Category : Concepts
-
Artificial intelligence: god and slave
Just as generative AI, such as ChatGPT and its counterparts, begins to develop, humans are already asking it all sorts of questions, much like a child does with their parents, a student with their teachers, or a believer with their deities. It thus appears as a kind of god, echoing the remarkable parallel drawn by…
-
Emotional rollercoasters
The Olympic fortnight was, according to many commentators, a magical interlude within a troubled period. After a chaotic political sequence marked by the dissolution of the French National Assembly and various concerns about organization and security, the 2024 Olympics, beyond the opening ceremony, benefited from a postcard-perfect setting, a shower of French medals, and an…
-
Do we want to live in peace?
In an era of political indecision where it is more about avoiding the worst rather than striving for the best, the question seems justified to me: do we want to live in peace? Have we reached some kind of ceiling in terms of softening manners? Raymond Aron defined democracy as « the organization of peaceful competition…
-
The political centrifugation, revealing a societal deadlock
Since the collapse of the major historical political parties, which coincided with Emmanuel Macron’s election in 2017, French political life has become increasingly fragmented and extreme. The centre has successively acted as a third way and then as a repellent. This fragmentation is accompanied by a renewal whose originality lies more in the names of…
-
“Fighting” Climate Change
The expression “fighting climate change” hadn’t really struck me until now. Reading it in a newspaper article, I wondered why it is so commonly used, both in English (fighting, tackling…) and in French (lutter). Is climate change an “enemy”? Certainly, it is a threat to humanity, but isn’t the source of this threat humanity itself,…
-
Progress and Limits of Freedom of Thought in Europe from the 16th to the 18th Century
Since the 19th century, Western intellectuals have studied the development of individualization, as opposed to the primacy of society over the individuals who compose it. Probably, the idealizations of the individual as well as the political tensions related to socialism and conservatism have contributed to favouring this angle of analysis. Here, we will focus on…
-
Some Time to Call Into Question our Values
The philosophers of the Enlightenment called into question values related to politics and religion. Within an aristocratic and sometimes despotic world, they advocated for freedom and equality. In doing so, they contributed to laying the political and moral foundations of contemporary Western societies. To what extent are we inclined to question these foundations? Let’s examine…
-
The vigour of the desire for recognition
The previous article concluded with the quest for recognition that individuals embark on, a quest that can come into conflict with a desire for intellectual emancipation. In this one, we will specify what the concept of recognition entails and in what way the desire for recognition interferes with the freedom of thought. Along the way,…
-
Idealization in History
That humans spontaneously idealize and that their idealizations shape them may seem obvious, but the obviousness vanishes when one considers the extent of their knowledge and achievements, which have literally transformed the Earth, not just on the surface. How to distinguish imagination from reality when the former models the latter? The answer to this question…
-
On the omnipresence of oppositions in human interactions
While the end of the 20th century, after the collapse of the USSR, might have raise hopes for a lasting ebb of conflicts and tensions between states,1 the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East remind us that the trend can be reversed. On the domestic political scenes, oppositions remain systematic outside of national…