Ludovico Geymonat le Problème de L’épistémologie Historique

The study of the various inspirations of Ludovico Geymonat's epistemology (positivism and neopositivism, neorationalism, historicism and dialectical materialism) illustrates the way in which for the Italian philosopher the problem of objectivity of knowledge remains inseparable from the historicity of the sciences. Geymonat's epistemological approach associates scientific progress to its objectivity.     

La Carrière des Publications D’ettore Majorana une Étude Bibliométrique

This article analyzes the reception of Ettore Majorana’s articles by tracing all the references made to them since the beginning of the 1930s. This methodology allows me to show that Ettore Majorana’s 1937 piece on spin-1/2 particles was largely rediscovered during the 1960s, but also to identify the people who actively promoted Majorana’s work, which has loomed larger in scientific debates since the 1970s. Analyzing co-citations, this article shows the conceptual network in which Majorana’s work fits.     

Le Pragmaticisme Comme épistémologie Sociale

Charles S. Peirce is neither known nor recognized as a social philosopher. Nevertheless, a careful reading of pragmaticist texts reveals that considerations of social and political theory are not absent from the American philosopher??s reasoning. This article highlights certain deliberations regarding the critique of the individual as well as the notion of community and social institutions. It thereby attempts to surmount the philological difficulties and provide a coherent interpretation.     

Pour une Épistémologie de la Controverse Historiographique

The great historical debates were generally fought on different fields at the same time. The present article tries to analyze the actual debates in the context and perspective of different research experiences, aiming to highlight their theoretical and empirical results. In focussing on the controversies about the history of society and historical anthropology it questions in the same time the recurrencies recalling the crisis at the end of the 18th and the beginning of 20th century and their epistemological consequences.     

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.     

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.     

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 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.     

Histoires de Lectrices en Italie au Début de L’époque Moderne

The connection between the history of reading and gender is made using a range of methodological perspectives, each illustrated by analysing concrete examples from the early modern Italian area. The significance of the circulation and reception of texts as well as the various attempts to control knowledge and behaviour via censorship and availability of reading material will be considered. In fact, since the XVI ^th century, written texts seem to play an increasingly influential role in defining the relationship between men and women. The figure of the early modern woman reader appears in literature sources as both a consciously constructed and easily influenced addressee, who nevertheless may still behave in a way different to that intended by the authors. This double approach facilitates the reading of normative texts from a new perspective that takes into account the possibility of creative adaptation and enables the question of interdependence between the production and reception of the written word to be reconsidered.     

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 Concept de « Démocratie Raciale » dans L’Histoire Intellectuelle Brésilienne

This article aims to reconstruct the history of the term “racial democracy” in Brazilian sociological literature. This term, usually associated with the idea of “myth”, is used in many studies of race relations without little definition or clarity. This article retraces its origins, in particular by showing that the concept is not the invention of Gilberto Freyre. It then examines the evolution of its use with particular emphasis on Unesco’s research in the 1950s and the texts of Florestan Fernandes in the 1960s.