Aux Antilles françaises, les typologies du métissage mettent en exergue les personnages emblématiques que sont les chabins. L’analyse des représentations dont ils sont l’objet montre qu’ils symbolisent une alliance unique, précieuse et paradoxale au niveau de la race, du genre et du tempérament, entre les origines noire et blanche, alliance valorisée qui provoque la fierté populaire. À l’opposé, un métissage inquiétant, celui des “métis” rappelle les fondements traumatiques de la société coloniale et suscite une méfiance épidermique. Derrière des catégorisations (...) et des assignations identitaires fortes émergent cependant des capacités de négociations identitaires qui permettent de sortir de tout enfermement radical. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the OdysseyErwin F. CookLillian Doherty. Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. viii 1 220 pp. Cloth, $37.50.Siren Songs makes a significant contribution to feminist literature on Homer. Most importantly, Doherty is able to show in detail how the very sensibilities that make Homer appealing to the modern reader can seduce the (...) unwary into accepting the poem’s androcentric frame of reference. If her book’s ideological model based on gender and class hierarchy leads to repeated imprecisions and reductionism, this affects its argument in detail, but not in outline.Doherty’s methodology is objectivist, assumes an essentialist definition of the female, and consciously avoids positioning the Odyssey in the context of archaic Greek gender constructions. One place where she at least acknowledges that the Odyssey originated in a specific culture exposes a problem some will have with this book: “It may be objected that my conclusions are hardly surprising given the aristocratic focus of early Greek epic and the patriarchal norms of archaic Greek society. In this context, it may be urged, the surprise is to see lower-class and female characters even this fully represented” (170). She responds that her conclusions refute arguments by Farron and Rose that in giving prominence to female and lower-class characters Homer makes an antiaristocratic statement. This tactic runs the risk of reducing her own efforts to a book-length refutation of a pair of articles.Many Homerists will also be surprised to read that “the production and reception of a narrative text is never a direct act of communication between the author and the external audience but a ‘bracketed’ or mediated communication” (87). Thus, the poem’s external audience is not “composed of living human beings, who have read and judged the epic since its creation, but... a hypothetical audience posited by the epic narrator” (19). Further, no true repetition exists in literature (182–83). These assertions derive from critical approaches to the modern novel, and although true to a certain extent of all literature they are arguably least true of poetry composed in performance using metrical formulae.Chapter 1 surveys scholarship on whether Penelope recognizes Odysseus before the mnesterophonia. Doherty argues that Penelope’s motivation remains obscure because of an accumulation of narrative indeterminacies created by multiple focalization (45–46; though cf. her apparent assumptions on 143). She lauds Felson-Rubin and Winkler for their insistence on regarding Penelope as an agent capable of acting in her own self-interest, and equal to her husband in metis. Yet they ultimately fail to stand outside the poem’s androcentric frame of [End Page 461] reference and to see that Penelope’s excellence is based on traits she shares with males. It thus becomes necessary to establish narrative openings that expose “instabilities within ideology” (52) or permit the reader “to project active and even subversive female subject positions” (63). Narrative redundancies serving to reinforce the androcentric frame must also be acknowledged, however, for opening the text may inadvertently render its androcentric frame more palatable.Chapters 2 and 3 reconstruct the poem’s internal and external audiences. Doherty argues that these audiences included women. Although Eumaeus’ ability to evaluate the beggar’s storytelling ability proves he is no stranger to epic performance, he “must be considered an ‘overhearer’ rather than a member of the regular audience” (72–73). Eumaeus can, however, support a very different view of class relationships in Homer: when Telemachus appears unexpectedly, Eumaeus kisses his eyes and greets him as a father greets a long-absent son, and Telemachus addresses him as atta; Eumaeus is able to buy a slave on his own; and he may have an advisory role at court since he says he used to question people claiming to have seen his master.The Nekuia is central to Doherty’s project in these chapters. Odysseus’ decision to pause after his catalogue of women divides the Nekuia “roughly along gender lines, and draws attention to the fact that the internal audience of Phaeacians is also marked for gender” (67). In her approval of Odysseus’ tale, Arete... (shrink)

Dans la Bibliothèque , le pseudo-Apollodore raconte la joute musicale qui oppose Apollon au satyre Marsyas. Le dieu musicien l’emporte parce qu’il joue de sa cithare après l’avoir retournée, exécutant une manœuvre que son rival est incapable de reproduire avec l’aulos. Apollon fait ainsi de sa cithare un instrument palintone et palintrope, très proche de son arc réflexe, un instrument capable d’inverser sa position, mais aussi de renverser la situation au profit de celui qui l’utilise. Même « conduite de retournement (...) » pour la lyre, dont la réversibilité efficace est redevable à la tortue ainsi qu’à Hermès et à son travail de luthier. La puissance de retournement des instruments à cordes apolliniens permet de jeter un éclairage nouveau sur la victoire d’Apollon et sur l’écorchement de Marsyas, tout en situant l’épisode dans le champ de la mètis. De l’instrument d’Apollon, retourné vers le bas, qui précipite Marsyas aux Enfers, à celui d’Orphée, tenu à l’endroit, qui en ramène Eurydice, se dessine la nature ambivalente de la lyre symétrique à celle de l’arc. Comme lui, la lyre est bien « signe de chute », de la vie vers la mort, ou « signe de remontée », de la mort vers la vie.The reversal’s notion and the musical agôn between Apollon and Marsyas in ps.-Apollodorus: interpretation of a myth. In The Library , the pseudo-Apollodorus reports how Apollo, the musician god, opposed to Marsyas the satyr, won the musical contest by playing his kithara upside down, a trick his opponent was quite unable to reproduce with his aulos. Thus, Apollo turned his kithara into a palintonos and palintropos instrument, very much like his reflex bow, an instrument, whose position could be reversed but which could also reverse the situation to the benefit of its user. The same reversal ability is true of the lyre, which could be played efficiently both ways thanks to the tortoise and to Hermes, the skilful lyremaker. The extraordinary capacity of Apollinian stringed instruments to be reversed throws a new light on both Apollo’s victory and Marsyas’s skinning, setting the episode in the mètis area. From Apollo’s reversed lyre hurling Marsyas down into Hades to Orpheus’s being played the right way, to bring back Euridyke from the underworld, emerges the ambivalent nature of the lyre in perfect symmetry with the bow’s. Just like it, the lyre means the fall from life into death but it also represents the ascent from death into life. (shrink)

:This selection draws from Vinciane Despret's book Beasts and Humans, a compendium to the eponymous art exhibition held in Paris's Parc de la Villette. The two selections translated here highlight the abilities of animals to teach us their forms of knowledge and intelligence. The first selection draws from the ancient Greek concept mētis to highlight a form of cunning intelligence that is shared and learned between humans and animals. It is an overlooked and often neglected form of intelligence, especially in (...) comparison to phronesis or sophia, but, as Despret notes, humans have been transformed by what they've learned, habitually and bodily, by their proximity with animals. The second selection showcases how animals continue to surprise and confound humans’ expectations. Drawing on two different cases where vultures have been reintroduced into extirpated areas of Europe, Despret shows how the success and achievement in one area is not necessarily duplicated elsewhere, and how different forms of kno.. (shrink)

The recent wave of data on exoplanets lends support to METI ventures (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), insofar as the more exoplanets we find, the more likely it is that “exominds” await our messages. Yet, despite these astronomical advances, there are presently no well-confirmed tests against which to check the design of interstellar messages. In the meantime, the best we can do is distance ourselves from terracentric assumptions. There is no reason, for example, to assume that all inferential abilities are language-like. (...) With that in mind, I argue that logical reasoning does not have to be couched in symbolic notation. In diagrammatic reasoning, inferences are underwritten, not by rules, but by transformations of self-same qualitative signs. I use the Existential Graphs of C. S. Peirce to show this. Since diagrams are less dependent on convention and might even be generalized to cover non-visual senses, I argue that METI researchers should add some form of diagrammatic representations to their repertoire. Doing so can shed light, not just on alien minds, but on the deepest structures of reasoning itself. (shrink)

Dil, düşüncelerin ifade edilmesini, bilgi aktarımını ve sosyal etkileşimi sağlayan temel bir olgudur. Dil eğitimi ise kültürler arası iletişimi kolaylaştıran ve dünya genelinde etkili iletişim kurma becerisi kazandıran bir faaliyettir. Birden fazla dil bilmek, farklı kültürlere ve bakış açılarına açık olmayı sağlar. Yaşadığı dünya düzeni içerisinde çağın gerisinde kalmak istemeyen, uygar ve etkileşimli bir toplum olma niyetini taşıyan Fransa hükümet yetkilileri dil eğitimi konusunda ciddi adımlar atmıştır. 1795 yılında Doğu dilleri üzerine uzmanlaş Inalco’yu kurarak başta Osmanlı olmak üzere İslâm dünyasının (...) konuştuğu dili öğrenen uzmanlar yetiştirmeye başlamıştır. Kuruluşundan itibaren sistemli bir şekilde dil yelpazesini genişleten Inalco, Türkçe, Arapça, Çince, Farsça, Hintçe, Japonca, Korece, Rusça, İbranice ve daha birçok Doğu dilini bünyesine katmıştır. Bu dilleri öğrenen ve konuşan kişiler sayesinde Fransa, Doğuyla olan münasebetini güçlü tutmakta ve burada bulunan devletlerle uzaktan yahut yakından temas içerisinde kalmayı sürdürmektedir. Yaklaşık dört asırlık geçmişiyle Inalco, bir dil eğitimi merkezi olmanın yanında şarkiyat kurumları içerisinde önde gelen, sayısız oryantalist yetiştirip çeşitli sahalarda eserlerin yazılmasına imkân tanıyan bir kurumdur. Kuruluş, misyonuna uygun olarak uzun süre Doğu dilleri ve medeniyetleri üzerine uzmanlaşmış öncü isimleri yetiştirip çalışmalarıyla kültürel etkileşimi teşvik etmiş ve kültürler arası anlayışı geliştirmeye yardımcı olmuştur. Kurumsal tecrübesiyle ilgi alanını hep genişleten Inalco günümüzde neredeyse tüm dünya dilleri ve medeniyetleri üzerine çalışmalarını devam ettirmektedir. Artık dil ve kültür alanındaki uzmanlığı ve köklü geçmişiyle dünya genelinde saygın bir kurum olarak kabul edilmektedir. Inalco’da yetişen dil uzmanları Fransız hükümetinin diplomatik ve ticari ilişkilerinde aktif rol alarak bu konularda yetkililere tercümanlık hizmeti sunmuşlardır. Aynı zamanda uzman oldukları dillerin yeni nesillere öğretilmesinde öğretici pozisyonlarını korumuşlar ve ilişkide oldukları kültürlerin tanınmasında da önemli roller üstlenmişlerdir. Her ne kadar yaptıkları iş şarkiyat hizmeti olsa da Doğu kültürüne ait mirasın gün yüzüne çıkartılmasında, değerlendirilmesinde ve tasnifinde yer alarak bu kültürlere ait ögelerin korunmasında yardımcı unsur olmuşlardır. Silvestre de Sacy, Louis Bazin, Régis Blachère, Louis Massignon vb. birçok Doğu bilimci burada yetişerek hem kendi ülkelerine hem de Doğu kültürüne hizmet etmişlerdir. Ancak akademik ortamda Inalco ve benzeri kurumlar üzerine yeteri kadar çalışmanın olmadığı da bir gerçektir. Dolayısıyla bu çalışmada, Inalco’nun kuruluşu, işleyiş şekli ve faaliyet alanları tanıtıldıktan sonra bir şarkiyat kurumu olarak misyonu üzerinde durulacaktır. Saha araştırması, gözlem, yetkili mercilerden alınan bilgi ve belgelerle oluşturulan çalışmanın alandaki boşluğu dolduracağı düşünülmektedir. Yaklaşık dört asırlık geçmişiyle Inalco, bir dil eğitimi merkezi olmanın yanında şarkiyat kurumları içerisinde önde gelen, sayısız oryantalist yetiştirip çeşitli sahalarda eserlerin yazılmasına imkân tanıyan bir kurumdur. Fiilen 1795 yılında Fransa’da kurulan Inalco kuruluş misyonuna uygun olarak uzun süre Doğu dilleri ve medeniyetleri üzerine uzmanlaşmış öncü isimleri yetiştirmiştir. Uzun süre şarkiyat alanına odaklanan Inalco, Doğu dilleri ve medeniyetleri üzerindeki çalışmalarıyla kültürel etkileşimi teşvik etmiş ve kültürler arası anlayışı geliştirmeye yardımcı olmuştur. Kurumsal tecrübesiyle ilgi alanını hep genişleten Inalco günümüzde neredeyse tüm dünya dilleri ve medeniyetleri üzerine çalışmalarını devam ettirmektedir. Artık dil ve kültür alanındaki uzmanlığı ve köklü geçmişiyle dünya genelinde saygın bir kurum olarak kabul edilmektedir. Ancak akademik ortamda Inalco ve benzeri kurumlar üzerine yeteri kadar çalışmanın olmadığı da bir gerçektir. Dolayısıyla bu çalışmada, Inalco’nun kuruluşu, işleyiş şekli ve faaliyet alanları tanıtıldıktan sonra bir şarkiyat kurumu olarak misyonu üzerinde durulacaktır. Saha araştırması, gözlem, yetkili mercilerden alınan bilgi ve belgelerle oluşturulan çalışmanın alandaki boşluğu dolduracağı düşünülmektedir. (shrink)

The Greek word mētis (μῆτις) traditionally refers to a particular form of wily intelligence associated with the arts of deception (dolos) and the knowledge of tricks (kerdē), subterfuges, and traps. Mētis evokes innovative and ground-breaking solutions, based on the capability to understand, anticipate, and possibly violate the others’ expectations. Most importantly, mētis presupposes practical wisdom, or prudence (phrόnesis), a dispositional quality that underpins all the virtues that deserve to be cultivated by sportspersons and that is pivotal to perfect sportspersons’ moral (...) character. Not only is prudence required to apply mētis profitably for winning a game, but it is also indispensable to perform consistently with the game’s norms—cognizant of sport values. This analysis of mētis is key to illuminate the embodied dimension of tactical and moral reasoning in contemporary sport practice. In this paper, we first argue that the strategic effectiveness of mētis proves that not only sensorimotor control but also higher forms of intelligence, like strategic reasoning, are embodied and inform skilful performance; second, we argue that relying on mētis is necessary not only to interpret the rules of the game in one’s own favor but also to respect the shared values that these rules uphold in the sport practice. (shrink)

While the effects of pattern learning on language processing are well known, the way in which pattern learning shapes exploratory behavior has long gone unnoticed. We report on the way in which individual differences in statistical pattern learning affect performance in the domain of language along multiple dimensions. Analyzing data from healthy monolingual adults' performance on a serial reaction time task and a self‐paced reading task, we show how individual differences in statistical pattern learning are reflected in readers' knowledge of (...) linguistic co‐occurrence patterns and in their exploration and exploitation of content‐specific and task‐general information. First, we investigated the extent to which an individual's pattern learning correlates with his or her sensitivity to systematic morphological and syntactic co‐occurrences, as evidenced while reading authentic sentences. We found that the stream of morphological and syntactic information has a more pronounced effect on the reading speed of, as we will label them, content‐sensitive learners in that the more probable the co‐occurrence pattern, the faster their reading of that pattern will be. Next, we investigated how differences in pattern learning are reflected in the ways in which individuals approach the reading task itself and adapt to it. Casting this relation in terms of exploration/exploitation strategies, known from Reinforcement Learning, we conclude that content‐sensitive learners are also more likely to initially probe (explore) a wider range of directly relevant patterns, which they can later use (exploit) to optimize their reading performance further. By affecting exploratory behavior, pattern learning influences the information that is gathered and becomes available for exploitation, thereby increasing the effect pattern learning has on language cognition. (shrink)

Promoting ethical decisions and behaviors is challenging for any organization. Yet managers are still required to make ethical decisions under conditions which deplete their self-control resources, such as high stress and long hours. This study examines the relationships among symbolic and internal moral identity, self-control, and ethical behavior, and investigates whether self-control acts as the mechanism through which moral identity leads to ethical behavior. Findings indicate that internal moral identity overrides symbolic moral identity in the relationship with self-control and that (...) self-control fully mediates the relationship between internal moral identity and ethical behavior. The implications for organizations is that while rules, procedures, and ethics training are useful, managers with a strong moral compass will be more likely to practice self-control leading to more ethical behaviors. (shrink)

We often have some reason to do actions insofar as they promote outcomes or states of affairs, such as the satisfaction of a desire. But what is it to promote an outcome? I defend a new version of 'probabilism about promotion'. According to Minimal Probabilistic Promotion, we promote some outcome when we make that outcome more likely than it would have been if we had done something (anything) else. This makes promotion easy and reasons cheap.

In the mid twenty-tens, many major food companies committed to sustainably source their priority ingredients, including North American commodity crops. With deadlines set for the decade’s end, companies joined multi-stakeholder initiatives and developed standards, metrics, and other assessment tools to help them track and drive progress. In short, they embarked on the sort of corporate supply chain governance that agri-food scholars have long studied. But how would this governance happen, especially in the commodity supply chains where companies knew and controlled (...) little about upstream production? Treating supply chain governance as not just a corporate undertaking but also the work of mid-level sustainability managers, this paper examines the practical skills and knowledge, or mētis, employed by managers in their efforts to win the support of colleagues, farmers, and other supply chain actors. This analysis provides insight into how and why food companies’ approaches to governing agricultural sustainability have changed since they set their 2020 sourcing goals. More broadly, it highlights the contingent nature of their governance. (shrink)

Any first step in organisational adaptation starts with individuals’ responses and willingness (or otherwise) to change an aspect of themselves given the transcontextual settings in which they are operating (Bateson in Small arcs of larger circles: framing through other patterns, Triarchy Press, Axminster, 2018). This research explores the implications for organisational adaptation strategies when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being embedded into the ecology of the organisation, and when employees have a dominant fixed or growth mindset (Dweck in Mindset: changing the (...) way you think to fulfil your potential. Robinson, London, 2017). Research participants were supplied with a single scenario based in 2030, where—as a result of Artificial Intelligence technology implementation—employees were going to be displaced. Using Torbert’s (Organizational wisdom and executive courage, New Lexington Press, San Francisco, 1998) ‘first, second and third person’ research theory, participants were asked to independently review their thoughts, sense, and image of the future from a fixed mindset position (considered to be the worst case), then from a growth mindset perspective (best case), and then do the same collectively. Five key findings are outlined which support the principle that having a growth mindset is a key component of adaptive capacity and futures literacy. The five key findings conclude that AI adaptation processes need to include compassion and authenticity, embodiment, fundamental needs and motivations, mutual learning and considering what lies beyond the edges of the organisation (Bateson in Small arcs of larger circles: framing through other patterns, Triarchy Press, Axminster, 2018). (shrink)

Digital technological innovation is reshaping the pattern of industrial development. Due to the shortage of digital talents and the frequent mobility of these people, the competition for talents will be very fierce for organizations to realize digital transformation. The digitization transformation of China’s service industry is far ahead of that of industry and agriculture. It is of great significance to study the organizational management and talent management of service enterprises to reduce the negative impact of insufficient talent reserve and meet (...) the needs of digital development. Based on 378 valid questionnaires from China’s service industry, this paper applied polynomial regression and a response surface model to analyze the impact of two kinds of person-environment fit on work engagement and individual creativity. The results show that: under the combination of high morality and high talent, work engagement and individual creativity are the highest; individual creativity is stronger under the condition of high morality and low talent than under low morality and high talent; and work engagement mediates the influence of morality and talent on individual creativity. The research reveals the internal mechanism by which morality and talent cooperatively promote individual creativity, which provides theoretical guidance for management practice of service firms to improve individual creativity in the process of digital transformation. (shrink)

This article develops Thomson’s post-Heideggerian view that ontological education is centrally concerned with disclosing being creatively and responsibly. To disclose being creatively and responsibly is to realize the meaning of being, developing our historical understanding of what being means along with our consequent understanding of what it means for us to be, both communally and in the many facets of our own individual lives. As ontological educators, we disclose our own being by becoming who we are, which we do best (...) by learning-in-public, that is, by ‘teaching learning’. In the teaching and learning that belong together in ontological education, we come into our own by helping others to come into their own as well. Thomson explains and develops the crucially meaningful difference between creatively and responsibly disclosing inchoate meanings, on the one hand, and technologically imposing pre-existing plans and ideas, on the other. Responding to five recent essays on Heidegger allows Thomson to elaborate a non-nihilistic way of understanding education, teaching, learning, and being in our late-modern age of increasing technology. This article thereby articulates and embodies some of the important educational possibilities opened up by a more genuinely meaningful postmodern understanding of being. (shrink)

Doping scandals can reveal unresolved tensions between the meritocratic values of equal opportunity + reward for effort and the “talentocratic” love of hereditary privilege. Whence this special reverence for talent? We analyze the following arguments: (1) talent is a unique indicator of greater potential, whereas doping enables only temporary boosts (the fluke critique); (2) developing a talent is an authentic endeavor of “becoming who you are,” whereas reforming the fundamentals of your birth suit via artifice is an act of alienation (...) (the phony critique); (3) your (lack of) talent informs you of your proper place and purpose in life, whereas doping frustrates such an amor fati self-understanding (the fateless critique). We conclude that these arguments fail to justify a categorical preference for natural talent over integrated artifice. Instead, they illustrate the extent to which unsavory beliefs about “nature’s aristocracy” may still be at play in the moral theatre of sports. (shrink)