Se aborda aquí el problema del circularidad en tanto que principal objeción y dificultad del pensamiento cartesiano, y de la posibilidad de una posición racional o cognoscitiva sólida en general. Se exponen las sucesivas versiones de esta objeción elaboradas por los contemporáneos de Descartes (circularidad Dios-cogito, Dios-evidencia, Dios-memoria), relacionándolas con sus correspondientes posturas de nuestros días. Para enfrentar este problema se retoma la duda metódica en su momento decisivo, el de la hipótesis del genio maligno, de la que se extraen, en diálogo de nuevo con la tradición y con los especialistas, las últimas consecuencias. Se exploran en seguida las posiciones fideístas o prerracionalistas que encuentran fuera de la razón el fundamento de la racionalidad, para concluir oponiendo a la salida fideísta, y por lo tanto escéptica, la apertura a la evidencia que, fundada en efecto en un acto preracional, volitivo, es perfectamente compatible, se muestra, con la autofundación de la racionalidad, siempre que no hablemos de una racionalidad meramente formal, siempre que partamos con Descartes de la evidencia presente a la conciencia.

Chez Rousseau, la fonction du législateur qui crée les états se ressemble, parfois, á celle de l'écrivain politique. Les deux tâches se développent, toutefois, dans des niveaux différents. Le premier fonde les états particuliers, tandis que le deuxième élabore les principes du droit politique, condition de possibilité de la légitimité de tous les états empiriquement donnés. Ainsi, la tâche de l'érivain politique nous indique, chez Rousseau, la place destinée à la philosophie politique, qui ne peut être confondue avec un programme concret d'action, mais comme un code de principes auxquels les hommes d'action devront se tourner, afin de bien conduire les affaires de l'état. Outre cela, il faut penser aussi au precepteur qui, quand il s'agit de l'éducation publique, aura un rôle bien défini pour promouvoir une transformation radicale de l'homme, d'un tout parfait, indépendant, dans l'état de nature, en une partie du corps colectif, pour faire de l'homme un citoyen. Ce que Rousseau nous montre c'est que le législateur, aussi bien que l'écrivain politique, devront agir sur l'opinion publique, voir, sur les moeurs, sans violence, car l'art d'agir sur l'opinion publique ne tient point à la violence.

I want to show the importance of the notion of conatus (endeavor) for Hobbes' political philosophy. According to Hobbes, all motion of bodies consists of elementary motions he called 'endeavors.' They are motions 'made in less space and time than can be given,' and they obey the law of persistence or inertia. A body strives to preserve its state and resist the causal power of other bodies. I call this the conatus-principle. Hobbes' argument for social contract and sovereign is based essentially on this model. He proves that the natural conatus makes people (i) strive to preserve their lives and therefore to get out of the destructive state of nature; (ii) commit to mutual contracts; (iii) keep the contracts unless some external cause otherwise determines; and (iv) establish a permanent sovereign power that Hobbes calls 'an artificial eternity of life.' All this is determined by the fundamental laws of nature, essentially, by the conatus-principle. I also show that the Prisoner's Dilemma interpretation of the Hobbesian state of nature does not represent all of the essential features of Hobbes' argument.

I maintain that Leibniz's distinction between 'organic machines of nature' and the artificial machine that we produce cannot be adequately understood simply in terms of differing orders of structural complexity. It is not simply that natural machines, having been made by God, are infinitely more complex than the products of our own artifice. Instead, Leibniz's distinction is a thoroughly metaphysical one, having its root in his belief that every natural machine is a corporeal substance, the unity and identity conditions of which derive ultimately from its substantial form. Natural machines are thus true unities, while artificial machines are mere aggregates of substances and are therefore only accidental unities. I briefly explore this connection between Leibniz's distinction between natural and artificial machines and his views about individuality. I conclude on a polemical note, in which it is suggested that these results undermine the currently popular view that Leibniz renounced corporeal substances toward the end of his life.

My paper is about two at least apparently conflicting stands in Leibniz's arguments concerning the nature of material things. The first strand is phenomenalist in character, connecting the ontological status of material things with harmony between the perceptions of monads. According to the other strand, material things are understood to be aggregates of monads. These descriptions are different, but it is difficult to decide whether they are incompatible or not. Could Leibniz coherently claim that material things are phenomena, mental things, in some sense, and at the same time constituted by real substances? I consider Leibniz's view of relations, because this helps us to understand the move. Against R. Adams (following P. Hoffman) I argue that the interpretation of Leibnizian phenomena as intentional objects does not help either. My thesis is that it is possible to see the two strands as compatible only by taking the phenomenalist account as the primary and by interpreting the aggregate account as derivative. The result is an interpretation of Leibniz's theory of matter as fundamentally phenomenalistic.

Où en sommes-nous, trois siècles et demi après le coup d’envoi cartésien, de ce rapport à l'autre, au langage de l'autre? Tout ce que nous savons taire, dire ou hurler sur cette question, c'est que la liberté des autres s'arrête partout où commence la nôtre. S'arrête. Justement là où elle devrait continuer. Là où elle devrait s'épanouir. Car bien au-delà de la liberté qui n'en est jamais que son garde-fou, rien de plus, commence ce qui nous guide les uns vers les autres. Commence la démocratie. Commence le partage, aussi bien des pouvoirs que des savoirs. Cette idée hérétique à Jérusalem. Cette idée anarchiste à Athènes. Cette idée qui perce à nouveau dans le cogito cartésian, explose avec les grandes révolutions romantiques et finit par constituer l'idéal même de notre Modernité. Qui a tort? Qui a raison? Qui décidera?...Une chose est certaine, toutes les sociétés autoritaires fortement hiérarchisées ont rompu des lances et tenté d'anéantir toute vision se fondant sur un anthropocentrisme trop radical. Sauf la démocratie. L'idée d'un gouvernement des personnes par elles-mêmes a beau être là, dans la pensée, elle n'a jamais pris forme nulle part, dans la réalité. Sans doute faute d'un dégagement sérieux de ce que constituerait un cogito collectif, et des avantages humains que cela représenterait. Pour tous. Au détriment d'une seule chose: la volonté de pouvoir de quelques-uns. Par ce concept de diathèse, posé ici en rapport avec le cogito cartésien comme source de la connaissance et de la morale, je cherche donc: d'une part à renverser cette manière d'identité logique, trop logique, de penser les êtres et les choses dans l'oubli des autres et du monde, et d'autre part à amener la pensée commune à s'élargir non seulement à des relations d'ordre conceptuel, monologique, dialogique, dialogale ou autre, autrement impensables, mais encore à l'action et à la création, par une vision renouvelée, diathétique, de l'éducation.

(1) Things are not to be found in the Critique (real things also called physical objects-an epoché 'avant la lettre' as in Husserl). The things as appearances are only Vorstellungen (representatio, B376). Confusion arrives because Kant calls these objects with the same names employed in the language of common sense for designating the things. (2) Due to the absence of these things, nothing is said concerning the relation between things and empirical objects (things as appearances, Erscheinungen). (3) Things in themselves, considered in the abstraction of sensible receptivity, are for this very abstraction, unknowable. Consequently, they cannot be considered as the origin of appearances. (4) I propose an explanation of the relation mentioned in (2). (5) What is the use of the Critique of so strange a conception as the thing in itself instead of simply mentioning real things and their representations in the subject? (6) Mind is not an adequate translation of the German gemüt. I think subject is better.

I discuss some of the features of the analysis of culture provided by the Britist idealist philosopher, Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923). It has been suggested that Bosanquet's philosophical views, especially on topics related to culture, were determined by the 'absolutist' metaphysics he inherited from Hegel and F. H. Bradley, and that one can see a shift in his work from an early humanism, contemporary with his studies in logic, to a late anti-humanism. I argue that this account is problematic, that Bosanquet's discussion of cultural phenomena in fact consistently reflected principles present in his logic, and that these were articulated long before his explicitly absolutist metaphysical views. Specifically, I briefly outline three elements constitutive of a discussion of culture — aesthetics, religion and social life — and show how Bosanquet's account of each of them displays characteristics that are typically found in his logic. Since Bosanquet never abandoned the idealist logic of his youth — indeed, he wrote on the topic throughout his philosophical career — there is reason to doubt that he ever gave up the humanist values associated with them. This, I conclude, obliges us to reevaluate the standard assessments of Bosanquet's philosophy.

Thomas Hobbes, like Francis Bacon before him, disliked Aristotle and scholasticism. They were both quite familiar with the objects of their dislike, having encountered Aristotle and scholasticism first hand at Oxford University. Bacon later described his tutors as "men of sharp wits, shut up in their cells of a few authors, chiefly Aristotle, their Dictator." Bacon clearly saw the extent of new possibilities in thought. He held that Europeans of his time needed to sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the limits of ancient learning) into an ocean of new learning. Hobbes, for similar reasons described the universities as places for the production of insignificant speech. Locke also echoed this rejection of scholasticism and contempt for the universities. The purpose of this paper is to talk about this rejection and the ways in which the continuing revolt against university education by Hobbes and Locke has contributed to a new view of the self.

Most philosophers have noted the linguistic turn at the end of the nineteenth century. Few, if any, have noted the historical turn in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Living in a time of anxiety in which the universe and life present problems to be solved, the problem for this paper can be stated as: Why was history so imprtant until recently, and is narrative so important now? I examine the advent of irrationalism in order to provide some explanation for the substitution of story for history. Some find the origins of modern humanism in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's contention that human beings have been given the wonderfully unique ability to choose for themselves. But Pico still limited the options for humankind to provisions of the traditional hierarchical ontology of the Middle Ages. Thus, for him, the journey of humankind to itself was not a historical one, but rather the choice between a vertical descent into vegetative or brute state of being, or a mystical ascent along the hierarchy to the angelic or even divine level. But Modern thought relinquished this hierarchy in favour of a human centred teleology, framing the ontology in between nature (individuality, non-rationality) as the origin and culture (reason, the social) as its outcome. Thus the ontology became historicised from Defoe, Lessing, Rousseau, through Kant down to Marx. In irrationalism this became a mythical movement remaining within the non-rational, as in Nietzsche, and Mussolini, and finally story, as in Virginia Woolff, and films such as Dead Poets Society and A River Runs Through It, or New Age neo-romanticism.

According to Kant, we refer to what is out there in the world by performing a demonstrative act, like pointing at an object with a finger. A Kantian mode of demonstrative reference is characterized by the existence of a real, 2-placed affective relation between an intuiting subject and the referent. Parsons suggests that Kantian intuition is both singular and immediate, and immediacy demands an object of intuition to be present, a condition clearly satisfied by objects within our immediate perceptual field. But since we do not have an immediate relation with remote objects, the scope of our demonstrative reference is severely restricted by intuitional immediacy. I wish to develop a global Kantian intuition in order to extend the scope of demonstrative reference. Kant's ontology of space entails that the global representability of space be given to an intuiting subject as a form of intuition. According to Melnick, Kantian intuition is a kinematic operation which involves directing attention and moving about. To make contact with the world, the subject must move away from its locale: although a spatially remote object (W) is not immediately present, we can shift our location by taking a path such that W will become so. Once we are close enough to be affected by W, we will be able to point at W and say "This." Thus, the intuitive scope of demonstrative reference is globalized as we shift our location.