Réseaux huguenots et espace Européen (XVIe–XXIe siècle)

Among the examples of the «principle of circulation» in European space, the Huguenot phenomenon is one of the most significant cases, by its duration, four centuries, its scale and the diversity of its expressions. It begins as early as the XVI^th century with the persecution of the first French Protestants who start emigrating to Holland, confirms its dimension after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685: 200,000 French Protestants take refuge mainly in Switzerland, in the United Provinces, in the British Isles and in Protestant Germany, continuing to have connections with their co-religionists who remained inside the French Kingdom. Throughout the XVIII^th century, three networks, religious, cultural and economic, in constant interaction without superimposing themselves, define a Huguenot circularity which marks European space. During the XIX^th-century nationalisms, this circularity strongly weakens without completely disappearing, in particular among the French Huguenots. From World War II on, a reactivation based on memory occurs, which leads in France the Huguenot areas to receive many of Nazism's victims, then facilitates religious and cultural exchanges between Huguenots from France and from the «Refuge».     

Voyages,mobilités,lumières

For a very long time and still today, travel stories have fascinated a vast public. It is important to debate their role and the model for intellectual and sensitive construction they propose. An essential link for the European elite's acculturation, they cannot for as much be separated from a much wider circulation which concerns society as a whole. In relation to the social morals of our past, the concept of mobility allows us to appreciate the totality of social practices and to confront the notions of movement and localization. The main cultural categories of space, time, sociability, social constraints and freedoms, are thus creating a structure for our understanding of change.     

L'urne et le pot de chambre

Résumé  En 1931, Ludwig Wittgenstein a identifié l'architecte et le critique culturel Adolf Loos comme une des dix personnes qui ont exercé la plus grande influence sur son développement intellectuel. Dans cet article est examinée l'influence de Loos sur Wittgenstein, en particulier son importance dans le projet de Wittgenstein pour la maison de sa sœur, ainsi que celle exercée sur les idées concernant la langue et l'éthique exprimées dans leTractacus. In 1931, Ludwig Wittgenstein identified the architect and cultural critic Adolf Loos as one of the ten people who had exerted the greatest influence on his intellectual development. In this article, I examine Loos's influence on Wittgenstein's design for his sister's house and also on the ideas about language and ethics set out by Wittgenstein in theTractatus. JohnHyman, né en 1960, estfellow au Queen's College d'Oxford. Il a publié de nombreux articles concernant l'épistémologie, la philosophie de l'esprit, l'esthétique et la philosophie de Wittgenstein. Son prochain livre, intituléThe Objective Eye. Colour, form and reality in the theory of art (L'Œil objectif. La couleur, la forme et la réalité dans la théorie de l'art), sera publié par les Presses de l'université de Chicago en 2006.     

Stéphane Lupasco et le tiers inclus

Résumé  Nous rappelons tout d'abord les trois étapes majeures dans l'œuvre de Stéphane Lupasco (1900–1988): l'introduction du principe de dualisme antagoniste, l'examen des notions d'actualisation et de potentialisation et la formulation de la logique du tiers inclus. Ensuite, nous étudions les relations entre le tiers inclus et la contradiction et entre logique et ontologie et nous évoquons le rapport entre Gonseth et Lupasco. Enfin, nous introduisons la notion de niveaux de Réalité qui donne une explication simple et claire de l'inclusion du tiers. BasarabNicolescu, né en 1942, est physicien théoricien au Centre national de la recherche scientifique, et enseignant chercheur à l'université Paris VI. Il est également membre de l'Académie roumaine et président du Centre international de recherches et études transdisciplinaires (CIRET). Ses principaux domaines de recherche sont la chromodynamique quantique, l'épistémologie et la transdisciplinarité.     

La république universellè des francs-maçons entre «culture de la mobilité» et basculement national (XVIIIe–XIXe siècle)

In 1723, the Charter of the Grand Lodge of England defines the project of the Masonic order: to become «the center of the union and the means of tying a faithful friendship among men who without that would have remained at a perpetual distance». From this aspiration to rebuild Babel, proceed the attempts to chart the Masonic Republic, to set up a network of truly universal correspondence and language — this last building site leading to Esperanto. The order developed throughout the XVIII^th century this universal utopia on the mode of a true citizenship of the Masonic Republic with its passport, its rights and its duties. Then it had to answer the formidable upheavals resulting from 1789 and the awakening of nationalities, while being directed towards a more committed design of the universal Republic of the freemasons, sensitive to the liberal ideals and the emancipation of the nations, with the risk of giving arguments to its detractors, convinced of the masonic involvement in a world-wide conspiracy.     

La fabrique de la perpétuité

TheTrésor des chartes is probably one of the best preserved single collection of archives of the ancient French monarchy. Paradoxically, however, it was never part of a central record office in the modern sense. This large and confused mass of documentation slowly emerged as a records collection during the XIII^th century. Although it seemed to follow the construction of a State administration, it was already inactive by the middle of the XIV^th century. Its records and charters, prestigious and inaccessible, were kept in the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris, close to the relics of the Passion bought by Louis the Ninth. As a record of the past it played a crucial role in the social construction of a notion of «perpetuity» suitable to the domanial and dynastic ideals of the monarchy. The ambiguities of this medieval heritage became obvious in the early modern period. Although there were a large number of inventories and classifications of theTrésor des chartes, it was never able to incorporate the other State records. The Republic inherited a majestic sanctuary which can certainly be described as a piece of shared memory, but which is unable to summarize the genesis of the Nation.     

Temps, succession,cogito

In the following pages I consider how Descartes argues the thesis of a permanent, continuous and actual thinking represented by expressionscogito andsum cogitans. Of this thesis I only examine the reasoning leading to those expressions first and then reasoning upon the same, single expressions, I found the continuity of thinking breaks off when the mind, set aside the dubious or deceitful opinions, meets with the clear and distinct ideas, and when it meets with the succession of ideas. In both these cases there emerged a kind of interruption which should have prevented the philosopher from writing «cogito» and «sum cogitans», that is from making use of a verbal form just meaning an actual and continuous action.     

L'art au temps des fractales

Fractals, as a mathematical concept, made their way into many scientific fields, but have also inspired artistic creations, in particular the plastic arts. The art exhibition «Fractal Time» gives us the opportunity to analyze the link between «art under fractalism» and mathematics. Metamorphoses of the concept, as it goes further its original field, provide us information on the relation between its initial theoretical ground and its additional esthetical meaning. We propose to distinguish, according to a criterion of theorical but non esthetical distance, three ways of derivation for «fractalism»: technical derivation, esthetical actualization and ideological actualization. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A01KB003 00010     

L'Édit de Nantes et l'indifférence hollandaise

Did the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes find, in the Netherlands, an echo comparable to the one caused by the revocation of this same Edict, a century later? A first inquiry through documents directly related to events of that period (letters of politicians, pamphlets, synod acts, etc.) do not provide any revealing account of a Dutch interest in the French biconfessionalism settlement. The hypothesis put forward in this paper in order to explain this silence from the Dutch side are based on the stake shifting between France and the Netherlands, at that time, concerning tolerance.     

Du tourisme généalogique dans l'Irlande contemporaine

The aim of this article is to explore the causes of the recent and surprising expansion of heritage tourism in Ireland, working with contemporary anthropological data. It is a fact that numerous descendants of Irish migrants have been returning ‘home’ recently to discover the land where their forebears originally came from. Of particular interest here are specific types of return to the homeland, such as the gathering of clans. We would like to point out here that such collective, ritualized activities have a twofold nature: in addition to their role in the forging of identity, they provide a means for the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland to develop touristic activities over the entire island, thus diversifying economic resources.     

Travail, redistribution et construction des espaces économiques (XIe–XVe siècle)

Although a popular topic among historians for most of the XX^th century, the expansion of the European medieval economy has recently fallen out of favour. This paper seeks to bring attention back to this subject, at an important moment of the construction of a global European economy, by replacing it in a long term perspective, from the XI^th to the XV^th century, and by analysing its own process of economic development and growth trends. Particular attention is devoted to the social processes developed for the promotion of worker groups and productive activities, which made possible the intensification of labour that is remunerated by a complex set of mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth, which are among the most original creations of medieval societies.     

Induction, probabilités et confirmation chez Carnap

The idea of associating probability and induction is not a theme suitable for the xx^th century but it has received a systematic development when the neo-positivist philosophers seized it. Beginning with the 1940's, the philosopher Rudolph Carnap proposed to affront the «Humian challenge» by founding a theory of confirmation through the construction of a probabilistic logic called «inductive». This project had been outlined in Cambridge during the 1920's by the economist John M. Keynes. To examine Carnap's program in its totality, to situate it in its historical context, to follow its evolution and the influences it has had, these are the aims of this article.     

Le principe de circulation et l'échec de la mythologie transeuropéenne

We have sought to identify an aspect of the repression of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism complementary to the creation of national identities in XIX^th-century Europe and the intervening war period. The idea of a common civilization would be maintained by the reciprocal capacity of translating national languages, because of their Indo-European common origins. The utopia of the language would replace the material route of the Enlightenment. It is the failure of the construction of European Indianist myth and not its success which explains the ideological diverting of the relations between language and nation. The missed promotion of the Gypsy language in the academic world illustrates this failure perfectly. After the First World War, the transformation of the principle of nationalities in ethnopolitics removed even the memory of this common ambition.     

Civilisation Versus Civitas? La Cité Grecque à L’Épreuve de la Civilisation

How does the Greek city-state attain its position as the cradle of European civilization? Such a position became possible only since civilization was conceived as a homogenous, irreversible historical process, identified with the historical progress of Europe. This is what concerned Guizot’s era. Yet, in the xix ^th century, civilization referred to a plethora of historical processes that permitted one to regard the course of the different people of Antiquity and modernity, ranging from the primitive to a state of refinement. My hypothesis is that civilization functions in this case as a differentiating concept: it makes possible the distinction between the Ancients and the Ancients, between the Moderns and the Moderns, between Antiquity and modernity as a whole. In this article, I focus on the desiderata and risks concomitant with the integration of Greece into the history of European civilization.     

Échange,Contrat et Civilisation

With the word «exchange», the confusion is often made between the savage of social contract and the savage of the market. This paper would a contrario set the one against the other, in showing how the two characters agree in fact to two absolutely different kinds of argumentation, which the Enlightenment led to coexist according to very distinct issues. Then the modern term of «civil society» has never solved this ambiguity and we find here the matter of several teachings, because it is possible to think at once about what is a «concept», a «historicity» and a «citizen». Methodology, anthropology and politics come therefore into sight as three horizons of an analysis which does not want to reduce the equivocation, but rather to measure its wealth.     

L’impossible constitution d’une théorie générale des machines ?

Three projects on the theories of machines are presented: “mecanology” of the architect Jacques Laffite (1932) inspired by biological evolution; “mecanical analysis ” of Louis Couffignal, a specialist in computing machines (1938), which pre figures functional analysis, and the algebraic theory of machines by the mathematician Jacques Riguet (beginning of the 1950’s). During those years, the three men are members of the Circle of Cybernetic Studies. The article focuses on the dialogue between projects, the axes of unification and divergence, and the styles, strategies and postulates of these three candidates, for generalization converging toward the reference constituted by cybernetics.     

Diversité des réactions réformées à la révocation

Starting from the analysis of the reactions of the Protestant groups to the Fontainebleau edict, this paper examines the development of two main concepts that are at the origin of political modernity, i.e. the distinction between religious and political domains on the one hand, and the popular sovereignty on the other. These two concepts emerged separately as a result of crossed and apparently paradoxal thoughts, whose coherence is to be sought in the anthropological positions underlying them. Therefore the study of the theological debates in the XVII^th century is a way by which the modern political concepts arose.     

Actualité de la philosophie de Ferdinand Gonseth

Résumé  Les progrès les plus récents de la physique contemporaine, en particulier la convergence de la physique des particules et de la cosmologie en une authentique cosmogonie scientifique, avivent les enjeux philosophiques de l'entreprise scientifique, mais les rapports conflictuels entre physique et philosophie ne s'en trouvent pas apaisés; un fossé semble même en train de se creuser entre science et philosophie. L'œuvre du philosophe suisse Ferdinand Gonseth qui s'est attaché à élaborer une philosophie qui so it et qui puisse rester au ni veau de la connaissance scientifique peut fournir une aide particulièrement adéquate à ceux qui voudraient contribuer à combler ce fossé. GillesCohen-Tannoudji, né en 1938, est conseiller scientifique auprès du directeur des Sciences de la matière du Commissariat à l'énergie atomique. Il est retraité de cet organisme, dans lequel il a fait toute sa carrière comme physicien théoricien dans le domaine de la physique des particules. Actuellement, il prépare une thèse de philosophie, sous la direction de Dominique Lecourt, sur la philosophie de Ferdinand Gonseth.     

Du parallélisme au fonctionnalisme contemporain

Résumé  Cette étude se propose de mettre en relief plusieurs analogies structurelles entre la conception spinoziste et la conception fonctionnaliste, développée par Hilary Putnam, de l'activité mentale. Ces conceptions, l'une classique, l'autre contemporaine, en marge de leurs divergences manifestes, paraissent toutes deux récuser aussi bien le dualisme substantiel qu'une lecture physicaliste de l'activité mentale, représentée en particulier par la théorie de l'identité entre états mentaux et états cérébraux. La confrontation entre la philosophie de Spinoza et celle de Putnam, dans l'ordre de la théorie de l'esprit, s'établit en trois points. Est d'abord examiné le postulat de l'autonomie explicative du mental. Le second point concerne la résolution du problème de l'union du corps et de l'esprit, par le recours aux notions d'organisation et d'isomorphisme fonctionnel, au principe de la thèse d'une identité psychophysique non substantielle. L'étude s'achève sur l'évocation du modèle mécanique de l'esprit, et de son identification à un dispositif automatique abstrait, automate spirituel selon Spinoza, machine de Turing selon Putnam. The aim of this paper is to underline some structural analogies between the spinozistic conception of mental activity, and the functionalist one, as it was developed by Hilary Putnam. Both of these conceptions, one classic and one contemporary, though obviously different from one another, seem to reject substance dualism as well as any physicalist approach to mental activity, namely the mind-brain identity theory. Our comparison between Spinoza's philosophy and Putnam's, as far as the theory of mind is concerned, goes along three lines. We first examine the postulate of the explanatory autonomy of the mental. Then we analyze a solution to the mind-body problem, which involves the concepts of organization and functional isomorphism: such a solution leads to the claim of a non-substantial psychophysical identity. In the end, we focus the analysis on the mechanical characterization of the mind, and on the identification of the mind to an abstract automatic device, represented by the spiritual automaton in Spinoza's philosophy, and by the Turing machine in Putnam's functionalist theory. PascaleGillot, née en 1967, agrégée et docteur en philosophie, est directrice de programme au Collège international de philosophie. Ses travaux de recherche portent sur la constitution des théories modernes de l'esprit dans la philosophie du XVII^e siècle, et sur la relation entre ces théories de l'esprit et laphilosophy of mind contemporaine.     

Des porte-parole protestants au chevet de l'édit de Nantes moribond

This article shows how the Edict of Nantes (1598), that had been criticized by French Protestants when it came out, progressively became the symbol of their belonging to the French nation and the acceptance of their religious particularity. But it is finally after its revocation (1685) that this Edict appears to make most sense to the Huguenot spokesmen. Thinking from a theological point of view as well as an historical, juridical and philosophical one, they consider it as a symbol of religious freedom. However, it is only by giving up their former status lost with the Revocation that they manage to develop an original thinking on the relationship between the State and individuals. In order to achieve this, they must distinguish between the subject or the citizen on one hand, and the believer on the other. But this distinction implies the renunciation of the nostalgia for aProtestant body, recognized as such in the kingdom of France.