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)

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)

In this paper, we study dialogue as a game, but not only in the sense in which there would exist winning strategies and a priori rules. Dialogue is not governed by game rules like for chess or other games, since even if we start from a priori rules, it is always possible to play with them, provided that some invariant properties are preserved. An important discovery of Ludics is that such properties may be expressed in geometrical terms. The main feature (...) of a dialogue is “convergence”. Intuitively, a dialogue “diverges” when it stops prematurely by some disruption, or a violation of the tacit agreed upon conditions of the discourse. It converges when the two speakers go together towards a situation where they agree at least on some points. As we shall see, convergence may be thought of through the geometrical concept of orthogonality . Utterances in a dialogue have as their content, not only the processes (similar to proofs) which lead to them from a monologic view, but also their interactions with other utterances. Finally, any utterance must be seen as co-constructed in an interaction between two processes. That is to say that it not only contains one speaker’s intentions but also his or her expectations from the other interlocutor. From our viewpoint, discursive strategies like narration , elaboration , topicalization may derive from such interactions, as well as speech acts like assertion, question and denegation. (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)

In this article, we offer a rebuttal to a key thesis in Chapter 5 of Engelhardt’s After God: namely, that there exists an “unbridgeable gap” between the dominant secular culture and traditional religious believers. Contra Engelhardt, we argue that it is possible to bridge the gap by employing a strategy that includes, but is not limited to, methods for cultivating understanding and respect and a sense of solidarity. Our argument proceeds in three steps. First, we elucidate Engelhardt’s thesis in light (...) of some of the key concepts he discusses elsewhere in After God. Second, in the hope of developing understanding and respect, we elucidate the history and teachings that form the consciences of traditional Christian medical professionals concerning abortion, euthanasia, and disfiguring surgeries. Third, in the hope of developing a sense of solidarity, we explain the broad scope of the dominant secular culture’s attempt to limit people’s freedom of conscience rights, showing that it includes not only traditional Christians but also members of other traditional religions, members of mainline religious groups, people with alternative conceptions of secularity, and even faithful members of the dominant secular culture. (shrink)

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)

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)

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)

In this final volume of Political Philosophy, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut summarize these efforts and put forward their own set of arguments.

In the management of the Covid 19 crisis, digital technologies were used in a major way. This article defends the hypothesis that these technologies took the form of a “tacit social experimentation”. This article justifies this concept in three levels. The first part uses this concept to qualify the form of biopolitics that was implemented to manage the crisis. Digital technologies were used to discipline the population and, literally speaking, as instruments of knowledge of the population. Uncertainty forced experts to (...) make preliminary observations and act to produce knowledge. Second, this article shows that the use of digital technologies during the crisis was experimental in a second sense. By promoting telemedicine within a more flexible legal framework, the authorities authorised an experimental use of telemedicine without knowledge or control of its side effects. Finally, the article defends the use of the concept of “tacit social experimentation” for ethical and political purposes. For indeed, understanding the experiments carried out during the crisis begs the question of the involvement of the participants and their democratic steering. (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.

Gorz’s Reform and Revolution was published in 1969, and it taught me to mistrust the « all or nothing » of the mythical Big Day when the relations of production would be changed all at once. I learned there was an enormous range of possible transformations inside capitalism, as we would demonstrate with the research program of the Regulation School. As a politician, I have always upheld this radical reformism.

For many authors, the transformations of capitalism have had the effect of causing suffering (stress, stigmatization, disaffiliation, etc..) whose social dimension is not recognized. For Emmanuel Renault, theoretical critique can analyze these new sufferings and become a "spokesman" giving voice to suffering beings. In this article, the author proposes to problematize this form of critical intervention, building on Paul Ricœur's reflections on the issue of the dispossession of the actors’ power to recount their actions themselves. If Renault’s intervention makes sense (...) in relation to the ideologization of narrative identity, it remains unsatisfactory against “internal” resistances to the emplotment of the self. Ricœur’s analysis of the analytic experience teaches us that these resistances cannot be lifted through mere intellectual understanding and that the narrative restructuration of the personality must sometimes take the form of real work. (shrink)

How can we interpret a film, a movie, or any other narrative content presented in visual form? We provide a theoretical frame (mostly gathered from Ricoeur, Gadamer, Habermas and the author's own theorizing) and provide a way to put the cinematic content in relation with the interpret's experience by suggesting questions.

Many terms have a technical meaning although it is not evident for everyone, for example, the "environmental governance", term that refers in the present context to citizen participation on this type of question, for example, of the health of a specific ecosystem, such as a forest or an agricultural field, from shared preoccupations and not from a problematic of organizational control. After having made precise what is the expertise and what are the main problems posed by the recourse to the (...) expertise in the contexts of citizen action, I propose that technical expertise can be tantamount to other types of expertise, referring mainly to profane knowledge, to the practice and concrete experience called "of field", which corresponds to an enlargement. Then it is suggested the model of an hybrid forum as a possible theoretical frame of this reformulation of the conception of expertise -/- Muitos termos possuem um sentido técnico sem que ele seja evidente para todos, por exemplo, a "governança ambiental", termo que remete no contexto atual a uma participação cidadã nesse tipo de questão, por exemplo, da saúde de um ecossistema específico, tal como uma floresta ou um vale agrícola, a partir de preocupações partilhadas e não a partir de uma problemática de controle organizacional. Após ter tornado preciso o que é a expertise e quais são os principais problemas postos pelo recurso à expertise nos contextos da ação cidadã, proponho que as expertises técnicas podem ser postas no mesmo patamar que outros tipos de expertise, referindo principalmente aos saberes comuns, à prática e à experiência concreta, dita "de campo", o que corresponde a uma ampliação. Sugere-se, então, o modelo de fórum híbrido como quadro teórico possível dessa reformulação da concepção de expertise. -/- . (shrink)

A logic of the moral life: that is one of the projects of Maurice Blondel during his career as a french philosophyer. That theme is coming out of his previous thinking of what he called "a logic of action" (une logique de l'action), as it was discussed in his famous 1893 french thesis, L'action. We provide an analysis of that further development.

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)

L’idée d’une « transition » énergétique, processus pilotable dans un monde relativement stable et anticipable, semble arriver à son terme. Même le GIEC en appelle désormais à des « transformations » énergétiques rapides et radicales. Toutefois, malgré la prise de conscience de l’urgence climatique et de la perte dramatique de biodiversité, qui s’actualise notamment dans une série de manifestations et de luttes, la question du climat est trop rarement articulée à la question de l’énergie. Dans cette Majeure, nous explorons ce (...) que pourraient vouloir dire ces transformations énergétiques et partons à la recherche des bonnes échelles pour agir et des récits pertinents pour inspirer les collectifs. (shrink)

À son commentaire des chapitres 10-14 du Livre IV de la Physique d’Aristote, qui portent sur le temps, Simplicius ajoute un assez long développement de 44 pages de grec dans l’édition de Diels (dans les Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca IX, Berlin, 1882), séparé du commentaire proprement dit et appelé traditionnellement Corollaire sur le Temps, dans lequel il développe ses propres thèses sur le temps et critique celles de son maître Damascius. On disposait d’une traduction anglaise du comment...

One of the most crucial questions in the philosophy of law deals with the very nature of legal reasoning. Does this reasoning belong to logic or to rhetoric? This debate, increasingly centered on rhetoric, is not merely a question of language use; it covers and indicates a more basic choice between formal legalism — focusing on rational deduction from the law — and pragmatic judiciarism — focusing on reasonable debate in the court.Today, it is necessary to circumscribe the respective fields (...) of logic and rhetoric in the language of law, while showing how they are sometimes complementary in the resolution of legal problems.But, even when we have acknowledged the need for a rhetoric accompanied by logic, we have to define that rhetoric cautiously. I confront a narrow rhetoric, often called argumentation, with a wider one of interrogative nature. There are two conceptions of rationality at stake. Their comparison enables us to raise the question of the foundation of law, as a locus to use arguments, as well as to solve social problems. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage, qui réunit vingt-et-un articles publiés pour la plupart entre 1990 et 2000, constitue le prolongement d’un précédent recueil publié en 1990 par l’auteur dans la même collection : Recherches sur le Néoplatonisme après Plotin. Les études du présent recueil sont réparties en quatre sections : i. Le Néoplatonisme en Occident (Porphyre) : « Pourquoi Porphyre a-t-il édité Plotin? Réponse provisoire » ; « Porphyre dans la Patrologie de Migne. Sur la divination ». ii. Le Néoplatonisme e...

Selon Simplicius, le Manuel d’Épictète comprend deux parties (cf. In Ench. xxx, 8-9), les chapitres 1 à 21 et 22 à 53. Ce premier tome, qui recouvre les vingt-neuf premiers chapitres du Commentaire de Simplicius, nous mène jusqu’à l’exégèse de la première phrase du chapitre 20 du Manuel. Nous avons ainsi avec ce premier volume la presque totalité du commentaire de ce que Simplicius considérait comme la première partie du Manuel. Cette édition, que l’auteur présente comme l’editio minor de l’é...

Le traité (ou dialogue) « pythique » du platonicien Plutarque de Chéronée (Iier – IIe s. ap. J.-C.) intitulé Sur l’E de Delphes est consacré à l’élucidation de la signification de l’E (la cinquième lettre de l’alphabet grec) consacré à Apollon Pythien. Une des interprétations (d’inspiration pythagoricienne) est que cet E désigne le nombre cinq, le nombre de l’univers. Dans le cadre de l’exposé de cette interprétation est fait état de l’opinion « de certains » selon laquelle il existe une (...) correspondance entre les cinq sens et les cinq éléments. L’A. montre que les deux lignes où il est question de la vue (E 390b6-8) s’inspirent essentiellement de l’explication qu’en Timée 45b-d Platon donne du mécanisme de la vision en termes de mélange du feu pur émis par l’œil avec le feu pur extérieur qui produit la lumière du jour. L’extrême brièveté de ce résumé (empreint d’aristotélisme, l’élément associé à la vue étant ici l’éther considéré comme cinquième corps), d’un passage dans Platon offrant lui-même bon nombre de difficultés, explique que ces deux lignes énigmatiques n’aient jamais été bien comprises. Au passage, l’A. revient sur les notions d’homoiopatheia (d’homogénéité) et de summetria (de commensurabilité) en Timée 45b-d et 67c-e pour en proposer une interprétation qui souligne et éclaire d’un jour nouveau le caractère dynamique de l’explication platonicienne de la vision. Un Appendice donne un aperçu des différentes lectures d’E 390b6-8 depuis les premières éditions imprimées à la Renaissance jusqu’aux éditions critiques des 19e et 20e siècles. (shrink)