Background
Pradines, Maurice was born in 1874 in Glovelier, Switzerland.
Pradines, Maurice was born in 1874 in Glovelier, Switzerland.
Lycée Henri IV and École Normal Supérieure. Agrégé 1895.
University of Strasbourg (1919-1938). Sorbonne (1938-1941). Académie Française 1949.
Continued to publish extensively after his retirement from teaching in 1941.
The fundamental belief explored throughout the w°rk of Maurice Pradines is announced in the thesis submitted for his agrégation: he took seriously Goethe’s remark: ‘In the beginning was action.’ He argues that knowing or thinking is an action, a point Kant failed to appreciate, and thus that a critique of the faculty of action must precede a critique of knowledge. Again, the whole of his enormously detailed work on sensation rests on the assertion that sensation is not a matter of the reception of brute ‘lata, prior to processing by the mind, but rather is active and a product of l’activité perceptive, an activity, not a mere reception. Pradines extended his psychological investigahons into areas often not touched by such work. Thus, for example, volume II of 1943-1948 contains ^dch on the subject of aesthetics. Pradines argues that human aesthetic capacity is a mutation, a capacity which has freed itself from the exigencies °f utilitarian service to the organism, and instead treats sensations playfully, endowing them with symbolic significance and arriving finally at disinterestedness. The beautiful is what we happen to find ravishing. For many years a theist, Pradines came to revise his religious beliefs late in life. He came to believe that the concept of God marks only a direction, and that the task of humanity is to advance in this direction. Whoever does not advance towards God goes nowhere.