Argument

Philosophy in 19th century France is the subject of a paradoxical judgment:

It has been evaluated, on the one hand, as a "philosophical reflection running on empty; the philosopher's mental universe is shrinking all the time. At the limit of an increasingly formal asceticism, meditation seems reduced to the operation of a stomach which, for lack of food, would digest itself" (Gusdorf, 1974, p. 436). The return to a metaphysics cut off from the legacy of the Enlightenment and the Ideologues, has led to the exclusion of positive contents and cut off philosophy from any possibility of taking its part in the advent of modern anthropology.

But, on the other hand, nineteenth-century thinkers were able, in the many situations in which they tried to write their own history, to describe themselves through interactions rather than exclusions. In the picture that Bergson painted for the Americans, he sketched out the two main features that, according to him, had given "French philosophy", since the sixteenth century, its own physiognomy: "it is a philosophy that closely follows the contours of external reality, as the physicist sees it, and very closely follows those of internal reality, as it appears to the psychologist" (Bergson, 1915, p. 18). For Bergson, what is characteristically French, in contrast to what is characteristically German or British, resides in this articulation.

Beyond their polarity, these two judgments thus place at the heart of the definition of philosophy, and of the particular form it took in France in the 19th century, the question of the relationship that metaphysics, particularly when considered in its psychological dimensions, bears to the sciences.

In the framework of the LabEx COMOD research project "The Battle for the Science of Man" (BATTMAN), the aim of this meeting is to explore all these relationships. The relationship of reciprocal exclusion is a case in point: exclusion, by philosophers and metaphysicians, of the integration of positive knowledge into a science of man; and exclusion, by scientists and positivists, of the speculative part in the knowledge of nature and man as a natural and social being. However, the reciprocal demarcations themselves are the result of interactions, which are often forgotten as they manifest a common lexicon and common issues. The Condillacian requalification of abstract metaphysics, in humble knowledge of the limits (extent and boundaries) of human knowledge, can thus, as the century progresses, be transformed into ideology and then into empirical psychology and positive metaphysics. Symmetrically, the expected scientific advances, particularly in medicine, can be correlated with a more rigorous theory of the relationship between mind and the vital principle, and be translated into various forms of organic spiritualism or medical metaphysics.

This meeting will thus allow us to observe a philosophy at work, in its practical state, one that sought to constitute itself in dialogue with fields of knowledge that we could consider as external to it. It will allow us, in short, to rethink the meaning and possibility of an interdisciplinary practice of philosophy, and this in returning to polemics at the origin of current disciplinary separations.