From Shakespeare to existentialism

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Jean Bardy

Que reste-t-il aujourd'hui de "l'évolution créatrice" de Bergson? Les progrès prodigieux accomplis par les sciences - biologie, physique, thermodynamique- semblent devoir marquer du sceau de la caducité un livre écrit alors que la théorie de la relativité vient de faire son apparition tandis que la biologie comme science n'en est encore qu'à ses débuts. Pourtant "l'évolution créatrice" surprend le lecteur à plus d'un titre. A l'heure où une "Réforme de la pensée" s'impose de plus en plus, la réconciliation de la science et de la philosophie est devenue urgente.

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Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel

"Philosophers debate the death of philosophy as much as they debate the death of God. Kant claimed responsibility for both philosophy's beginning and end, while Heidegger argued it concluded with Nietzsche. In the twentieth century, figures as diverse as John Austin and Richard Rorty have proclaimed philosophy's end, with some even calling for the advent of 'postphilosophy.' In an effort to make sense of these conflicting positions -- which often say as much about the philosopher as his subject -- Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel undertakes the first systematic treatment of 'the end of philosophy,' while also recasting the history of western thought itself. Thomas-Fogiel begins with postphilosophical claims such as scientism, which she reveals to be self-refuting, for they subsume philosophy into the branches of the natural sciences. She discovers similar issues in Rorty's skepticism and strands of continental thought. Revisiting the work of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century philosophers, when the split between analytical and continental philosophy began, Thomas-Fogiel finds both traditions followed the same path -- the road of reference -- which ultimately led to self-contradiction. This phenomenon, whether valorized or condemned, has been understood as the death of philosophy. Tracing this pattern from Quine to Rorty, from Heidegger to Levinas and Habermas, Thomas-Fogiel reveals the self-contradiction at the core of their claims while also carving an alternative path through self-reference. Trained under the French philosopher Bernard Bourgeois, she remakes philosophy in exciting new ways for the twenty-first century."--Publisher's description.

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Morton White

An examination of some of the main problems of contemporary analytic philosophy, in which it is argued that existential statements, neccessary truths and ethical judgments are not justified in fundamentally different ways.

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Suzanne Cunningham

Two of the dominant traditions in twentieth-century philosophy explicitly excluded Charles Darwin's account of evolution, not because they claimed it was mistaken, but because they saw it as irrelevant. These two traditions - analytic philosophy, founded by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and phenomenology, fathered by Edmund Husserl - set the stage for great deal of subsequent philosophy. The non-Darwinian framework that they constructed continues to constrain significant portions of the field, in particular, theories of perception and mind. Philosophy and the Darwinian Legacy traces the major reasons for the exclusion of Darwin and evolutionary considerations from philosophy. These reasons include the ambivalence of nineteenth-century philosophy toward the views of Darwin, the numerous disagreements among biologists at the turn of the century about the status of Darwin's views and the determination of the architects of analytic philosophy and phenomenology to protect ethics, logic and sociopolitical values from all taint of historical contingency. Professor Cunningham argues that this exclusion of Darwinian views distorted most subsequent philosophical theories of perception and mind. She criticizes purely cognitivist theories of perception as well as Machine Functionalist theories of mind, and then offers positive proposals on how these theories should be amended to take account of the adaptive role that perception and mind play on behalf of a living organism's struggle for survival and well being.