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)

Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned: the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by abstraction. It is not Badiou's wish to plead for an accused that is perfectly capable of defending itself without the authors aid. Nor does he seek to proclaim, like Frantz, the hero of Sartre's Prisoners of Altona, 'I have taken the century on my shoulders and I have (...) said: I will answer for it!' The Century simply aims to examine what this accursed century, from within its own unfolding, said that it was. Badiou's proposal is to reopen the dossier on the century - not from the angle of those wise and sated judges we too often claim to be, but from the standpoint of the century itself. (shrink)

The place of the subjective -- Everything that is of a whole constitutes an obstacle to it insofar as it is included in it -- Action, manor of the subject -- The real is the impasse of formalization : formalization is the locus of the passing-into-force of the real -- Hegel : "the activity of force is essentially activity reacting against itself" -- Subjective and objective -- The subject under the signifiers of the exception -- Of force as disappearance, whose (...) effect is the whole from which it has disappeared -- Deduction of the splitting -- A la nue accablante tu? -- Any subject is a forced exception, which comes in second place -- Jewelry for the sacred of any subtraction of existence -- Lack and destruction -- The new one forbids the new one and presupposes it -- On the side of the true -- There are no class relations -- Every subject crosses a lack of being and a destruction -- The subjects antecedence to itself -- Torsion -- Theory of the subject according to Sophocles, theory of the subject according to Eeschylus -- Of the strands of the knot, knowing only the color -- A materialist reversal of materialism -- The Black sheep of materialism -- The indissoluble salt of truth -- Answering to the sphinx demands from the subject not to have to answer or the sphinx -- Algebra and topology -- Neigborhoods -- Consistency, second name of the real after the cause -- So little ontology -- Subjectivization and subjective process -- The topological opposite of the knot is not the cut-dispersion but the destruction-recomposition -- Subjectivizing anticipation, retroaction of the subjective process -- Hurry! hurry! word of the living! -- The inexistent -- Logic of the excess -- Topics of ethics -- Where? -- The subjective twist : and -- Diagonals of the imaginary -- Schema -- Ethics as the dissipation of the paradoxes of partisanship -- Classical detour -- Love what you will never believe twice. (shrink)

This volume, assembled with the collaboration of the author, presents for the first time in English a comprehensive outline of Badiou's ambitious system.

Badiou explores the exponentially rich and varied world of French philosophy in a number of groundbreaking essays, published her for the first time in English or in a revised translation. Included are the often-quoted review of Louis Althussers's canonical works For Marks and Reading Capital and the scathing critique of 'potato fascism' in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari's A Thousand Plateus. There are also talks on Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy, and reviews of the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Barbara (...) Cassin, notable points of interest on an expansive tour of modern French thought.Guided by a small set of fundamental questions concerning the nature of being, the event, the subject, and truth, Badiou pushes to an extreme the polemical force of his thinking. Against the formless continuum of life, he posits the need for radical discontinuity; against the false modesty of finitude, he pleads for the mathematical infinity of everyday situations; against the various returns to Kant, the argues for the persistence of Hegelian dialectic; and against the lure of ultraleftism, his texts from the 1970s vindicate the role of Maoism as a driving force behind the communist Idea. (shrink)

A leading continental philosopher from France and author of Theory of the Subject interrogates the "anti-philosophy" of Ludwig Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, arguing that his beliefs compromise truth and logic while rendering philosophy a practice of esoteric aphorisms.

Enigmatic relationship between philosophy and politics -- Figure of the soldier -- Politics as a nonexpressive dialectics.

"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)

The shift in Foucault’s work from genealogy to ethics finds consensus among Foucault scholars. However, the motivations behind this transition remain either misunderstood or understudied in large part. Foucault’s recently published or soon-to-be translated 1977/—9 lectures (published as Security, Territory, Population and as The Birth of Biopolitics) offer new elements for understanding this dense and uncharted period along Foucault’s itinerary. In this article, the author argues that Foucault’s interpretation of the liberal tradition, which is at the core of the 1977—9 (...) lectures, must be examined in combination with Foucault’s other major interests in the late 1970s, namely the Iranian Revolution and Kant. The discovery of spirituality (Iran), the valorization of an autonomous subject (Kant) and the call for a tolerant environment towards minority practices (liberalism) pave the way for the later Foucault’s ethics, which are grounded in spiritual exercises and means of liberating the subject. (shrink)

"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)

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)

La beauté d’un corps qui nous attire ne saurait être atteinte par nos étreintes et nos caresses. Autrement dit, la fascination devant la beauté ne ressortit, en aucune façon, à une pulsion érotique. « Le beau – dit Simone Weil – est ce qu’on désire sans vouloir le manger. Nous désirons que cela soit. » C’est dire que pour jouir de la beauté, dont Platon considère que, par rapport à d’autres entités, elle est celle qui « se manifeste avec le (...) plus d’éclat », il ne faut pas s’en approcher ni vouloir se l’approprier. (shrink)

Après la publication de nos deux articles intitulés « Nouveaux dialogues entre Hylas et Philonous » et « Suite aux Nouveaux dialogues entre Hylas et Philonous » (in L’Enseignement philosophique, 65 e année, n° 2, décembre 2014-février 2015, p. 3-22, et 67 e année, n° 4, juin 2017-août 2017, p. 27-48), on trouvera dans ce nouvel article (qui met un terme à une aventure intellectuelle que nous n’imaginions pas durer si longtemps) un approfondissement de notre thèse sur la perception, mise (...) en rapport avec des analyses portant d’abord sur le temps (septième dialogue), puis sur le langage ou sur l’absence de langage (huitième dialogue). Enfin, revenant sur nos pas, nous chercherons à définir (neuvième et dernier dialogue) quelle fut notre méthode et, d’une façon plus générale, quelle idée nous nous faisons de la philosophie. (shrink)

À l’instar de Diderot qui, après sa Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient, a écrit ses Additions à la Lettre sur les aveugles, nous proposons une suite à nos « Nouveaux dialogues entre Hylas et Philonous » (publiés dans L’Enseignement philosophique, 65 e année, n° 2, décembre 2014- février 2015, p. 3-22). Reprenant l’examen du sujet principal (la perception) qu’ils avaient naguère abordé dans ces dialogues (qui étaient au nombre de trois, comme les tout premiers conçus (...) autrefois par Berkeley et dont les nôtres étaient le contre-pied), puis le prolongeant (cet examen) dans d’autres directions, Hylas, interprète de nos pensées, et Philonous, interprète des objections que nous ne cessons de formuler contre elles, réfléchissent, dans le quatrième dialogue, sur la prétendue capacité que nous aurions de penser nos sensations ; dans le cinquième dialogue, sur l’opposition entre être et être un être ; enfin, dans le sixième dialogue, sur les raisons que l’on a de se réjouir non seulement de voir que tout est éphémère, mais également de vieillir et de mourir. (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.

Le passé comme le futur n’ayant pas la moindre existence, l’itinéraire que nous proposons est celui qui va de la croyance à ce qui en nous et autour de nous serait pure répétition, éternel retour, à la reconnaissance de chaque moment présent comme absolument nouveau, comme inespéré et surprenant.

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)

Réduire nos sensations à n’être que de simples supports ou que de simples relais ne peut que nous conduire à bâtir des savoirs illusoires et à n’être jamais satisfait de ce qui s’offre à nous. C’est ce que nous montrons à propos de la prétendue expressivité de la musique, du langage, de la beauté et de la Nature elle-même.

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)

The interdisciplinary relevance of Spinoza today.

We provide partial answers to the following problem: Is the class of Borel linear orders well-quasi-ordered under embeddability? We show that it is indeed the case for those Borel orders which are embeddable in R ω , with the lexicographic ordering. For Borel orders embeddable in R 2 , our proof works in ZFC, but it uses projective determinacy for Borel orders embeddable in some $\mathbf{R}^n, n , and hyperprojective determinacy for the general case.

We prove two results about the embeddability relation between Borel linear orders: For $\eta$ a countable ordinal, let $2^\eta$ (resp. $2^{<\eta}$) be the set of sequences of zeros and ones of length $\eta$ (resp. $<\eta$), equipped with the lexicographic ordering. Given a Borel linear order $X$ and a countable ordinal $\xi$, we prove the following two facts. (a) Either $X$ can be embedded (in a $\triangle^1_1(X,\xi)$ way) in $2^{\omega\xi}$, or $2^{\omega\xi + 1}$ continuously embeds in $X$. (b) Either $X$ can (...) embedded (in a $\triangle^1_1(X,\xi)$ way) in $2^{\omega\xi}$, or $2^{\omega\xi}$ continuously embeds in $X$. These results extend previous work of Harrington, Shelah and Marker. (shrink)

Alain de Lattre. IV RÊVERIE ET PROFONDEUR Avant d'aller plus loin, tâchons de rassembler sur quelques traits ce que nous avons vu. Il y a de la distance dans les choses, disions-nous '. Fort bien. Quelle distance ? Celle qu'on pourrait voir ...

Leibniz comprenait la question pourquoi y a-t-il quelque chose plutot que rien? sur un mode ontologique; il l'interpretait dans le cadre d'une physique continue, lineaire et necessaire; et il y repondait en invoquant le principe de raison suffisante. Nous comprenons desormais cette question sur un mode non ontologique, en substituant une notion relativiste et pragmatiste de realite a la notion absolue d'etre; nous l'interpretons dans le cadre d'une physique discontinue, non lineaire et probabiliste; et nous y repondons en denoncant, sur (...) un mode non sceptique, le principe de raison suffisante. Operer un tel renversement de l'analyse leibnizienne ne suffit toutefois pas. Car nous restons dans le cadre de la logique binaire adoptee par Leibniz, a savoir l'opposition entre le quelque chose (1) et le rien (0)... (shrink)