Epistemological relativism Epistemological relativism, before being asserted, was an accusation, formulated in particular against Thomas Samuel Kuhn (challenge taken up by Paul Feyerabend). George Lakoff defines relativism in his book Metaphors We Live By, as a rejection of subjectivism and … Read More
From the middle of the 19th century, a form of anti-realism imposed itself with the development of positivism (Comte, Mach, Duhem), then of neo-positivism and empiricism in the first half of the 20th century (Vienna Circle, A.J. Ayer, Ryle). These … Read More
This debate is particularly highlighted in the polemic which opposed at the beginning of the 18th century (from 1714 to 1716) Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in a famous epistolary exchange where Samuel Clarke made himself the lawyer of … Read More
From Antiquity to Modern Times A form of civil disobedience already existed in the myth of Antigone, who defies the laws of the city to give her brother a decent burial, and in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, where women decide to refuse … Read More
Cartesian mechanism (Mechanism of vision after a drawing by René Descartes. For Descartes, without the proof of the existence of God, we would have no guarantee of the reality of what we perceive confusedly by our senses.) The mechanism defended … Read More
Critical rationalism, stemming from the Kantian enterprise, can be characterized by three traits: The renunciation of its dogmatic and metaphysical pretensions. The integration of experience within an experimental dialectic. Recognition by reason itself of its limits and its historicity. Kantian … Read More
Realism was a response to philosophical questions posed in different terms depending on the era. We can then distinguish three important periods in the history of philosophical realism, corresponding to three types of debates: Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Quarrel … Read More
Neo-pragmatism The pragmatism of Richard Rorty Pragmatism, which established itself in the United States as the dominant current before the Second World War, suffered a long eclipse due to the dominance of the analytical style, but is experiencing a revival, … Read More
(Bertrand Russell in 1957. Credit: Anefo, Wikipedia) The tenets of idealism have been questioned time and time again since its emergence, and the criticisms leveled at it are as varied as are the different forms of idealism. In England, the … Read More
Thomas Nagel The philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel, although long associated with a form of epistemological dualism concerning the body-mind relationship (the “dual aspect theory”), introduced himself in a book by 2012 as an idealist, in direct opposition to materialism … Read More
Berkeley’s immaterialism (John Locke, whose empiricism strongly influenced the thinking of George Berkeley.) During the first half of the 18th century, the Irish philosopher, theologian and bishop George Berkeley developed a radical but influential idealist conception, later called “subjective idealism”, … Read More
Plato and the theory of Ideas (Platonic allegory of the Line, describing all the major epistemological (left) and ontological (right) divisions between the sensible and the intelligible. ) Plato is, in the fourth century BC, the first European philosopher to … Read More
