Productions scientifiques

Cet article s’intéresse à l’évolution récente d’une thématique particulière des nanosciences et nanotechnologies, les nanomachines moléculaires, au prisme d’un événement singulier dont la préparation a mobilisé les efforts des chercheurs avec une intensité particulière : la première course internationale de nanovoitures en avril 2017. Il retrace la genèse de ces objets, explique les motifs de l’organisation de la course, en raconte quelques épisodes et s’interroge sur la signification de cet événement : a-t-on affaire à un processus de "gamification" d’une technoscience en mal de légitimité socioéconomique et de pertinence scientifique ? Il montre qu’autre chose est en jeu, qui n’exclut pas la production de connaissances mais l’inscrit dans une nouvelle manière – technophanique – de réaliser des expériences.

According to some testimonies, the Aristotelian ethics have been torn between a hedonist reading, as much as an anti-hedonist one, throughout Antiquity. From Critolaos to Verginius Rufus and Sosicrates, pleasure is considered both as "an evil [that] gives birth to many other evils" and as the first appropriate thing and the supreme good. This noteworthy disagreement stems from a famous difficulty within the Aristotelian corpus, raised by Aspasius, i.e. the alleged coexistence of two 'definitions' of pleasure in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics VII and X. In this paper, I offer a reconstruction of Alexander's treatment of this difficulty, based on some passages from Alexander's Ethical Problems and the Mantissa. I try to show that Alexander does not dismiss the so-called "definition A" of pleasure (the unimpeded activity of one's natural state) as being spurious, although he obviously values more the definition B (according to which pleasure perfects the activity as a kind of supervenient end). Even if he never openly brands the definition A as "dialectic" (like Aspasius), Alexander takes it as a reputable endoxon, which however needs to be emended in that it blurs the distinction between pleasure and activity. Pleasure only supervenes on the activity to which it is appropriate, and this supervenience is precisely what accounts for the inaccuracy of the definition A. As much as the child conflates the apparent good and the good, so the hedonist takes pleasure to be identical with the activity and the telos of human life. On the contrary, for Alexander, pleasure is actually only a sign of happiness and the shadow of the activity.

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