Jules Vuillemin

Jules Vuillemin (born February 15, 1920 in Pierrefontaine-les-Varans in Franche-Comté , † January 16, 2001 in Les Fourgs ) was a French philosopher and logician .

Life

Vuillemin attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and from 1939 to 1943 the École normal supérieure , where in 1943 he acquired the “Agrégation de philosophie” . In 1948 he submitted his Thèse L'être et le travail, les conditions dialectiques de la psychologie et de la sociologie , which corresponds to the German habilitation. He taught at the Center national de la recherche scientifique from 1944 to 1950 . From 1950 to 1962 he was a professor at the University of Clermont-Ferrand . In 1962 he succeeded Maurice Merleau-Ponty of the chair for epistemology (philosophie de la connaissance) onCollège de France , which he held until 1990. In 1987 Vuillemin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

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Vuillemin was primarily concerned with questions of logic, the philosophy of mathematics and the history of philosophy and the philosophy of science , but in his twenty or so books and hundreds of articles he also addressed almost all other areas of philosophy and its history. During the 1950s and 1960s he was one of the very few French authors who followed the developments in analytical philosophy and mathematical logic in England and the United States and made contributions to them that were at the level reached there.

Although Vuillemin achieved a low level of awareness among a larger audience, he has a central position in the history of French philosophy of the twentieth century, alongside Jean Cavaillès and Georges Canguilhem . At a time when phenomenology and existentialism dominated in France, which had also determined his first books, he stuck to the tradition of Gaston Bachelard's epistémology . L'héritage kantien from 1955 is a story of the philosophy of subjectivity and its end, which significantly influenced Michel Foucault's Les mots et les choses ('The order of things') and his diagnosis of the 'end of man' as one basic philosophical concept.

As a historian of philosophy, Vuillemin, succeeding Martial Guéroult, established a typology of philosophical systems, the logical structure of which he derived in his book Nécessité et contingence from 1984 from their various answers to a fundamental logical problem, which Diodoros Kronos in his antinomy of the Kyrieuon logos ("Master's conclusion" or "master's argument"). Since these answers are incompatible with one another, there is an irreducible pluralism of philosophy, the history of which can be viewed as a discontinuous sequence of systems that reformulate the logically possible answers to this basic problem.

Publications

• Essai on the signification de la mort . PUF, Paris 1948
• L'héritage kantien et la révolution copernicienne, Fichte, Cohen, Heidegger . PUF, Paris 1954.
• Physique et métaphysique kantiennes . PUF, Paris 1955 (new edition PUF, 1992).
• Matématiques et métaphysique chez Descartes . PUF, Paris 1960 (new edition PUF, 1987).
• Introduction à la philosophy de l'algèbre . Vol. I: Recherches sur quelques concepts et méthodes de l'Algèbre Moderne . PUF, Paris 1962. (New edition 1993)
• Leçons sur la première philosophie de Russell . Armand Colin, Paris 1968.
• La logique et le monde sensitive. Étude sur les téories contemporaines de l'Abstraction . Flammarion, Paris 1971.
• Le Dieu d'Anselme et les apparences de la raison . Paris: Aubier, 1971.
• Nécessité ou contingence, l'aporie de Diodore et les systèmes philosophiques . Minuit, Paris 1984.
• What are Philosophical Systems? Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• L'intuitionnisme kantien . Vrin, Paris 1994. (collection of articles)
• Nouvelles réflexions sur l'argument dominateur: a double référence au temps dans la seconde prémisse . In: Philosophy 55, 1997, pp. 14–30 (important addition to Nécessité ou contingence ).

Secondary literature

• Helmut Angstl: Comments on Jules Vuillemin, The Aporia of the Master's Closure by Diodoros Kronos and their solutions . In: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 10.2, 1985.
• Jacques Bouveresse: Homage to Jules Vuillemin (1920–2001) . Collège de France, Paris 2001 ( PDF ).
• GG Brittan Jr. (Ed.): Causality, Method and Modality. Essays in Honor of Jules Vuillemin . Kluwer, Dordrecht u. a. 1991.
• Bernhard Waldenfels: Phenomenology in France . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1983.

Web links

• Archives Jules Vuillemin
• Literature by and about Jules Vuillemin in the catalog of the German National Library