This article attempts to define the status of the political order in Pascal's thought by examining the coherence of the fragments on custom, imagination, force and justice in the Pensées. Situating this order between divine Justice and unjust human justice, Pascal offers a contribution to the Augustinian account of the relationship between moral and political existence by his description of the experience of temporal authority and of the spiritual skill which that experience requires.

After a presentation of the main onto-theological theses contained in the Liber de causis, the author explains how they were received and interpreted by Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant in their respective commentaries on the short treatise “de primis causis rerum.” Starting from a mistranslation of the word “yliathim,” Thomas “injects” into the De causis his own doctrine of the distinction between being and essence. As for Siger, while he is often regarded as an adversary of Thomas Aquinas, his ideas about the ontological difference between the Prime Cause and the created beings are on the very lines of the Thomasian lecture of the Liber de causis.

Two aims are at work in James Brown's Smoke and Mirrors: to defend realism against some of its recent detractors, and to expound his own programmatic commitment to a Platonic form of realism. I am sympathetic to his first goal, and dubious about the second, so, as Brown himself predicts, I am enthusiastic about the critical part of the book but critical of his Platonic project. But I will begin this review with a hearty recommendation. Smoke and Mirrors is clear, articulate, perceptive, occasionally provocative, and a healthy antidote to the sceptical pessimism about science that one encounters so often today.

Comment Richard Wolin a-t-il pu, à deux ans d'intervalle, publier deux fois le même volume dans des maisons d'êdition différentes, et pourquoi celles-ci ont-elles accepté un tel marché? On se trouve en effet ici en présence de deux ouvrages, ayant même directeur de publication et même titre, portant tous deux sur le nazisme de Heidegger, et qui plus est, ayant exactement le même contenu à une différence près! En fait, c'est le résultat d'une rocambolesque histoire impliquant Heidegger, Derrida et Wolin lui-même, exégète minutieux du corpus politique heideggerien. Mais avant de relater cette aventure, laquelle, bien que révélatrice, relève tout au plus de la petite histoire, parlons d'abord de l'histoire avec un grand «H», celle qui, sous la forme du nazisme, s'est engouffrée à la dérobée dans l'œuvre du penseur de Fribourg, et qui menace actuellement d'entacher la philosophie tout entière de celui que d'aucuns appelaient encore, il y a peu, le «plus grand philosophe du xxe siècle».