(Duns Scotus) The first symptom of this disintegration is found in the movement of ideas inaugurated by Duns Scotus, the subtle doctor. He had a very short career: born in Scotland around 1265, he studied the “arts” and theology at … Read More
The destinies of the West during the Middle Ages were partly determined by the Arab conquest which, extending from India to Spain and advancing to the south of Italy and the Greek islands, formed a sort of screen between Europe … Read More
We had to wait until the end of the 11th century to see, in the West, a real resumption of intellectual activity: not that this intermediate period was empty or unimportant. It is found everywhere, and in monasteries and in … Read More
Around the 5th century, the unity of Mediterranean civilization was broken at the same time as political unity. With the destruction of cities which marked the invasion of the Barbarians throughout the West, the traditional centers of culture disappeared; with … Read More
It is impossible to better grasp the currents of ideas which agitated minds towards the middle of the second century than in the little treatise On the Unreasonable Contempt for Popular Opinions by Polystratus (1) who succeeded Hermarqus at the … Read More
Historicity of reason With the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel put forward the historicity of a reason which develops its forms through the history of the world. The Hegelian discovery is the historical character of reason, and this awareness of historicity … Read More
The inquiry theory The inquiry as fixation of belief in Peirce In The Fixation of Belief (1877), Peirce thinks of inquiry not as the pursuit of truth per se, but as a struggle to move from irritating and inhibiting doubt … Read More
An original conception of philosophy For several reasons, pragmatism has long passed, especially in Europe, for a non-philosophy or for an “American redneck”. First of all, pragmatism is an active philosophy that does not seek truth through intellectualism alone. Its … Read More
Schelling and the “philosophy of identity” (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.) At the very end of the 18th century, Friedrich W. J. Schelling, a young German philosopher claiming to be first of Fichte, wrote a series of works which influenced … Read More
The plurality of disciplines involved in structuralism and the methodologies used reflects the heterogeneous nature of the classic definition of it, and some authors (such as Jean Piaget in psychology) prefer to insert structuralism into a long-term history of scientific … Read More
Critics of economists Economics has undergone a paradigm shift since the end of the 19th century with the triumph of neoclassical theory. This introduced a break with the classical national economy on which Marx’s analysis was based and which consists … Read More
Consequentialism has been criticized on several counts. For Moore, in Principia Ethica, consequentialism, or at least classical utilitarianism (which, let us recall, defines the moral good as the maximum of pleasures associated with the minimum of pains), falls into naturalistic … Read More
