THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY ANNUAL CONFERENCE St.Hilda's College, Oxford. 9th - 11th April, 2010

Phenomenology and French Epistemology

The conference will examine the relation between phenomenology and the work of Gaston Bachelard, Jean Cavaillès, George Canguilhem and Michel Foucault.

These thinkers were part of a significant current of philosophy that ran alongside phenomenology in France from the time that Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations appeared there. The differences were often sharply drawn. Cavaillès concluded a careful reading of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic with a call to abandon the philosophy of the subject in favour of a philosophy of the concept. Others followed his lead, and the two currents appeared to diverge. Yet there remained certain proximities. Phenomenology the French epistemological tradition share an interest in formalisation, and themes such as history, language, exteriority, and the conditions underlying the possibility of thought are passed between them at various points. At the heart of it all stands Bachelard, whose early writing on time and the philosophy of science was forcefully anti- phenomenological, yet who continued to read phenomenology closely and who could in his later writing describe his project in phenomenological terms.

The speakers at this conference will address the relation between phenomenlogy and French epistemology through a series of reflections that draw texts or thinkers of the one current towards the other. The aim of the meeting is to understand better the points at which the two currents came closest and what continued to separate them.

There will be presentations on Bachelard’s understanding of consciousness in terms of discontinuity, on a significant unpublished work by Canguilhem on the subject, on Foucault’s reading of Blanchot, on the possibility of a phenomenological reading Cavaillès, on the extent to which Foucault can be read as joining Cavaillès in an immanent critique of the phenomenological approach to truth, and finally broader and more strategic view of the relation between the two currents. There will also be a panel discussion of Johanna Oksala’s book, Foucault on Freedom.

The British Society for Phenomenology

St Hilda’s College, 9^th – 11^th April 2010

Phenomenology and French Epistemology

Abstracts

Zbigniew Kotowicz (Paris)

On Gaston Bachelard: Atomism, Consciousness and Scientific Thought

This presentation of the work of Bachelard will concentrate on his development of the idea of temporal atomism. This strand of thought, while seemingly not very prominent in Bachelard’s oeuvre, seems crucial to understanding how his conception of what constitutes the self, or perhaps more precisely, how he sees the structure of the consciousness, determines the nature of the scientific discovery. This exposition will proceed in three stages.

First, a preliminary exposition of Bachelard’s engagement with Democritean atomism that we find in ‘Les Intuitions atomistiques’. This will be done in order to delineate the kind of atomism that Bachelard espoused (against Democritus’ concept of a substantial atom but a very Democritean conception of the void).

Second, an attempt to show how Bachelard’s atomist principles informed his view of the nature of consciousness.

Third, an attempt to show how his conception of the nature of the consciousness in turn determines the way he views scientific developments.

Adonis Frangeskou (Staffordshire University)

The Thought of the Outside: Towards an Archaeological Aesthetic

The paper will discuss Foucault's essay on Blanchot as a kind of prologue to an archaeological aesthetic. It is divided into two stages. In the first stage, I will attemt to read Foucault's interpretation of the Blanchotian experience of language such as it relates to the disappearance of the subject. What should then become apparent during the course of this first stage is the 'problematic status' of the Blanchotian experience of language as read by Foucault. To this end it will also be necessary to recall the general structure of the essay and to pose a number of questions bearing on the ecstatic-temporal meaning of this 'subjectivist problematic.' In the second stage of the paper, I will endeavour to establish a dialogue between Foucault and phenomenology which reinscribes his interpretation of the Blanchotian experience of language in a 'temporal problematic' unique to this experience. The paper will end with the potential that this reinscription holds for developing the idea of an archaeology of experience in Foucault's critical thought.

Michael Roubach (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Time, Modality, and the Possibility of a Phenomenological Interpretation of Cavaillès

Is a phenomenological interpretation of Jean Cavaillès’s philosophical position feasible? In his final work, On the Logic and Theory of Science, Cavaillès argued that Husserl’s phenomenology cannot provide an adequate philosophical framework for a theory of science. Despite this stance, over the years there have been several attempts to reconcile phenomenology with Cavaillèsian thought. Jean Toussaint Desanti, Maurice Caveing, and Pierre Cassou-Noguès have--each in his own way--sought to bridge the differences between the two approaches. But this project has been critiqued by Claude Imbert, who argues that it is inherently problematic.

In the paper, I explore these opposed positions, focusing mainly on the notions of time and modality. These notions are key to determining the plausibility of a phenomenological interpretation of Cavaillès, inasmuch as they are invoked both in the strongest arguments in favor of such an interpretation, and in the strongest arguments against it. On the one hand, the phenomenological notion of time seems to be an excellent vehicle for interpreting Cavaillès’s general claims concerning the temporality of concepts. Such an interpretation has the advantage of articulating the link between time and modality. On the other hand, Imbert argues that both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s versions of phenomenology assume a categorial understanding of propositions and hence a predicative reading of the modal notions, a reading that necessitates a subject who carries out the subject–predicate synthesis, rendering the said notions subjective. Imbert concludes that phenomenology is not suitable as a philosophical framework for the formal sciences.

After presenting both sides of the issue, I develop a reading of the notions of time and modality that allows for a phenomenological interpretation of Cavaillès’s thought, yet is not vulnerable to Imbert’s critique.

Michele Cammelli (Centre Georges Canguilhem, University of Paris VII)

The Subject and Error in the Thought of Georges Canguilhem

The reconstruction of the “Subject” and the “Error” in the thought of Canguilhem I propose here will consist in three steps :

1) I will focus on his “philosophy of the subject”. To throw light on the Canguilhem’s approach to the issue of the Subject, I will propose two principles that inspire it : the “non-conformity principle” and the “exceeding principle” of the Subject.

2) I will then show the particular role that error plays in his philosophical work. According to the “positive approach” proposed by Canguilhem, “error” does not mean only a negative possibility of logic but also (and more fundamentally) a positive possibility of existence. When we say “to be mistaken” we’re already translating in a negative and a passive meaning positive possibilities of actions referred by expressions as “to stray”, “to deviate.” Therefore the moment of the “error” is not just a void one. Its very possibility reveals the Subject as bearer of an original power of alteration (L’erreur témoigne du sujet en tant que porteur d’une puissance originale d’altération). Thinking the Subject by the principles of  “non-conformity” and “exceeding” allows us to understand this differential dynamic (penser le sujet à partir des principes de non correspondance et d’excedance nous permet de saisir cette dynamique différentielle qui lui va avec).

3) Finally, I will examine the political implications of his approach to the Subject. According to Canguilhem every society build its own values and produce its own forms of “subjectivation.” The main danger of our societies is that of producing a scientifically normalized Subject. This is why he tried throughout his life to elaborate a sort of “philosophy of Error” as an antidote we urgently need. I will show how Canguilhem’s critique of the ideological and political role of science in our society takes shape during his antifascist engagement in the 1930’s.

Kevin Thompson (DePaul University, Chicago)

Dialectic, Archaeology, Genealogy: Cavaillès and Foucault on Discontinuity and the Question of Truth

This paper develops an account of Foucault’s distinctive method of historical inquiry and its attendant conception of truth by setting it within the context of the French tradition of the history of scientific rationality, the so-called school of “historical epistemology”. In particular, I argue that Foucault sought to develop his methodology in response to one of the problems at the very core of this tradition: discontinuity, and this taken in a threefold sense, the discontinuity between scientific knowledge and mundane life (formalization), the discontinuity in sudden advances in scientific knowledge and technique (revolution), and, finally, the discontinuity in the emergence and formation of entirely new sciences (novelty).

Jean Cavaillès, one of the central formative sources for this intellectual stream, famously referred to discontinuity in science as “the continual revision of contents by elaboration (approfondissement) and erasure (rature)” and he proposed that a truly comprehensive theory of science must be rooted in what he called a “philosophy of the concept” where discontinuity arises not from the performances of consciousness, as in constitutive phenomenology, but from “a dialectic”.

I contend that Foucault developed both the archaeological and genealogical dimensions of his historical method by thinking the problem of discontinuity with and against the dialectic that Cavaillès proposed. To show this, I begin with a brief sketch of Cavaillès’s enigmatic invocation of dialectical progression as a way of comprehending the ruptural historicity of scientific development. I then turn to Foucault’s account of archaeology and genealogy as distinct but concordant lines of historical analysis and argue that each explicitly seeks to take up the different aspects of Cavaillès’ dialectic in ways that Foucault believed remained more faithful to the temporally dispersed rhythm of history.

The underlying claim of the paper is that both Cavaillès and Foucault’s work should properly be seen as immanent critical appropriations of and contributions within the phenomenological tradition. One of the most significant consequences of the innovations that they offer, however, is that they appear to undo what had been one of the principal axioms of the phenomenological theory of science: the link between truth and evidence. Whereas, for Husserl, evidence is the intuitive givenness of objects or states of affairs as they themselves are, both Cavaillès and Foucault’s methods of historical inquiry seem to move away from any kind of simple reliance on traditional intuitionism. But if, as both contend, science strives to be a discourse of “truth-telling”, what becomes of the status of truth in their accounts? Specifically, do their otherwise different approaches ultimately share a common conclusion that truth is merely internal to discourse? The paper concludes with a consideration of this important question.

Jean-Michel Salanskis (University of Paris, Nanterre)

Phenomenology and Epistemology: War and Marriage

I shall first explain why, in the French context of the twentieth century, phenomenology and epistemology had good reasons to reject and misjudge each other (although at the time of Husserlian foundation, they were meant to go the same way). Then I will describe how French phenomenology and French historical epistemology nevertheless could work together as inspiration for some authors. The case of epistemology of mathematics will be here privileged. And finally I shall expose my personal program of etho-analysis, which I regard as taking up phenomenology and epistemology, even if at the cost of modifying each one.