Volume 23, Issue 2

While many historians and philosophers have sought to understand the ‘failure’ of the French Revolution to thrive and to avoid senseless violence, very few have referred to the works of two women philosophers who diagnosed the problems as they were happening. This essay looks at how Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges theorised the new tyranny that grew out of the French Revolution, that of ‘petty tyrants’ who found themselves like ‘cocks on a dunghill’ able to wield a new power over those less fortunate than themselves. Both offer diagnoses and prognoses that revolve around education. Wollstonecraft argues that a revolution that is not backed by a previous education of the people is bound to result in chaos and violence. Such education, however, must be slow, and it necessitates the reform of the institutions that most shape the public’s character. A revolution, perforce, is fast, and it often takes several years, or even generations before the spirit of the reforms finds itself implemented into new institutions. Olympe de Gouges shares Wollstonecraft’s worry and she observes that the men who were once dominated quickly become tyrants themselves unless their moral character is already virtuous. But the state of being dominated leaves little room for virtue; hence, newly minted citizens need to be educated in order not to replicate the reign of tyranny onto other. Gouges suggests that the answer to the difficulty she and Wollstonecraft highlighted was to educate the people where they could be found: on the streets, or, where they could easily and willingly be gathered: in theatres. By helping organise revolutionary festivals, highlighting the ways in which citizens could be virtuous, and writing plays to awaken their virtue, and proposing a reform of the theatre, so that the production of such plays would be possible, Gouges offered a plan for the civic education of French citizens in the immediate aftermaths of the Revolution. Unfortunately, the chaos she and Wollstonecraft had sought to remedy, led by the cocks or petty tyrants, ensured that they were unable to see through their plans, with Wollstonecraft having to leave Paris and Gouges being sent to the guillotine.

Affectivity has become an operative concept for a variety of analyses of our everyday media-based public communications. However, it often remains unclear what affectivity is and how it can be used for analysing media-based public discussions. To clarify the role of affectivity in such analyses, I take a look back to the classical phenomenological analyses of affectivity provided by Edmund Husserl. I argue that based on Husserl’s analyses, affectivity is essentially a relation between the object and the affected subject evoking (sometimes emotional) responses in the subject. Accordingly, the role of affectivity in the opinion formation and other similar processes in media-based public discussions can be analysed as contingent sedimentations of the object’s such relations to the subject. As my analysis demonstrates, analyses of affectivity in the context of media-based communications do not capture their research object—affectivity—if affectivity is conceived as a feature of the media contents and not as a modality of experience.

Kant’s moral philosophy is challenged by the so-called “Socratic Paradox”: If free will and pure practical reason are to be identified, as Kant argues, then there seems to be no room for immoral actions that are to be imputed to our individual freedom. The paper argues that Kant’s conception of rationalizing (“Vernünfteln”) helps us to avoid the Socratic Paradox, and to understand how immoral actions can be imputed to our individual freedom and responsibility. In rationalizing, we misuse our capacity of reason in order to construct the illusion according to which we are not bound to the absolute demand of the moral law, but rather subject to exceptions and excuses. Finally, the paper interprets the three rules of “common sense” ( sensus communis ) in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment in terms of an antidote to rationalizing.

The theory of mental models is a current cognitive approach trying to describe the way people make inferences. According to this theory, people reason from possibilities or models linked to sentences. Sometimes, such possibilities or models are transformed by the action of a semantic modulation. The point this paper is intended to make is that Stoic logic also has the machinery to explain semantic processes such as that of modulation. This is shown by means of the criterion Chrysippus of Soli provided for conditional sentences and the theory of sign related to that criterion.