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Voir et connaître la société

Voir et connaître la société

Regarder à distance dans les Lumières écossaises


La croisée des chemins



Seeing and Knowing the Society
Observing at Distance during the Scottish Enlightenment

This study rewrites part of history prior to the constitution of knowledge in the human sciences. It focuses on how to build the subject-object relationship and make society a "nature" which surrounds us and which we can observe from a distance. In what way did such an extraction of the knowing subject from society become conceivable in the 18th century?

To operate, however, this “distance” had to avoid two pitfalls: the psychological identification of the knowing subject with the inner figure of subjectivity - criticism of introspection-, and the metaphysical identification of the knowing subject with God - criticism from a certain rationalist and constructivist point of view.

Starting from a comparative study of modern and critical empiricism in 18th-century England and Scotland, the author reports on the new ontological, epistemological and methodological requirements on which such a remote vision depends.