Michel Meyer S Problematology

Michel Meyer offers a new beginning for philosophy rooted in a theory of questioning that he calls "problematology." Meyer argues that a new beginning is necessary in order to resituate philosophy, science, and linguistic analysis, and he proposes a global view of rationality by returning to the nature of questioning itself. For Meyer, philosophy does not solve problems or give answers but instead shows how propositions are related to a whole field of questions that give them meaning. Reason is identified not with answers but with the question-answer process. Meyer pursues this new theory of reason and meaning in a critique of Western philosophy from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle through Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Foucault. He provides a detailed analysis of Descartes' notion of radical doubt and demonstrates its implications for the subsequent philosophical tradition that ignored the questioning process while pursuing an unshakable foundation for knowledge. Meyer argues that recent work in rhetoric points toward a theory of radical questioning and claims that the methods of rhetoric and argumentation must be turned back on philosophy itself in order to recover the original significance of metaphysics as the science of ultimate questions.

In today's society, everything is in question. The reflexive questioning of modernity has fundamentally problematized society, including philosophy, which has experienced a crisis of metaphysics. Michel Meyer's problematology answers this crisis by questioning questioning, unfolding a new way of doing philosophy, with special relevance for the study of society. In this first-ever extended treatment of Meyer's work, Nick Turnbull examines the main features of problematology, including the principle of questioning and the deduction of an original conception of difference, based on the question-answer relationship. Turnbull shows how these concepts produce new perspectives in the philosophy of the emotions, history, meaning, politics, rhetoric and science. He applies Meyer's ideas to key questions in the philosophy of social science, showing how problematology offers important insights for understanding contemporary society. The book compares problematology with the work of well-known thinkers, including Bourdieu, Castoriadis, Collingwood, Derrida, Dewey, Gadamer, Heidegger and Lyotard. Turnbull uses problematology and rhetoric to explain how meaning is constructed through practice in the negotiation of social distance.

Michel Meyer offers a new beginning for philosophy rooted in a theory of questioning that he calls "problematology." Meyer argues that a new beginning is necessary in order to resituate philosophy, science, and linguistic analysis, and he proposes a global view of rationality by returning to the nature of questioning itself. For Meyer, philosophy does not solve problems or give answers but instead shows how propositions are related to a whole field of questions that give them meaning. Reason is identified not with answers but with the question-answer process. Meyer pursues this new theory of reason and meaning in a critique of Western philosophy from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle through Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Foucault. He provides a detailed analysis of Descartes' notion of radical doubt and demonstrates its implications for the subsequent philosophical tradition that ignored the questioning process while pursuing an unshakable foundation for knowledge. Meyer argues that recent work in rhetoric points toward a theory of radical questioning and claims that the methods of rhetoric and argumentation must be turned back on philosophy itself in order to recover the original significance of metaphysics as the science of ultimate questions.

This book offers a new approach to the principles and functioning of rhetoric. In everyday life, we often debate issues or simply discuss questions. Rhetoric is the way in which we answer questions in an interpersonal context, when we want to have an effect on those with whom we are communicating. They can be convinced or charmed, persuaded or influenced, and the language used can range from reasoning to the sharing of narratives, literary or otherwise. What is Rhetoric? provides a breakthrough in the field, offering a systematic and unified view of the topic. The book combines the social aspects of rhetoric, such as the negotiation of distance between speakers, with the theory of emotions. All the principal authors from Plato and Aristotle to contemporary theorists are integrated into Michel Meyer's "problematological" conception of rhetoric, based on the primacy of questioning and answering in language and thought.

Contemporary or postmodern thought is based on the lack of foundation. The impossibility of having a principle for philosophy has become a position of principle. As a result, rhetoric has taken over. Content has given way to the priority of form. Michel Meyer's book aims at showing that philosophy as foundational is possible and necessary, and that rhetoric can flourish alongside, but the conception of reason must be changed. Questioning rather than answering must be considered as the guiding principle. What the author calls &"problematology&" is not only the study of questioning but also the analysis of the reasons why it has been repressed throughout the history of philosophy. Since Socrates, philosophers and scientists have reasoned by asking questions and by trying to solve them. Questioning has been the unthematized foundation of philosophy and thought at large. Philosophers, however, have preferred another norm, granting privilege to the answers and thereby repressing the questions into the realm of the preliminary and unessential. They have not considered their discursive practice as being based upon some question-answer (or problem-solution) complex, but exclusively on the results they call propositions. Meyer argues that propositions ensue from corresponding questions, and not the other way around. Anthropology, ontology, reasoning, and language thus receive a new interpretation in the problematological conception of philosophy, a conception in which questions and problems are thematized afresh. The theory of language in everyday use, in argumentation, or in literary analysis receives a full and decisive treatment here, making Meyer's question-view one of the leading theories in contemporary thought, alongside his rhetoric for which he is already well known.

The subject of the passions has always haunted Western philosophy and, more often than not, aroused harsh judgments. For the passions represent a force of excess and lawlessness in humanity that produces troubling, confusing paradoxes.In this book, noted European philosopher Michel Meyer offers a wide-ranging exegesis, the first of its kind, that systematically retraces the history of philosophic conceptions of the passions in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Freud. The great ruptures that led to passion's condemnation as sin, and to its romantic exultation as the truth of existence, are meticulously registered and the logic governing them astutely explicated.Meyer thus provides new insight into an age-old dilemma: Does passion torture people because it blinds them, or, on the contrary, does it permit them to apprehend who and what we really are?

According to the traditional view, meaning presents itself under the form of some kind of identity. To give the meaning of a sentence amounts to being capable of producing some substitute based on the identity of the terms of the sentence. Is then the meaning of a book, or of any text, the capacity of rewriting it? Instead of retaining a double-standard theory of meaning, one for sentences and another for texts, that would allow for an ad hoc gap, the author provides a unified conception, called the question view of language he has developed, known as problematology. He pursues a systematic analysis of questioning in literature and shows how questioning makes the understanding process possible.

Originally published in 2000, this is the first English translation of the major work of a Philosopher whose writings have been described by Le Monde as 'revolutionary.' For Michel Meyer, in an age where everything is problematised the question itself must become not only the method but also the subject of a truly 21st century philosophy. Questioning and Historicity is the most authoritative account yet published of Meyer's philosophy of 'Problematology,' a philosophy that questions questioning itself. The book explores how and why questioning has been repressed and explains why we should look now to questioning, examining all the consequences of this for thought, man, science, ethics, and all the age-old concerns of philosophy.