Le récit de Rousseau comme épreuve de la liberté de conscience

It is known that, according to Rousseau, the voice of conscience speaks instantaneously, and immediately ratifies the good that reason presents to it. The ferocious corruption that strengthens the progress of knowledge, the tumult of conversations or spectacles, however, prevent modern man from listening to his conscience, at the moment when society requires its engagement: the actuality of corrupted relations that enclose the individual gains ground against the presence of moral imperatives in his heart. Therefore Rousseau’s moral philosophy cannot dispense with a theory of memory: the latter permits thedictamen of the conscience to be disengaged from the transitory passions that subject us to contemporaries; it disengages the horizon of an authentic freedom and a responsibility that creates the person’s permanence, in regard to the soul’s immortality. In sum, we show here that in Rousseau’s eyes, reform is accomplished in a conversion narrative.     

Le marché dans l'économie de la grèce antique

The market constitutes the crucial point in the debate which prevailed since the xviii^th century in the history of antique economy. Became particularly complex for the Greek world because many historians and anthropologists (like Karl Polanyi) place there the liberty of the market economy as a break with the previous period. History must abandon too dogmatic a position on this emergence of the market and consider first the levels of the constitution of a market place, the agora, beginning with the end of the archaic period. The Greek city intervenes in the way in the exchanges. In this article, we study these interventions on the conditions of the sale and purchase, the practices, the values and the prices, the supplies, so as to understand the real innovation which that represents.     

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.     

Les cercles croissants de la désidentification psycho-et sociogenèse de la haine réflexions sur le Rwanda

Sans résumé Ce texte, rédigé en anglais en octobre 1997, a été traduit ici en fran?ais par Michèle Garlati, avec le soutien financier de l'Académie royale néerlandaise des sciences. Une version préliminaire est parue dansTheory, Culture and Society, vol. XIV, 2 mai 1997, p. 105–122.     

De la controverse aux règles de la méthode de discussion : La métamorphose Pascalienne de la dispute sur le vide

Pascal’s Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide (1647) outlines a physical demonstration that aims to put to an end controversies between plenists and vacuists. The traditional form of the dispute with which Pascal wanted to break, however, finds itself reactivated by Étienne Noël, who takes up again the plenist objections which the Expériences nouvelles only consider as possible the better to refute them. Pascal’s letters Au très révérend père Noël and À Monsieur Le Pailleur on the contrary permit one to define a field of disputation different from the one which Noël perpetuates. Pascal subordinates the dispute to the recognition of common epistemological principles: the antithetical discussion about the vacuum should be governed by methodological criteria accepted by all. In contrast with the model of the learned dispute, Pascal thus defines a radically new model: the scientific dispute.     

Le modèle politique vénitien notes sur la constitution d’un mythe

From the sixteenth century on, the «mixed» government of Venice became a political model for the Europe of theAncien Régime. Harmoniously combining the principles of democracy (the Grand Council), aristocracy (the Senate) and monarchy (the Doge), guaranteeing social peace and the stability of the institutions, claiming to protect Venice from the hazards of history, this form of government gave birth to a veritable myth. An essential part of the reflection on the diversity of Italian republican traditions, the study of the Venitian political myth allows us to question also the disputable usages of the republican paradigm in recent historiography.     

Le scepticisme et les hypothèses de la physique

The History of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza is often called upon to support three theses: first, that Descartes had a dogmatic notion of systematic knowledge, and therefore of physics; second, that the hypothetical epistemology of physics which spread during the xviith century was the result of a general sceptical crisis; third, that this epistemology was more successful in England than in France. I reject these three theses: I point first to the tension in Descartes’ works between the ideal of a completely certain science and a physics replete with hypotheses; further, I argue that the use of hypotheses by mechanical philosophers cannot be separated from their conception of physics; finally I show that, at the end of the xviith century, physicists in France as well as in England spoke through hypotheses and I examine different ways of explaining this shared practice. Richard H. Popkin’s book serves therefore as a starting point for insights into the general problem: to what extent and for what reasons some propositions in physics have been presented as hypotheses in the xviith century?     

La Sociologie de la Musique de Max Weber Après un Siècle

In this article, the author wonders how the research program sketched out by Weber in early 1910 appears to us today, but also how it would appear if we wished to return to it one hundred years later, making the necessary modifications while remaining true to its spirit. To this end, the author envisions each of the three fundamental components of Weber’s program successively (the particular evolution of Western music, Weber’s emphasis on musical “techniques” and the fact that for Weber, the motor of change is rationalisation) and places them in the context of Weber’s work and of our contemporary concerns.     

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.     

Relativité d'échelle structure de la théorie

Résumé  La théorie de la relativité d'échelle développe les conséquences de l'abandon de l'hypothèse de différentiabilité des coordonnées spatio-temporelles. La première est he caractère fractal, c'est-à-dire explicitement dépendant des résolutions, qu'acquiert l'espace-temps. On redéfinit alors les résolutions comme caractérisant l'état d'échelle du référentiel, puis on postule un principe de relativité d'échelle, suivant lequel les lois de la nature doi vent être valides quel que soit cet état. Il s'agit ainsi de construire une extension des théories existantes de la relativité, qui s'appliquaient jusqu'à maintenant aux changements d'état de position, d'orientation et de mouvement. Par conséquent, la structure de la théorie suit un cheminement parallèle aux différents niveaux de la théorie relativiste (galiléenne, einsteinienne restreinte puis générale), auxquels s'ajoutent les effets du couplage entre échelle et mouvement. LaurentNottale, né en 1952, est directeur de recherche au Centre national de la recherche scientifique, à l'observatoire de Paris-Meudon. II est spécialiste d'astrophysique et de physique théorique.