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Mortal subjects: passions of the soul in late twentieth-century French thought.

凡人的主题：二十世纪晚期法国思想中灵魂的激情。

基本信息

批准号：
AH/H003746/1
负责人：
Christina Howells
金额：
$ 3.58万
依托单位：
University of Oxford
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2010
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2010 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FH003746%2F1
关键词：
Mortal subjects passions soul late

项目摘要

My research explores conceptions of the human subject in its relationship to death in French thought of the second half of the twentieth century. Several interweaving strands traverse the study, in particular the relations between body and soul, love and death, desire and passion. From the first discussions of the passions by the Greek philosophers, in particular Aristotle, passion has held a borderline position. Manifested in both body and soul (weeping and anguish of heart in sadness, sexual desire and emotional yearning in romantic love, for example), passion has proved persistently difficult to categorize. It is not possible to work on passion without exploring the mind/body relationship; and the question of death, of human mortality, is the place where this relationship is most intensely explored. What happens to the subject in death? What does human embodiment mean for the subject at the point of death? And the focus on death necessarily brings love into the frame, for the relationship between love, passion and death is intrinsic to human experience. Friendship and love are always already permeated by anticipated loss. All experience is predicated on its ultimate transience, in other words on its death. It is the inevitable death of the other that gives our relationship with him or her its poignancy and intensity. Ancient and modern philosophers have, of course, examined these ideas many times before, and I shall draw on them for the insights they offer into contemporary debates and to gauge the ways in which modern thinkers are dependent on and depart from their precursors. At one pole of my study will be an exploration of texts such as Plato's Symposium and Aristotle's De Anima, at the other pole will be an attempt to take into account the claims of radical materialism as they are expressed for example in the advances of contemporary neuroscience, as well as the contributions of Anglo-American Philosophy of Mind and the Analytic philosophical tradition. This is, I am aware, a vast area of study, but one of the main aims of my research is precisely to construct a synthetic rather than a sectarian approach. How then are passion and death understood by recent theorists and scientists? It is easy to see how philosophies inspired by contemporary neuro-science may relegate love to being a mere by-product of chemical changes in the brain caused by neuro-transmitters carrying endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin and dopamine which have been observed to accompany and perhaps even cause the experience commonly referred to as 'falling in love'. Similarly, death may seem unproblematic if mind, spirit and soul are envisaged as mere effects of activity in the brain. Radical materialism certainly risks de-dramatising all experiences of passion and mortality. Nevertheless, a desire for a more humane understanding of such fundamental experiences as love and death is often manifest in even the most apparently reductionist thinkers. This is evident, for example, in recent collaborative work between biologists, neuroscientists, psychoanalysts and philosophers whose joint ventures attempt to understand the nature of mind, emotion and consciousness in ways which do not reduce the spiritual to an illusory reflection of the neurological. It is against this broad background that my study of mortality, subjectivity and passion in recent French philosophy will be conducted. The issues examined are clearly of interest to specialists and general public alike. I believe that the resolutely interdisciplinary approach of this project will make a real contribution to our understanding of French thought of the second half of the twentieth century as it attempts to grapple with some of the most fundamental and perennial of philosophical questions.

我的研究探讨了二十世纪后半叶法国思想中人类主体与死亡关系的概念。几条交织的线索贯穿了这项研究，特别是身体与灵魂、爱与死亡、欲望与激情之间的关系。从希腊哲学家，特别是亚里士多德对激情的第一次讨论开始，激情就一直处于边缘地位。激情表现在身体和灵魂上（例如，悲伤中的哭泣和内心的痛苦，浪漫爱情中的性欲和情感渴望），一直很难归类。如果不探索身心的关系，就不可能研究激情;而死亡问题，人类的死亡率，是这种关系最深入探讨的地方。实验对象死后会发生什么？在死亡的时刻，人类的化身对主体意味着什么？对死亡的关注必然会把爱带入框架，因为爱、激情和死亡之间的关系是人类经验的内在特征。友谊和爱情总是已经渗透了预期的损失。所有的经验都是以其最终的短暂性为前提的，换句话说，就是以其死亡为前提的。正是他者的不可避免的死亡，使我们与他或她的关系变得尖锐和强烈。当然，古代和现代的哲学家们已经对这些思想进行了多次考察，我将借鉴它们为当代辩论提供的见解，并衡量现代思想家依赖和背离他们的前辈的方式。在我的研究的一个极点将是文本的探索，如柏拉图的《会饮篇》和亚里士多德的《论生命》，在另一个极点将试图考虑到激进唯物主义的主张，因为它们在当代神经科学的进步中得到了表达，以及英美心灵哲学和分析哲学传统的贡献。我知道这是一个广阔的研究领域，但我研究的主要目的之一正是构建一个综合而不是宗派的方法。那么，现代的理论家和科学家是如何理解激情和死亡的呢？很容易看出，受当代神经科学启发的哲学如何将爱情降级为大脑中化学变化的副产品，这些化学变化是由携带内啡肽、血清素、催产素和多巴胺的神经递质引起的，这些神经递质被观察到伴随甚至可能导致通常被称为“坠入爱河”的经历。同样，如果思想、精神和灵魂被设想为仅仅是大脑活动的结果，那么死亡似乎是没有问题的。激进的唯物主义当然有可能使所有激情和死亡的体验去戏剧化。尽管如此，即使是最明显的还原论思想家，也常常表现出对爱与死亡等基本经验的更人性化理解的渴望。例如，最近生物学家、神经科学家、精神分析学家和哲学家之间的合作就是一个明显的例子，他们的联合企业试图以一种不把精神归结为神经系统的虚幻反映的方式来理解心灵、情感和意识的本质。正是在这一大背景下，我的研究的死亡，主体性和激情在最近的法国哲学将进行。所审查的问题显然对专家和一般公众都感兴趣。我相信，这个项目的跨学科方法将为我们理解20世纪下半叶的法国思想做出真实的的贡献，因为它试图解决一些最基本和最持久的哲学问题。