Université Bordeaux 2

Faculty Member, Sciences de l'homme

Other Affiliations: EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) - Paris, Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale
Université Michel de Montaigne - Bordeaux 3, UFR Humanités

PRAG contractuel. Chargé d'enseignement en philosophie & épistémologie

UFR Sciences de l'homme & UFR Sciences & modélisation Université Victor Segalen Bordeaux 2

About

- Chargé d'enseignement en philosophie & épistémologie des sciences humaines 
(Département de Psychologie, UFR Sciences de l'Homme)
- Chargé d'enseignement en épistémologie, histoire & philosophie des sciences
(Département de Mathématiques Appliquées & Sciences Sociales; UFR Sciences & Modélisations)
- Chargé de cours en anthropologie médicale & philosophie de la santé
(Institut des Métiers de la Santé, CHU Pellegrin Bordeaux )

PhD thesis
Philosophizing according to Thompson Morgan Clarke,or the paradoxical equivocalness of ordinarity.
The question of the influence of experience and language on the conditions of understanding and of skepticism.
Advisor: C. Ramond Univ. Paris 8
Scientific supervisor: J. P. Narboux Univ. Bordeaux 3

Abstract:
Our study focuses on the recognition that Thompson Clarke was the precursor of a powerful epistemic contextualism which gives an account of conceptual applicability and what philosophers claim to mean. Clarke examines the traditional epistemological definitions pertaining to the nature of concepts, of philosophizing, of ordinarity and of skepticism. By studying the nature of traditional epistemology, his ambition is to substitute his own method for examining presuppositions with regard to the nature of experience and of language for that of Austin. He thus defends a philosophy of programmed understanding which makes us look at what we do with our concepts regarding understanding. It can be achieved by an examination of the legacy of skepticism, i.e. a new light thrown on the nature and the procedures of the skeptic’s scenario manifestly show that the so-called objectivity attributed to ordinarity is only superficial or relative. The Clarkian idea of relative non-objectivity is in no way identifiable with, or merely reduced to, epistemic relativism or to epistemic subjectivism. According to Clarke, experience has no internal features. He simply suggests that the existence of objects is confirmed by characteristic features that we discern, recognize and identify as such. These features which characterize objects enable us to establish the applicability of the concepts. However, ordinarity does not strictly have features which would restrict it from being thus or thus as philosophers and skeptics claim. This claim belongs to a dream of a completedness of the conceivability of the structure of ordinarity shared implicitly by the epistemologists and their detractors, the skeptics. The states of dreaming and waking are not two experiences of a type which it suffices to identify. Just as the dream does not have characteristic features which will determine its application or its non-application, ordinarity does not have features of its own which fundamentally enable us to determine and to fix either a limit to it, or an absolute boundary between the philosophical and the non philosophical. For these reasons, according to Clarke, we don’t really know what a concept is, nor why concepts and their applications, such as those of the Plain and of the Philosophical, are likely to be context-sensitive.
Key words:
Austin, Background, Cavell, concept, contextualism, empiricism, epistemology traditional, Frege, inquiry, intentionality, McDowell, Moore, ordinarity, philosophising, Putnam, representationalism, skepticism, Stroud, Travis, Wittgenstein.

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