islamophobia in Europe and the US, and Tony Blair’s public acknowledgement of the shortcomings of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. With these factors in mind, the essay argues that it is possible to detect in Amis’s book early warning signs of how the West’s relationship with both Islamism and Islam would develop in the period following its publication. Drawing on William Connolly’s work on tragedy and Edward Said’s work on Orientalism, the essay argues that The Second Plane ought to be read as advancing a hubristic ‘neo-Orientalist’ cultural and political agenda which today threatens to lock much of the world into an ongoing cycle of recrimination and revenge. Against this, a case is made for an appreciation of the complex circumstances which give rise to suicide terrorism and for a sense of history largely absent from Amis’s writing on the subject.     

A Decadence Baedeker: D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death

This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the author’s own particular sexual politics. The novel is an experimental text striving to be a Gesemtkunstswerk, an integrated work that incorporates music, painting, poetry, regional folklore, and private thoughts about personal and national power. I discuss the novel’s themes of violent sexuality and the anxiety of powerlessness and explore their implications for the fascist political aesthetics in which D’Annunzio played a pioneering role.     

Manent and Perreau-Saussine on MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism

This essay examines Pierre Manent’s and Émile Perreau-Saussine’s critique of Alasdair MacIntyre. Both criticize MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelianism as an apolitical Aristotelianism, arguing that it is a deficient because it neglects Aristotle’s question of the best regime. In examining MacIntyre’s narrative biography of Justice O’Connor in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, I show the merit of this critique, in that it obscures what the applications of MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism are in the modern polity. While MacIntyre is not without a strong reply to their objections, I conclude that the deeper, unresolved disagreement MacIntyre has with Manent and Perreau-Saussine is over how to characterize modernity.     

‘One Belt,One Road’ and China’s emerging Afghanistan dilemma

This article argues that China’s approach to Afghanistan since the end of the Cold War has been shaped by the desire both for security in Xinjiang and for geopolitical advantage in Central Asia. While Beijing’s Xinjiang calculus was ascendant from 1991 to 2001, since 2001 a broader geopolitical calculus has emerged. This latter factor has been encapsulated in President Xi Jinping’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy, which, at its core, is an outgrowth of Beijing’s decades-long agenda to integrate Xinjiang and utilise this region’s unique geopolitical position to facilitate a China-centric Eurasian geo-economic system. While China’s Xinjiang calculus determines that it shares an interest with the USA in combating radical Islamism in Afghanistan (and Central Asia more broadly), the geopolitical calculus of the ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy points to a fundamental incompatibility between US and Chinese interests.