Jacques Bouveresse

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jacques Bouveresse (2009)

Jacques Bouveresse (born August 20, 1940 in Épenoy ; † May 9, 2021 ) was a French philosopher .

He was a. Known for his work on Wittgenstein and his references to analytical and continental, especially discourse-analytical and deconstructivist methods and theoretical approaches, often criticizing the theses of French philosophers such as Michel Foucault , Jean-François Lyotard or Jacques Derrida , similar to Richard Rorty's pragmatism .

Life

Bouveresse was born in Épenoy in the Doubs department (France), the son of farmers, completed his secondary education at the Besançon seminary and then spent two years preparing for a bachelor's degree in philosophy and scholastic theology in Faverney in the Haute-Saône department . He attended the preliminary literary studies courses at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux and was admitted to the École normal supérieure in Paris in 1961 . His dissertation was there on the subject of “Le mythe de l'intériorité. Experience, signification et langage privé chez Wittgenstein ”. As early as the 1960s, Bouveresse had begun reading texts by analytical theorists, which was at least as unusual in his environment as his preoccupation with Robert Musil . Because of his analytical interests, he attended lectures by Jules Vuillemin and Gilles Gaston Granger (* 1920) - at that time almost the only ones who pursued such topics. He has a lasting friendship with both of them. From 1966 to 1969 Bouveresse gave logic courses at the Sorbonne , from 1969 to 1971 he was a lecturer (Maître-Assistant) at the philosophical faculty (Unités d'enseignement et de recherche ed philosophy) of the University of Paris I , then until 1975 at the CNRS , then until 1979 lecturer ( Maître de conférences ) at the University of Paris I, then until 1983 professor at the University of Geneva and thereafter until 1995 professor at the University of Paris I.

From 1995 he held the chair of philosophy of language and epistemology (philosophy du langage et de la connaissance) at the Collège de France held that the chairs of epistemology (philosophy de la connaissance) by Jules Vuillemin (1962-1990) and the comparative epistemology by Gilles -Gaston Granger (1986-1990) succeeded him. From 1994 he was a full member of the Academia Europaea .

Research priorities

Bouveresse dealt intensively with Ludwig Wittgenstein , Robert Musil and Karl Kraus . Thematically, he dealt in particular with the theory of science , epistémology , philosophy of mathematics , philosophy of language and analytical philosophy . He dealt very critically with the nouvelle philosophy .

Philosophy of religion

Bouveresse defended a non-religious, non-relativistic, rationalistic religious-philosophical position. In 2007 he answered the theses of Jacques Ellul and Régis Debray . This had argued: to overcome any attempt religions by non-religious substitutes, must fail because this replacement either directly religious is necessary or religious is . Bouveresse brings up several counter-arguments:

  1. It is wrongly concluded from factuality (it was always like this ...) to validity (it must be like that ...).
  2. Each substitute may be accompanied by some "belief" (in Kant's sense of purely subjective belief ), but not necessarily a religious belief. Debray does not get this difference into view because of his orientation to Émile Durkheim , who relates religion not to the knowledge of truths, but to the ability to act. Any objects and ideas can then be called “religious” or “holy” and then any general pursuit of goals trivially produces social cohesion and a religious emphasis on the goal compared to private goals.
  3. Not every “religion” is rationally placed equally well. A “religion within the limits of mere reason”, for example, is better off than one that does not know these limits. And Republican values ​​made "fewer sacrifices to reason and intellect" and "fewer direct dangers or harmful side effects". Especially if you follow Durkheim, you have to measure religions by their “fruits” and agree with his judgment that only the “religion of humanity” as a civil religion, which among other things. “Has to ensure the protection of personal rights” can legitimately be “today's religion”. But that excludes "a religion of the type of historical religions". On the other hand, it is to be criticized for measuring the “fruits” in terms of political success and for “envious of the success of a society that of the United States”, since it “knows less and in a… traditional… sense… remains religious for more to be able to ”.

Instead, the initial findings for Bouveresse are better explained by the following hypotheses:

  1. The substitute religions were simply either not real religions at all or not convincing enough.
  2. Contrary to Debray's appeal to Durkheim, the "force whose work the individual feels in religious experience ... in reality ... is the expression of society's power over the individual."
  3. The lively revival of "the oldest gods" can be explained on the one hand by the "increasingly widespread feeling of social forlornness, from which the socially disadvantaged in particular suffer". That is why today's society is incapable of providing meaning and is no serious competition. On the other hand, there is a case of “historical amnesia”: after the failure of innovations, “all the good… solutions” are forgotten about history, “although one actually knows that these attempts, to put it mildly, have not been very successful”.

This results in a different future perspective than for Debray, who said that the European “free thinkers” “lag behind” other countries in a “provincial” way. Rather, as Jean Bricmont has already asserted against Debray, it is precisely “the lack of a secular and anti-religious tradition in the USA ... that is responsible for the backwardness of this country in religious terms” - and even if we have such a “theological dynamism” "Would still be imminent, it was simply a matter of" regression ". Conversely, Bouveresse and Bertrand Russell suggests as a consequence that a society must learn to “think in a non-religious way” about its guiding principles. In particular, society only becomes competitive as a meaning-giving authority when it overcomes the current “feeling of social forlornness”. Bouveresse therefore agreed with Bricmont in recognition of "the skeptics, enlighteners and scientists ... who have taken great risks so that we can live free of religious beliefs today."

Work (selection)

  • Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie. De l'abus des belles-lettres dans la pensée , 1999
  • Peut-on ne pas croire? Sur la vérité, la croyance et la foi , Marseille: Agone 2007, ISBN 2748900685

literature

  • Manfred Frank : Familiarité psychique et auto-attribution épistémique. A propos du livre de Jacques Bouveresse: Le mythe de l'intériorité, in: Critique, Août-septembre 1994, focus: Jacques Bouveresse: Parcours d'un combattant, pp. 593-624 ("incorrect French translation by André Combes" )
    • Abridged German version: Psychological familiarity and epistemic self-attribution , in: Thinking of Individuality. Festschrift for Josef Simon for his 65th birthday. Ed. Thomas Sören Hoffmann , Stefan Majetschak. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1995, pp. 67-86

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Mort de Jacques Bouveresse: la philosophie du langage perd sa voix. In: Liberation. Retrieved May 11, 2021 (French).
  2. cf. B. Kevin Mulligan : Introduction ( Memento from May 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 187 kB): On the history of continental philosophy, in: Topoi 10/2 (1991), 115–120: “ John Searle is one of the very few analytical philosophers to have accorded to a Continental philosopher the privilege he so frequently accords his analytic peers: that of explaining at length his disagreements. A second example of this all too rare species is Jacques Bouveresse, whose wide-ranging critical forays do for his Parisian colleagues what Benda had done for their predecessors. "
  3. ^ So in Reading Rorty: Pragmatism and its Consequences , in: Brandom, Robert (Ed.): Rorty and his Critics, Oxford / Malden 2002, 129-145.
  4. ↑ Directory of members: Jacques Bouveresse. Academia Europaea, accessed August 30, 2017 .
  5. In his volume Peut-on ne pas croire? , which contains four older religious-philosophical essays in a revised version.
  6. All quotations from Jacques Bouveresse: Approaching the Function of God , in: Le Monde diplomatique , April 13, 2007. For the sake of clarity, freer thetical paraphrases are given below. See also: Peut-on ne pas croire? , in: Le Monde diplomatique, 2, 2007, p. 26f, engl. Translated: Debate: the need to believe , in: Le Monde diplomatique, 3, 2007; Interview  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. to the book at radio france - france culture@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.radiofrance.fr  
  7. Manfred Frank ( Memento of November 8, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) at the University of Tübingen , select the rubric: List of publications. There is also an engl. Barrel of the text