Action, thought and organism: from Kant to Canguilhem via Alain

• Grant number: 19/03066-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Effective date (Start): January 01, 2020
• Effective date (End): June 30, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Márcio Suzuki
• Grantee: Emiliano Sfara
• Supervisor: Vincent Guillin
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Research place: Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST), Canada
• Associated to the scholarship: 17/23137-2 - The influence of Kant's philosophy at the origin of the unpublished and published texts of Georges Canguilhem (with a hypothesis about the genesis of Gérard Lebrun's philosophy), BP.PD

Abstract

Our main postdoctoral project aims to deepen the Kant-Canguilhem-Lebrun theoretical lineage. After a period of research at the IHPST of Paris with a Kant and Lebrun specialist (Huneman), with a second research period (6 months) at the CIRST of Montréal (founded by Camille Limoges) we would like to study with Vincent Guillin, who is interested in the links between Canguilhem, Kant, the Ecole réflexive (Lachelier, Lagneau, Alain) and Descartes. In particular, demonstrating 1) that the master of Canguilhem (Alain) had transmitted to his pupil the Cartesian and Kantian principle of the antecedent of practical action with respect to abstract rules of thought and 2) that Canguilhem unlike Descartes and Alain applies this principle to the idea of organism, defining it as a biological principle, we would like to advance a thesis that the organism, in Canguilhem's philosophy, does not respond to an external finality (mechanical rules) but to an internal finality, i.e. precisely to a biological principle. (AU)