British Idealism

C. S. Lewis, renowned Christian apologist and beloved author of children’s novels, is rarely thought of as a “philosopher” per se despite having both studied and taught philosophy for several years at Oxford. Moreover, Lewis’s long journey to Christianity was essentially philosophical — passing through seven different stages. This journey, as well as every philosophical topic Lewis discussed, including metaphysics, natural theology, epistemology, logic, psychology, ethics, socio-political philosophy, and aesthetics are explained here in detail. Barkman incorporates previously unexplored treasures from Lewis’s unpublished philosophy lecture notes, lost philosophical essays, and hand-written annotations from copies of his philosophical books, such as Aristotle’s Ethics and Augustine’s City of God

My theme is ‘life-writing’, understood as the shaping of one's life through the contemplation of values, although this activity is mostly unreflective. To become an art so that one's life can be shaped in greater accord with clearly held values, this process must become reflective. These values have an inescapably ethical dimension, because as we necessarily poetize our surrounding world, we contribute to our personal and communal ethos the character that arises from the culturally shaping power of guiding ideals. Even the immoralist cultivates life within an ethos where obscure feelings connect with some thing or other, whereby certain aims will then appear more valuable than others.

To understand how we cannot help but shape our lives according to dimly or clearly intuited values, I compare Coleridge’s primary imagination, the ‘shaping spirit’ ‘necessary for all human perception’ with Kant’s ‘blind though indispensible function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all, yet of which we are scarcely ever conscious’. With Coleridge, we find in imagination an impulse to connect profound but obscure presentiments and ideas with our surroundings. This impulse propels great art and everyday aesthetics alike. Whether we pursue merely what attracts us, or seek value beyond this, all lives are freely shaped, without excuses, as the existentialists say, but not always in the most pellucid consciousness. Our choices inevitably engage us in the poetic art of life-writing. Cast in medias res, we necessarily improvise. But this is no argument against lives being moral-aesthetic works, spontaneous compositions in value.

One of the central ideas in 19th century British Idealism was the concrete universal, described by Bosanquet as the universal 'in the form of a world', as opposed to the universal 'in the form of a class'. This talk compares the understanding of the reality of universals in T.H. Green with his 19th century pragmatist peer Charles Peirce.

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

Idealists invert standard thinking in addressing the so-called problem of consciousness. For, if one takes the mind or mental activity to be in some sense fundamental then there is no longer a question of how consciousness fits, or fails to fit, into the world as revealed by modern science. Quite the contrary, the issue is how to account for the general tendency to believe that that world represents a genuinely mind-independent reality (and, indeed, what this tendency amounts to). Consequently, the greatest challenge for idealists – or at least those who wish to make their position credible to modern eyes – is to account for scientific practice, and the status of its constructs, adequately without endorsing realist interpretations.

This paper advances four principal theses. First, that the concept of coherence carries a theoretically important and historically influential connotation which is largely ignored at the present, namely, that of serving as a regulative ideal guiding inquiry, and theory choice, in metaphysics. Second, that this connotation can be revived to good effect with regard to a considerable range of metaphysical controversies of contemporary relevance and concern. Third, that within the context of this metaphysically-oriented sense of coherence there is a vital need to distinguish clearly between two competing kinds of coherence — internal and external — each of which is associated with a metaphysical orientation fundamentally opposite to the other. Fourth, that there are strong reasons to conclude that the efficacy of coherence as a comprehensive regulative ideal requires a fundamental commitment to the notion of internal coherence.

Locke’un bilgi/algı felsefesinin iki temel dayanağı; “soyut ideler” kavramı ve “birincil-ikincil nitelikler” ayrımıdır. Berkeley kendi felsefesine öncelikle Locke’un bu iki düşüncesini eleştirmekle başlar. Ona göre ne soyut ideler diye bir şey vardır, ne de birincil ve ikincil nitelikler ayrımı anlamlıdır. Ona göre tutarlı bir deneyciliğin bu türden düşünceleri kabul etmesi mümkün değildir. Berkeley’nin bu eleştirileri daha sonra “madde” kavramına yönelteceği eleştirinin de temelini oluşturacaktır.

[This DRAFT book chapter is virtually complete. A slightly edited version of this chapter has been submitted and approved for publication in the forthcoming volume The Philosophical Legacy of Jorge J.E. Gracia, scheduled to be published in 2021by Rowman & Littlefield.]

Abstract: The question of development and its place in the world is one of the oldest in the history of metaphysics. In the course of the formative years of the discipline that culminated in the metaphysical views of Plato and Aristotle, Heraclitus’ emphasis on development qua concrete unity of process and result eventually gave way to a commitment to identify, in one degree or other of abstraction from becoming, the fundamental locus of reality, intelligibility, and goodness with being per se. Classic examples include Plato’s absolutely separate and timeless forms as well as Aristotle’s absolutely immutable and distinct infimae species (including both immaterial and materiate forms), in terms of which his closely related theory of scientific demonstration is constructed.

Despite its subordination, the theme of development, even in the realm of presumably immaterial and timeless being, was never entirely neglected – important Islamaic and Christian metaphysicians often emphasized the active and dynamic as opposed to static nature of pure being or existence. Eventually, however, the categories of what later Christian metaphysicians would come to call “general metaphysics”, and later Islamaic metaphysicians “general matters”, would become increasingly ossified, static, and conceived in ever greater abstraction from the intelligible realities, which are intrinsic values, that they are supposed to be about. In the West, as famously explained by Étienne Gilson: The resultant science of ontology eo nomine became easy prey to Kant’s critique of the powers of abstract a priori reason. That critique would also diminish confidence in the ontological aspects of earlier metaphysical systems which trace, ultimately, to Parmenides; as well as to any intellectual intuition of some separate or absolute rational fact and the associated infallible and incorrigible axioms upon which scientific demonstration depends. Closely related, confidence in the knowability of intrinsic value also diminished, in tandem with the rise of the value-free and purely quantificational conceptions of science that dominate the present age.

In the spirit of several famous post-Kantian and later Islamaic metaphysicians, in this chapter we cast back, beyond Parmenides, to Heraclitus as the starting point of the metaphysical enterprise as well as of the developmental paradigm of metaphysics. The first section builds upon Jorge F. E. Gracia’s conception of metaphysics in terms of categories per se and their interrelations. A development of Gracia’s conception incorporates insights from R. G. Collingwood’s scale of forms and G. R. G. Mure’s conception of development. In the resultant synthesis, the interrelation of categories is conceived in terms of a developing series of categories. The second section situates Heraclitus as the founder of Western metaphysics in general and of the developmental paradigm in particular. The next section discuses aspects of the tension between the developmental and ontological aspects of Aristotle’s metaphysics and associated theory of scientific demonstration; these contributed to the eventual collapse of Aristotelian science. Finally, some basic ideas of mathematician William Lawvere’s adaptation of Hegel’s objective logic are formulated using the language of contemporary mathematical category and topos theory, a framework that holds out the exciting promise of doing for developmental metaphysics what symbolic logic has done for ontology. The preliminary result is illustrated via a metaphysical theory of Benedetto Croce.

Durante l’età vittoriana moltissimi intellettuali, scienziati e filosofi si sono dedicati alla “ricerca psichica”, ovvero allo studio dei fenomeni paranormali (telepatia, telecinesi, chiaroveggenza, spiritismo ecc.). Il presente volume raccoglie e traduce per la prima volta in italiano una selezione degli articoli che William James ha dedicato a questo affascinante e controverso ambito di ricerca. Questi saggi, di straordinaria importanza storica, ci introducono ad una dimensione dell'opera di James dove l’ansia di una prova scientifica della vita oltre la morte si intreccia con vicende personali a volte anche toccanti, e ci permettono di gettare uno sguardo inedito sulla nascita della psicologia e sull’evoluzione del pragmatismo filosofico.

Quando muore, nell’agosto del 1910, William James è unanimemente considerato il più importante psicologo sperimentale americano. Le sue teorie sulla struttura della coscienza hanno contribuito in modo significativo alla fondazione della psicologia contemporanea.
Il suo monumentale saggio sui Principi di psicologia (1890) resta uno dei testi fondativi di questa disciplina. Insieme all’amico Charles Sanders Peirce, James è stato il teorico del pragmatismo, ma le sue ricerche hanno sondato anche i territori della metafisica, proponendo audaci speculazioni sulla natura profonda della realtà, della conoscenza e dell’etica.

(Draft, ottobre 2018, citare solo dalla versione pubblicata da Mimesis)

Philosophers know a great deal about how reasoning can go wrong but very little about what can go wrong with the conclusions that philosophers try to establish by their reasonings.  It is Stove’s great merit that he tackles the latter problem directly, though a certain dogmatism in his approach and a contemptuous attitude towards the ‘great’ philosophers have almost certainly led to a neglect of his work.

This paper inquires into the appropriateness of the label ‘neo-positivist’ that he applies to his own position and considers his view that there are probably, but not certainly, innumerable ways in which a philosophical claim can be wrong, mistaken, untrue, absurd even.  An attempt is made to relate our lack of knowledge here to the Chomsky/McGinn thesis that there may be kinds of problem with which the human intellect is just not equipped to deal.

Along with utilitarianism, British idealism was the most important philosophical and practical movement in Britain and its Empire during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Even though the British idealists have regained some of their standing in the history of philosophy, their own historical theories still fail to receive the deserved scholarly attention. This article helps to fill that major gap in the literature. Understanding historiography as concerning the appropriate modes of enquiring into the recorded past, this article analyses the key historiographical commitments that underpin the writings of the early T.H. Green (section two), Edward Caird (section three), and F.H. Bradley (sections four and five). Section six explores the influence of Bradley’s historiography. These approaches are linked by the belief that all thought can be properly understood only by critical historians who possess the appropriate tools with which to distinguish permanently valid truths from the transient imperfections with which those truths are mixed. A crucial division between them is the invocation of a neo-Hegelian Geist by the early Green and Caird, and Bradley’s reliance on a progressive human nature. Moreover, the article establishes that R.G. Collingwood’s highly influential theories of ‘absolute presuppositions’ and ‘re-enactment’ were taken largely from Bradley’s historiography.

This paper traces the ancestry of a familiar historiographical narrative, according to which early modern philosophy was marked by the development of empiricism, rationalism, and their synthesis by Immanuel Kant. It is often claimed that this narrative became standard in the nineteenth century, due to the influence of Thomas Reid, Kant and his disciples, or German Hegelians and British Idealists. The paper argues that the narrative became standard only at the turn of the twentieth century. This was not due to the influence of Reid, German Hegelians, or British Idealists as they did not endorse the narrative, although Thomas Hill Green may have facilitated its uptake. The narrative is based on Kant’s historiographical sketches, as corrected and integrated by Karl Leonhard Reinhold. It was first fleshed out into full-fledged histories by two Kantians, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann and Johann Gottlieb Buhle. Numerous historians, several of whom were not Kantians, spread it in the English-speaking world. They include Kuno Fischer, Friedrich Ueberweg, Richard Falckenberg, and Wilhelm Windelband. However, the wide availability of their works did not suffice to make the narrative standard because, until the 1890s, the Hegelian account was at least as popular as theirs. Among the factors that allowed the narrative to become standard are its aptness to be adopted by philosophers of the most diverse persuasions, its simplicity and suitability for teaching.

Prior to the Great War, academic philosophy throughout Europe was arguably dominated by Idealist schools, with Neo-Kantianism prominent in France and Germany, and British Idealism still a leading force in the United Kingdom. The outburst of the Great War, and the German army’s burning of the library of the University of Leuven in particular, gave rise to a reaction by intellectuals across various fields, including philosophy. Of particular interest here is the way that philosophers sought to contribute to the war effort, thereby ushering in an international controversy between some of the chief figures in Germanophone Neo-Kantianism and their French, British, and American critics: viz, the association of a particular philosophical character with specific national cultures. Germanophone Neo-Kantians, for example, sought justification for the war effort in the writings of their German Idealist intellectual ancestors, while figures such as Dewey and Boutroux, blamed Idealist philosophy for Prussian militarism. After surveying the debates over the association of Idealism with the war, this paper will examine how idealist schools faded from prominence in interwar European academia. I will argue that the association of German Idealism with the war contributed to the formation of the idea of a divide between analytic and continental philosophy.

Sir Robert Gordon Menzies was the founder of the Liberal Party of Australia. As well as being Australia's longest-serving prime minister, Menzies was the most thoughtful. Menzies' world picture was one where Britishness was the overriding normative principle, and in which cultural puritanism and philosophical idealism were pervasive. Unless we remember this cultural background of Menzies' thought then we will seriously misunderstand what he meant by the very project of liberalism. The Forgotten Menzies argues that Menzies' greatest aspiration was to protect the ideals of cultural puritanism Australia from two kinds of materialism: communism; and the mindset encouraged by affluence and technological progress. Central to Menzies' project of cultural and civilisational preservation was the university, an institution he spent much of his career extolling and expanding. The Forgotten Menzies makes an important contribution to the history of political thought and ideology in Australia, as to understanding the largely forgotten but rich intellectual origins of the Liberal Party.

I argue that, from his early "Studies in the History of the Renaissance" to his late essays on Hellenic culture and philosophy, Walter Pater's work sets forth an original theory of intersubjectivity. This theory is grounded in close analysis of what we might call "scenes of contact" in the domain of art. Pater's concepts of "touch," "impress," and "the scene of human experience" show how the artwork participates in broader relationships that make social existence possible. The affinity of these concepts to contemporaneous theories of lived experience, expression and understanding by Wilhelm Dilthey shows Pater's participation in an emerging intellectual paradigm. Taken together, these readings offer an alternative to accounts of Pater as a materialist, an impressionist, or a hedonist. Instead, his work should be understood as part of a broader theoretical inquiry of his generation into the fundamental nature of experience.

Realism/Idealism are major rhetorical tropes of international relations.  This paper attempts to generate a thicker specification of their meanings.  Canonical international relations texts were searched for prototypic Realist and Idealist items.

The Erklären/Verstehen (explanation/understanding) distinction is often discussed in the context of the defence of the autonomy of the human sciences in the tradition of neo-Kantian philosophy but it is rarely connected to the defence of the autonomy of historical explanations articulated by Collingwood and Oakeshott. Unlike earlier British idealists Collingwood and Oakeshott are concerned not in the metaphysics of time but in the methodology of history. This contribution locates their defence of the autonomy of historical understanding against the background of their commitment to a form of conceptual idealism. Against the background of an idealism which is purely conceptual (not causal or ontological) they argue that history is a form of experience with a distinctive method and subject matter. Both Collingwood and Oakeshott reject empiricist epistemology and argue that historical understanding is inferential not factual and that the inferences at work in history are different in kind from the inductive inferences at work in the natural sciences. But their rejection of the fact/value distinction presupposed by empiricist epistemology does not lead them to endorse any relativist conclusion concerning the possibility of knowing the past.

The notion of “Cambridge change”, invented by Peter Geach in the late ’70, aims to describe the fact that some changes can be attributed to a subject without any internal change in this subject, but with only a change in another subject related to the first one – what can be named a “relational non-internal change”.
This case is already known by Plato (Theaetetus, 155b-c) and studied by Aristotle (Physics, V, 2, 225b11-13; Metaphysics, K, 12, 1068a11-13). In the Antiquity, it has been applied to the problem of the relations between God and the world by Augustine (De Trinitate, V, XVI, 17) as well as by Boethius (De Trinitate, V, PL 64, 1254A-B), who have seen there the way of resolving the conflict between the divine Immutability and the universal Providence of God, using the notion of non-reciprocal relation: one created thing can change between instant t1 and instant t2, without anything changing in God, if not the real non-reciprocal relation from the thing itself toward God.
At the time of the great theological synthesis, in the middle of the 13th century, Albertus Magnus as well as Thomas Aquinas will assume this data of the theological Tradition in order to undergo them rationally, reading critically the writings of Augustine and Boethius under the light of a new approach from Aristotle, especially in their respective comments on the Metaphysics and the Physics.
There are several problems here that theologians must deal with: Divine Immutability and universal causality of God, but also the question of the nature of the creation in a created thing, the real relativity of the persons in the Trinity, or the relation of reason from God to the world: All those problems may constantly incriminate the Aristotelian frameworks of the categories, that Albert as well as Thomas wish to preserve at all costs, in order to build a totally well-ordered Universe. Every reality, substantial, accidental, or even conceptual has always to be situated in the heart of a relational network, going from God and back to Him, following the neoplatonician model of exitus/reditus, reformulated by Albert and Thomas as a fundamental metaphysical principle. The “Cambridge change”, or relational, non-internal change, appears therefore in the works of the two great Dominicans as an essential tool in their project of unification of science.
The contribution aims then first to describe the antique theological and philosophical use of the criteria of “Cambridge change”; then, to list the most important texts of Albert and Thomas that implement this conception of change, in order to understand the metaphysical issues of this problem; to finally evaluate the distance between both authors on this topic – as well as in the application they make of it, as in the ontological signification they confer to this fundamental element for their unitive conception of the Universe.

This article analyses the theory of sexuality, personality and politics developed by the literary critic John Addington Symonds (1840-93). Sections one and two introduce Symonds' changing reputation as a modernist theorist of 'sexual inversion' (homosexuality). Section three examines his conceptualisation of the processes whereby an individual can sublimate sexual urges to create a harmonious and unalienated personality which acknowledges the need to combine transgressive self-expression with social convention. Section four demonstrates how this theory led Symonds to endorse an eroticised form of democratic socialism, while section five explores the culmination of Symonds' thought in a form of pantheistic idealism. This research is significant in that it extends our understanding of nineteenth-century socialism and sexuality into areas that are marginalised and yet historically important.

This essay considers the manuscript 'Political Philosophy' in the context of Michael Oakeshott’s thought and of the contemporary debate about the nature of political philosophy. In the first part, it shows that the differentiation between three different levels of political thought proposed by Oakeshott implies the incommensurability between normative conflicts and philosophy. In the second part, it analyses the consequences of this perspective on the nature of the diachronic development of political philosophy and on its relation with its context. The conclusion points out how the dialectic between contingencies of political experience and the eternity of philosophical concepts constitutes a dilemma that animates Oakeshott’s position.

De la période romantique aux années symbolistes, où l’on s’élance « vers l’idéal » (Léon de
Tinseau, 1896), en passant par Emma Bovary qui « poursuit l’idéal à travers les bastringues et les
estaminets de la préfecture » (Baudelaire, 1857), le XIXe siècle est hanté par l’idéal. Dans le sillage
de la philosophie platonicienne et de l’idéalisme allemand, de nombreux écrivains, artistes et
historiens s’emparent de cette notion. Elle engage en effet un ensemble de réflexions esthétiques
et éthiques sur ce que l’on peut ou doit représenter en art, et sur les systèmes de valeurs
dominants.
La notion fait d’autant plus facilement l’objet d’une appropriation ou d’un rejet que son
contenu reste souvent vague. Image d’une perfection située hors du monde matériel, l’idéal est
moins défini par des caractéristiques intrinsèques que par la valeur qui lui est attachée : il est, tout
au long du siècle, objet de culte, d’aspiration, de déni, de rejet, de regret. Valorisé quand il est
opposé au désenchantement, au spleen, au prosaïsme bourgeois, il devient objet de critiques
quand il est considéré comme le négatif de la science, de l’énergie, de la vérité et de la réalité. Il
produit les « lacrymales historiettes des Theuriet et des Sand » (Huysmans) mais motive
aussi La Recherche de l’absolu. Dès lors, l’idéalisme apparaît comme un facteur de structuration du
champ artistique et intellectuel et façonne au cours du siècle toute une série de clivages, opposant
entre autres romantiques et philistins, symbolistes et naturalistes.
Pour prolonger la réflexion entretenue depuis septembre 2012 par leur séminaire de
recherches consacré à l’idéalisme (doctoriales-serd.com/projet.html), les Doctoriales de la SERD
organisent un colloque de deux journées. C’est à l’examen des transferts culturels et disciplinaires
que s’intéresseront les interventions, qui croiseront approche lexicologique et approches
esthétique, sociale ou politique. Qu’entend-on par « idéal » au XIXe siècle et quelle fonction revêt
cette notion dans les débats intellectuels et artistiques de l’époque ?
Samedi 8 février 2014
salle 682
9h Accueil des participants
9h15 Introduction du colloque par le comité d’organisation
9h45 Les genres littéraires de l’idéal (Modération : Aude Déruelle)
Thomas Conrad (Paris III Sorbonne nouvelle)
Le laboratoire de l’idéal de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam : manières d’écrire l’idéal
Pascale Auraix-Jonchière (Blaise-Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand)
La poétique du conte dans les romans champêtres de Sand : une clé pour l’idéalisme ?
10h45 Débats et pause
11h30 Les romantiques et l’idéal (Modération : Emilie Pezard)
Damien Zanone (Louvain, Belgique)
L’« idéalisme » de George Sand
Amélie de Chaisemartin (Sorbonne Paris-IV)
Les romanciers romantiques et le « beau idéal » néoclassique
Marie-Clémence Régnier (Sorbonne Paris-IV)
La mansarde, le château ou l’appartement : habiter en poète. Idéalisations de l’espace domestique
du Poète chez Théophile Gautier
12h30 Débats
13h00 Déjeuner
14h30 Symbolisme et idéal (Modération : Françoise Gaillard)
Eric Lecler (Université d’Aix-Marseille)
L’idéalisme et ses détournements de sens : du symbolisme à l’Absolu littéraire
Renzo Alvarado Ruiz de Castilla (Sorbonne Paris-IV)
Ne dites pas Symbolisme, mais dites Idéalisme
Maja Vukusic Zorica (Université de Zagreb, Croatie)
André Gide et l’idéalisme fin de siècle
16h45 Débats et pause
17h30 Premières conclusions par le comité d’organisation
Samedi 5 avril 2014
salle Pierre Albouy
9h00 Accueil des participants
9h15 Introduction par le comité d’organisation
9h45 L’idéal dans les écrits sur l’art (Modération : Olivier Schefer)
Fanny Bacot (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Ressemblances et dissemblances dans les exempla idéalistes : usage, portée et application de
l’idéal dans la critique d’art fin-de-siècle
Florence Beillacou (Université de Strasbourg)
Zola et « la guerre à l’idéal » : idéalisme, académisme et romantisme dans les écrits sur l’art et
la littérature
Thibaut Radomme (Louvain / Oxford)
L’Art ou le Progrès ? Les idéaux antagonistes d’Édouard Fétis et de la bourgeoisie libérale
dans la Belgique du XIXe siècle
11h15 Débats et pause
11h45 Naturalisme et idéal (Modération : Aude Jeannerod)
Jean-Marie Seillan (Nice Sophia Antipolis)
Naturalisme et anti-idéalisme
Pascaline Hamon (Paris III Sorbonne nouvelle)
L’idéal dans la critique littéraire fin de siècle : un étendard antinaturaliste ?
12h45 Débats
13h15 Déjeuner
14h30 Héritages de l’idéalisme (Modération : Alain Vaillant)
Thomas Constantinesco (Paris Diderot Paris VII)
De l’idéalisme en Amérique : Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne
Matthew Sandefer (Princeton University)
Réalisme idéal ou idéalisme réel ? Syncrétisme littéraire au XIXe siècle
Marie Panter (ENS Lyon)
Le roman idéaliste en contexte réaliste-naturaliste : Victor Hugo, Theodor Fontane, Thomas
Hardy
16h00 Questions et pause
16h30 L’idéalisme, entre littérature et philosophie (Modération : Victoire Feuillebois)
Eric Dayre (ENS Lyon)
Que se passe-t-il entre 1790 et 1810 en Grande Bretagne et en Allemagne ? Ce qu’on a appelé
l’idéalisme romantique
Sarah Alharbi (Montréal / Paris VIII Vincennes Saint-Denis)
Évolution de la notion d’« idéal » dans la théorie des genres poétiques chez Schiller et
Schlegel : essai de reconstruction de l’héritage littéraire de l’idéalisme allemand au XIXe siècle.
18h00 Débats
18h30 Conclusion du colloque par le comité d’organisation
Comité d’organisation :
Capucine Echiffre (Nantes)
Victoire Feuillebois (Aix-Marseille Université)
Aude Jeannerod (Jean Moulin Lyon 3)
Lola Kheyar Stibler (Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Mathilde Labbé (Sorbonne Paris-IV / Blaise-Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand)
Émilie Pezard (Sorbonne Paris-IV)

Though far more often remembered as a poet, Coleridge's theory of ideas was spectacular in its originality and bold reach. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) stands tall in the cultural pantheon for a few world-famous poems. It is less well known that in his own lifetime, and in the decades following his death, this canonical poet had an equal reputation as a philosopher. This article introduces key elements of Coleridge's philosophy in outline, including his theory of ideas, the polar philosophy, and his dynamic idealism, which sees matter as arising from a clash of opposed forces, themselves derived from more originary powers or ideas.

Science popularization might take different forms. In the early twentieth century, Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington presented the most successful endeavors. Philosophers were highly unimpressed and disturbed by these popular works and various authors declared their disagreement with the physicists' philosophical books against their own philosophical background. I will discuss three different philosophers, L. Susan Stebbing, C. E. M. Joad and Philipp Frank, whose three lines of criticism represent three different forms of philosophy, social engagement, and scientific outlook. What is interesting is that there was a point when the most diverse philosophers (of science) agreed in contrast of their common enemy, namely, those popularizing scientists that have their reputation and use it to propagate false, or at least misleading views about science, culture, and values. What we shall see is how far this agreement went among these figures and how the divergent strategies culminated in very similar results regarding knowledge dissemination.

This article counters the dominant misinterpretations of the British idealists’ reception of Plato, thereby undermining the current historiography of Plato’s modern reception in the English-speaking world. Section one introduces the topic, before section two explores the British idealists’ celebration of Plato. Section three argues against the fundamental assumption of the current historiography: that the British idealists were dogmatic Neo-Platonic Hegelians. Rather, while the British idealists recognised Plato’s sometimes dogmatic formulations of the forms, they saw greater philosophical value in his “searching” texts. They appreciated the provisional, inchoate character of human conceptualisations of the forms and emphasised our responsibility to test them. Section four highlights the British idealists’ recognition of Plato’s literary turn. Section five demonstrates that, contrary to the received view of Plato scholars, the British idealists themselves were egalitarians who prioritised personal virtue, decentralised debate and local self-determination. Conclusion: the British idealists interpreted Plato in ways that differed significantly from Jowett and the current historiography.

Towards the end of the 19th century there was a revival of the struggle for democracy throughout the world. The formation of Australia as a federation embodied this commitment, a commitment subsequently abandoned. The impetus for public education in Australia came from its commitment to democracy, inspired by the British Idealists. If the people of a country are to be its governors, these philosophers argued, they must be educated to be governors. Taking this injunction seriously, I will argue that the history of the struggle for democracy should be central to education, taught in such a way that students are able to appreciate what this commitment to democracy means. Taking Australia as a model, I will argue that this implies that the young be educated so that they define themselves in relation to the vision of a democratic society and see themselves as historical actors responsible for the future of their country and the future of humanity._ 505 424..437

This article asks to what extent R.G. Collingwood’s ‘logic of question and answer’ is compatible with the central tenets of Giovanni Gentile’s ‘actualism’.  It is argued that, interpreted as an actualist device, Collingwood’s ‘logic’ offers useful insights into the mechanisms underlying Gentile’s theory. Both must confront what I call the ‘Actualist Dilemma,’ which holds that if there is no reality independent of actual thinking, truth becomes entirely relative to whatever beliefs a thinker happens to have, including those regarding the structures and conditions by which truth is determined. Understood as attempts to address the basic problem of the relation between truth and inquiry, these theories are more alike than they first appear. For both, the foundation of truth is an interpersonal standard regarded from the subjective standpoint of actual thinking.

The essay examines Thomas Hill Green’s idealistic reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De anima, starting from his “monopsychist” view of human understanding. His criticism of the Aristotelian notion of substance leads him to a recalibration of hylomorphism and a “noetization” of matter, which could be seen as an averroizing move. Green holds that there is only one “Eternal Consciousness” and that the individual thinking subjects are particular manifestations of it. As for Averroes’ unity of intellect, this idea derives from a “left-wing” account of the potency of thought. But there are several other ontological, ethical, religious, and political consequences in making potency something essentially spiritual. The comparison between the two philosophers could help to throw light on the ‘obscure’ conception of “Eternal Consciousness”.

This introductory chapter aims to provide a preliminary account of the intellectual connection between Green’s practical philosophy and the modernity issue. Section one indicates the complexity of modernity presenting in the texts and studies of multiple disciplines. Yet, these texts and studies all notice one important feature of the modernity, the individual alienation in the modern society. Section two discusses Green’s general attitude towards the modern society. As Green believed that the atomic view of the individual is the root for all the malign results of the modernity, he turned to German philosophy to look for possible solutions to improve the society. Section three indicates that Green’s solution represents in his ethical account of modern politics, according to which each individual person can only manifest the meaning and the worth of his or her existence by participating public affairs. And when China encountered with the challenges of the modernity, some Chinese scholars had introduced Green’s practical philosophy into China as they thought that Green’s ethical politics may assist them to respond to those challenges.

McTaggart takes love seriously. He rejects rival accounts that look to reduce love to pleasure, moral approbation or a fitting response to someone's qualities. In addition, he thinks that love reveals something about the structure of the universe, and that in absolute reality, we could all love each other. In this paper, I follow McTaggart in his rejection of rival accounts of love, but distance myself from his own account of love in absolute reality. I argue that in claiming that we could all love each other, he fails to adequately account for an important part of the phenomena of love, namely chemistry

This book argues that Michael Oakeshott’s political philosophy contributes to current debates in normative international theory and international political theory on the historical, social, and moral dimension of international society. Davide Orsi contends that the theory of civil association may be the ground for an understanding of international society as a rule-based form of moral association constituted by customary international law. The book also considers the role of evolving practices of morality in debates on international justice. Orsi grounds this work on a study of Oakeshott’s philosophical arguments and compares the Oakeshottian perspective to recent constructivist literature in International Relations.