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Philosophy

Thomas Flynn
Précis of Talks Given in Europe with ICIS Support

Thomas R. Flynn Summer, 2005

Because this is the centenary of the birth of Jean-Paul Sartre, I was invited to participate in four and to deliver five lectures on his thought. The following are the préces of these and the dates and locales in which they were delivered.

First Conference.(University of Vienna, June 2, 2005)

"Sartre as Philosopher of the Imagination"

Sartre's early thesis for the diploma in advanced studies was on the imagination (1926), published ten years later in revised form as L'Imagination. I demonstrate how "imaging" as he elaborates it in the late 1930s emerges as the model for consciousness in . This explains several features of Sartre's later thought. I shall discuss four such in some , namely, the role of the image in Sartre's aesthetics, in his existentialist ethics, in his concept historical intelligibility, and in the "utopian" character of his social philosophy with its ideal of "city of ends."

Second Conference.(University of Helsinki, June 4, 2005)

"Sartre, A philosopher of the Nineteenth Century Thinking the Twenty-First?"

Foucault criticized Sartre for being "a philosopher of the nineteenth century trying to think the ." By a close analyses of three theses central to Sartre's philosophy, I intend to show its relevance in a "post postmodern" age. Those theses are: the nonself-coincidence of the self ("Human reality is not a self but a presence-to-self"), the focus on "authenticity" in context of the renewed interest in philosophy as a "way of life" (see invited symposium on that in which I'm participating at the APA this December), and continued interest in an ethic of rather than one of rules (as per the work of Levinas and, perhaps surprisingly in this , that of Foucault himself).

Third Conference. (International Philosophical Seminar, Kastelruth/Castelrotto, Südtirol/Alto , Italy, July 6, 2005)

"Kristeva and Sartre: Imaging Consciousness as Paradigmatic"

(Lecture followed by 50-minute discussion). This 45-minute talk will build on the ideas presented the Vienna lecture but with added reference to Julia Kristeva's remarks from a psychoanalytic about Sartre and the imaginary in three chapters of her Intimate Revolt (Columbia . Press, 2002). I press the question of Sartre's famous denial of the unconsciousness in light his use of arguably "unconscious" and even Freudian concepts in his multi-volume study of (The Family Idiot) where he insists that one can "comprehend" more than one "knows." Forth Conference.(Cerisy-la-Salle, Normandy, France, July 27)

"History and Commitment in Sartre's Theory of History" (Histoire et engagement dans le théorie sartrienne)

Building on arguments formulated in volume one of my two-volume study, Sartre, Foucault and Reason, I raise the issue of what it means to extend Sartre's famous theory of "committed literature" to what I call "committed history." Sartre was a moralist as well as an in his approach to history as elsewhere. It was his introduction of the crucial concept of mediating Third (le tiers médiateur) in the social ontology of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical , that enabled him to break the logjam which had blocked any but a Hobbesian approach to . In other words, the best that Sartre's earlier Being and Nothingness could offer was a of war of all against all. I shall indicate how the concept of the group member as mediating enables Sartre to respect the specificity of social subject (the irreducibility of properly social to mere psychological properties of the individual) without thereby sacrificing the of moral responsibility that is a nonnegotiable for Sartrean existentialism. I use his multi-volume Flaubert study (which he describes as "a novel that is true") to exemplify the kind of "truth" that "committed history" seeks to achieve.

Fifth Lecture (Department of Philosophy, University of Munich, July 11, 2005)

"Sartre as Philosopher of the Imagination"

Substantially, the same lecture as the one delivered in Vienna, except that this was preceded by a paragraph précis in German.

Jack Zupko
Buridan and Autrecourt: A Reappraisal

Jack Zupko, Department of Philosophy

This paper develops my reading of Nicholas of Autrecourt (fl. 1330s) as a critical philosopher more interested in subverting the dominant paradigm of Aristotelianism than in offering any kind of alternative philosophical system. In this regard, the criticisms of his slightly older Parisian contemporary John Buridan (c. 1300-1361) are telling: Buridan agrees with Nicholas that absolute certainty is not possible in Aristotelian natural philosophy, but argues that no one in his right mind would think that empirical judgments admit of absolute certainty because the evidence of sense, memory, and experience is not deductively closed. His specific references to Nicholas's teachings confirm that he thinks Nicholas has made a kind of grammatical mistake in not grasping that necessity can come in other forms besides logical, and that these other forms are what make our knowledge of the natural and moral sciences possible. Nicholas's more substantive views – e.g., his defense of atomism – probably struck Buridan as having been adopted solely to score points against Aristotle, and did not seem to him to form anything like a coherent whole.