The first lecture introduced these questions by recalling the origins and motivations of anti-intellectualism, present as far back as Antiquity (cf. the Thracian maid's mockery of philosophers lost in the heavens; Theaetetus, 174a-175a). More recent forms of this anti-intellectualism have been revisited in Pierre Bourdieu's accusations against "scholastic reason [1] " and the illusion of an independence or transcendence of knowledge and all reflective practice, where we must see a relationship of logical co-originarity between practices and structure, the "field", in short, a whole system of dispositions orhabitus that renders inconceivable any "point of view from nowhere". We've shown that this is less a matter of radical anti-intellectualism or deterministic sociologism, than of "a simple adherence, constitutive of scientific commitment, to the principle of reason" and, as Bourdieu puts it in Pascalian terms, of the desire to find "the reason for effects" - in this case, to find social reasons for social effects, and in particular "for effects that don't seem to be social but nevertheless are [2] ". For Bourdieu, the demands of science cannot be compromised, even for the most respectable political reasons. Simply, "to inscribe in theory the real principle of strategies, i.e., practical sense", is to show that "notions such as habitus (or system of dispositions), practical sense, strategy, are linked to the effort to emerge from structuralist objectivism without falling into subjectivism [3] ". Hence Bourdieu's proximity, already noted by Bouveresse, to authors such as Wittgenstein, but also to Gilbert Ryle. For all three, "learning a game can involve the formulation and explicit acquisition of the rules that govern the game". But "one can also acquire the kind of regular behavior that corresponds to the practical mastery of the game without the enunciation of any rules having to intervene in the process". This is why, in many cases, "a description of the practical knowledge that makes possible the practice concerned may not ultimately be very different from an appropriate description of the practice itself [4] ".
14:30 - 16:00
