Philosophy of Work / Philosophie du travail

Présentation

However bored we may be with our jobs, however indifferent we may be towards the sorrows and satisfactions of a professional career, however cynical we may be about promises of fulfi lment through work, it is nonetheless hard not to be personally affected by work, hard not to find oneself asking whether it is as it ought to be, both for oneself and for others, and hard to resist the urge to criticize the way work is done and the value that is attached to it. As with religion and politics, when it comes to work, everyone is a philosopher.
It is an irony then that those whose work it is to do philosophy – that is, professional philosophers – nowadays, for the most part, have little to say on the topic.
If philosophers are to find their voice again on the topic of work, they will do well to listen to what their predecessors had to say about it. Plato, Locke and Marx are perhaps the most obvious reference points, but by no means the only ones. As this volume attempts to show, there are other philosophers from the past whose refl ections on work we can profitably engage with today. We can profi t from such engagement not just by obtaining clarity on aspects of specific philosophical problems of work, such as the contribution of different types of work to the good life, but also by retrieving a sense of the significance of work for philosophy more generally. At stake in the latter is the possibility that work might have ’paradigmatic’status for philosophy, that it might serve as an organizing principle for a whole way of thinking about reality or human affairs. A distinctive feature of the essays gathered here is their attempt, more or less directly, to shed light on the meaning and prospects of this suggestion.

L’Auteur

Ont participé à ce volume : T. Angier, J.-Ph. Deranty, P.-M. Morel, E. Renault, N.H. Smith.