Introduction: Debates on Experience and Empiricism in Nineteenth Century France

MANZO, SILVIA; ANTOINE-MAHUT, DELPHINE

Perspectives on Science

MIT Press

Año: 2019 vol. 27 p. 643 - 654

1063-6145

This special issue studies the concept of experience and of empiricism during the nineteenth century. It concentrates on the reflection sand debates around these concepts by representatives of French eclecticism and spiritualism, particularly (but not only) in their exchange with their German counterparts. The papers collected in this volume will contribute to showing the extent to which these debates exhibited a muchmore diverse, complex and nuanced understanding of experience and empiricism than has been the case for adherents of the standard narrative. Particularly,it will demonstrate how this debate was formed in a specific location, France, where spiritualism was institutionally dominant. It is precisely the historiographical narrative of spiritualism as dualistic and inhospitable to the positive sciences that has for a long time relegated to the shadows the actual interactions that took place between spiritualist authors and their interlocutors of other persuasions. As a result, this special issue will point out that the historiographical categories empiricism, rationalism and criticism and the nineteenth-century labels sensualism, spiritualism, idealism are ideological constructs that obscure, hide and overlook the complicated contestations around experience ongoing between historians of philosophy of various persuasions(Joseph-Marie Degérando [1772?1842] and Tennemann) within the dominant eclectic and spiritualist school itself (Victor Cousin [1792?1867]),between various strands of post-Kantian philosophy (Cousin and Friedrich W.J. Schelling [1775?1854]), and among those spiritualisms competing withthat of Cousin (Paul Janet [1823?1899]).