La Société romande de philosophie de sa création à son institutionnalisation

Abstract

This article presents a central cultural areopagus of French-speaking Switzerland from 1906 to 1939, the Société romande de philosophie (SRP), nearly unknown to philosophers and historians alike, a blind spot of philosophy in Romandie. The spontaneous reading philosophers can make of their past as a history of philosophical theories ensues in a retrospective disciplinary unit attributed to philosophy. Yet, contrary to that view, we show that, in Romandie, this past was structured both by a disciplinary pluralism supported by numerous cantonal, intercantonal and international networks, and by a genuine unity around certain values other than the criterion of discipline. As a result, identity— and therefore belonging—was not based on philosophy as a discipline, but on disciplinary plurality as much as on the very sharing of many values. Those ranged from intellectual fraternity to taking the divine seriously, from the celebration of the homeland to federalism and the tolerance vis-à-vis divergent ideas, from the praise of living together to the search of the truth.