Depuis plus de 20 ans, la revue Kernos propose (presque) chaque année une Chronique archéologique de la religion grecque, qui synthétise les découvertes archéologiques liées aux pratiques cultuelles grecques. Annoncée en 2000, la Chronique paraît pour la première fois dans le volume 14 de 2001. Ses principes en sont alors fixés par Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge et Didier Viviers. Il s’agit d’offrir aux chercheurs un outil de travail en matière d’archéologie des cultes, qui s’appuie sur les travau...

Forgotten in France for many centuries, the romance of Partonopeus de Blois was resurrected in the eighteenth century and enjoyed a certain notoriety which culminated in Massenet's opera Esclarmonde, a nineteenth-century adaptation of the tale by the librettist Alfred Blau. This paper reveals the story of the rediscovery and the dissemination of Partonopeus de Blois through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and explores the motivations of the early philologists for choosing this romance. The author then focuses on the sources of (...) the opera Esclarmonde and on the possible inspirations and influences affecting its creators. (shrink)

Are the categories used to study the social world and acting on it real or conventional ? An empirical answer to that question is given by an analysis of the debates about the quality of statistics produced by the European National Institues of statistics in the 1990s. Six criteria of quality were then specified: relevance, accuracy, timeliness, accessibility, comparability and coherence. How do statisticians and users of statistics deal with the tension produced by their objects being both real (they exist (...) before their measurement) and conventionally constructed (they are in a way, created by these conventions)? In particular, the technical and sociological distinction between the criteria of relevance and accuracy implies a realistic interpretation, desired by users, but that is nonetheless problematic. (shrink)

Alfred Fouillée écrit à une époque marquée par l'affrontement de la France et de l'Allemagne et par la crainte d'une déchirure de la société face à l'emprise croissante des idées révolutionnaires et au déclin irréversible des formes traditionnelles d'autorité. Ses ouvrages consacrés à la "question sociale" ont assuré sa notoriété jusqu'à en faire le "parrain intellectuel" de la Troisième République, ce qui peut aussi expliquer le relatif oubli dont il est l'objet.Pourtant la signification et la portée de l'œuvre d'Alfred Fouillée (...) ne se réduisent pas à cette dimension. Il est aussi l'auteur d'une philosophie évolutionniste de la vie dont l'idée-force est le concept central. La vie est la synthèse de la force et de l'idée, et l'évolution est le processus par lequel l'accent passe de la force à l'idée. Du vivant au social, l'idée-force devient idéal et l'évolution, initialement involontaire, devient réforme volontaire. Si elle commence avec l'égoïsme et la lutte pour la vie, l'évolution ne prend son sens que par sa fin, l'altruisme et la fraternité. C'est pourquoi la démocratie est l'idée-force en politique, même si, du fait que l'évolution requiert maintenant la volonté et la liberté, la crise est le régime normal de la démocratie, si l'ont sait voir en elle l'aiguillon qui l'incite à s'approcher de son idéal. Pages de début Introduction. Philosopher et servir son pays I. Refonder la société II. Une philosophie de l'évolution III. Unesociologie réformiste Conclusion Bibliographie complémentaire Pages de fin. (shrink)

Kant’s essay on the question of literary piracy has so far been read as a foundational text in the history of literary property. When Kant refers to the book as a “mute instrument,” scholars of intellectual property already know how to interpret that formulation because they presume the distinction that the contemporary jurisprudence of intellectual property makes between matter and form and its concomitant assumption that print is just an inert, nonagentive medium. In fact, Kant begins his analysis of unauthorized (...) publication not with the question What is an author? but with the question What is publication?. His insight was that unauthorized publication revealed a structural feature of publication in general. The effect of the interposition of print, or the fact that speech begins in and with print, is that the author is structurally alienated from his or her speech. Kant was not an Enlightenment media theorist, but he recognized that speech had to be mediated and therefore delivered to the reader and that it was the medium itself that determined the conditions under which authors and readers could exist and be present to one another and under which speech could become an authorship. In order to create a language channel for public reason, Kant had to take a detour through the legal fiction of agency. Speech might have been an action that could have its existence “only in a person,” but this supposedly innate bond was made by a legal fiction of representation, according to which one person could truly speak “as if” they were another. Kant’s answer to the question What is a book? developed a law that was not so much a law of literary property as a law that sought to suspend the alienating effects of print so as to restore the Enlightenment ideal of communication. (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)

It was originally suggested that the Anthropocene began in 1784, the date of James Watt’s patent for the rotative steam engine. Patent dates are interesting artefacts. They owe their existence to the chronopoietic technique of patent jurisprudence, which generates temporal sequences out of synchronous states of knowledge. This may not be geological time, but it informs the experience of time that is proper to the culture whose deposits of Pu-239 now mark the onset of the Anthropocene. Patent jurisprudence makes a (...) crucial contribution to what might be called the ethos of the Anthropocene: the sense of society as having an inexhaustible capacity for innovation, for endless self-renewal. And, as it turns out, the steam engine yields some interesting insights into this mode of enchantment. (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.

Loin des caricatures que s'est permises Voltaire, Alain Niderst voit en Leibniz le plus grand esprit des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, dont on ne peut qu'admirer l'universelle curiosité et l'intrépide audace qu'il a montrées dans tous les domaines. Ce n'est pas une statue solennelle de Leibniz que le lecteur trouvera dans cet ouvrage. Il verra au contraire comment Laineur de la Théodicée a été amené à un combat mille fois répété pour édifier et pour défendre son système. Ainsi, Bayle, (...) Locke, Fontanelle, Clarke et bien d'autres furent les correspondants du philosophe de Hanovre et ses lecteurs, souvent admiratifs, parfois critiques. Si le système de Leibniz s'est forgé dans cette lutte si longue et si audacieuse, ce n'est, peut-on dire, que dans ses dernières années qu'il parviendra à des certitudes, et donc à une forme de sérénité. Le livre d'Alain Niderst n'est pas seulement l'histoire d'un homme et de son siècle : on y trouve l'histoire toujours renouvelée de la pensée à la recherche de vérités sûres qui la justifient et la consolident. (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)

Cet article cherche à montrer qu’une métaphysique s’engendre au sein même de l’orphisme, par l’auto-exégèse du mythe, métaphysique qui irriguera le platonisme et le néo-platonisme. Elle se place sous la figure d’un personnage conceptuel, Dionysos, depuis lequel se pensent les rapports de l’Un et du multiplie et par conséquent aussi, la façon dont les âmes s’engendrent à partir de l’Un.

On a tenté, à partir des Stances du milieu par excellence, de ressaisir le sens de la vacuité selon Nāgārjuna : cela supposait que l’on suspendît les croyances fondant l’attachement de l’ego à un « soi-même » tout autant qu’aux « choses ». Par là, on entrevoyait l’idée d’un milieu absolu, par lequel les phénomènes, vides de « nature propre », seraient interconnectés sans être assujettis aux formes conventionnelles de l’espace et du temps.

This paper assumes that the realization of a teaching action implies the conceptualisation and the theorization of practice, a positioning that allows to put things into perspective with respect to the professional activity and to learners, as well as a complex linguistic and cognitive positioning towards academic knowledge and institutional injunctions. This hypothesis is confronted with the scriptural positioning that young pre-service teachers adopt for the writing of their professional report, and is viewed through the lens of the point of (...) view issue. After having considered this issue in its various dimensions, the paper focuses on the linguistic concept of point of view, then analyses its relations to the adjacent notion of empathy and, more specifically, of empathic mobility. Finally, it explains how these linguistic technics, correlated to the empathic mobility and to the related abilities, contribute to the professionalization of (young) teachers by allowing them to problematize their own point of view; this problematization is achieved through a reflexive distance from the point of view of (institutional or academic) authority figures or from their own research objects and by taking into consideration their current situation and their experience in order to better emphasize the complexity of their research object and to better prepare for their professional activity. (shrink)

Trajectoire de la modernité retrace le parcours philosophique d'Alain Renaut. Précédées par un court texte d'Alain Renaut lui-même, les trois grandes parties de l'ouvrage se composent de contributions historiques et systématiques. Il présente le chemin parcouru par le philosophe de Heidegger à Kant, et comporte quelques notes critiques des travaux de Renaut. Il décline ensuite les aspects constitutifs de l'humanisme dans les différents travaux du philosophe, et s'étend de la pensée de l'Europe à des réflexions sur la démocratie, (...) en passant par la pensée de la différence individuelle ou de groupe, comme l'expression d'une demande de justice sociale et politique sans laquelle l'humanisme demeurerait inachevé. Il regroupe enfin un ensemble d'articles consacrés au tournant d'Alain Renaut vers les problèmes de philosophie politique appliquée, comme la conception de la notion de philosophie politique appliquée, mais encore des sujets qui ont dominé ses dernières années d'enseignement accentuant l'autre dimension négative, souvent oblitérée, de la pensée de l'humanisme moderne."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking work, French legal scholar Alain Supiot examines the relationship of society to legal discourse. He argues that the law is how justice is implmented in secular society, but it is not simply a technique to be manipulated at will: it is also an expression of the core beliefs of the West. We must recognize its universalizing, dogmatic nature and become receptive to other interpretations from non-Western cultures to help us avoid the clash of civilizations. In Homo (...) Juridicus, Supiot deconstructs the illusion of a world that has become flat and undifferentiated, regulated only by supposed "laws" of science and the economy, and peopled by contract-makers driven only by the calculation of their individual interests. Such a liberal perspective is nothing but the flipside of the notion of the withering away of law and the state, promoted this time not under the banner of the struggle between classes, but rather in the name of the free competition between sovereign individuals. Supiot's exploration of the development of the legal subject-the individual as formed through a dense web of contracts and laws-is set to become a classic work of social theory. (shrink)

Olympie est assurément l’un des sites majeurs pour quiconque s’intéresse à la religion des anciens Grecs et Judith Barringer a déjà livré nombre de travaux qui attestent son expertise en cette matière. On se réjouit de voir arriver une monographie sous sa plume, un livre dont la qualité d’écriture s’ajoute à celle de l’analyse, de ses riches fondements documentaires (dûment problématisés en regard de l’importance du texte de Pausanias pour la lecture du site) et d’une bibliographie multilingu...

Discusses Locke's life and views and their impact on American philosophy, as well as his role in the Harlem Renaissance.