heidegger and asian thought

Heidegger  mentionne  la  philosophie  indienne  et  chinoise \ud plusieurs  fois  dans  ses  écritures  et  il  a  montré  lʹaffinité  de  sa \ud propre pensée avec la tradition Taôiste et le Bouddhisme de Zen \ud à  ses  visiteurs.    La  relation  entre  la  pensée  d’Heidegger  et  la \ud philosophie  des  Upanisads  et  de  Vedanta  peut  être  dévoilée  par \ud une  analyse  attentive  des  aspects  suivants:    la  structure \ud littéraire et le style; la poésie, non seulement la prose des textes \ud en  question;  la  rhétorique,  les  éléments  mythiques  et  magiques, \ud les vers dʹhumilité et de prière au commencement et à la fin de \ud plusieurs textes de Vedanta. Comme elles, la pensée d’Heidegger \ud est  une  attente  et  une  préparation    pour  lʹarrivée  du  sacré,  du \ud divin, le Dieu, sans le masque métaphysique.  Elle souligne que \ud sans une connexion avec lʹéternel, lʹhomme est devenu incapable \ud de se connaître comme un mortel et la quête de lʹimmortalité est \ud devenue  dénuée  de  sens.    Pour  nous  aujourdʹhui,  la  pensée \ud d’Heidegger a peu pour faire avec une synthèse culturelle ou la \ud notion  dʹune  culture  planétaire  ou  dʹune  philosophie \ud universelle.  Sa pensée est post philosophique dans le sens que ce \ud n’est plus métaphysique et n’opère plus avec les présuppositions \ud implicitement communes à l’entière philosophie

Review: Éduquer par la Philosophie et le Conte au Développement Durable: 12 Ateliers Pédagogiques (Education through philosophy and tale for Sustainability development: 12 pedagogical workshops)

Book review of Éduquer par la Philosophie et le Conte au Développement Durable: 12 Ateliers Pédagogiques

Conceptual Truth Defended

Philosophers often rely on hypothetical scenarios to establish claims about causation, consciousness, knowledge, and the like. Consider e.g. this line of thought: (1) Knowledge is not justified true belief. Just contemplate the scenarios Gettier (1963) puts forth. In the situations Gettier describes, we find a protagonist having a true justified belief that p – but he still does not know that p. This is a paradigmatic instance of what I call scenario-based reasoning. In (1), Gettier’s scenarios are brought up to justify a claim about knowledge. Contemplating the situations Gettier describes is taken to somehow show, first, that this holds true: (2) Someone could be in a Gettier-style situation. Contemplating the Gettier-cases is, secondly, assumed to establish a rather substantial counterfactual conditional, to wit: (3) If someone were in a Gettier-style situation, she would have justified true belief, but she would still lack knowledge. Since (2) and (3) entail that someone could have justified true belief but no knowledge, we may conclude that knowledge cannot be justified true belief. In much the same vein

The Impact of Heinrich Rickert's Ideas about Chaos on Rudolf Carnap

This research aims to address the hypothesis of the possible influence of Rickert’s ideas about chaos on the philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. This paper considers arguments in favor of the hypothesis and those against it. I show that pieces of evidence exist, proving that Rickert’s interpretation of chaos influenced Rudolf Carnap when he was working on Der logische Aufbau der Welt. I argue that Carnap’s pre-Aufbau unpublished manuscript Vom Chaos zur Wirklichkeit demonstrates this influence. This study opens new vistas in exploring the genesis of Carnap’s ideas

Behavioral Paternalism

International audienceIn this article I address the question of the moral legitimacy of paternalism. Paternalism is considered illegitimate a) when it acts under false pretenses to satisfy the interest of the paternalist agent, b) when it violates the individual autonomy of the people interfered with and c) when it does not respect the equality between people by singling out those who are deemed unable to decide for themselves. Over the last decade a new type of paternalism has emerged thanks to the groundbreaking works of some behavioral economists. This new type of paternalism, that I call here Behavioral Paternalism (BP), has become popular through Sunstein and Thaler's Nudges theory and challenges the view that paternalism is unacceptable today. The aim of this paper is to assess its moral legitimacy (not exclusively focusing on the autonomy proviso). The results of my investigation can be summarized as follows. Though BP is usually acknowledged for its 'libertarian' character, it does not satisfy the conditions of what is considered, since Feinberg, as 'soft paternalism'. Nevertheless, BP has a strong point that has been underestimated by its partisans: it withstands the equality argument. Unlike traditional forms of paternalism, BP is not demeaning and does not ostracize any category of people. Lastly, BP can be proved genuinely altruistic. This, however, demands that one abandons Sunstein and Thaler's main assumptions

What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Science? On Ernst Mach’s Pragmatic Epistemology

The paper aims to investigate some aspects of Ernst Mach’s epistemology in the light of the problem of human orientation in relation to the world (Weltorientierung), which is a main topic of Western philosophy since Kant. As will be argued, Mach has been concerned with that problem, insofar as he developed an original pragmatist epistemology. In order to support my argument, I firstly investigate whether Mach defended a nominalist or a realist account of knowledge and compare his view to those elaborated by other pragmatist thinkers, such as W. James, H. Vaihinger and H. Poincaré. Secondly, the question of what does it mean, for Mach, to orient ourselves in science is addressed. Finally, it will be argued that, although Mach tried to keep his epistemology restricted to a mere operational and economical account of science, that question involves the wider plane of practical philosophy