Philosophical fictions in the classical age
What do we believe in when we read classical western philosophers?
André Charrak
1st Lecture
Introduction : Believing in Fictions, Believing in Philosophy
In reading the various european philosophers of the 17th and 18th century, one must be
struck by a paradox that affects every tradition. On the one hand, the major rationalist systems
(Descartes is an obligatory starting point), normally described according to the order of reasons, resort to the register of fiction for key demonstrative sequences. On the other hand, the empiricist tradition makes wide use of fictional descriptions designated as such (Rousseau's state of nature, for
instance), whereas the authors that illustrate this tradition all proclaim the need to focus on the facts.
This Lecture will be devoted to shed light on the relations between a methodical approach claiming
to grasp the truth by developing a rational system and the use of fictions irreducible to mere philosophical principles.
2nd Lecture
Fiction and Abstraction : Meaning and Limits of the « Thought Experiments »
As a beginning, the problem of the status of fiction in rational work will be approached from
the vantage point of science – such as the role that Mach attributes to the thought experiment in his
major interpretation of Galiléen innovations. In this context, fiction is considered as an operation of
abstraction applied to reality, which leads us to imagine the objective independence of properties
that, in fact, are not separable. One must clearly take account of the resistance encountered by Galilean methodology in the very context of the renewal of philosophy. And it is, of course, the decision
(gradually conquered) of Descartes that is revealed as the most instructive one here. Then we will
examine the transposition of this method in metaphysics and we will compare two samples of an
opening up of first philosophy (Descartes and Hobbes) through a fictive supposition, which aims to
be very similar to those of the astronomers.
3rd Lecture
A Modal Approach to Fictions
How do the semantics of possible worlds, in the 17th and 18th centuries, contribute to our
intelligence of fiction’s specific properties, which justify some of its essential uses even beyond the
Leibniz-Wolff tradition? The authentic problems raised by the modal interpretation of fiction do not
emerge until we consider them in this relatively elaborated form. They may be identified in Leibniz
who, during this period, develops precisely the most important theory of modality and doesn't limit
the use of fictions to the thought experiments. We will study the cases in which fiction maintains its
narrative quality, that is to say, the cases in which it consists, not of an isolated or abstract hypothesis, but of an actual system. This perspective allows to understand the first theory of novel during
the 18th century.
4th Lecture
History, Fictions, Myths
One may formulate the problem that we will explore during this last Lecture in an apparent
paradox that is worth the risk, by anticipation of the historical evidence that we will produce: is it
possible to develop a non-modal theory of counterfactuals? The main argument lies in the creation
of an hypothetical history by the empiricist philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Rousseau in
his Discourse on Inequality.We will show that in this empiricist genesis, it is no longer only a question of a fable or a fiction, but of a discourse that includes a specifically mythological dimension.
In this perspective, it is possible to develop another function of fictions, with a lower metaphysical
cost than the one required by modal realism: in the current state of the human world, they reveal a
historical depth whose irreducibility is highlighted by myth.