Sciences

What Dominique Pagani says

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 relativism1. 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 Gödel2. 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 scientific3. Without disdaining science, he points out that the object of philosophy is a subject4. 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 Heisenberg5.

1. 1Platon14 Sept 2015
2. 2Les fondements de la distinction platonicienne et aristotélicienne5 May 2026
3. 3LES APORIES DE L’ANTHROPOLOGIE23 Nov 2022
4. 4Dialectiques de l'hésitation et de la décision13 Nov 2022
5. 5La répression du sujet dans la société civile bourgeoise9 Aug 2025

Introduction produced automatically from the 5 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.