The book should have been called "Traité des niveaux des actes d'unité" or some such because it is a phenomenology only in a peculiarly Heideggarian way - indeed the book would not even make sense to a reader conversant with European philosophy since Descartes who had not read Heidegger on Kant and the "problem of metaphysics".
The only copy that I could locate in a university library in Minnesota was a copy which did not yet have all of its pages cut (if you are not familiar with uncut pages, look for something on the web on quarto, signatures and folio in book binding.) This one volume shows no sign of a prior careful reader (no erasures in any margins of the many cut pages) but had been bound crudely in a hard-cover "wrapper" using binding tape - the tape is now dry and exposes the following on the back cover under a layer of adhesive:
The author, J-P Leyvraz,
read French at Glosgow and Durham 1947-49This book, completed in March 1969, appears to have led to his being assistant prof in philo at UG in 1969 and he is listed elsewhere as promu in 1970.
doctorat e. l., 1960
assistant U Geneva 1959-61
held a Swiss bursary 1960-62
privat docent U Geneva 1961
visiting fellow at Yale 1964-66
The preface to the book states that the first chapters were written under the Swiss bursary and the last chapters while at Yale under a Ford Foundation grant.
However the publisher states that the Yale years were under the American Council of Learned Societies. Perhaps it was both and perhaps his Yale years were sponsored by French Studies or comp lit and not philosophy: this it should be possible ot clarify in due course.
Leyvraz's book could be a paradigm case for what Harry Frankfurt has termed "bullsh*t". Almost any page at random contains what were already "howlers" by 1969. It bears a strong "parenté" with the claims of Dufrenne in his book on aesthetics that Heidegger has proven this or shown that: in Leyvraz book it is all presumed as the background for his treatment of natural kinds and imagination.
One appalling claim is that in his treatment of a "set" [ensemble] and the imagination is not a psychological treatment as he does not appeal to a "faculté de imagination".
The book is peppered with "donc" as if "therefore" or "thus" inserted here and there constitute either justification, argument or "grounds" for his arbitrary assertions.
Leyvraz went on to embrace Wittgenstein (who became a new mode in France) which is utterly bizarre given the treatment of language in the "phenomenology of experience" - except that as a Catholic he can take some comfort. If this seems unfair, be assured that the very introduction of the book promises us that the book leads us to the very soul (ipséité) that Heidegger denied his readers and the very experience of the divine that is the business of theologians.
The claim by Leyvraz that the "niveau physique" somehow includes the "niveau mathématique" while assuring us that the organism in the "niveau biologique" is not in the geometrized world - while never distinguishing between epistemology and ontology let alone presuppositions, facts, propositions, hypotheses and theories places his book firmly in the anti-rational anti-science movement of "thought" as an alternative to philosophy (note the book is not entitled "Philosophy of Experience".)
What interests me now is the relationship of Leyvraz to the career of Kevin Mulligan in Geneva and that to Pascal Engel in Paris - and the Leyvraz of the 1977 sojourn as a Visiting Professor at Vassar College. Much of what I may learn will have to remain confidential - but a comparison of the career of Leyvraz to that of Dallas Willard to that of Antonio Rappo and others (selected informally based on published abstracts and titles) will help this initial survey of careers in philosophy and other university "thought" departments from the viewpoint of the sociology of education take its first tentative, intitial form independent of the prevailing prejudices of "free theory" versus "hard science". It is already apparent that "translation" plays an important role in many of these academic careers (why academics in America would require -and fund - French and German translations of technical texts is itself a troubling matter in the nation of Jefferson, Franklin and Wm. James.)
Amusement: I learned today that some "ontologists" in American philosophy departments consider that the "ontology" for WWW semantic web frameworks amounts to "applied ontology" and they are available as experts. I wonder if they will also offer their services to Departments of Dentistry or Astrophysics just as Heideggerians so often offer their services to Departments of Nursing in the name of "Daseinanalyse". To think of the fate of those unemployed nominalists as SemWeb takes form ...
If you are aware of any reputable work in philosophy which credits the "phenomenology" of Leyvraz, please post a comment.
In both his treatment of "l'imaginaire" and in the fact that as author on the book's cover Leyvraz appears not as "Jean-Pierre" but as "J-P" there is a hint that he may have imagined his book to rank with J-P Sartre's "Etre et le Néant". Not. But it falls not too many notches below.
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