List of Articles
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Metaphysics and Science
Can Time Exist Without Change?
Can Time Pass When Absolutely No Change Occurs? This question, which lies at the heart of Sydney Shoemaker’s famous thought experiment, invites us to distinguish the measurement of time from its very nature. By revisiting this argument, Fabio R. Llorella Costa suggests that the hypothesis of “time without change” may already presuppose what it claims to prove. A clear and rigorous reflection leading from logical analysis to a genuinely ontological inquiry into the nature of becoming.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
An Interview with Sylvie Paillat: The Metaphysics of Laughter
Why has laughter occupied such a marginal place in the history of philosophy when it may well reveal one of the deepest dimensions of human existence? In this interview, Sylvie Paillat presents the central insights of her work The Metaphysics of Laughter. She argues that laughter, far from being merely a psychological or social phenomenon, can become a privileged avenue toward the great metaphysical questions: Being, consciousness, finitude, transcendence, and the meaning of the Logos. An original reflection that invites us to rethink philosophy itself in the light of a truly “metaphysical laughter.”
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Metaphysics and Science
AI, artificial mental energy, unintelligent by nature
Machines calculate, but do they understand? Based on the fundamental distinction between reason and intelligence—a distinction overlooked by much of modern thought—this article argues that the term “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer. Current systems do not think, do not understand, and are not free; they harness a new power of computation and simulation. From Kant to Turing, from Leibniz to Jean Borella, this reflection sheds new light on the debates surrounding AI, its dangers, its promises, its energy costs, and its impact on the future of human societies.
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Metaphysics
Descartes the Metaphysician
How should Cartesian philosophy be approached? It is important to emphasize, throughout Descartes’ intellectual journey, the essential role of evidence (évidence), which must be distinguished from mere certainty. It is the indubitability of evidence that enables Descartes to discover the Cogito and to formulate the various “proofs” of God’s existence. Evidence is not a demonstrative procedure that constructs its object; rather, it is an immediate experience of thought through which the mind necessarily submits to a given intellectual content. Consequently, interpretations that reduce Descartes’ philosophy to an onto-theology or to a merely pre-critical enterprise ought to be challenged. One may thus speak of a genuine Cartesian metaphysics, a metaphysics whose inspiration can, in many respects, be traced back to Platonic thought.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Metaphilosophy: The Three Modes of Philosophizing
What does it mean to philosophize? To seek the truth, to contemplate it, or to formulate it? Drawing on an insight of Jean Borella, this article argues that the philosophical act comprises three inseparable dimensions: interrogation, contemplation, and formulation. Every great philosophy is shaped by the tension among these three modes, sometimes privileging one at the expense of the others. Such a perspective opens the way to a genuine metaphilosophy: no longer a particular doctrine, but a reflection on the very nature of philosophizing itself.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Metaphysics: The Third Way
The modern distinction between secular philosophy and confessional theology, consistent with the contemporary episteme, tends to impose a restrictive alternative between two forms of metaphysics. Yet these are by no means mutually exclusive: any genuine metaphysics, insofar as it seeks the intelligibility of the whole, cannot be confined within the limits of discursive reason alone.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Feminism, Otherwise
Can we conceive a feminism that is neither ideological nor merely reactive? An unexpected reading! In just a few pages, we encounter a rediscovered feminism—from ecofeminism to Plato, from Virginia Woolf to Simone Weil—culminating in a renewed understanding of the feminine as a power of truth. This is precisely the book’s wager: from the lived body in Maurice Merleau-Ponty to the figure of Diotima in Plato, it seeks to uncover a metaphysics of the feminine that has largely gone unnoticed.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Meeting with Jean Grondin: The Beauty of Metaphysics
In this interview, Jean Grondin reflects on the enduring presence of metaphysics despite modern critiques and proposes its refoundation from both historical and conceptual perspectives. Drawing on its Greek sources—Plato and Aristotle—he highlights its fundamental role as a search for meaning, beauty, and first principles. The dialogue also explores its contemporary developments, particularly through hermeneutics, as well as its relationship to theology, spiritual traditions, and the challenges of the modern world. What emerges is a conception of metaphysics as an open and inexhaustible dialogue on the meaning of things and… The beauty of metaphysics.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Meeting with Bruno Bérard: Metaphysics for Everyone
This interview offers a critical assessment of the contemporary status of metaphysics, characterized by its institutional dispersion and its frequent reduction to historical or analytical expressions. Against this dilution, Bruno Bérard reasserts its principial scope by grounding it in three converging indices: the requirement of a first cause, the irreducibility of meaning to discursive rationality alone, and the persistence of revealed contents within spiritual traditions. Metaphysics is thereby restored to its status as first philosophy, oriented toward a supra-rational intelligence of reality that exceeds the limits of modern ontology and epistemology.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Meeting with Jean-Paul Coujou, “Metaphysics as Ontopolitics.”
This article proposes a rereading of the history of metaphysics based on its constitutive articulation with the political. By bringing to light a common origin between the discourse on being and that of being-in-common, Jean-Paul Coujou develops an “ontopolitical” perspective aimed at overcoming their modern separation. Metaphysics thus appears as inseparable from the historical, juridical, and communal conditions of human existence, opening toward a political ontology in which theory and practice, being and community, tend to converge within a single intelligibility of the real.
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Metaphysics
“Non-two,” “non-one,” “non-three,” “non-thousand.”
The Western popularity of “non-two” (advaita) can be explained by the power of its negative formulation, which expresses the ultimate identity between ātman and brahman while allowing a relative distinction to remain. This apophatic logic is not, however, unique to India: analogous formulations can be found in other traditions, such as “non-One” to denote the beyond of being (Non-Being) in Christian or Neoplatonic metaphysics, “non-Three” to paradoxically express the mystery of the Trinity, and “non-Thousand” to evoke the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ gathering the multitude. These paradoxical formulations serve to transcend ordinary conceptual oppositions and to open the mind to the mystery of the One and the many. In many spiritual traditions, their culmination is the disappearance of the individual self, a condition for union with the Absolute. Thus, these antinomic formulas do not constitute a doctrine in themselves, but rather intellectual tools that allow one to break free from overly narrow logic and glimpse a deeper metaphysical reality.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Meeting with Guillaume Lurson. “Refounding a Philosophy of the Soul”
Trained early in metaphysical reflection, Lurson found in the great abstract questions—being, freedom, the soul—a privileged access to the foundations of human problems. Influenced first by Kant, then nourished by Plato and Plotinus, he long experienced the tension between the desire for the absolute and its limits. His doctoral work on Félix Ravaisson (1813-1900) led him to rethink metaphysics beyond the separation between ontology and theology, seeking mediations that reconnect being and Spirit. He defends a form of spiritualism according to which Spirit permeates all levels of reality and manifests itself in diverse modalities. Fidelity to Spirit, unity of being and thought, and the resolution of moral and aesthetic questions form the core of his book on Ravaisson. Finally, he outlines the project of a contemporary refoundation of the philosophy of the soul, open to alterity and to the contributions of the human sciences.