In reaffirming the intimate link between mind and life, John Duns Scotus is faithful to Augustine. His conception of the rational soul, however, differs from Augustine's trinitarian image, since he stresses the difference between intellect and memory on the one hand, and will on the other hand. He also departs from Augustine by attributing, in his theory of intelligible species, a real, if partial, causal role to the external object in their generation. The principle that there cannot be more reality in an effect than in its cause is true only of the total cause, and not of a partial cause, because an inferior partial cause can concur with a superior partial cause, such as the intellect, to produce a common effect, the perfection of which surpasses its own.

This paper focuses on Heidegger's 1937 lecture course on the Nietzschean doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Heidegger interprets the motive of recurrence in Nietzsche as the Moment (Augenblick) of the Eternal Recurrence. Through this key motive of the moment, we try then to examine the double function of the doctrine which, on the one hand, refers us back to some essential themes of the existential analytics, whereas, on the other hand, it paves the way for the new confrontation with metaphysics in the Beiträge zur Philosophie. We hold that the turning away from the existential conception of the moment toward its “aletheiological” understanding in terms of a “site of the Moment” (die Augenblicksstätte) takes place in the context of this very lecture course. This transition is even more critical as it constitutes the very heart of Heidegger's critique of subjectivity in the new perspective opened by the history of Being: Nietzsche's doctrine of time provides the basis for this questioning.

In a famous passage from his Logic, Kant says that three questions — What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? — ultimately hang on the third one, which is the question of Man. This paper examines the nature of this special link between the very ends of philosophy and the question of Man. Its intent is to show how Culture, as receptive to Ideas, provides both the unity of the different definitions of Man given by Kant, and the condition of possibility for the questioning of philosophy. This distinctive quality of man, according to Kant, is the precondition for Metaphysics, Ethics, and Religion. In the end, philosophy's principle of unity lies not in the limitation or finiteness of man, but in the fact that man, according to Kant, is always in relation with some form of infinity, whether it is that of Ideas (metaphysics), that of the Law (ethics), or that of the ultimate Good (religion).

The “sceptical” solution to the paradox which Kripke attibutes to Wittgenstein is supposed to lead to the conclusion that there is a sense in which thought and language are essentially social phenomena. In the following, I argue that both the “sceptical” and the “communautarian” character of this solution can be questioned, though without having to agree with Davidson, according to whom the solution to this paradox does not depend on any notion of a common language.

In the place of the traditional sequence ascending from culture (acquisition) to philosophy (reflection), and then to wisdom (meditation) — where the progressive internalisation of exteriority is valued — Hegel substitutes a different path (also geographical-historical). This path leads from (oriental) wisdom, in which the spirit originally gathers itself into its solitary emptiness, on through (Greek) culture, which gives it form as determined through the exchange of diverse collective modalities of world mastery, to philosophy, in its germanic completion. The differentiated identity of philosophy in its Germanic conclusion (systematic at last) accomplishes the interiority of wisdom found within cultural alienation, by going beyond both, as does real life.

The non-existence of fictional entities does not seem incompatible with their possible existence. The aim of this paper is to give an account of the intuitive truth of statements of possible existence involving fictional proper names in an actualist framework. After having made clear the opposition between a possibilist and an actualist approach of possible worlds, I distinguish between fictional individuals and fictional characters and between the fictional use of fictional proper names and their metafictional use. On that basis, statements of possible existence involving fictional proper names appear to say of fictional characters conceived as abstact objects that they might have been exemplified.

If research devoted to the clandestine literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is today enjoying considerable expansion in the scholarly world, it tends, nonetheless, to be restricted to materialist considerations. However, other themes are open to exploration, such as the immaterialist one which is explicitly mentioned in two manuscripts (the Réflections morales et métaphisiques sur les religions et sur les connoissances de l'homme and the Jordanus Brunus Redivivus). After presenting and analyzing these two texts, we argue that this clandestine account of immaterialism could explain both the evolution of this theory during the Enlightenment and the misunderstanding of Berkeley's philosophy.

This paper tries to show that the idea of a right of the criminal to being punished, which founds and legitimizes Hegel's retributive conception of justice in his Philosophy of Right, is closely linked in fact with the way he used to think about the tragic in his early writings. Moreover, in the light of Schelling's reading of the tragic conflict aroused by the affirmation of freedom, in the Letters on Criticism and Dogmatism, it will be possible to investigate what this substantial background, thus interfering with law, concretely means for the question of Justice.