Doctorate

« Reception of the Enlightenment in the Vienna Circle: from the spirit of Enlightenment to the Scientific World-Conception. The relationship of Logical Empiricism to the Thought of the French Enlightenment »

Abstract:
Reading the logical empiricists sometimes leaves a feeling of familiarity with the 18th century philosophers of the French Enlightenment. Logical empiricism is a philosophical movement emerging in the interwar period in central Europe, largely composed by Austrian and German trained scientists. The central group of this movement was the Vienna Circle. They theorized a “Scientific World-Conception” (Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung), from which one can easily find some resemblance with the indistinct and evanescent outlines of a “Spirit of Enlightenment” (Geist der Aufklärung); they are deeply intertwined.
This work attempts to explore the complex and not yet deeply studied, reception relation between logical empiricism and the French Enlightenment philosophers of the 18^th century.
These two distinct philosophical movements, which belongs to two eras separated by more than a century have had, for different reasons, to develop similar problems and to provide them solutions: the connection between disciplines, the systematization of knowledge and its critique, neatness and clarity in the use of language, the need for collaboration between scholars, emancipation among others. With an attentive approach to the history and the intertwining of scientific, philosophical, social, cultural elements as well as by combining several methods of analysis, the aim is to shed light on the distant similarities between these two movements, then to discover the use logical empiricism made of the Enlightenment, and understand the reasons of it.

Underway since September 2020 (5^th year)

More informations: theses.fr