Anne-Françoise Schmid

On generic Epistemology

Abstract This text proposes a generic epistemology, relatively independent of any discipline, with the aim of understanding newly emerging scientific objects and disciplines, as well as new logics of interdisciplinarity. This epistemology is also relatively independent of the present, requiring a thinking of the future as something other than the realization of the present ; somewhat like that suggested by the practice of scenario planning. It does not supplant “disciplinary; epistemology, but seeks to demonstrate, through their simultaneous exercise, the passage from a critical to a fictional paradigm, where disciplines are decentred and philosophies immersed in the sciences ; not the “established; sciences we know from descriptions constructed along the lines of classical disciplines, but emergent or future sciences, for which the intention of the researcher is constitutive. The question is no longer that of the criteria of scientificity, but that of the identity of science.

The Philosophical Underpinnings of Design Theory

This paper describes the philosophical conditions for a ‘Design Theory’. A theory of design is a theory that recognises a mode of reasoning that produces the new. There is a massive gap between the traditional Philosophy and the Design Theory. Nevertheless, in the current context philosophy is modifying itself and can invent new relationships with the concepts of the design theory. The introduction of the notions of fiction, interdisciplinary site, genericity, enables opening spaces in which we can address heterogeneities. Classical scientific and philosophical disciplines are no longer able to describe these and Design can treat them with the idea of “new”. These relationships between Philosophy and Design are developed in an example, the creation of Genetically Modified Organism Fish. We show that it is not a complex object, but an integrative one, which implies new methodological approaches, participating to philosophy and to design theory together.

Couturat’s Reception of Leibniz

Louis Couturat (1868–1914) was a French philosopher and mathematician1. He mainly wrote works on the philosophy of mathematics and the international auxiliary language project. He was involved in the beginnings of the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale and the founding of the French Society of Philosophy. He is known for his polemic with Henri Poincare on the “logistic” question. His extensive correspondence (1897–1913) with Bertrand Russell, published in 2001 (Russell, 2001), contains exchanges on their respective interpretations of Leibniz. We will be making use of this still relatively unexploited document in the course of this paper.