Summary
Dominique Pagani approaches the sciences through their relationship with philosophy. He argues that every scientific revolution comes before a philosophical advance: philosophy follows Euclid, Descartes follows Galileo, and Kant, Rousseau and Marx follow the sciences of life and of history. Mathematics brings the universal, against cultural relativism. In Plato, mathematics opens up the intelligible world, but geometers start from hypotheses that only dialectic goes beyond. He finds the alternation between Plato and Aristotle as far as quantum theory and Gödel1. Starting from the Jebel Irhoud skull and the remarks of the paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, he examines the antinomy of the continuous and the discontinuous, which is found in mathematics as well as in philosophy: no frontier separates the human from the non-human, and the desire to find one is not scientific2. Without disdaining science, he points out that the object of philosophy is a subject3. Finally, he criticizes neopositivism, a cult of science by people who do not know it, which reduces knowledge to external objects and represses the subject. Such a science can join forces with blindness, as with Heisenberg4.
- 1The foundations of the Platonic and Aristotelian distinction5 May 2026
- 2The aporias of anthropology23 Nov 2022
- 3Dialectics of hesitation and decision13 Nov 2022
- 4The repression of the subject in bourgeois civil society9 Aug 2025
Introduction produced automatically from the 5 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 5 videos
Cycle 15The foundations of the Platonic and Aristotelian distinction
5 May 2026What distinguishes Plato from Aristotle, the two poles between which the history of philosophy has oscillated for 2500 years?
Cycle 14The repression of the subject in bourgeois civil society
9 Aug 2025What do money, neopositivism, and bourgeois civil society have in common in the repression of the subject and self-knowledge?
Cycle 11The aporias of anthropology
23 Nov 2022Can we fix a threshold where one ceases to be animal and becomes man, or must man be thought as the very movement of this passage?
Cycle 11Dialectics of hesitation and decision
13 Nov 2022Why is hesitation, as opposed to decision, at the very origin of philosophy, and how does it touch on the problem of language?
Cycle 1#1.2 Between crisis and war: philosophising?
14 Sept 2015Why does philosophy always arise from crisis, and what distinguishes it from other forms of thought?