Esprit
2013-11-19
Abstracts for Esprit 11/2013
Paul Ricoeur
Approaches to Ancient Greece: from nostalgia to mourning
Using Nietzsche?s distinction between monumental, antiquarian and critical history, Paul Ricoeur analyses how history responds to contemporary preoccupations with the past through nostalgia or oblivion. Ricoeur refuses both approaches, favouring mourning and reviving contemporary questions about the past.
François Hartog
The historiography of antiquity
Antiquity has often been a source of myths and ideals used to construct political and national identities. Ancient Greece thus became a model for 19th century Germany and philology was praised as the queen of sciences. France, on the other hand, relied on its Latin legacy and looked for eternal beauty and truth in the philosophical and literary "classics". As for archaic Greece, it emerged with the crisis of faith in modernity.
Interview with Jacques Taminiaux
The Greek dreams of German philosopy
German philosophers (such as Hegel, Heidegger or Arendt) often relied on Greece as a model and ideal. However, the idea of the "Greek world" being homogeneous is largely an illusion and revives metaphysical perspectives on history and philosophy.
Marcel Hénaff
Greece before 'reason'
Archaic Greece is not just a "preceding" period announcing classical Greece. To better understand this, one must not only, as Ricoeur shows, give up the longing for the classical, but also move away from the specific example of Greece in order to analyse, through general anthropological approaches, what defines an "archaic" culture.
Interview with Pierre Judet de la Combe
Archaic Greece vs. classical Greece: a construed dichotomy
The opposition between a rational and godless classical Greece and an archaic Greece dominated by myth and pre-logical thought is an outdated construction: the pre-Socratic philosophers and the authors of tragedies were already describing a "modern" world and thinking in global terms.
Myriam Revault-d'Allonnes
The utility of tragedy
Ricoeur shows how Greece was used by German philosophers to understand their own time, yet, how did the Greeks themselves interpret their past? Tragedy, by transforming the past into a tool for living, was and is one of the most powerful ways through which to endow the past with meaning for the present.
Interview with Thomas Piketty
The return of capital and the rise of inequality
After the Second World War, many believed that capitalism tended towards a reduction of inequalities. However, what we see today is that the 20th century convergence of incomes was only an interlude; the past thirty years have seen a rise in the accumulation of capital, which has brought us closer to where we were in the 19th century. How can we reduce these inequalities with structurally weak growth?
Yves Michaud
Open universities in the era of Wikipedia, Youtube and MOOCs
The Open University project, "Université de tous les savoirs", which was launched in 2000, is coming to an end. Yves Michaud explains how the massive online distribution of knowledge has changed things and how a transdisciplinary approach can survive in the face of the sheer abundance of available content and the difficulty of sorting and organizing it.
Zaki Laïdi
International negotiations: the end of multilateralism
Negotiations on trade or the environment seem further and further removed from multilateralism. Norms are not imposed by international organizations, but by countries who decide their level of involvement based upon their own interests. One witnesses the proliferation of bilateral agreements, an evolution which, especially because of the growing power of the US and China, represents a risk for Europe, a staunch defender of multilateralism.
The full table of contents of Esprit 11/2013