Henri Pirenne et la révolution liégeoise de 1789 contribution á l'histoire de l'historiographie des révolutions

Notre article a pour objectif, après un bref rappel historique des épisodes de la Révolution liégeoise de 1789, de souligner l'apport de l'historien belge Henri Pirenne à l'historiographie des révolutions, de mieux cerner les fondements de sa pensée sur le sujet, et de comprendre la nature des oppositions qu'il a rencontrées et de l'héritage qu'il a laissé.     

Épistémologie, histoire et histoire des sciences dans les années 1930

During the 1930’s epistemology, history and history of science reciprocally and importantly influenced each other, even if indirectly. Philosophers and historians discussed the epistemological concepts emerging from the crisis of the exact sciences. They rejected Empirism and Idealism for an «experimental Rationalism» that connected theory and experience. It all caused a dialectical conception of science, fundamentally historical, but for which historians were still reluctant from a theoretical point of view. History was nevertheless the centre of philosophical and epistemological reflexions.     

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.     

Relativité et réalité Nottale, Simondon et le réalisme des relations

The exhaustion of the controversy about realism in physics, which is an epistemological consequence of the radical discrepancy between quantum mechanics and relativity, indicates the irrelevance of the traditional opposition between realism and antirealism. Since its purpose is the reunification of microphysics and macrophysics by the means of fractal space-time and scale relativity, Laurent Nottale's theory of Scale Relativity gets over this opposition by postulating the ontological value of the physical relations. The physicist's relational realism hence confirms spontaneously the intuitions of Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of nucleation, which considers the necessary recognition of the ontological value of relations in order to establish the «great synthesis of relativity and quantum physics».     

Paul Bernays et la rénovation des fondements philosophiques des mathématiques

The history of the foundations of mathematics in the XX^th century leads to a revision of the meaning of traditional philosophical notions such as «evidence», «experience» or «rationality». This paper focuses on the influence of Ferdinand Gonseth's «open philosophy» on Paul Bernays' philosophical interpretations of the technical results in the foundations. Familiar with the ideas of Jacob Friedrich Fries and Léonard Nelson, the logician Bernays turns at the middle of the century more and more towards Gonseth's ideas. Quite before Thomas Kuhn, Bernays considers the revisions under consideration not simply as a problem of truth and falsehood, but as a task requiring the introduction of a new conceptual system. Indeed, in opposition to Kuhn, according to Bernays, the necessary change is less the consequence from a change of paradigm and methodological incommensurability as a epistemological necessity.     

La résistance allemande au nazisme,entre histoire et mémoire

Gerd R. Ueberschär (éd.), Der 20.Juli 1944. Bewertung und Rezeption des deutschen Widerstandes gegen das NS‐Regime, Cologne 1994, 348 p.

Peter Steinbach, Widerstand im Widerstreit. Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus in der Erinnerung der Deutschen, Paderborn, Munich, Vienne, Zürich, 1994, 298 p.

Peter Steinbach / Johannes Tuchel (éd.), Lexikon des Widerstandes 1933–1945, Munich, 1994, 238 p.

Wolfgang Benz / Walter H. Pehle (éd.), Lexikon des deutschen Widerstandes, Francfort/Main, 1994, 400 p.     

Lacan et les probabilités

Lacan was interested by the treatment of the probabilities, the theory of games and decision, all topics that gave way to an interpretation of Pascal’s calculus of partition and of the famous argument of betting. Starting from a critical examination of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, that Lacan propounds to the philosophers to replace by logical space and time of the theory of game (as a substitute), the psychoanalyst attempts to prove that Pascal is probably the forefather of the theory of game and decision. A number of interpretations of the «geometer of hazard», which will happen in the years 1970, are in debt, perhaps unconsciously, surely in a secrete way, to the farther lacanian interpretation.     

Paul Tannery et Joseph Needham deux plaidoyers pour une histoire générale des sciences

Whereas, under the influence of Comte's endeavour, they both present global histories of science, in fact, Paul Tannery and Joseph Needham use distinct historiographical frameworks. Tannery grounds his general history on the notion of civilisation, of which science is a component. The methodological tool he uses to highlight the salient features that characterise a given civilisation at a given time as regards science is synthesis. Needham takes modern science as his starting point, and aims at bringing to light that it was constituted by a synthesis of the contributions of different traditions. For him, the shaping of this modern knowledge proceeded from a continuous effort that, in turn, was carried out by the various groups composing mankind. In contrast, Tannery is preoccupied by ruptures and crises, which can cause the disappearance of entire domains of knowledge, but also intense periods of creation. What is conventionally called the «scientific revolution» thus takes a very different meaning for the two historians.     

La vertu des images. Analogie, proportion et métaphore dans la genèse des sciences sociales au XVIIIe siècle

Moral newtonianism, in fashion by the middle of the XVIII^th century, is not only a metaphor. Based on the oneness of nature, it assumes a law of society equivalent to the law of distance innewtonian physics, perhaps offering the possibility of measurement. This method of inductive analogy (A/B=C/D) underlies Jean-Jacques Rousseau'sSocial contract: Rousseau uses classical metaphors of clockwork, modeling his notion of government on a watch and including mathematical proportions used by clockmakers to design the parts. Similarly, in hisTheory of moral sentiments, Adam Smith uses the old metaphor of the eye of the mind, modeling his social system on the recent notions of perspective: two persons, when they meet, will regulate their passions — of any type except interest — according to an imaginary distance between them, which varies according to the nature of the passion and its level. It is essential to restore these translations and the subsequent debates in order to understand the implications for sociology throughout the XIX^th century.