Dans l'Appendice au livre I de The World and the Individual (1898), le philosophe américain Josiah Royce développe, en se fondant sur Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen ? de Dedekind, une critique détaillée du livre de Bradley Appearance and Reality. Se concentrant sur le fameux § 66, Royce maintient que la théorie de Dedekind peut être vue comme l'accomplissement du mouvement de pensée inauguré par Fichte et Hegel : le 'Soi idéal ' est infini et l'arithmétique est la (...) théorie de sa structure formelle. Cet article analyse le contenu de ce texte, en le mettant en relation avec la pensée de Russell et de Lotze. (shrink)

Summary This paper examines the entomological investigations carried out by the French naturalist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau during a series of insect epidemics that ravaged France in the second half of the eighteenth century.1 This article began as a paper for Pamela H. Smith's ?Knowledge in Transit? graduate seminar. I would like to thank the participants of that seminar for comments and feedback. I would also like to thank Pamela Smith, Carl Wennerlind, Anya Zilberstein, Christopher L. Brown, Charly Coleman, Matthew (...) Jones, Peter Walker and Melissa Morris for their suggestions and comments on this paper. Finally, thanks to Vanessa Copeland for invaluable assistance in the archives in Paris. The author acknowledges support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University. It shows how a particularly fierce invasion of caterpillars in the Angoumois region in the 1760s sparked theoretical debates about the nature of animal generation between academic naturalists, farmers, provincial officials and amateur naturalists. As part of a wider effort to reform agricultural production in France, Duhamel du Monceau sought to eliminate vernacular understandings of insect generation and to reform local pest control techniques. In his attempt to develop a body of pest-control knowledge grounded in the systematic observation of insect generation, however, Duhamel du Monceau relied heavily on the efforts of amateur naturalists. The paper shows how he mobilized a nation-wide network of entomological observers, and collected specimens and observational reports from farmers, improving landlords and local officials throughout France. Some informants did not only act as ?mere? observers, but formulated their own causal claims about insect generation that sometimes contradicted those of their metropolitan counterpart. Finally, it demonstrates that a ?patriotic? discourse that joined agricultural improvement and civic virtue provided a powerful impetus for the formation of collaborative relationships between academic naturalists, state officials and enlightened agricultural improvers. (shrink)

L’idéalisme britannique est un mouvement qui a dominé les universités britanniques pendant une cinquantaine d’années à la fin du xixe siècle et au début du xxe siècle, mais qui est passé presque totalement inaperçu dans le monde francophone. Rejetés en bloc par les philosophes analytiques, ces auteurs ont aussi été ignorés pendant longtemps dans leur pays, mais certains d’entre eux, notamment Bradley et Collingwood, jouissent d’un regain d’intérêt à la faveur d’un renouveau des études sur les origines de la philosophie (...) analytique. Ce texte est une introduction à l’idéalisme britannique, qui retrace, dans une première partie plus historique, les grandes lignes de sa genèse, son développement et son déclin. Dans une deuxième partie, nous donnons quelques arguments en faveur d’une étude plus approfondie de ce mouvement.British Idealism is a philosophical movement that dominated British universities , for fifty years around the turn from the XIXth to the XXth century, but it went largely unnoticed in the French-speaking world. Condemned by analytic philosophers, these authors were also ignored in their own country, but some of them, notably Bradley and Collingwood, are now enjoying a newly found popularity within the larger trend towards a study of the origins of analytic philosophy. This text is an introduction to British Idealism that plots, in an historical first part, the outlines of its rise, development and decline. In the second part, we provide reasons for further studies of this movement. (shrink)