Methodos (Mar 2017)
Entre fatalisme et chaos : l’événement dans la philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg
Abstract
The article sets out to draw forward the concept of history implicit in the philosophy of Léon Brunschvicg. Recently, some doubt has been cast on the historical character of Brunschvicg’s concept of history, doubt that could be transmitted to the theories of some of his better known successors, such as Jean Cavaillès, Louis Althusser and Alain Badiou, who arguably make use of a similar concept of history. The problem is that, despite his commitment to a conception of history composed of events that introduce something genuinely new into the situation in which they take place, Brunschvicg’s history is, in fact, commanded by a teleology and therefore, to some extent, determined in advance. The article describes in some detail the succession of events in the history as it is exposed in two of Brunschvicg’s works, La modalité du jugement, from 1897, and Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique, from 1912. In the former work, Brunschvicg introduces history into the domain of what for Kant was pure reason by showing how the conditions of a priori knowledge are dependent on the activity of the human spirit in time. In the latter work, he shows how, empirically, in the history of mathematics, these conditions were realised. The article finishes with an analysis of the way in which Brunschvicg’s history, on the one hand, follows a logic and can thus be thought as predetermined up to a point, and, on the other hand, how the events of history break with their past and produce something that defies the prevailing logic of their epoch. Brunschvicg’s philosophy is thus an attempt to reconcile the dynamic nature of human spirit with the non-arbitrary nature of its products.
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