Regard sur "l'évolution créatrice"

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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.

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George Dyson

In his prediction of the World Wide Web's ultimate challenge to human civilization--a globally networked, electronic, sentient being--Dyson traces the course of the information revolution, illuminating the lives, work, and ideas of visionaries who foresaw the development of artificial intelligence, artificial life, and the global mind.

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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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Alain Badiou

Twenty years ago, Alain Badiou's first Manifesto for Philosophy rose up against the all-pervasive proclamation of the "end" of philosophy. In lieu of this problematic of the end, he put forward the watchword: "one more step". The situation has considerably changed since then. Philosophy was threatened with obliteration at the time, whereas today it finds itself under threat for the diametrically opposed reason: it is endowed with an excessive, artificial existence. "Philosophy" is everywhere. It serves as a trademark for various media pundits. It livens up cafe s and health clubs. It has its magazines and its gurus. It is universally called upon, by everything from banks to major state commissions, to pronounce on ethics, law and duty. In essence, "philosophy" has now come to stand for nothing other than its most ancient enemy: conservative ethics. Badiou's second manifesto therefore seeks to demoralize philosophy and to separate it from all those "philosophies" that are as servile as they are ubiquitous. It demonstrates the power of certain eternal truths to illuminate action and, as such, to transport philosophy far beyond the figure of "the human" and its "rights". There, well beyond all moralism, in the clear expanse of the idea, life becomes something radically other than survival. -- Cover.