We describe a new way to construct large subdirectly irreducibles within an equational class of algebras. We use this construction to show that there are forbidden geometries of multitraces for finite algebras in residually small equational classes. The construction is first applied to show that minimal equational classes generated by simple algebras of types 2, 3 or 4 are residually small if and only if they are congruence modular. As a second application of the construction we characterize residually small locally (...) finite abelian equational classes. (shrink)

Anthropological scholarship after Marilyn Strathern does something that might surprise lawyers schooled in the tradition of ‘law and society’, or ‘law in context’. Instead of construing law as an instrument of social forces, or as an expression of processes by which society maintains and reproduces itself, a new mode of anthropological enquiry focuses sharply on ‘law itself’, on what Annelise Riles calls the ‘technicalities’ of law. How might the legal scholar be inspired by this approach? In this article, I explore (...) one possible way of approaching law after anthropology, which is to find within law’s own archive a set of resources for an analogous representation of law itself. Drawing on the historical scholarship of Yan Thomas, I suggest that the Roman conception of law as object offers an engaging counterpart to the anthropological take on law as a specific set of tools or, technicalities, or as a particular art of making relations. (shrink)

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)

The present article reviews the concepts of enunciation in Greimas’s and other semioticians’ works; it examines the way in which these latter revisit Benveniste, the reorientations they propose or the aspects they leave aside, such as the distinction between speaker and enunciator (as the source of a point of view in a propositional content composed of a.

L’auteur commence par rappeler la diversité d’aspects des textes mathématiques. Il s’appuie pour cela sur plusieurs études historiques récentes consacrées à l’analyse et aux conséquences de cette diversité dans le cas des mathématiques babyloniennes, grecques et chinoises. Il propose ensuite une analyse sémiotique de la transcription de l’un des textes latins par lesquels l’arithmétique fondée sur les chiffres arabes a été diffusée en Occident. La comparaison des résultats obtenus avec ceux de la même analyse appliquée à la traduction française qui (...) a récemment été donnée de ce texte lui permet de comparer l’évolution de la forme des textes mathématiques avec l’évolution des caractéristiques sémiotiques des nombres. Au cours de cet article, il propose un rapprochement entre le type de «mise en texte» adoptée et certains préjugés formalistes. (shrink)

According to the well known Platonic distinction of different types of knowing, discursive thought (διάνοια) is second to intellect (νοῦς), and above opinion (δόξα). Intellection intelligizes the entire intelligible cosmos, all at once (ἀθρόως), in an undivided manner. Discursive thought, involving temporal thinking, articulates into plurality the indivisible character of the intellectual life. I argue in this paper that Proclus does not reduce discursive thought to discursivity. Discursive thought is thought, i.e. intellection (διά‑νοια) before being discursive (διά‑νοια), intellection of Psychic (...) Forms, and intellection in the manner of the soul. (shrink)

Damascius’s proper insight into the neoplatonic triad has an idiosyncratic mood. Triad is not essentially seen as a kind of completeness, it is rather the place where some kind of tenseness is at stake between its second and third moments. One of the main points of this paper is connected to the very act of the triad’s second moment. This act is a twin act : rising to existence and multiplying to the infinite. The surmise grounding the argument dwells on (...) a duality that lies in receptivity issuing from the One, duality mirroring the duality affecting the One itself. (shrink)

I reconsider Aristotle’s account of perception by way of an ‘organic’ reading of the sensitive mean. I argue that the mean serves as a homeostatic mechanism that allows for the replication of forms in the organs in the process of perceptual alteration. The mean, as a product of properly constituted organs, is that by which Aristotle separates animals from plants.

This article analyses various ways to articulate the ethical investigations of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas with the doctrine of the responsibility to protect. In response to genocide and mass atrocity, an imperative to understand responsibility in a broader and more forceful way entails in both cases a new and analogous revision of the related concepts of identity and sovereignty. A basic complementarity of Levinas’ ethics with the responsibility to protect is ascertained: while Levinas’ ethical investigations can indeed bring a philosophical (...) basis to the responsibility to protect, the latter can, in a limited way, be construed as practical policy implications of the former. (shrink)

In a lamellar TiAl alloy deformed at room temperature under an orientation that activates slip parallel to the interfaces, the n phase exhibits intralamellar dislocation networks parallel to the primary slip plane and entirely glissile in their habit plane. Their meshes are mainly rectangular with branches all coplanar, screw or near-screw in character and with Burgers vector of and types. Dislocation organization at and in the near-vicinity of these intralamellar networks suggests a reaction between a family of primary coplanar d (...) 011] dislocations that slip in the network habit plane and a family of dislocations that cross-slip from a plane inclined to the lamellae into the network. The reactions result in junctions with Burgers vector that subsequently transform into rectangular units. The presence of these networks is consistent with that of a residual elastic twist between adjacent n lamellae. (shrink)

Η φυσικοχημική ανάλυση των χρωστικών υλών δεκαοκτώ σπαραγμάτων έγχρωμων κονιαμάτων, που προέρχονται από διαφορετικούς μινωικούς χώρους της Κρήτης της εποχής του Χαλκού (Αμνισός, Κνωσός, Αγία Τριάδα, Χανιά και Μάλια), επέτρεψε την ταύτιση νέων χρωστικών υλών που δεν ήταν έως σήμερα γνωστές παρά μόνο από την αιγυπτιακή ζωγραφική της ίδιας περιόδου. Η παρούσα εργασία, που δημοσιεύεται είκοσι και πλέον έτη μετά την τελευταία σημαντική μελέτη της τεχνικής των μινωικών τοιχογραφιών, προσφέρει την ευκαιρία να συνταχθεί ένας κριτικός κατάλογος χρωστικών υλών και χρωμάτων (...) που χρησιμοποιούνταν στην αιγαιακή και την αιγυπτιακή ζωγραφική. Αυτό επιτρέπει κυρίως να καθοριστεί με κάποια βεβαιότητα η προέλευση πολλών από αυτά. (shrink)

S’il est vrai que la réception d’une œuvre en dit autant sur l’œuvre elle-même que sur l’époque qui la reçoit, la réception de l’œuvre de Michel Henry mérite une attention particulière : parce qu’elle se fait, de toute évidence, difficilement, et qu’elle déconcerte, parce qu’elle repose peut-être sur un malentendu, voire une série de malentendus ;...

La théorie de la signification exposée dans les Recherches logiques et Sur la théorie de la signification est fondée sur l’analyse du discours informatif. Si Husserl se penche sur les expressions objectives se rapportant à des objets ou des état-de-choses empiriques ou idéaux,...

Haitian Creole is a unique language, as are all creole languages. Mother tongue of almost six million people—without counting those who have immigrated—it has its own particular ways of expressing in words, of making sentences and forming a discourse. However, for more than two centuries it has been excluded from many circuits of communication. The limits imposed on it have kept it from developing a creativity, at the vocabulary level as well as that of organizing a discourse that would assure (...) a function of plural communication, both oral and written. The present challenge of this long-throttled language has posed an important number of problems in linguistics, teaching, culture and politics because of new communication systems and especially because of education. (shrink)

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..

Consisting of contributions from international scholars in diverse fields, Beauclair and Toth's collection asks how humanity might free "nature" from the demands of human action and human thought without mendaciously reinscribing humanity's distance from it or denying a proximity that is only traversable by artificial means.

Aladdin.--Pan.--Jupiter.--Christophorous.--Selected bibliography.

Aristotle’s Naïve Somatism is a re-interpretation of Aristotle’s cognitive psychology in light of certain presuppositions he holds about the living animal body. The living animal body is presumed to be sensitive, and Aristotle grounds his account of cognition in a rudimentary proprioceptive awareness one has of her body. With that presupposed metaphysics under our belts, we are in a position to see that Aristotle in de Anima (cognition chapters at least) has a di erent explanatory aim in view than that (...) which the literature generally imputes to him. He is not explicating what we would call the “mental”—the private, inner realm which some take to be of a di erent kind than the physical—as most take him to be. His explanandum is content acquisition; the explanans is showing how the body becomes like various aspects of objects. Although he famously describes the mind (nous) as unmixed with the body, he is guided by functional constrains—nous cannot be limited or qualified if it is to potentially think all things. Thus, his inquiry into cognition is philosophically limited from a contemporary perspective. Aristotle is not doing philosophy of mind, for he doesn’t seem to find the “mental” philosophically perplexing. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze is a contemporary French thinker who shows the greatest awareness to Québec culture by integrating into his philosophical work some of its revolutionary forces. By way of illustration, the first part of this article attends to the contributions of prominent cultural figures — all discussed by Deleuze — namely, Jack Kérouac, Pierre Perrault, Michèle Lalonde, Norman McLaren, and Alexis the Trotter. The second part of this article explores the reception of Deleuze in Québec in and outside of academia. (...) Notably, we will see how his philosophy was part of the counter-culture before even receiving recognition within philosophy departments. (shrink)