Philosophizing ad Infinitum
138 pages
English

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138 pages
English

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Description

One of France's preeminent historians of philosophy, Marcel Conche has written and translated more than thirty-five books and is recognized for his groundbreaking and authoritative work in Greek philosophy, as well as on Montaigne. In Philosophizing ad Infinitum, one of his most remarkable and daring books, Conche articulates a unique and powerful understanding of nature, inclusive of humanity, as infinite in time and space—ever self-renewing, eternal, and beyond complete understanding or control.

In today's world the notion of infinity is at the core of the crisis humanity faces understanding nature. For the last two hundred years economies have been running at full speed, fueled by the implicit belief that natural resources are infinite; however, it is clear that they are not and that humanity needs to radically rethink the foundations of environmental and economic systems. Conche seeks to begin this rethinking, illustrating along the way insightful and sometimes unorthodox ideas about Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Bergson, and others.
Foreword
J. Baird Callicott

Translators’ Introduction
Herman Bonne and Laurent Ledoux

Preface to the English Translation
Marcel Conche

I. Flashback

II. Presence of the Infinite: Plato and Science in Opposition to the Infinite

III. With and Without Aristotle

IV. With and Without Chrysippus

V. With and Without Epicurus

VI. With and Without Montaigne

VII. A Moment With Omar Khayyam

VIII. Concerning Nietzsche

IX. My Path With and Without Bergson

X. With Pascal and Without Him

XI. With the “Old Sage” and Without Him

Appendix: Correspondence between Marcel Conche and Gilbert Kirscher

Glossarium
Bibliography of Marcel Conche
Notes
Index

Sujets

Informations

Publié par
Date de parution 08 mai 2014
Nombre de lectures 2
EAN13 9781438451909
Langue English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1598€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

WORDS OF PRAISE
It is a brilliant idea to publish an English translation of Philosopher à l’infini , one of Marcel Conche’s most remarkable and daring books! Through a dialogue with the greatest philosophers of the past, Conche defines himself in comparison with them in a debate amongst equals. This initiative is doubly important because Marcel Conche is not only one of our most eminent historians of philosophy (Conche is the author of unrivaled works on the pre-Socratic and Hellenistic philosophers, and on Montaigne), but first and foremost, he is one of the very greatest French philosophers of our time. Though Conche has always kept his distance from fame, the latest trends and the media’s glare, he is read and admired by connoisseurs and increasingly by a wider, appreciative, and cultivated audience. His thinking, nourished by an immense yet original and profound culture, is inspired by skepticism and naturalism. He finds the foundation of a universal morality, that of human rights, within the notion of infinite nature. Moreover, Marcel Conche is, in my view, one of the very rare contemporary philosophers who manage to avoid nihilism. His oeuvre is abundant and diversified but always remarkable and of a standard of excellence, forms part of the philosophical pinnacles of our era.
—André Comte-Sponville , author of A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues and The Book of Atheist Spirituality
Marcel Conche possesses three qualities which are rare among philosophers today: he conceives philosophy as an activity rather than as merely writing; since his early childhood, he has had a profound intuition of Nature as the Whole of reality; and he continuously rereads, with respect but no taboo, the philosophers whom he has studied all his life. He is a model and an example. To philosophize ad infinitum is both to think about the infinite but also to think infinitely.
— Christian Godin, Université Blaise-Pascal de Clermont-Ferrand, France, author of La Nature and La Totalité
Marcel Conche is not only a great academic philosopher and the writer of great philosophical books, he is a philosopher who never ceases to develop and hone his thinking. He is also a man who has dedicated his life to teaching philosophy without being influenced by fads or ideologies. His philosophy is driven by the search for truth and the willingness to deal with what is essential, always starting with what is in front of us, which has always been and always will be accessible to everybody. His prose is clear and jargon-free. He is a model for all those who strive to help us to think freely.
—Gérard Schmitt, Redactor in Chief of L’Enseignement philosophique
Marcel Conche is probably the greatest metaphysician of our era. His thinking on the infinity of nature, which leads him along the paths of freedom and creation, combines itself with a moral philosophy and a reflection on the meaning of being in which humanity’s fragile greatness is fully revealed.
—Syliane Malinowski-Charles , Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Canada
Marcel Conche provides the reader with deep, insightful, and sometimes controversial ideas on a number of philosophers: from Plato to Epicurus, and from Montaigne to Lao Tzu. He is engaged in a lively dialogue with each of them about the fascinating topic of the infinite. This is a revealing book about the meaning and the practice of philosophy in today’s world.
—Catherine Collobert , University of Ottawa, Canada
Infinite Philosophy: this book paints a perfect picture of the life of Marcel Conche, a natural-born philosopher. His aptitude to question absolutely everything drove him to the pre-Socratics, even at an early age, in his relentless quest for the truth. With Montaigne, the thinker to whom he feels most akin, Marcel Conche stands tall as an exceptional figure in contemporary French philosophy, renewing and enriching a great philosophical tradition.
—Françoise Dastur , University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France
PHILOSOPHIZING AD INFINITUM
SUNY series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics ————— J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren, editors
PHILOSOPHIZING AD INFINITUM
Infinite Nature, Infinite Philosophy
MARCEL CONCHE
Translated by
Laurent Ledoux and Herman G. Bonne
Foreword by
J. Baird Callicott
Originally published in French as Philosopher à l’infini by Marcel Conche © 2005 Presses Universitaires de France 6, avenue Reille 75685 Paris
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Jenn Bennett Marketing by Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conche, Marcel. [Philosopher à l’infini. English] Philosophizing ad infinitum : infinite nature, infinite philosophy / Marcel Conche; translated by Laurent Ledoux and Herman G. Bonne; foreword by J. Baird Callicott. pages cm. — (SUNY series in environmental philosophy and ethics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5189-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Conche, Marcel. 2. Philosophy, French. I. Title. B1802.C6513 2014 194—dc23
2013027105
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
It would be a lovely dream, and it is not an impossible one, that the post-Bergsonians concur with the pre-Socratics.
—Jean Wahl
Metaphysics does nothing more than transfer to within ourselves this dominant notion of the infinite.
—Louis Pasteur
I am permanently conscious of being immersed in an enveloping, infinite and incomprehensible nature.
—Jean Leyssenne
CONTENTS Foreword J. Baird Callicott Translators’ Introduction Herman Bonne and Laurent Ledoux Preface to the English Translation Marcel Conche I. Flashback II. Presence of the Infinite: Plato and Science in Opposition to the Infinite III. With and Without Aristotle IV. With and Without Chrysippus V. With and Without Epicurus VI. With and Without Montaigne VII. A Moment with Omar Khayyam VIII. Concerning Nietzsche IX. My Path with and Without Bergson X. With Pascal and Without Him XI. With the “Old Sage” and Without Him Appendix: Correspondence between Marcel Conche and Gilbert Kirscher Glossarium Bibliography of Marcel Conche Notes Index
FOREWORD
J. Baird Callicott
Marcel Conche is a philosopher after my own heart. He is, first and foremost, a student of the history of Western philosophy (and to some extent of Eastern philosophy as well), going back to the pre-Socratics. Especially to the pre-Socratics. Most twentieth-century Western philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic have narrowed the temporal scope of philosophy to a tiny and ultimately insignificant moment in the 2,500-year sweep of Western philosophy—to their own twentieth century.
Indeed, many Anglo-American philosophers actually think that all “philosophy” that preceded the professionalization of philosophy in the twentieth century was but a prelude to the real thing done by them. From lisping amateurs like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant professional philosophers have inherited a suite of suggestive puzzles, which may now be definitively solved only by those properly “trained” in the methods of contemporary logical analysis. (Dogs, soldiers, and factory workers are “trained”; philosophers, I would prefer to think, are educated—very often, mainly self-educated over a lifetime.) The historical precursors of true philosophy are also a repository of incipient arguments that may be expressed in formal notation and examined, usually out of context, for validity. And, in extreme cases, “philosophers” who are, like Conche and me, intellectually engaged with the “philosophy” done prior to the twentieth century on its own terms have been banished from some American philosophy departments altogether and regarded as mere historians of ideas, not as philosophers proper.
While the professionalization and isolation of philosophy in its own disciplinary silo on the Continent has not been so extreme, the Continental tradition—that stemming from phenomenology, anyway—has been equally arcane, method-constrained, and dissociated from the thought of such ancestral figures as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Rousseau, to say nothing of the Greeks.
Conche is a refreshing exception and contrast; he is not only a student of the entire, grand two-and-a-half-millennium-long sweep of Western philosophy, he positions himself as a peer among the giants of the past, upon whose shoulders he proudly stands. Hubristic? No! His is the only way to think boldly and creatively. One must imagine oneself as pressing that heritage forward in an ongoing historical dialectic of ideas in which oneself has a part. And in that project I join him. Otherwise, one simply settles for taking one’s seat in the academic equivalent of a corporate cubicle, minding ones knitting, and being satisfied to toil away on some narrow bit of arcana that engages the attention of perhaps a dozen other clever fellows arguing over the same trifles. Occasionally some bit of trivia will capture the imagination of the corporate hierarchy and the lucky fellow who thought it up will have his fifteen minutes of fame and perhaps land a plum chair in a top-tier research university, there to rest on his laurels. That is not for Marcel Conche, nor is it for me.
So what is this “infinite” that Conche presumes to illuminate? It should be noted, as does Conche himself, that the infinite, or something like it, prominently appears at the dawn of Western philosophy. The archē of Anaximander—the ur-stuff, that from which al

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