Can we assert anything about laïcité? Three truisms, one theorem

What if one could reason about secularism — not hurl convictions, but demonstrate? This column runs the experiment in miniature: from three observations no one refuses, logic alone leads to a result that unsettles both camps — what a mathematician would call a theorem. Its lesson: neither closing everything nor opening everything holds; the reasonable setting is interior, and depends on context. In the lineage of Spinoza, who already treated the passions "in the manner of geometers". A sequel to "Defining laïcité is not choosing it". Op-ed no. 4, published on laiciscope.org; critical material tied to the book "Laïcité through the Lens of Reason" (D. A. Zighed).

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Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-09-26
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22978514
Primary Topic
Political Philosophy and Ethics
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Can we assert anything about laïcité? Three truisms, one theorem

Djamel Abdelkader Zighed
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Political Philosophy and Ethics
article

Can we assert anything about laïcité? Three truisms, one theorem

Djamel Abdelkader Zighed
article en

Abstract

What if one could reason about secularism — not hurl convictions, but demonstrate? This column runs the experiment in miniature: from three observations no one refuses, logic alone leads to a result that unsettles both camps — what a mathematician would call a theorem. Its lesson: neither closing everything nor opening everything holds; the reasonable setting is interior, and depends on context. In the lineage of Spinoza, who already treated the passions "in the manner of geometers". A sequel to "Defining laïcité is not choosing it". Op-ed no. 4, published on laiciscope.org; critical material tied to the book "Laïcité through the Lens of Reason" (D. A. Zighed).

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Université Lumière Lyon 2 (FR), Institut d'Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (FR)
Reduced inequalities
Openalex Percentile: Top 3%
Political Philosophy and Ethics
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