This article analyzes the speech act of confession or avowal to reassess the concept of first-person authority. Central issues frame the discussion of avowal in the debate on self-awareness, self-consciousness, and self-knowledge. In this context, the article demonstrates how avowal involves specific forms of acknowledgment and responsibility, shaping self-knowledge as a commitment that reflects both a self-relation and a relation to others. These relationships are then examined in terms of their temporality, encompassing moments of both appropriation and withdrawal. The exploration of confession and the value attributed to accuracy and sincerity will allow us to reframe questions concerning the authority of the first person by incorporating practical and ethical considerations into the understanding of self-knowledge. Consequently, the authority of the first person will be understood as the authority of self-formation and self-positioning.
Although Husserl condemned a form of relativism he called 'anthropologism,' he nevertheless admitted, notably in his correspondence with L & eacute;vy-Bruhl, that cultural relativism, as a method of anthropological inquiry, was entirely legitimate insofar as it meant "feeling from within a closed humanity, living in a lively and generative sociality." For Husserl, intersubjectivity is the fundamental dimension of the world of human life, constitutive of both the subject and the objective world, and thus the foundation for any anthropological approach that makes sociality the elementary condition for human existence. Yet one can go further than the admission that I am aware of the world through intersubjectivity, if one concedes with L & eacute;vi-Strauss - drawing on a suggestion from Rousseau - that my co-subjects need not be exclusively human alter egos but may also include other living beings. This article explores the philosophical and political consequences of extending the domain of the 'we' beyond humans by advocating the granting of legal standing to non-human collective subjects.
This paper revises Rahel Jaeggi's proposition for a critique of forms of life with insights from Foucault's approach to power and resistance. I address Foucault's comments on counter-conducts and other revolts of conduct through the lens of Jaeggi's critique of forms of life, arguing that Foucault's efforts to localize practices of resistance which counter governmental power involve a critique of forms of life. I suggest that Foucault's power-theoretical paradigm allows us to approach alternative forms of life as corollaries of dominant forms of life. His relational approach to power implies that practices of resistance develop alternative normative horizons to govern social life, thus superseding the denaturalizing moment of genealogical critique. As such, Foucault's work allows us to highlight the revolts of conduct as a politics of forms of life with a normatively significant and transformative character.
Dreyfus claims that Searle's views on intentionality and the social world are similar to Husserl's but criticizes Searle's ideas in light of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. This paper's thesis is that both the analytic and continental traditions have unjustly neglected this critique. The article compares Husserl's notion of the life-world with Searle's philosophy of mind, specifically his concept of Background, which is analogous to the lifeworld in Husserl. Next, the paper examines Dreyfus' criticism, which moves from a Heideggerian to a Merleau-Pontyian perspective. The paper concludes that Dreyfus's viewpoint is closer to Husserl's in The Crisis than is commonly assumed, and that the concept of Background is best understood as arising from the actions of embodied social beings, as Merleau-Ponty proposes.
This article examines two key research questions. First, it explores the philosophical and theoretical relationship between Carl Menger's theory of subjective value and Franz Brentano's concept of intentionality, despite the lack of direct archival evidence linking the two thinkers. While their ideas have been extensively studied, the conceptual and historical connections between them remain under-explored. By focusing on shared intellectual traditions, particularly Aristotelian thought and their engagement with psychology, this study aims to bridge this gap. Second, the article investigates how Menger's and Brentano's approaches contribute to a theoretical framework for understanding modern consumer behaviour. Menger's emphasis on individual needs and preferences intersects with Brentano's concept of intentionality, which highlights the directedness of mental phenomena. This study analyses how these perspectives inform consumer society by examining the intentional relationship between the consumer subject and objects of consumption. Rather than solely establishing a link between Brentano and Menger, the objective is to propose an alternative analysis of consumer culture beyond postmodern or psychoanalytic approaches, using Brentano's theory of intentionality and Menger's subjective value theory.
This paper investigates the reception of G.W.F. Hegel's Science of Logic through a comparison of Stephen Houlgate and Slavoj & Zcaron;i & zcaron;ek's interventions. Both thinkers have been positioned in the movement insisting that Hegel's Logic should be read ontologically as a work of speculative metaphysics, reacting to the more Kantian, epistemologically inspired movement with key figures such as Robert Pippin. Both Houlgate and & Zcaron;i & zcaron;ek have critiqued Pippin but neither has engaged with the other's interpretation, and there has been no comparative analysis of their approaches to date. In light of this lacuna, I argue that Houlgate and & Zcaron;i & zcaron;ek diverge significantly in their reading of the Logic. First, I systematize & Zcaron;i & zcaron;ek's diverse readings of Hegel to highlight & Zcaron;i & zcaron;ek's emphasis on the formal structure of the dialectical process. Second, I analyze Houlgate's notion of immanence and passivity in the Logic in order to demonstrate its difference with & Zcaron;i & zcaron;ek. Drawing upon the work of David Gray Carlson, one of the few scholars to engage with both & Zcaron;i & zcaron;ek and Hegel's Logic, I demonstrate this difference through a comparative close reading of both authors' interpretation of the transition from becoming to determinate being in the opening of the Logic.
This article focuses on the presence of technology in Ortega y Gasset's work, arguing that technology is one of the main themes of his production and that his philosophy can be understood as a philosophy of technology. To this end, it shows how the problem of technology does not appear exclusively in Meditation on Technique but can be found in numerous earlier and later texts. Ortega y Gasset's novel conception of technology or technique is thus revealed as a thematic nucleus that constitutes one of the keys to his philosophy. A better understanding of his proposal can help us to understand and respond to the challenges of our technologized world.
In his three Cahiers de l'Immuable, published between 1975 and 1976, Fernand Deligny reflects on the cartographic practice that emerged within his network for autistic youth in the French C & eacute;vennes. In this remote region, from around 1969 to 1979, his collaborators consistently traced the movements and objects on the network's domains. Deligny's notion of tracing thus referred to this cartographic activity carried out by the 'close presences,' but it also alluded to the youth, whose movements, according to the pedagogue, embodied a form of tracing. Both were actively tracing something. When read as an attempt to delineate the object of these forms of tracing, this object shifts across Deligny's Cahiers de l'Immuable, indicating an evolved understanding of his care project and a renewed anthropology of the youth between the first and last cahier. The present article examines this shift through the formal developments in the cartography and the changing emphasis in Deligny's conceptual framework - transitioning from rep & egrave;re and the common body to chev & ecirc;tre and the Immutable. Through the foregoing analysis, this article argues that the focus of Deligny's care project and anthropology moved from an emphasis on displacement to a quest for the originary.
Fernand Deligny's practice and writings explore the notion of space in a unique way. This practice allowed Deligny to think of places outside language by removing maladjusted children from institutions and places designed to accommodate them. These places constitute spaces in which coexistence is possible on the basis of the specificity of the species rather than the subject. Reading Deligny's writings, it is possible to lift the veil on what language does to space. It is also possible to show how spatial indeterminacy is a source of initiative. But this indeterminacy should not be understood as an absence of regularities. Spatial indeterminacy brings to the surface gestures and movements that are specific to the human species. It dissolves the subject in the places it crosses, denouncing human pretensions: language and power.
Based on the experience of living together with mute and autistic individuals combined with observing them intensively, Fernand Deligny and his fellows initiated a particular vocabulary on the interaction between both the autistic and non-autistic body and the space in which they lived. This happened in several 'living areas' in the mountainous landscape of the French C & eacute;vennes, sometimes around indoor environments and sometimes right in the middle of nature. Confronted with non-verbal beings that showed a profound permeability for the concrete, material circumstances around them, Deligny put the emphasis on the investigation of those 'common' spatial circumstances and how they were used and functioned. The observations of the gestures and movements of the autistic individuals and the 'close presences,' using cartography and the film camera, gave information on which living areas were apt and how its spaces could or should be maintained. During the thirty years of the 'tentative,' the team created and used concepts such as lignes d'erre, chev & ecirc;tre, rep & egrave;rer, corps commun, coutumier and asile. This text explains Deligny's discourse on autism and investigates the interaction between the spatial circumstances, the autistic individuals and the 'close presences,' and how the spatial vocabulary emerged and functioned in the 'tentative.'
The hypothesis at stake here is that Deligny's form of writing corresponds to a form of dialogy which is much more radical than what is usually called by this name, most prominently after Bakhtine's studies on Dostoyevsky. We show that in order to think of such a dialogism, one must make sense of a space, whose properties are of another order than uniform and homogeneous, but depend on the notion of a pure exteriority that excludes any sharing of common references as much as it excludes any well-defined identity of meaning. Paradoxically, dialogical writing in this sense expresses itself through the acceptance of not understanding the otherness of another person, rather than through the attempt to make it possible by locating every point of view into a common space: acknowledging the point of view of the other would be a way to reduce it to a space submitted to the power of consciousness and discourse, i.e., to a space of presence, which is a temporalized space. By contrast, the radically dialogical form of writing and of tracing that is to be found in Deligny's books must be interpreted according to the attempt to make space free from any sharing of a common language, thus letting space be a pure expression of lived divergence. We finish the paper with a comparison between Faulkner's fictitious rendering of the autistic way of being in The Sound and the Fury and Deligny's own "tentative." This comparison forces us to introduce some shades in the understanding of what spatial divergence means.
This text aims to consider space from the figure of the break and formulates the hypothesis that it is what breaks the continuity of space that gives to it a dimension of hospitality. The break reveals the space in an existential dimension. In this perspective, the work of Fernand Deligny and the philosophy of Maldiney invites us to consider the break as a condition of possibility of the existence and as a way to inaugurate a poetics of walking, which makes the slightest gesture a critical and a creative moment.
In their work with nonverbal autistic children, Fernand Deligny and those around him developed a non-goal-oriented clinical process of sorts. On the one hand, this process is embedded within a specific historical context. Deligny's invention aligns with a tradition that sought to conceptualize deviations from the norm not as deficits or dysfunctions but as possessing their own inherent positivity. His work resonates with the ideas of figures such as Kurt Goldstein and Georges Canguilhem, as well as the perspectives of Lacanian psychoanalysis and institutional psychotherapy. On the other hand, Deligny's perspectives arguably represents the most radical position within this constellation. Furthermore, Deligny's approach appears to place particular emphasis on space, the arrangement of objects within it, and the meticulous organization of schedules for daily activities. In this sense, I suggest that the various living spaces hosting autistic children within the network were conceived as installations where everything had its designated time and place: they were designed as the installation of an adequate milieu.
This article explores the assertion advanced by numerous commentators that Immanuel Kant explicitly condemned slavery in his works. Against the backdrop of contemporary struggles with the legacy of slavery, it analyzes passages on slavery from Kant's writings, which these commentators often cite as evidence of his explicit condemnation of the practice. Through a close examination of these passages, the article aims to evaluate the validity of such claims, shedding light on the complexities of comprehending Kant's stance on this critical moral issue.
This article uncovers surprising parallels and affinities between Malebranche's La Recherche de la verite (The Search After Truth) and Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), for example, concerning the way both describe and account for the status of sensory perceptions and dreams. It also suggests how certain aspects of Malebranche's metaphysical project find resonance in Proust's vision of art.
This article examines the attitude of the German Dominican historian Heinrich Denifle (1844-1905) towards Meister Eckhart. It explores whether, behind Denifle's criticism of his fellow Dominican, there are valid philosophical arguments that could be relevant to contemporary Eckhart scholarship. In doing so, the article argues for the philosophical significance of polemics that may initially appear to be merely historically contingent.
The starting point of the article is the distinction between the personal pronoun I and the nominalized adjective The self. Modern anthropology (Pascal, Hobbes, Locke...) has made the "I" the very essence of the human individual, and the atom of all forms of civil association. This overlooks the fact that man, as a thinking being, can also become the "impartial spectator of himself" (Adam Smith) and take a distant view of this "self," creating what has been aptly termed "possessive individualism" (C.B. Macpherson). In reaction to this idea of a competitive, selfcentred "I," the We of the community has been opposed, exalted, and spiritualized: nation, church, ethnic group, civilization ... a We made up of members, not individuals, ontologically distinct from one another. The thesis of this article is that this communal We is merely a self elevated to the power of the collective: a common self. In contrast to the modern hypertrophy of the ego and the communitarian we, which is merely its enlarged form, another path is possible and, today more than ever, salutary: one that sees in every human being a singular universal, a synthesis in act of the same and the other.
