Tous droits réservés © Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1979 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.

Science des rêves, rêves de la science TIMOTHYJ. REISS À l'automne 1895 Freud rédigeait un document où, pour la première fois, il cherchait à mettre au clair une psychologie capable de se prévaloir de caractéristiques «scientifiques» : dans cette esquisse, nous avons cherché à faire entrer la psychologie dans le cadre des sciences naturelles, c'est-à-dire à représenter les processus psychiques comme les états quantitativement déterminés de particules matérielles différenciables, ceci afin de les rendre évidents et incontestable 1. Freud indique ainsi de manière assez claire que : 1) une psychologie qui se veut scientifique ne saurait faire mieux que de se donner comme cadre initial celui des sciences naturelles établies dont on connaît les démarches méthodologiques; 2) une telle science «représente» ce qu'on peut appeler des «processus psychiques» comme composés d'éléments que l'on peut étudier «quantitativement» et comme s'ils formaient des «états»-moments dans les processus psychiques qui-bien sûr-ne cessent en fait 1 Sigmund Freud, «Esquisse d'une psychologie scientifique», dans la

York University. His most recent books are The Uncertainty of Analysis (Cornell UP, 1988) and The Meaning of Literature (Cornell UP, 1992). He is at work on a sequel to the second of these, as well as on several other volumes: one on the sixteenth-century debates about meaning and method, another on Racine and political thought, and a third on the place of Descartes's work in the social and political controversies of the time. I N HIS 1983 Harvard commencement address, Carlos Fuentes spoke of the North American threat to and incomprehension of varieties of cultures and politics in Latin America and eloquently stressed the need for an imagination and memory that would enable such varieties to live, even within a single vast network of cultural relations. The various cultures would form a pluralistic area of exchange, retaining and surpassing local identities-creating a polyphony, not a monotone. Fuentes was merely adopting, he said, Milan Kundera's "plea for 'the small cultures' from the wounded heart of Central Europe" (Myself2\4). The practices that provoke such pleas are what this European issue of PMLA set out to discuss-not, of course, the practices that constitute the military and economic threat the United States poses to Latin America but those social and economic ones that might create a European hegemonic "system" of the arts, communications, and culture. Fuentes surely found his model in the more vehement speech Aime Cesaire made thirty years earlier in denouncing colonial outrages to an august European chamber. Cesaire, too, protested that societies and cultures need one another and argued that a society incapable of cross-cultural understanding was itself doomed. The ignorant or willful denial of cultural diversity, Fuentes repeated, "is... a prelude to death." Like Cesaire, he saw the potential for a more generous relationship in an exchange of memory and imagination that would enable cultures to "complete" one another (199, 214). Cultural intervention and political colonization create similar blindnesses, concealing inequalities, covering contradictions, and legitimizing savage immoralities. To avoid these evils, imagination and memory are essential. Yet the contemporary American culture is one of forgetfulness, one that almost takes pride in its lack of interest in other cultures, one that finds the effort truly to imagine and sympathetically to identify with cultural differences not only wholly unnecessary but worthy

This erudite work of scholarship will change the way that we look at Renaissance intellectual history. With new and abundant evidence, Paul Grendler demonstrates that Italian universities experienced a huge Renaissance between 1400 and 1650. Far from declining after 1400, as some medievalists used to claim, Italian universities flowered and formed the necessary foundation for advances in every intellectual discipline. The driving force behind expansion and innovation in Italian universities was humanism. Italian humanists were responsible for the new availability of numerous previously unknown classical authors, a deeper knowledge of Greek that enabled more precise translations and commentaries, and a new critical approach to texts and learning. Grendler's monumental book will serve as the starting point for all future research on education in the Renaissance. It will be an essential reference not only for scholars of humanism and institutional history but also for those interested in the histories of particular disciplines, such as law, natural science, mathematics, anatomy and medicine, and innumerable other aspects of Renaissance culture.

Philosophy and the philosophers making it are set in and respond to particular histories. For this collection's writers, to see philosophy ''expressive of something like the human subject's struggle to clarify its consciousness or conscience'' (p. 6) is to universalise one history's claim. The editors take sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe to be an era of momentous cultural change, when those presenting themselves as 'philosophers' did so as owing duty, a Ciceronian office, not just ''to truth, to Man, to God, to Nature, perhaps to a sovereign or else to God through a religious order'' (p. 10), but to understand and direct change into the intellectual, moral and practical paths that best suited and led this historical moment. To do so, and be legitimate for this task in their own and others' eyes, the philosopher had to have a certain persona, inevitably initially disputed in a time of change, unable to be taken for granted when the analysis of time and place and the nature of philosophy were unclear. The editors by and large agree that the ideas and experiences enabling these assumptions include quite different ones of personhood from those of a universal human subject supposed by modern philosophies of consciousness. For them, persona is not an individual's performance or choice. Rather, Conel Condren writes in his contribution, it embodies ''a moral economy'', being an office as ''a whole sphere of responsibilities, rights of action for their fulfilment, necessary attributes, skills and specific virtues, highlighted by their concomitant vices and failures'' (p. 66). Personae,

Introduction: By 1527 or 1528, when Copernicus wrote the final Latin version of his treatise on the minting of money, the long period of dissension between Poland and the Teutonic Knights as claimants of the domains of Royal Prussia had been more or less papered over.1 It ...