List of Articles
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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.
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Metaphysics
For a Metaphysics of Encounter
This text proposes a metaphysics of Encounter conceived not as a mere exchange between pre-existing entities, but as the very process by which beings come into themselves. Situated within the convergence of metaphysical traditions, it affirms that Encounter constitutes a fundamental hypostasis of reality. Dialogue is no longer a passive medium, but an active motor endowed with generative, singularizing, and transformative functions. The author proposes a quaternary structure (Pure Consciousness, Resonance, Manifestation, Dialogue) in which Dialogue dynamically actualizes the other principles. This perspective finds a privileged grounding in the Gospel of Saint John, where Encounter appears as the very mode of revelation and ontological transformation.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Meeting with Camille Chamois. “Are other worlds possible?”
What first awakened your interest in metaphysics? I became interested in this question in the mid-2000s (so rather late), when I was confronted with what then appeared to me as a paradox. On the one hand, I discovered that there was indeed a very active contemporary metaphysical scene (contrary to what the Heideggerian or Derridean […]
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Meeting with Laurent Cournarie: Metaphysics—or the Nostalgic Essence of Philosophy
It would certainly be excellent news to learn that metaphysics is not dead. But one may doubt its proclaimed rebirths as much as its endlessly repeated deaths. This doubt may well be the rather “deflationary” standpoint we personally adopt with regard to metaphysics. Being a metaphysician, doing metaphysics The little we have published on metaphysics—both […]
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Metaphysics and Science
Between one sex and thousands, how many sexes are there?
Sex, gender, and sexuality constitute a trilogy of relatively intertwined concepts. Before developing a metaphysics of sex, a basic principle of reality requires that each of these areas be studied. Here, it is sex (in the sense of physical and physiological sex) that is analyzed. Between a single sex and thousands of sexes, it would already be necessary to determine the number of different sexes in (human) nature. Without giving away the suspense, we will see that the female and male sexes are not watertight categories. On the other hand, it must be agreed that this is an unavoidable typology.
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Metaphysics and metapolitics
The Metapolitical Significance of St. John Cassian for the Spiritual Foundation of European Christianity
Within the framework of metapolitical reflection, Theophilus Burg’s article highlights the metapolitical significance of St. John Cassian (c. 360–435) in the spiritual formation of Christian Europe. As a mediator between the Eastern ascetic tradition of the Desert Fathers and Western monasticism, he transmitted an anthropological model grounded in contemplation, discipline, and inner transformation. This legacy durably structured the religious, cultural, and missionary institutions of the West, far beyond the strictly theological sphere. Cassian thus appears as the bearer of a spiritual archetype—the monk—whose metahistorical function was to shape a civilization from an inner center ordered toward the Absolute.