The aim of this essay is to critically compare ancient ethics with modern ethics, considering them both under one particular aspect, namely, the relationship between ethics and intelligence. In fact, one of the most significant differences between ancient and modern ethics is precisely the divergence in how this relationship is conceived. With this in mind, an appendix is added, dedicated to the philosophy of the 20th Century, the time when the modern conception reaches a crisis point. In the conclusion, I also intend to speak about Christian ethics, which, while not exactly a philosophical ethic, occupies its own peculiar place, so to speak, in the way the relationship between ethics and intelligence is conceived.

The aim of this paper is to clarify and support the following hypothesis: the four propositional forms of Aristotelian syllogistics (AaB, AeB, AiB, AoB) state relations between universals, or are primarily conceptual. We characterize as “conceptual” those propositions which deal only with concepts and ignore any reference to objects. In a conceptual proposition, therefore, the reference is tacitly present in the simple occurrence of the terms, but is neutralised or cancelled out, because it is only the intension of these terms, that is, the concepts, which are dealt with in the proposition. On the other hand, we characterize as “objectual” those propositions (whether extensional or intensional in modem terms) which deal directly or indirectly of objects, even when, as it is often the case, a concept has to be assumed in the determination of these objects. In the present paper we try to confirm this hypothesis, by answering the following questions: (i) how to interpret the kind of predication present in each type of syllogistic proposition; (ii) if these predications really express relations between universals in the given sense and, therefore, if the propositions that express them are conceptual propositions in this sense; and to what measure can these propositions serve to introduce, also, objectual propositions.

Pour Spinoza, le désir, autant que «l’appétit dont on a conscience», définit l’essence de l’homme, puisqu’il est une modalité spécifiquement humaine du «conatus», interdite à tous les êtres sans capacité réflexive, en nous concédant un statut privilégié par rapport aux autres modes. Étant donn é le désir comme essence de l’homme, la raison permet l’orientation du désir vers la direction d’une augmentation d’être. La rationalité consiste dans un changement d’attitude, celle de la rationalisation et de l’explication du désir, en permettant la substitution des affections négatives par des affections positives, bien qu’on n’arrive pas à une libération complète des passions. Elle soulève le désir à l’exposant maximum, conduisant vers la connaissance, connaissance qui mène à la libération. Cependant, la raison ne supprime pas les désirs, parce qu’elle ne se constitue pas comme une instance séparée, supérieure et imposante, elle permet seulement l’autonomie devant le désir.

Leibniz rédige sa Théodicée afin de répondre au cepticisme presenté par Pierre Bayle, dans son Dictionnaire historique et critique, à propos de la légitimité des réponses de la philosophie, d’un côté au problème essentiel de la liberté humaine et son incompatibilité avec l’omnipotence et l’omniscience divines, et de l’autre côté à l’inadéquation entre une bonté suprême en Dieu et l’existence du mal. En même temps que Leibniz essaie de donner des réponses à ses contemporains Spinoza et Hobbes, il reprend et actualise des thèses augustiniennes déjà acceptées par la tradition théologique chrétienne.

Dans l’oeuvre de Kant il y a un ensemble de text es sur l’histoire, écrits tout au long de quinze années, où on peut trouver trois moments de thématisation de l’histoire. Pourra-t-on parler d’une théorie de l’histoire chez Kant ? L’auteur veut montrer qu’il n’y a pas proprement dit une théorie de l’histoire en Kant mais un chemin pour une théorie des possibilités des propositions de l’histoire.

This essay intends to discuss the starting point of Hegel’s criticism of Spinoza. According to Hegel, Spinoza’s idea doesn’t manage, even though it wants to, to give an absolute foundation to difference and self-conscious singularity; that is why the Dutch thinker didn’t reach the specificity of the modem conception of freedom, as it is represented by Christianity and effectively developed in modernity by the mediation of the particularity in the civil-bourgeois society. Hegel hopes to demonstrate his thesis analyzing Spinoza’s concepts of substance, attributes and modes: there is not between them, according to Hegel’s criticism, an immanent negative development. Consequently, Spinoza’s thought ends up in an impasse: or the finite modes keep a juxtaposed existence to substance or they annihilate themselves because of it. To Hegel, it is the second alternative that characterizes Spinoza’s thought.

Individualism is one of the fundamental traits of our time, based on an emphatic and recurrent defence of individual freedom, as experienced by consciousness. This point of view seems to entail a refuse of all kinds of transcendence, cosmological or onto-theological, characterized by an authoritarian and undisputed heteronomy. However, this perspective does not take into account a third type of transcendence, one that occurs in that radical immanence, in the core of individual freedom and autonomy. This type of transcendence takes shape as an ethical and aesthetical relationship carved in the heart of each individual human being, each one of his particular conscious States and the simultaneous consciousness of his Humanity. The aim of this essay is to give an understanding of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and its philosophy of Revelation, as a reflection on religion and its anthropological origins. In our viewpoint, The Essence of Christianity is an effort to ascertain the genetic elements of human religiosity and clarify its meaning as a movement of reconnecting the human individual with a transcendence that is his own Humanity, given in the immanence of his conscious life. Religion remains a law of transcendence, as the feeling that binds the individual to his Humanity, an everlasting commandment coming from an Otherness that projects itself as a horizon to his free actions.

Il s’agit d’analyser les différences entre Cousin e Jouffroy à propos du rôle de l’histoire de la philosophie et aussi bien de la psychologie dans la sphère de l’éclectisme spiritualiste, dont l’hégémonie était contestée au sein même de l’école.

Symbolism is a basic synthetic activity required by human enterprise in order to be able to produce an occasion of actual existence. Whitehead regards perception as the most frequent and fundamental kind of symbolism. Language is another essential sort of symbolism. Immediacy and abstraction are two intersecting phases in the process of symbolism; we need both for the occasions of perception and the emergence of language. Whitehead unites various kinds of experience under the notion of symbolism and enhances the founding roles of perception and language. His doctrine is an outstanding insight into the wholeness of reality.

This article consists of a number of initial reflections on concepts inherent to the theoretical paths traced by J. Habermas and N. Luhmann. It was developed with the intention of showing how a confrontation between their ideas allows us to offer contrasts to specific elements of Habermas’s arguments. The understanding of these divergences is necessary for an accurate interpretation of their respective theories of law.

The purpose of this paper is to present some thoughts upon the ever pressing question of the role of justice in our societies, according to Michel Foucault. Centered upon Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the paper draws the guidelines which Foucault developed about the aggiornamento of the exercise of power and its changing methods, from torture to the scientific methods which he named technologies of the self. Going from the exercise of violence centered upon the body to its submission by means of idea and mind control, power has associated itself to the scientific (psychiatric) approach of identity, leading to a controllable abnormality (present in prisons). All of this in the name of a population policy, a bio power which ensures the docility of individuals while optimizing their productive force. Hence the remaining epigraph quoted challenge where Plato provocatively States: justice is the same everywhere, it is the rule of the strongest.

The simplest and most widely endorsed elucidation of the notions of truth and falsehood is given in Aristotle’s dictum: “to say of what is not that it is, and of what is that it is not, is false; while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”. Nowadays, while some take the dictum as the first Statement of truth as correspondence, the dictum may also be seen as a first Statement of deflationism. Deflationism holds that the essential about truth is captured in equivalence schemas for truth. Similar schemas are usually put forward for falsity. Can deflationism coherently deny bivalence? I will argue that it cannot since the putative counterexamples to bivalence also falsify the relevant truth-schemas. The attempts made to render the supposition of counter examples to bivalence compatible with the truth-schemas usually take two steps: in the first place, they try to deal with the way we can reject that a relevant item is bivalent without self-contradiction, and, in the second place, they try to explain how, although there are gaps, the schemas for truth and falsehood are still correct. I will argue that these attempts fail, since they are ad hoc or generally ungrounded. So, either deflationism is in adequate as an account of truth, or there cannot be counterexamples to bivalence. I conclude that it is not only deflationism that faces this dilemma; anyone who defends that some version or other of the truth-schemas is correct faces the same difficulties as the deflationist. This would corne as no surprise for Aristotle. His dictum about truth was followed by a Statement of bivalence: “so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false”.

This paper intends to approach Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical view of history to Walter Benjamin’s dialectical concept of it, choosing, as a contrasting point of view, historicism, which overlaps fact by comprehension on behalf of a so-called scientific neutrality. To the impossibility of ignoring the “being-there” of the historian, peculiar to gadamerian hermeneutics, Benjamin adds both the presuppositions of historical materialism and the concept of time present in Jewish-Christian theology and Jewish mystics, turning History into science and remembrance, conservation and redemption.