Contenu du sommaire : Les philosophies écossaises : naturalismes et sciences de l'homme

Scottish Philosophies: Naturalisms and the Human Sciences
My contention is to emphasize in what manner many Scottish Philosophers should be understood as dialoguing with Hume, especially on the possibility of a true knowledge. Such a possibility involves a re-examination of what is usually called naturalism in its relationships with classical rationalism. I shall then be able to present all the contributions as many attempts to underline aspects of such a naturalism on epistemological, ontological, and moral levels considering some of these Scottish Philosophers — particularly Hume, Reid, Hutcheson, Smith and Stewart.

Titre en anglais: Reid's Naturalist Critique of Hume's Skepticism
This paper shows how irrepressible belief is a sufficient fact, for Reid, to repudiate Hume's doubts concerning perception and induction. Distinguishing between psychological descriptive naturalism and epistemological normative naturalism, it shows how Humean naturalism can be skeptical while Reid's naturalism counters skepticism. It advocates the idea that Reid's naturalist critique of skepticism has a purely epistemological side, independent of any metaphysical assumption.

Dugald Stewart on Naturalism and the Culture of the Mind
This article considers Stewart's entwined treatment of the philosophy of the mind (examining the natural powers of the mind) and the intellectual culture of the mind (involving the promotion of “liberal” education and political reforms). In the first section, I recall some particular features of this treatment as compared with the philosophies of Thomas Reid and David Hume. Then I examine the connection between the naturalism of the philosophy of Common Sense and the perfectionism behind Stewart's political stance in his Elements of philosophy of the human mind. Despite Stewart's inheritance of Reid's philosophical system, he departed from Reidian themes in interesting ways. These differences arise from the renewed attention Stewart paid to the practice of mental operations, insofar as it leads to mental habits and natural dispositions. In so doing, Stewart may have seen himself as refining Reid's version of Scottish common sense philosophy, by reworking a systematic methodology in a more pragmatic way – but a way that Reid himself had opened.

The Undiscovered Man. Foundations and Limits of the Anthropological Discourse in Adam Ferguson
To understand the psychological and anthropological springs of progress in order to take control of its course: this is the political and moral project of An Essay on the History of Civil Society published by Adam Ferguson in 1767. Borrowing from Thomas Reid his axiomatics of common sense, Ferguson bases his project on a naturalist fondationalism which aims at making possible, against Humean scepticism, the building of a science of human nature. Thus founded, the anthropological discourse which spreads out across the Essay intends to find the “physical laws of the mind” from the observation of human practices. But by imposing the evolutionism of a “rational” law on the reality of the facts observed, this self-referential discourse ends up abolishing the very object of its quest: man itself.

Scottish Sentimentalism and the Problem of Moral Normativity
In this paper, I show that there are strong epistemological disagreements between two leading figures of the Scottish sentimentalism, Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith, about moral normativity. Whereas the first one defends the existence of a moral sense, the second argues that we develop our knowledge of moral norms socially, through our sympathy with other people feelings and the representation of an impartial spectator. I argue that, despite their efforts, both those two authors fail to say clearly what really moral norms are, and that they try to escape moral relativism without any true success. I suggest that those difficulties constitute an important challenge for moral sentimentalism.

David Hume: Philosophy and the Branches of Knowledge
In A Treatise on Human Nature, Hume identifies moral philosophy with the science of Human Nature and he maintains that such a science is capital, since the other provinces of knowledge are to be conquered from it. In his Essays Moral, Political and Literary, Hume explores a new link between philosophy and the other forms of knoweldge. He examines the reciprocal relations between the state of the arts and sciences and the political conditions of the society in which they rise or decline. The present paper shows how these two aspects of Hume's philosophical discourse on the other sciences are interlocked.

Totemism and its Trace. How Psychoanalysis Thinks about History
This paper proposes a philosophical reading of Totem and Taboo, one of the most vilified Freud's books. It presents its main theses, not only on the killing of the father, but also on the transmission of psychic phenomena, and on the correlative concepts of culture and history. The paper is based on a particular element of the Freudian elaboration: the discrepancy between both traces of totem and of taboo, still recognizable in the constitution of modern societies through the structure of moral prohibitions and the features of obsessional neurosis. Following these traces, we can see that a really psychoanalytic thinking of the history is taking shape, as a condition of existence for societies in which totemism – and its articulation between thinking and reality – is no longer in use.