Revue de la BPC          THÈMES                    X/2001

 

http://www.philosophiedudroit.org/

 

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" Opened eyes ".

Conviction and degrees of knowledge

in education of philosophy of law (*)

 

 

by Prof. Jean-Marc Trigeaud,

Bordeaux Univ.

 

 

 

 

The university world is implicitly affected by the "non-congnitivist" criticism  which is attached to the notion of faith. This notion is disqualified under the influence of a misologism which professes towards faith the refusal of any intellectual knowledge and prefers to use a depreciating concept of faith or "conviction". This introduces a characteristic shift from objective towards subjective. This method is certainly usual of movements, empiricist or rationalist, from Sophists to Hume, from Hegel to Weber, to Raz or to Rawls. But the data of problem appear under a new aspect : it is at the same time the possibility of an ethical evaluation which is shaken, and one comes there to confine excessively academic "science" in a descriptive and factual role. That leads to an immediate contradiction in the education of law and especially philosophy of law, while they are the only inevitably axiologic and normative disciplines which remain in a society ; because if ideological systems can disappear, law survives, whether effective or not, and it conveys values and standards without depending on any subjectivity.

 

 

 

I. Itinerary of a depreciation

 

 

Return of the moral element on background of empiricism

 

At first, it can be tempting to follow a criticism which sharply separated de facto judgments from value judgments and which stacked there distinction between collective judgments and individual judgments. It contributed to sit the development of sciences called human in the XX-th and to allow an accumulation of unsuspected knowledge, discovering the deep mechanisms of phenomena, which are little studied up to there, and not limited any more with space and time. But, very fast, the artifice of such dissociations revealed itself when they tackled the human problem which they claimed to submit to a reduction to positivism and materialism. How would the subject not be involved in the object? It was the crisis of the objectivism, and it was the lawsuit of the plan of weberian origin, which postulated the detachment of the value with regard to facts. But curiously, the return of vaguely moral or ethical preoccupations, or of evaluation, led nowadays to forget this evolution of human sciences towards the questioning of their presuppositions, and to ignore this overtaking of their initial "positivism" towards a conciliation with a point of metaphysician view whom they had pushed away. These preoccupations showed themselves in the perspective of a narrow division between the two aspects of which they had nevertheless admitted the correlation. They then maintained different discourses repeating the idealistic formalism of he former, when they did not favour the resurgence of its enemy brother : a desolation in the empiricist search of sequential and fragmentary mental states. So the inflexible " ethics of the responsibility " of Phénoménologie de l'Esprit has been restored, associated to the dogma of the phenomenism, which praises the merits of the established institutions and the customs of the group as a fulfilment in the process of rationalization of the consciousness, or as object of quantitative and statistical inquiries, of which the method of collectage is sufficient criterion (agreement of consensus, or hermeneutic conventionalism). The background is nihilistic : of negation of what escapes the reason, whether it emits contents by generalization, or it restricts to administer a mass of affects or of empty presumed opinions.

More than ever one did moralized so much as in our time, eagerly to apply canons of evaluation and direction to different human activities, while it bases himself on a latent philosophy of refusal of a moral knowledge by spirit, and while it subscribes at the same time to idealism and positivism which adopt by preference an "ethics" against a "morality"; the first, ethics, justifies itself by its general dimension, second, morality, compromises itself by its particular dimension ; the first is a product of the autonomous reason inspired by a scientific model, the second let assimilate to a sort of individual aesthetics which this reason has to enlighten and to structure as a dark material. Gradually, the same reduction which makes guilty a judgment suspect to be more "moral" than "ethics" strikes the religious riveted to the behaviour (" religare ") and disconnected from a structural disposal of consciousness or spirit : one refuses to it to be other thing than a simple phenomenon exteriorising the sentimental and contingent perception of the value.

 

 

Faith - conviction

 

Faith is then understood as "conviction", as the act strictly of allegiance and submission to a value intuited empirically, and it is fatally sent back to the extrinsic sphere of a "private life" whose echoes have not to ring on another scene. Hence, at the same time, the incapacity to raise to an unity of objective sense and so impotence to arouse support for an object devoid of truth or value. Conceived as psychic or emotional projection, this object is noticeable only in its material frame and in its formal compatibility with an agreed prototype which answers an imposed reference of group. The result is a scattering of testimonies, burst in the measure of a variety of "sensibilities", and a decomposition of the unity considered in sector-based units ; it is only a question of generalizing an experience emptied of his axiologic aptness and absorbed in the particularities of opinion to bring out  lines or quantifiable tendencies.

So faith appears typically as conviction : it is non-understanding, non-knowledge, "non-light", under the influence of a reduction in a second sense full of misologism. It draws its foundation from itself, and its subjective phenomenality handover to in an absolute relativity 1. It corresponds to a voluntary and not intellectual element, and encourages other shrinkages : it gets in touch with a law and not with the "natural" requirement whose this law is the interpreter ; it is connected in a "volunteer" law according to the current  "imputativist" plan. So this faith becomes the factor of all the blind procedures of command. Attached for a person returned to the "character" or to his outside dimension connected with the group, it is to this group that it addresses when it turns to a person more profoundly singular, by resorting to techniques hardly veiled by learning or by collective training (taste of certain religions for collective and politicising demonstrations to the detriment of the exercise of the critical thought and the opening in the otherness which often mark their primitive burst and founders).

Furthermore, one could find here a significant  analogy between this faith - conviction and the outside constancy of our behaviour towards others. As well as faith loses its essence by diluting in a vague faith which makes it vulnerable in the pressures of the will, also "creative-fidelity" finds its forgery in the "apathy-fidelity" or in the constancy made with lazy acts wanted in their pure shape or in their "letter". It is the criticism that Gabriel Marcel took up from Josiah Royce's studies on The Loyalism ; and he added in a new correspondence of 1971 that it did not even appear to him to be able to justify itself by " sociological reasons ", those that adduce worldly agreements.

In these conditions, one goes away from a " primeity " considered as dangerously resistant. So a characteristic inversion of the person - relation takes place, because the relation of donation to exist under the transcendence, in the acceptance of the even possibility of other, in the reception of the personal presence, finally became only a contractual exchange with the being like granted to the norms of the common immanence.

 

 

Massification and spirit of division

 

In fact, this is which contributes to introduce division and which distorts the notion of very tolerance considered as quality of will but not of  reason, and as pure peaceful coexistence of opposites. Faith - conviction degenerated into simple obedience to contents massively proposed.

The signs of division suppose rallying to generic entities of group, to "beings - of - reason", that is traced on politic ; they supplant the signs of unity, perceived by the spirit or by the faith widened in the traditional meaning, in reference to an universality assembling the totality of the persons in an ontologic and existential sense.

If faith is assimilated to this conviction such as the modern analytisme (for example wittgentsteinian²) strengthens its outlines, one can then reveal, in an evangelical – and socratical – way, the spirit of the world. Faith indicates certainly a subjective shape, but an empty shape, of which the principle of information or the classic forms objective, of which in brief cause of being is confused with a content or with a material received from the world, from the "mindless" (had said Merleau-Ponty) of the dominant opinion. That means to serve its faith or its conviction with a passive dedication to an "everybody thinks ", to an "One" mediatized with the maximum of sincerity and attractive docility. It is here the group which appears to dictate to each his being and its end in conformance with the faith, in conformance with a non-thought according to his own being-of-reason, either it is called State, party, family, syndicate or Church : from socialism to associationnism, modern left or right fascisms, exalting the State or the civil society, showed these sad recoveries of  faith and religious in a neo-Hegelian perspective of " spirit in people "... Le paysan de la Garonne expressed enough himself on these questions from before the title of this retrospective work so that it is not necessary to return there.

Faith raised to the knowledge of an object which imposes itself to it, in its supra - intellective experience, has to receive exactly its principle of information, its objective shape or its ontological cause of the internal Master, this "light" that ideas communicate when they are seized in the immediacy of their movement towards the being, towards the Other one, towards Him ; and such is the lesson of Distinguer pour unir (distinguish to unite) : that faith which bases on an internal objective principle can be brought to the testimony against the one which is declared radically subjective and which depends on an external principle, or in luthériano-hegelian terms : of the second sword, or that of Caesar.

 

 

First law, or personalized law

 

In this case, what seems inequitably rejected is a first foundation, a foundationally and justificatory more than founder (according to a vocabulary which we used to distance itself from Ricoeur's analysis 2). The "first" is situated in ontological more than in ontique ; what succeeds in moving the set of terms, including religious. But even here, paradox consists of a break with the evolution of human sciences. The religious phenomenon which was approached in the beginning of century with the methods of Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl or Mauss, was then able to be treated  with those of Eliade or Teilhard, Leroi-Gourhan or Dumézil, and, once passed by new reductions, and so, by the structuralist prisms, it appears under a more complete dimension : the " primaity " can become finally more metaphysical and can indicate a " personnaity " deeper than that of pure social roles. Then law may offer the most obvious example, and, as far as it is taken away from religious, it moves doubtless closer to it more that it is believed.

If legal is frequently underestimated, for the benefit of politic, it is because it is not possible without an evident hypocrisy to disconnect there content and form ; the one is there the expression of the other one, the content indicates to it a given at the same time ontological and axiologic : the idea of what is the thing and of what it has to be. If a proposition establishes that a sanctioning consequence becomes attached to a cause of malpractice, the cause of this cause, the underlying "thing" whose malpractice indicates lesion or infringement, means what penalty compensates for or pays. Nothing is culturally "imposed" with the law which is pulled with what a given by nature "posed" through what a cultural attitude of malpractice "deposited" or destroyed. Law is made by values of reaction to opposing values according to the natural values which they contradict. Inevitably, it conveys representations relative to these values3.

More concretely, one can denounce a law in drift in regard to its initial principle or to its "primaity". Law is indeed led to make use of formulations inspired by the same empiricist and not-cognitivist ideology of convictions to stimulate the respect for moral pseudo-requirements anchored in the persons, after having reduced these to their individualistic aspect even in their selfish aspect least respectable. Regrettably, it characterizes a sort of regression similar to what could be in the bio-behavioural field the return in the ante-Pasteur area. For example, one will dare to call upon "proprieties" or upon " privacy " for what treats standards of healthiness or law and order ; and one will leave to an uncertain collective the approval in ceaselessly particularized standards. Also, "secret" and "anonymity " can be brandished, and provoke some judicial connivance, as being the object of law, by forgetting the duty of the wider truth of which they are correlative and which they offend : childbirth under X, following the fallacious pretext to avoid appeal to an abortion, resistance said justifiable in a biologic exam because disrupting a new domestic comfort, " secret of the families " either school occupations to cover murder acts in sexual matter, or still put in the secret of correspondences revealing misappropriation of commercial possessions in fraud in the fiscal law.

 

 

II. Ways of a reconquest

 

 

The scale of knowledge

 

To fight against this tendency and to reintroduce a reference to the "faith" more acceptable and more corresponding to its essence than simple "conviction", best is then to practise extension integrator of the knowledge and to lead it to assume the normative quality which is already intrinsic in spite of the theory of the "imputed justice ". It is indeed possible to open a knowledge, which is only general and theoretical in appearance, such as that of law, for an exactly universal and philosophic knowledge, aiming at just and at inequitable ; and, in this continuation, one can show that "faith" is the order of the cognitive testimony and not of  a psychic or emotional autosuggestion, and that it considers so  an internal and second approval at an outside and first element linked to an experience onto-axiologic of the thought and not a submission or a blind obedience of  will to legal rules.

There it is necessary to deepen the criterion of truth of knowledge and to agree that there are knowledge, if not of different natures, at least of different degrees.

It is in the sense that will be rehabilitated the process of a realistic knowledge which goes up from the conceptual abstraction to the intuitions of intentionalised spirit towards being and value. This interpretation proves the possibility of including completely in an university education a knowledge of faith : because acts of discernment emanate from spirit and are acts of thought and not decisions of will, and because, as such, they do not prejudge at all the subjective and individual membership of each in the contents which they expose.

There is there an ontological implication at the same of  value judgment and this original knowledge which expresses faith finally freed of its restrictive "fideiste" connotation (partially of Scottish origin). Faith is not conviction but knowledge centred on the truth which imposes itself in its must - be (devoir-être), truth to make be (faire-être) or live, and, at least , to make know (faire connaître) and to respect as soon as it appears in educational activity.

By regressive analysis of given of the taught discipline, one always returns to such a truth of faith as in an inseparable  presupposed or in an underlying object which it is a question of clarifying, under the objects which one suggests more directly studying.

Is not it already the same it in art history? To comment on a "descent from cross" or on an archaic divinity (as made it Baudelaire in Salons, Apollinaire, Breton or Malraux) obliges to say what is the presented thing, and to bring out intentional object or teleologic aim of creative consciousness which animates it, what reveals object of a faith as truth of aesthetic value without anticipating echoes of an internal acceptance which does not enter the area of the observed work. It still is necessary to leave certain neo-nominalist and minimalist prejudice, as helps it finally, at this end of millennium, interest for " first arts " at quay Branly.

Also, indication or exposition, in a class of legal philosophy, cognitive and objective criteria of ethics – until the model of love of persons in the totality of their concrete and unique existence – does not force at all this one that undertakes the university education to these truths of justice registered in the patrimony of a culture, in an historical period, led to declare itself inwardly follower of their ultimate justifications in God.

 

 

In the heart of university education

 

To define subjects and objects of law, legal persons and possessions, will allow to show which philosophic conceptions slip there, according to certain dominants, sometimes realistic, sometimes idealistic. It will be make the lawsuit of law based on truths which inspire it and which can be more or less "true" according to the knowledge they require, and more exactly of its nature and its degree.

The law A which would base on a body of more suggestive than discursive knowledge, and so more opinion than rational or intellective approach, is less just than the law B which assumes the complete dimension of the knowledge through its rationality, then through its intellectuality. But the law which implies a notion of exclusively rational knowledge, eliminating any knowledge superior of intellective character, or supported on the intuitions of spirit, even though they are not always legally matter of objectification, appears also as a less just law, if it is considered more worthy the whole before its parts, or in other words justice in itself, which is "shape", before the law, which is "matter". Moreover, certain positivism of neo-rationalist natural law (from Rawls to Ricoeur) was able to favour, what is very symbolic, confusion between faith (reduced to the conviction) and equity (reduced to a calculation of equality neutralizing any singularity even though it believes to receive the weakest) 4.

A law A which protects the man such as pervading opinion wants it, by elaborating its diffuse expectations, is certainly less respectable than the law B whose protections depend of perceptions of the generalizing reason, interpreter of an unchanging nature. But this law B is still insufficient and cannot prevail of an authentic superiority only if it admits its limits and if it declares not to be able to protect "positively" only  the rationally and generally noticeable man, according to criteria fixed by the common sense of the common experience, and if it admits that it is necessary for it,"negatively" , by the system of the " obligations not to do " 5, to honour an higher dignity( B +), in the existential and singular reality of every person who marks " the first act " in it, and which is that the philosopher of Garonne calls the intuition of the intellective knowledge. From opinion ( A ) to nature according to reason ( B ), from this nature to the person according to spirit ( B +).

To invest his religious faith in education can then consist in encouraging this spirit of abstraction which discovers gradually, and by a regressive analysis in a sense, totality or universality that suppose parts spread in multiple and successive majorities, this totality or universality which gives itself as the truth and as the (overestimated) object that intellection intuitions in supreme effort beyond any conceptualising process. It draws it at the foundation of the activity, and it indicates the polarity which explains its movement and which justifies it. How could teach only a part of the object of  knowledge and not the whole to which it corresponds, under an imaginary not – cognitiviste pretext? Situated in a metaphysical perspective, reflection on knowledge and on its object, divided in being and in duty – being, integrates by itself the data of the faith by proving that it is not conceivable to distinguish them from to what they bring a supplement of understanding or comprehensibility.

 

 

The imprint at All-Other and faith - knowledge

 

Certainly, faith has to go farther and lead love, and works of love. But it is already to enter faith that to make know what one knows about the highest degree of an exactly "negative" knowledge, which is not a knowledge of God, but which is even so the knowledge in which we are called to rise to accomplish our " creaturality ", revealing what Platon and Rosmini names the " divine part " of the man, and revealing in him, in the sense of  Jean, Paul and Augustin, " the spirit of knowledge ".

Love means that "is" what is so known and recognized , one gives evidence by a faithful action to know and about its appropriate order more than about a preceptive will and about its imperativity. If obedience there is, it aims at the humility to comply with the requirements of the spirit. Once crossed this threshold, one extends beyond the specific domain of the education.

The implication of the faith, perceived under this cognitive aspect, in the educational experience, does not prejudge at all a subsequent voluntary aspect or, in stronger reason, an element of faith. But this element of faith is deprived of sense if the element of the truth misses it, and it is insidiously erroneous and inequitable to reduce faith. The fideism of the reduction prepares indeed an invasion of the objectivity of rational and intellective motives by the subjectivity of the psychological and sensitive motives, or in fact, the absorption of the person by the individual.

Such a phenomenon is followed by a diversion (in a postnietzscheism style) from  cognitive towards interpretative : from value towards the profile of evaluation ; from unity which collects and structures the variety of multiple, reflection of its original otherness, towards the pluralism which splits up by introducing the proliferation of "species", and reproduces there an impoverishing identity to itself ; from the irreducibility of the human persons, as the personality of peoples and cultures, towards a "globalisation" of standardized and quantified particularisms ; from communication, exchange and tolerance based on the different same, in the thickness of the " creative duration " of consciousness, in the harmony artificially built between similar sequences, expressing the resembling same inside a repetitive time, at the same moment material and abstract.

But the faith which deprives itself so of the simple conviction and which escapes the reduction or, according to Gabriel Marcel's word, the " encapsulage " which one would like to undergo him, assures especially a rampart against the injustice under its most high shape when this injustice amounts to the negation of the being of these persons, of their otherness, by the sneaky attempt to align them on a model of majority.

It is important to restore here faith as act of knowledge proceeding of the "light" written in the deep soul, in the ideas which arise from it and which correspond to the inner Master, substantially inherent in the spirit, the one that Maritain, commentator of Saint Thomas and Saint Jean de la Croix 6, compared to "opened eyes soul". This definition of the faith breaks finally one-sided linkage with the conviction. No faith without information or "enlightened" instruction, and received, not  from the outside, the surrounding opinion, in a passive and blind way, which there would be only to rationalize, but of the truth of ideas formed by the spirit.

From that moment, mystic theology parts from a theology of the neo-Platonic apophasis which resumes a cusian or hegelanised Catholicism and which claims to reach at once although indirectly in the truth by overcoming the dialectic of opposite ; faith does not suppose a strictly intellectual knowledge, even though this first crossing which passes by the negative marks a desirable step, but a suranalogic and ananoétic knowledge, a contemplation of supernatural order : because the object exceeds it and because it agrees of its existential transcendence, its radical otherness. The knowledge of faith does not know quidditativly anything about this degree  but it becomes charitative and no more philosophic. And so it can quickly take the name of love.

 

***

 

 

 

III. To persevere in the critical lucidity

 

 

"Method" or alibi of the good consciousness

 

Injustice steered against the persons and hurting their "faith" accompanies sometimes, but in a more journalistic speech than philosophic, of noxious sarcasms which abuse accommodatingly this fideist reductionism as a definitive cultural fact (v. André Glucksman). But the contemporary alibi of this injustice is the technocratisme of the "method". Avoiding any object or any contents appear to put shielded from the ideologies which could seize it, as it is said. It is however to forget that the truths of the spirit, and the so elementary truth of the being of the persons, guarantee best a justice which "knows" what it protects rather than to learn "how" it must do it. Original knowledge was never a bearer of an injustice : injustice was characterized rather by substituting a partial knowledge of which the methodology is the last expression, the knowledge which can moreover be compatible with the restrictive conception which makes faith passive obedience and not humble submission, and which can become the means to express, to paraphrase Kelsen, " any contents " : any end. In other words : faith reduced or decreased as method cut from the principles which make it known the truth of its object, can arouse injustice under opposite appearances of irreproachability.

The methodological knowledge of a Nazi or Stalinist male nurse who made the good injection with the loyal respect for his superiors and with pious conviction, separated in a watertight way, to be a faithful believer, could caricature this positivism which set up method in an implicit factor of determination of justice by forbidding to distinguish the care brought to free people and to imprisoned people, or, better still, very care and cognitive experiments related to their object if it is not to their end. Faith lived under its most restrictive dimension of conviction can not possess more virtue, defender of justice linked to the person, than the method of a positivism which anticipated it in the failure and which already has on the consciousness of the XX-th, as one will assert it never enough , dozens of million exterminated people.

The worst of scenarios would be that faith is naïvely used to become, like the method, behind which it will lie in ambush and which it will praise by following fashionable hermeneutic formalism ( Ricoeur), an unexpected tool (although very clearly scheduled) of injustice, the angelic injustice or " with pure hands " of which effect is to eternally produce "division" in the object of the knowledge as soon as it succeeded in cutting this one of its ontological substratum and its noetic faculty of intuition. One can so declare, with the " ethicians " of this very enlightened movement, to abandon holocausts to the judgments of the judges and the history, to mark an extreme condolence for the last pursued murderers, and proclaim himself a man of faith and a professor of moral and political philosophy. About this type of attitude, Jung, as Gabriel Marcel, had hard comments by calling it to a sense of the responsibilities which one cannot here, as Weber, dissociate in Verantwortung and in Gesinnung, without pharisian duplicity. This fundamental "diabolism" is indeed the source of a major injustice and it finds in thus reduced faith an ally all the more strong that it enjoys an immunity calculated faced with the sociological opinion which it flatters ; it rests on a supreme unconsciousness which is taken wrongly for innocence.

But the academic who " in consciousness " chose completely and without unhealthy division a knowledge strictly dependent on philosophic knowledge inspired by the faith, will avoid devout " langager theorists " in their doubtful compromises. He will widen this faith into intellective intuition, and he will be able to consider himself invested with the mission to dismiss any fideist reductionism, any expression of conviction ; he will dare to assert that judgment called moral is ethical and depend of objective and knowable criteria of the value in being, according to a mode of intuitional knowledge, that is intellective in its immediacy, and according to a metaphysical reference to the being as other. Its art and its competence are to bet on the common structure of the humanity in reason and in intellection, and to awake in student of willingness, by captatio benevolentiae, this minimum of aspiration in the truth which carries, if not to love and want, at least  to know and to recognize what is evident by the ontological experience as a "indubitable" 7 : on what we can so agree because situated in an ontological order, even though a Revelation would not have taught us which was its ultimate destination, because such a Revelation intervenes at first only to make understand us what we know or do not want to know.

 

 

Threaten from irrational, eviction of the otherness

 

If there is a sense of the religious faith, there is to be the means of a discovery of the being as other, and so implacably unknowable beyond what is perceptible in the identity. Faith teaches supreme reality of the singular, which gives itself in the universal, from the different in the same; it shows that this truth is the highest, embodied in every person, and it allows, in the continuation of an university thought, to raise the human science to the authentically cultural and sacred dimension.

The first given which faith seized, defines at the same time the source of any law, the reference of principle which steers and directs it : this unique which implies the universal in the otherness of the being and which distinguishes exactly "culture", and activities of the spirit which relate to it, of the "nature" turned towards of strict homologies.

They are the eyes of the faith, the eyes of the "light" or original knowledge, which lead spirit opened to a culture in this native or "first" meaning, to admit its limits and a science of another sort than the one to that it is used, an indirect and negative science, which "knows" that what he does not know "is", which yields to the evidence that the thought of the existence is not transformable in thought of the essence, that the thought of the alive is not that of the quiddity, that the universal does not absorb all the substratum or the subsistence which covers it, and which enigmatic unfathomable so deprived of the speeches of a superstitious animism asks to be contemplated in one supra-science which does not "assimilate" it, which does not make it "his", but which promotes it as "other", - in this abolition of subjective faculties, in this " dark night " of the thematic pretensions of the subject which Maritain of the Degrees of science presents at the top of the capacities of intellection. Then only enigmatic unfathomable can be loved as such at the bottom of each one.

It is in this supra-science that leads faith and it is this possibility of love that it shows, as appeal certainly to the faith, but into a belief  that she would not know how to command, no more than it foresees it. It pushes anti-rational and moves in supra-rational by marking the ultimate degree of the activity of the spirit capable of  intellection. It holds at the beginning of this " mystery of the being " in all the depth, as mystery of the All Other, but not to have pursued the dark suggestions of the world and what it is always convenient to call "convictions" to dismiss or to compromise their referents that one always has a little too much haste, under social pressure, to deprive of the discernment of  thought.

 

 

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(*) Version in Engl. of the conference of October 18, 2000, for the colloquium: " Faith, Scholarship, and Culture in the 21st Century ", October 19-22. The American Maritain Association/Center for Continuing Education, McKenna hall, University of Notre Dame, Chicago / Indianapolis. Trad. rev. Ms. Ostler and M. Smith.

Version française reprod. in J.-M. T. :  Droits premiers, Bordeaux,  Bière, 2001, chap. 6  (voir THÈMES 2002).

 

1. Comp. Bertrand Russell, Science and religion, tr. Franc. Ph. Mantoux (Paris: Gallimard,  1957), pp. 16 s. But s. contra, a little before the ed. of the original an argument drawn from the Greek and oriental metaphysics at the forming of ideas to Hartley B. Alexander, Nature and Human Nature (Chicago / London:  The open publ. C °,  1923).

2. S. our Métaphysique et éthique au fondement du droit (Bordeaux: Bière, Bibl. philo. comp., Ph. D - 11 , 1995), pp. 92 s.

3. S. our art.: "L'attachement à la forme. A propos du positivisme de N. Bobbio" , reprod. in our Essais de philosophie du droit (Genova: Sec, Biblioteca di Filosofia Oggi - 35 , 1987), pp. 131 s; and our criticism of the judgment of legal responsibility in L'homme coupable. Critique d'une philosophie de la responsabilité (Bordeaux: Bière,  Bibl. philo. comparée, Ph. D. - 17 , 1999), pp. 92 s

5. V. our Métaphysisque et éthique..., chap. 19.

4. V. our art. " L'ontologie de l'équité", in McGill Law Journal (Montreal: McGill Univ., Vol. 34, No. 3 , 1989), pp. 414 s; and our art. " Le droit du plus faible " in Persona y derecho (Pamplona: Eunsa), reprod. in L'homme coupable, précit. pp. 41 s

5. V. our Métaphysique et éthique..., chap. 19.

6. V. J. Maritain, Distinguer pour unir ou les degrés du savoir (Paris: Desclée, 4è éd. 1946), p. 438 s. 635 s. comp. Rosmini, Teodicea, a cura di di U. Muratore, in Opere, Vol. 22 (Stresa-Roma: Città Nuova, 1977); comp. M. F. Sciacca, Le problème de Dieu et de la religion dans la philosophie contemporaire,  French tr. J. Chaix-Ruy (Paris: Aubier, Philo. de l'esprit, 1950).

7. V. Maritain in Le songe de Descartes (Paris: Buchet / Chastel, s.d.).