"Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?" -/- In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy (...) Brown discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Rancière highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it. -/- Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate. (shrink)

Explores the link between mathematics and ontology.

Les idées ici proposées ne dépendent point de quelque idée supérieure d'abord posée, et ne conduisent même point à quelque notion commune qui puisse définir tous les arts en peu de mots. Au contraire je me suis attaché à marquer les différences, les séparations, les oppositions, me réglant ainsi, autant que peut faire la critique, sur les oeuvres elles-mêmes, dont chacune s'affirme si bien et n'affirme qu'elle.

When Johann and Daniel Bernoulli founded fluid dynamics they encountered several problems. To go beyond the vision of Newtonian particles, a new set of images was needed in order to deal with the spatial extensibility and lack of form of fluids. I point to evidence that analogy was an essential abductive strategy in the creation of this imagery. But its heuristic behavior is complex: analogy can provide an initial model or proto-model that establishes the starting point of a theoretical process, (...) but it can play other roles as well. The historical genesis analyzed here shows that the participation of analogy in physicists’ creativity is not so restricted and that its richness opens up the field for very different roles and strategies in model-based discovery processes. Analogies can crop up intermittently in the evolution of a theory; and they can cooperate with images, extreme case reasoning and thought experiments, and even activate these processes at origin. Although it may seem that the contributions of analogy are generative in the sense of helping to discover new aspects of reality, we must stress the evaluative function that sometimes is performed by analogical reasoning in order to gain confidence. The study of the Bernoulli’s genesis of the foundations of fluid dynamics generates interesting hypotheses about the multiple roles that analogy can play in scientific model-based reasoning. (shrink)

To this day, the study of the substratum of thought and its implied mechanisms is rarely directly addressed. Nowadays, systemic approaches based on introspective methodologies are no longer fashionable and are often overlooked or ignored. Most frequently, reductionist approaches are followed for deciphering the neuronal circuits functionally associated with cognitive processes. However, we argue that systemic studies of individual thought may still contribute to a useful and complementary description of the multimodal nature of perception, because they can take into account (...) individual diversity while still identifying the common features of perceptual processes. We propose to address this question by looking at one possible task for recognition of a “signifying sound”, as an example of conceptual grasping of a perceptual response. By adopting a mixed approach combining qualitative analyses of interviews based on introspection with quantitative statistical analyses carried out on the resulting categorization, this study describes a variety of mental strategies used by musicians to identify notes’ pitch. Sixty-seven musicians (music students and professionals) were interviewed, revealing that musicians utilize intermediate steps during note identification by selecting or activating cognitive bricks that help construct and reach the correct decision. We named these elements “mental anchorpoints”. Although the anchorpoints are not universal, and differ between individuals, they can be grouped into categories related to three main sensory modalities – auditory, visual and kinesthetic. Such categorization enabled us to characterize the mental representations that allow musicians to name notes in relationship to eleven basic typologies of anchorpoints. We propose a conceptual framework which summarizes the process of note identification in five steps, starting from sensory detection and ending with the verbalization of the note pitch, passing through the pivotal role of mental anchorpoints and mental representations. We found that musicians use multiple strategies and select individual combinations of mental anchorpoints belonging to these three different sensory modalities both in isolation and in combination. (shrink)

Les Conférences sur la psychologie élémentaire du sentiment et de l’attention furent tenues par E.B. Titchener (1867-1927) à l’Université de Columbia en février 1908 et publiées en juillet de la même année à New York (The Macmillan Company). Dans ces conférences, qui traitent successivement de la sensation, du sentiment, et enfin de l’attention, Titchener (1867-1927) fait un point méticuleux de l’état de la question dans la psychologie de l’époque avant d’avancer ses propres hypothèses. Il pu...

L'Adhésion littéraire est son dernier ouvrage : un livre testament, dans lequel il partage sa conception de la littérature comme objet politique, qui engage nos valeurs, nos croyances, notre manière d'être ensemble."--Page 4 of cover.

Si l’activité de nos organes des sens est différente de celle de notre cerveau, sans pour autant en être distincte, puisqu’elle est, comme elle, de nature corporelle, en revanche, ce que nous sentons, sans pour autant être différent de nos sensations, en est tout à fait distinct. De plus, si ce qui par nous est senti n’est ni différent ni distinct de nous qui sentons, il n’en demeure pas moins qu’il n’y a pas une seule de nos sensations, toutes indivisibles, (...) qui ne soit un mixte d’activité et de passivité. Enfin, nos organes des sens, qui nous servent à sentir, ont beau être tout à la fois sentants et sentis, nous ne les sentons jamais en tant que sentants. (shrink)

Mon titre est descriptif. Je propose une interprétation du slogan de Wittgenstein : « la signification est l'usage ». Cette interprétation exploite une idée proche de celle du Putnam de « The Meaning of Meaning » selon laquelle il y aurait une division du travail linguistique. Je soutiens que la capacité de pratiquer un certain type d'inférences à l'aide d'un stock d'expressions spécialisées ou techniques sert d'accréditation au sein d'une communauté d'experts. Les membres de cette communauté sont alors dépositaires du (...) bon usage des expressions en question. Cette interprétation se veut, curieusement peut-être, une réponse non -kripkéenne à la question « qu'est-ce que suivre une règle ? ».My title is descriptive. I offer an interpretation of Wittgenstein's “meaning is use” slogan. This interpretation exploits an idea close to one of Putnam's in “The Meaning of Meaning” according to which there is a division of linguistic labour. I hold that a capacity to make certain inferences from a given stock of specialised or technical expressions entitles one to belong to a certain community of experts. Members of this community are then responsible for the good use of said expressions. Curiously perhaps, this interpretation is also a non -kripkean answer to the rule following riddle. (shrink)

Some viewpoints on the foundations of mathematics and its philosophy are more connected to scientific practice and its heuristics, mainly with the construction of physical theories and the search for the best explanations of physical phenomena by means of abduction or the solution of problems by the analytical method. Some researchers have introduced the importance of human cultural activities into the cognitive aspects of the mental processes of scientists, proposing an embodied approach in the bridge between mathematics and reality. Fluid (...) mechanics is an interesting area in this sense due to its position if the network of mathematics. By means of an historical example on vortex motion by Helmholtz, we show that the intuitive idea of eddy contains cognitive properties of a mental schema and that it gives many heuristic options for an embodied mathematical explanation about vortex dynamics. (shrink)

This work presents a mathematical model describing the interactions between the cross-shore structure of small pelagic fish population an their exploitation by coastal and offshore fisheries. The complete model is a system of seven ODE’s governing three stocks of small pelagic fish population moving and growing between three zones. Two types of fishing fleets are inter-acting with the fish population, industrial boats, constrained to offshore area, and artisanal boats, operating from the shore. Two time scales were considered and we use (...) aggregation methods that allow us to reduce the dimension of the model and to obtain an aggregated model, which is a four dimension one. The analysis of the aggregated model is performed. We discuss the possible equilibriums and their meaning in terms of fishery management. An interesting equilibrium state can be obtained for which we can expect coexistence and a stable equilibrium state between fish stocks and fishing efforts. Some identification parameters are also given in the discussion part of the model. (shrink)

The Politics of Gilles Deleuze and the Random Materialism of the Late Althusser A cursory reading of the writings of the late Althusser in which the philosopher attempts to devise a « random materialism » might lead us to regard them as the matrix from which a number of post-structuralist conceptions of politics, including that of Gilles Deleuze, have sprung. Our intention in the present article is to demonstrate the partial nature of such a filiation. To do so, the article (...) focuses on the relationship between the late Althusser and the Deleuzean conception of politics. It will thus examine the refusal, common to both philosophers, to elaborate a totalising theory of the political and their concomitant invocation of a principle of contingency. Such an affinity should not however disguise the differences between Althusser and Deleuze with regard to the manner in which the actualisation of such a programme is to be envisaged. (shrink)

The sociology of knowledge is faced with a problem of historical temporality that it has carefully avoided up until now. The subject has been avoided or ignored because a discussion of it in depth would run the risk of questioning all modern scientific thought. The problem is that of the concept of absolute time as it is used in evolutionist theory. In this category of theory I include not only social evolutionism, abused for a long time and recently reanimated by (...) the “socio-biologists,” but also biological, paleontological, geological and other types of evolutionism, that is, those qualified as “scientific.”. (shrink)

(2006). Democratic Deliberation in a Multinational Federation. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 419-444.

Un rapport récent1 de la Commission d’enseignement de l’Académie de Médecine mettait en garde les pouvoirs publics contre un symptôme grandissant : celui d’une désaffection pour les carrières hospitalo-universitaires traditionnellement caractérisées par la triple mission de soins, d’enseignement et de recherche. Le rapport insistait par ailleurs sur le malaise ou le mal-être..