Ciências Humanas

'Common Sense and Enlightenment',March 13, 2015 - March 15, 2015, Princeton University. A long term project of the CSSP comes to fruition in 2015 when the first two volumes of a multi-authored History of Scottish Philosophy will be published by Oxford University Press. Scottish Philosophy in the 18th Century, Volume One, edited by James Harris (University of St Andrews) and Aaron Garrett (Boston University) covers Scottish Enlightenment writers and topics in morality, politics, aesthetics and religion. Scottish Philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries, edited by Gordon Graham, engages with the post-Enlightenment debates between once famous, but now much less well known, Scottish philosophers—Thomas Brown, William Hamilton, J F Ferrier, Alexander Bain, John Macmurray—with chapters on more wide ranging topics such as the Scottish reception of Kant and Hegel, the rise of Idealism, and the influence of Scottish philosophy abroad. The CSSP Spring Conference 2015 will celebrate the appearance of these two volumes. Plenary sessions and panels will take up themes from the chapters of the books - see preliminary program and list of invited speakers below.  The 2105 Spring Conference has additional financial support from the Scots Philosophical Association.

Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) fut l’une des figures majeures de la philosophie allemande au XIXe siècle. Philosophe, logicien, psychologue, médecin, il a connu à son époque une renommée extraordinaire. Professeur de philosophie à l’Université de Göttingen, où
il succéda à Herbart, il mena un parcours de recherche aussi original qu’influent. Entre romantisme et positivisme, entre naturalisme et historicisme, sa doctrine ne s’est jamais confondue avec les courants les plus importants de son époque. Admirée et suivie, autant en Allemagne qu’à l’étranger, sa pensée fut ensuite, après sa mort, condamnée à l’oubli en raison de son supposé éclectisme méthodologique et, finalement, classée sous la rubrique ambiguë d’« idéal-réalisme ». Le legs de Lotze s’inscrit dans un rapport complexe à la phénoménologie,
à la philosophie analytique naissante, au pragmatisme américain et au néokantisme allemand jusqu’à Heidegger. L’analyse de ce legs n’a cependant jamais bénéficié d’une réflexion critique capable d’en mesurer la portée et les limites. Par un travail d’évaluation historico-critique, ce volume se propose de combler cette lacune.

The proposed special issues covers the period seventeenth- and eighteenth century and focuses on the issue of how a sample of influential thinkers of that period conceptualised the human agent’s mental abilities as governing perception, action and moral behaviour. The representative thinkers included in this issue are: Descartes, Cudworth, Locke, Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz, Reid, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant.
During the period under consideration in this proposed issue there is a great revival of interest in the powers, capacities or faculties of the human mind, leading to innovative accounts which partially ground in a broad sense, modern psychology. Having inherited a general classification of the cognitive and moral powers from late Scholasticism, many authors during the period under consideration were mainly interested in putting them to work, to explain and describe how we think and perceive (rather than the contents of our thoughts and perceptions). Accordingly, the proposed special issue examines several aspects of the mental life, including perception, attention, reflection, imagination, consciousness, conscience, self-knowledge, activity and passivity of thought.