Contenu du sommaire : La philosophie américaine.

The author, who is the guest editor of the present issue on American philosophy, considers the latter in an ideological, historical and universal perspective. He defines it as the philosophy of a new universality, based on the public testing of ideas, and, in consequence, experimental and democratic.

American philosophy has been taken seriously by American philosophers only in recent times. A real Renascence has lately come about, with the systematic publication of critical editions of the great classical authors : Peirce, James, Royce, Dewey, Mead, and the reference, nowadays obligatory, to American philosophers in preference to European ones, not out of national feeling, but because the former provide American solutions to American problems. To the bibliography included in the article, the author has added a list of other useful works, the whole constituting a valuable tool for students of American thought.

Philosophical discussion in North America to-day is characterized by the abandonment of analytic philosophy (often by the analysts themselves and by the return to pragmatic problematics which is not a return to basics (though it may be that), but a revival of the spirit of a method and of the method itself as a way to solving the new problems arising in the world we live in.

Ethics in twentieth-century America is examined for the development of its theoretical approaches, the successive methodologies that furnished its intellectual tools, and some indication of sociohistorical problems it addressed. The account covers : general theory of value in the controversies over naturalizing man ; emotivism and the debate over relativism ; analytic ethics ; the growth of human rights theory ; the renewal of systematic theory contractarian, utilitarian, rationalist, pragmatic ; the emergence of a widespread applied ethics ; and the attempted redirection of ethical theory.

In the first part, the author rejects the current European idea of American materialism and insists on a certain American « consciousness of literature », which is closely linked to American pragmatic philosophy, and of which the key-word is « research ». The author then examines the themes and problems of this research, concluding that as the term « literature » covers all aspects of cultural activity, one should speak metaphorically of a « politics » of literature rather than a « philosophy », and that politics itself is a universal practice of literature. The second part, which illustrates the first, is a historical analysis of half a century of American thought. Philosophy has retreated in the face of the attacks of science ; literature and criticism have replaced it and taken up the cudgels for humanism. The critic has assumed an overwhelming intellectual and cultural prestige. The different critical movements are examined, one of the most recent Deconstructionism, being a most powerful phenomenon which could logically imply the self-destruction of criticism. However a reaction is taking place ; an anti-theoretical neo-pragmatism has emerged and constitutes a major new tendency.

This article starts from the hypothesis that « hard-boiled » fiction deals with the becoming of « interior man » inherited from the nineteenth century. The « objective » technique common to both Hammett and Hemingway and the obscuring of psychological motivation which results from it really subvert the hermeneutic code central to detective fiction. The « tough guy » dismisses (not just suppresses) those depths which foster explanatory commentary and thus questions the paradigmatic function of analytical discourse. The Œdipal pattern of explanation is found wanting in the light of the self's true experience of its abjection as the backdrop to selfhood. The disavowing subject, as it dismisses this primordial experience, exposes the limitations of, and repeats the birth of self to, language.