Contenu du sommaire : Écrire la philosophie au XVIIIe siècle

Writing Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century . . .in the Eighteenth century, the philosophical debates don't any longer take place only in the academic circle among trained philosophers. The traditional philosophical form, the elaborate deductive philosophical system and its genre, the treatise, went out of fashion. Henceforth philosophy happens everywhere in the society where people are reading. The French Enlightenment is a great moment of invention and of formal experimentation: reinvention of the dialogue-genre, invention of the modern novel, new fictional devices (thought experiments, political fictions, etc.), development of the philosophical potential of the dictionary, the travelogues, etc. The articles in this issue intend to describe, comment and interpret these new forms of writing.

The lettre galante and the Geometrical Spirit. Metaphysical Expression and the Metaphysics of Language in Fontenelle's Philosophy of DiscourseThis paper analyzes Fontenelle's program of a philosophical writing that achieves two ambitions. In the first place, it fills a philosophical program of “enlightenment of ideas”, under the general idea of “geometric spirit”, which turns out to be synonymous with conceptualization. We examine this through the cases of history and mathematics of the infinite. At the same time, this philosophizing writing produces a metaphysics of the mind, namely a theory of the production and the expression of our ideas, which is embedded in an anthropology and in a philosophy of culture. Finally, Fontenelle's philosophical writing carries out a philosophy of speech, i. e. that for Fontenelle, our vernacular language represents the matter of thought itself, as much as the tool of the thought.

The birth and fast development of the universal dictionaries lead to a new form of dissemination of knowledge in the middle of the Seventeenth Century: they also include philosophical terms. But it is in the Encyclopédie that Diderot carries out the dual and paradoxical task of transmitting the language and “changing the common mode of thinking”. At the same time he works on the dictionary, collecting and fixing the meaning of the terms of the common language, he carries out what is specific to philosophy: questioning the definitions and producing new definitions.

Philosophy is an important element of the Eighteenth century novel. Some of the fundamental philosophical questions (e.g., can philosophy improves our savoir vivre?), turn out to be decisive components of the novelistic plots. This article looks at how the libertine novel, Thérèse philosophe, highlights fundamental statements of the heterodox Enlightenment, while paradoxically featuring a new figure of honesty and philosophical virtue.

In Les Confessions, Rousseau invents a genealogy of the individual according to his relations which requires a language and a poetic. If his undertaking relates to the empirist philosophy which aims for reconstructing the generation of knowledge, he modifies its approach of memory, denying the memory associations of the first childhood to be freezed, admitting their inherent dynamic being observable until adulthood, and underlining their literary determination in his own case. From a literary point of view, the undertaking implies four requirements: improving the language of feelings; not boring the reader, then selecting paradigmatic actions; inventing a poetic of superimposition in order to observe the developing of affects in the course of time; inviting the reader to others assemblies and interpretations.

The extensive and eclectic work of Kierkegaard is to be understood as an organized totality. Although written in a relatively short period of time, and marked by very different rhythms and styles, it is unified towards the only thought of the singular. One of its gateways is time, according several meanings to dialectically grasp: the time lived by the author, the literary time of the writing, the narrative time of the characters and the time as conceived by the philosopher.

The paper examines the evolution of Heidegger's reading of Kierkegaard between the 20s and the 30s-40s. If Heidegger begins by ascribing a place to the Danish philosopher amongst Augustine and Luther, he will eventually inscribe Kierkegaard within an horizon which is no longer that of Christian philosophy, but that of the 19th century German thought. Thus, in the Contributions to Philosophy and in other contemporary texts, Kierkegaard forms a “historic” constellation with Hölderlin, Hegel, Schelling, and Nietzsche, while also becoming, insofar as in Heidegger's view he still remains deeply misunderstood, the mirror of the misinterpretation of Being and Time.