7 mars 2015
info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
Aurélien Gros, « L'Anthropologie historique de Jean-Pierre Vernant.: Enquête épistémologique. », HAL-SHS : philosophie, ID : 10670/1.0cn23x
This dissertation is an epistemological and genealogical analysis of Jean-Pierre Vernant’s thought. Its object consists of the inquiries he carried out as a Hellenist from his onset at the CNRS in 1948 to his admission to the College de France in 1974. It attemptsto objectify the epistemological normativity at work in the gradual development of a new discipline, historical anthropology. Epistemological normativity is considered here as the production of standards by the inquiries, whose aim is to solve problems. The historical anthropology of Jean-Pierre Vernant was elaborated through a series of encounters amongst heterogeneous precursors: Louis Gernet, Ignace Meyerson, Georges Dumézil, Claude Lévi-Strauss (chapters 1-3). Nevertheless, we demonstrate that this new discipline goes beyond these encounters. Indeed, a unique definition of problems and problem solving are developed through articulations between the diachronic dimension of historical thinking and the synchronic dimension of structural thought. An explanatory scheme incorporating these dimensions is implicitly modelled on the bricolage (chapter 4), thereby taking the comprehension of historical process and human invention beyond the binary aporia of stability and instability.The uniqueness of the insertion of Jean-Pierre Vernant’s thought in the post-war philosophical and political context is then explored. The history of critical reason is one of the issues (chapter 5). The collision of the pluralization of types of rationality with the resistance of reason against dogmatism and totalitarianism, two radically different perspectives, is another issue (chapter 6). Lastly, we argue that the historical anthropology of Jean-Pierre Vernant is a reconstruction of Western thought to express a new relation tothe past – henceforth no longer conceived as the authority of tradition but as an opportunity to think the future – with a political philosophy using critical reason as the key point of democracy and human action in history. Prefigured by Gernet during the prewarperiod, this articulation brought forth a new humanism (chapter 7).