tailieunhanh - The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 35

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 35. The book is alphabetized by the whole headings of entries, as distinct from the first word of a heading. Hence, for example, abandonment comes before a priori and a posteriori. It is wise to look elsewhere if something seems to be missing. At the end of the book there is also a useful appendix on Logical Symbols as well as the appendices A Chronological Table of Philosophy and Maps of Philosophy. | FRENCH PHILOSOPHY jean-jacques rousseau wild man of French literature harbinger of Romanticism his polemical demand for popular legitimation of government inspired the revolutionaries of 1789. auguste comte expounded in the 1830s a positivist theory of knowledge and put forward sociology as the newest and most complex of the sciences. henri bergson distinguished experienced time from measured time assigning greater reality to the former parallel to this was his distinction ofthe roles ofintuition and intellectin acquisition of knowledge. Maurice merleau-ponty argued that a person s apprehension of the outside world is a two-way process each in different senses gives meaning to the other. French philosophy 321 Understanding these movements is complicated by three factors what passes for philosophy in France is distorted by its Anglo-American readership any movement in philosophy is partly externally constituted by criteria for being a philosopher and each influential modern French philosopher has been something other than a philosopher too. Paradigmatically phenomenology is the presuppositionless description of the contents of experience without any prior ontological commitment to the objective reality or causal properties of those contents. It has both the quasi-Kantian aim of describing the transcendental conditions for knowledge and the quasi-Cartesian aim of providing an ultimate justification of knowledge in the description of the contents of consciousness or phenomena . By knowledge is meant here all knowledge and so afortiori all philosophical and scientific knowledge . In the thought of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty this pure or Husserlian phenomenology undergoes a Heideggerian transformation which is partly anticipated in the later writings of Husserl . Notably the Husserlian thesis that the world of the natural attitude roughly common sense may be suspended to facilitate a phenomenological description of consciousness is rejected and the existential notion .