Cybernétique et psychanalyse, deux mots qui formeraient presque un oxymore. Pourtant cet ouvrage propose de repenser les liens entre la psychanalyse et l'informatique. Il révèle que les apports de la psychanalyse à l'épistémologie et l'histoire de l'informatique sont restés enfouis depuis près de soixante ans, alors même qu'elle fut une des premières disciplines à conceptualiser l'informatique, qui ne portait pas encore ce nom. Il s'agit alors à la fois de montrer l'apport pour la psychanalyse des recherches de l'informatique naissante, et (...) la particularité de l'approche psychanalytique de l'informatique, plus particulièrement chez Jacques Lacan. Cet ouvrage propose des outils et des concepts au lecteur pour prendre des distances par rapport à la trop simple opposition entre les sciences cognitives, voire les neurosciences, qui seraient la psychologie à l'ère du numérique, et la psychanalyse contemporaine. (shrink)

Cet article a déjà été publié dans le Carnet Zilsel, en date du 16 septembre 2017. L'auteur remercie Catherine Dupuy, Pascal Engel, Éric Guichard, Gaïa Lassaube, Pierre Lévy, Pierre Mœglin, David Monniaux, Mathieu Triclot et Stéphane Vial, ainsi qu'Arnaud Saint-Martin et Jérôme Lamy, éditeurs du Carnet Zilsel, de leur relecture du projet d'article et de leurs remarques. Il va de soi que l'article lui-même n'engage que son auteur. Rhuthmos remercie Alexandre Moatti et les Carnets Zilsel d'avoir permis - (...) Philosophie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Dans un livre publié en 2012 aux Presses Universitaires de France, Il y a des Dieux, Frédérique Ildefonse (l’A.) raconte la prise de conscience ou plutôt le « pari », ce sont ses termes, qui la conduit à Salvador, sur le terreiro abritant des orixás, ces saints de la religion afro-brésilienne du candomblé pratiquée par les esclaves en résistance à la domination des Blancs : « Je ne pouvais plus seulement nourrir d’elle-même ma recherche sur les Grecs. J’avais découvert qu’il (...) existe un lien en... (shrink)

Introduction: De la morale dans la littérature.--François Rabelais.--Michel de Montaigne.--Pierre Charron.--Étienne de la Boëtie.--Jean Bodin.--Michel de l'Hôpital.--Dix-septième siècle: considérations préliminaires.--La Rochefoucauld.--La Bruyère.--Récapitulation: moralistes ascétiques, période intermédiaire.--Saint-Evremond.--Pierre Bayle.--De la spontanéité de l'esprit humain en matière de philosophie.--La volonté cherchant sa loi.

"Le Proslogion de Saint Anselme de Cantorbéry - l'œuvre la plus célèbre d'un des premiers et des plus grands philosophes du moyen âge - a joué dans l'histoire de la philosophie médiévale et moderne un rôle de tout premier plan. Il contient, en effet, ce fameux argument, dit..." ontologique ", qui - fortune à nulle autre pareille - sema la division et la discorde parmi les philosophes et les théologien". Alexandre Koyré, Introduction au Proslogion.

ABSTRACT This article examines the Fourierist reception of Owenism. In challenging the established historiography on Owen’s reception in France, the article draws on a wide range of Fourierist material – letters, unpublished draft manuscripts, and neglected articles in Fourierist and non-Fourierist periodicals – that previously not accessible to twentieth-century historians in order to reassess the Fourierist response to Owen and Owenism. The article pays special attention to the work of Fourier’s leading disciple, Victor Considerant. It contrasts Fourier’s highly critical evaluation (...) of Owen’s work, with Considerant’s more considered reading of Owen and conciliatory approach in dealing with other socialists, such as the Saint-Simonians and Owen’s French disciples. The article also examines the work of some of Fourier’s other followers, including Jules Lechevalier, Adrien Berbrugger, Alexandre Baudet-Dulary, and Amédée Paget and their evaluations of Owen and Owenism. (shrink)

How does being a woman affect one’s epistemic life? What about being Black? Or queer? Standpoint theorists argue that such social positions can give rise to otherwise unavailable epistemic privilege. “Epistemic privilege” is a murky concept, however. Critics of standpoint theory argue that the view is offered without a clear explanation of how standpoints confer their benefits, what those benefits are, or why social positions are particularly apt to produce them. For this reason, many regard standpoint theory as being out (...) of step with epistemology more broadly. But this need not be so. This article articulates a minimal version of standpoint epistemology that avoids these criticisms and supports the normative goals of its feminist forerunners. This account serves as the foundation for developing a formal model in which to explore standpoint epistemology using neighborhood semantics for modal logic. (shrink)

Many species rely on the three-dimensional surface layout of an environment to find a desired goal following disorientation. They generally do so to the exclusion of other important spatial cues. Two influential frameworks for explaining that phenomenon are provided by geometric-module theories and view-matching theories of reorientation respectively. The former posit a module that operates only on representations of the global geo- metry of three-dimensional surfaces to guide behavior. The latter place snapshots, stored representations of the subject’s two-dimensional retinal stimulation (...) at specific locations, at the heart of their accounts. In this paper, I take a fresh look at the debate between them. I begin by making a case that the empirical evidence we currently have does not clearly favor one framework over the other, and that the debate has reached something of an impasse. Then, I present a new explanatory problem—the representation selection problem—that offers the pro- spect of breaking the impasse by introducing a new type of explanatory consideration that both frameworks must address. The representation selection problem requires explaining how subjects can reliably select the relevant representation with which they initiate the reorientation process. I argue that the view-matching framework does not have the resources to address this problem, while a certain type of theory within the geometric-module framework can provide a natural response to it. In showing this, I develop a new geometric-module theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 697-716 [Access article in PDF] "La Mère Humanité":Femininity in the Romantic Socialism of Pierre Leroux and the Abbé A.-L. Constant Naomi J. Andrews Humanity, my mother, since you have led me, by so many paths, to conceive this design, support me, inspire me, affirm me. —Pierre Leroux, "Invocation to my Muse." 1It was during the July Monarchy in France, in the (...) era immediately preceding the Revolution of 1848, that the ideology we call socialism became more than an abstraction held by isolated intellectuals and conspirators. 2 A series of individuals, loose-knit associations, and more formal écoles were active during the 1830s and 1840s, developing a varied agenda of social reform, economic cooperation, or association, mystical Christianity, and women's liberation. Roughly lumped under the pejorative rubric of utopian socialism, and perhaps more accurately called romantic socialism, this movement was ultimately unsuccessful in achieving its diverse goals, but contributed significantly to the political discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 3Socialism at this stage of its development overlapped in many ways with republicanism, both being, to quote one historian of the latter, "an amalgam of responses to the Enlightenment, the 1789 Revoluation and above all economic [End Page 697] change." 4 Many early socialists were also republicans, and socialist ideas influenced the ideology articulated by republicans such as Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Auguste Blanqui. Louis Blanc, perhaps the best-known socialist of the decade surrounding the 1848 revolution, was and is known as a Jacobin socialist. 5From a certain perspective republicanism and socialism shared common origins and assumptions during the July Monarchy. Most socialists had come out of the political milieu of republicanism, whether through the carbonarist movement, opposition political clubs such as Droits de l'Homme and Les Amis du Peuple, or through the influential journalism trade of the Bourbon Restoration and early July Monarchy. Pierre Leroux, for one, had been a co-founder of the widely read journal le Globe, a bastion of liberalism, which he later turned over to the Saint-Simonians upon his conversion to their "church." 6 Although diverse in many ways, the left of this era did share certain core tenets, chief among them opposition to the Orleanist monarchy and, to varying degrees the belief in more democratic rule of the French nation.To say this, however, might erroneously imply a unity that was certainly not a feature of socialism during this period. In fact socialism, despite its near mystical devotion to ideas of unity, was anything but singular during its pre-Marxian phase. The spectrum of socialist thinkers and groups ranged widely. Standing closest to the republicans in their beliefs about politics and the revolutionary tradition were Jacobin socialists, most usually associated with Louis Blanc. Blanc and others articulated a social philosophy that sought "to unite two distinct ideologies: Jacobin democracy and co-operative socialism." 7 Thus Jacobin socialism combined republican political priorities and commitment to national political processes in general and to a centralized state in particular with attention to economic change, to reforming the distribution process along more equitable lines and to putting the situation of working people at the center of political change. In this goal Jacobin socialism reflected, as did other strains of socialism, the economic instability of the era and the emergence of an organized working class movement which followed the aborted revolution of 1830. 8At the other end of the spectrum one might put the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierist École Sociétaire. 9 Vehemently anti-republican, these groups shared [End Page 698] very little with the Jacobin socialists, other than a certain concern with the emerging working class, one of the few consistent features of early socialism. Unlike Jacobin socialists, these groups focused their theories of community at a very low level, having a strongly utopian component to their thinking. As a result, they tended to see national politics as irrelevant to the situation of ordinary people and even as a... (shrink)

On Humour and the Comic in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Y. T. Radday and A. Brenner.The Trouble With Kings: The Composition of rhe Book of Kings in the Deuteronomistic History. By Steven L. McKenzie.Sacred Space: An Approach to the Zheology of the Epistle to the Hebrews. By Marie E. Isaacs.Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Book of Fourth Ezra. By Michael Edward StonePaul the Convert: iShe Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee. By Alan F. Segal.Creative Biblical Exegesis: Christian (...) and Jewish Hermeneutics through the Centuries. Edited by Benjamin Uffenheimer and Henning Graf Reventlow.The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Escharology. By Brian E. Daley.The Emergence of the Laity in the Early Church. By Alexandre Faivre, translated by David Smith.Pastoral Life and Practice in the Early Church. By Carl A. Volz.The Making of the Creeds. By Frances Young.La correzione fratenia in s. Agosrino. By Agostino Clerici.Beaup and Revelation in the Thought of St Augustine. By Carol Harrison.Grace, Politics and Desire. Edited by Hugo Meynell.Boerhius and Aquinas. By Ralph McInerny.The Weight of Glory. A Vision and Practice for Christian Faith: The Future of Liberal Theology. Edited by D. W. Hardy and P. H. Sedgwick.Atonenrent and Incarnation. By Vernon White.Tragic Method and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama and Religious Thought. By L. D. Bouchard.Parmenides of Elea, Fragments: A Text and Translation, with an Introduction. By David Gallop.Language, Thought and Falsehood in Ancient Greek Philosophy. By Nicholas Denyer.Weakness of the Will. By Justin Gosling.Knowledge and the Sciences in Medieval Philosophy. Vol. I, edited by Monica Asztalos, John E. Murdoch and Ilkka Niiniluoto.Episcopal Power and Norenrine Sociev. 1000–1320. By George W. Dameron.Matins, Lauds and Vespers for St David's Day. By Owain Tudor Edwards.More's ‘Utopia’. By Dominic Baker‐Smith.Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisitionfrom the Basque Lands to Sicily. By William Monter.Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478–1834, By Stephen Haliczer.The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe. By Piero Camporesi, translated by Lucinda Byatt.Lucrecia's Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth‐Centun Spain. By Richard L. Kagan.Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth‐Century Spain: The Alumbrados. By Alastair Hamilton.Japan's Encounter with Christianiry: The Catholic Mission in Pre‐Modern Japan. By Neil S. Fujita.Galileo, Bellannine and the Bible. By Richard J.Augustine Baker's Inner Light: A Study in English Recusant Spirituality. By James Gaffney.The Prorestarit Evaqelical Awakening. By W. R. Ward.The Study of Anglicanism. Edited by Stephen Sykes and John Booty.The Anglican Tradition: A Handbook of Sources. Edited by G. R. Evans and J. Robert Wright.The Restoration Church of England, 1646‐1689. By John Spurr.Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. By Jon Butler.A Woman Styled Bold: The Life of Cornelia Connelly, 1809–1879. By Radegunde Flaxman.Cane Ridge: America's Pentecost. By Paul K. Conkin.Revivalism and Social Change: Christianio, Nation Building and the Market in the Nineteenth‐Century United States. By George M. Thomas.Church and State: The English Experience. By Adrian Hastings.Evelyn Underhill: Artist of the Infinite Life. By Dana Greene.Northern Ireland: Fairh and Faction. By Maurice Irvine.The Tragedy of Belief: Division, Politics, arid Religion in Ireland. By John Fulton.Shattered Vows: Exodus from the Priesthood. By David Rice.Making Saints: Inside the Vatican: Who Become Saints, Who Do Not, and Why. By Kenneth L. Woodward.Ecclesiae Memoria: Miscellanea in onorr del R. P. Josef Metzler, O. M. I. Edited by Willi Henkel. (shrink)

Nous remercions chaleureusement Thomas Golsenne de nous avoir autorisé à reproduire le texte ci-dessous PM – Cette conférence a été présentée au Centre d'art contemporain du Parc Saint-Léger à Pougues-les-eaux le 4 avril 2017, en marge de l'exposition de Florentine Lamarche et Alexandre Ovize, Les motifs sauvages. Que sa directrice, Catherine Pavlovic, soit chaleureusement remerciée de son invitation. Florentine Lamarche et Alexandre Ovize, L'Artichaut, 2015 Dans leurs gros vases - Esthétique – Nouvel article.

Among the very architects of the recent re-emergence of emergentism in the physical sciences, Robert B. Laughlin certainly occupies a prominent place. Through a series of works beginning as early as his Nobel lecture in 1998, a lecture given after having been awarded, together with Störmer and Tsui, the Nobel prize in physics for its contribution in the elucidation of the fractional quantum Hall effect, Laughlin openly and relentlessly advocated a strongly anti-reductionistic view of physics – and, more particularly, of (...) the interface between condensed matter and particles physics – which culminated in what can be considered his emergentist manifesto: A Different Universe. Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (2005). In spite of this prominent role in the vindication of emergentism, rare are the philosophers, among whom even those sympathetic to the idea of emergence, who have paid serious attention to Laughlin’s insights. The subtleties of his view – it is true, often concealed in many technicalities – have accordingly, and somewhat unfortunately, mainly passed unnoticed. (shrink)

En dépit des réformes dites libérales des années 1860, l'Empire russe resta tout au long du XIX e siècle un empire dont le souverain s'intitulait officiellement : « Tsar et Autocrate de toutes les Russies ». L'autocratie différait fortement de la monarchie française d'Ancien Régime, qu'embarrassaient et que contenaient mille traditions et reliques du passé : droit coutumier et droit romain, vieilles lois de sources diverses toujours en vigueur, privilèges, prérogatives, immunités, franchises, exceptions et exemptions, Église indépendante, etc. Dans le (...) système russe du « césaropapisme », l'empereur faisait également office de souverain pontife de la religion orthodoxe : il en était le « défenseur et gardien ». - En 1881, le tsar Alexandre II fut tué dans un attentat, alors que l'octroi d'une Constitution semblait imrm'nent. Son règne avait été marqué par une série de réformes, dont la plus célèbre (1861) est celle qui avait émancipé les paysans serfs. Constantin Pétrovitch Pobedonostsev (1827-1907), célèbre juriste et homme d'État russe, qui avait été le précepteur des fils d'Alexandre II, va alors devenir le principal représentant d'une politique de contre-réformes, d'une politique refusant que soit faite la moindre concession aux idées libérales. Nommé par Alexandre III procureur du Saint-Synode, il exercera une influence prépondérante en Russie pendant la première partie du règne de ce tsar (c'està-dire de 1881 à 1887). Certains de ses écrits, pamphlets ou manifestes ont été réunis dans un Recueil de Moscou, paru en 1896. Nous y verrons Pobedonostsev dénoncer une à une toutes les institutions qui pourraient, si jamais elles étaient importées d'Occident, limiter les prérogatives du tsar autocrate : séparation de l'Église et de l'État ; suffrage universel et discours sur la prétendue souveraineté du peuple ; instruction gratuite et obligatoire, impliquant une limitation du travail des enfants ; liberté de la presse et invocation constante de l' « opinion publique » ; institution (à l'anglaise) de jurys populaires dans les tribunaux. - Mais nous aurons la surprise de trouver également, dans ce même Recueil de Moscou, un catalogue très raisonné des principales « pathologies » qui, selon Pobedonostsev, accompagnent nécessairement un régime de démocratie représentative : corruption des représentants ; combinaisons et tractations incessantes entre les partis ; indifférentisme massif et hypertrophie du moi personnel chez les électeurs ; omniprésence d'une presse dépourvue de tout mandat électif et parlant cependant au nom du public ; etc. Un tel catalogue constitue à n'en pas douter ce que l'œuvre de Pobedonostsev, ce réactionnaire « sur toute la ligne », contient de moins inactuel. (shrink)

This paper considers the medium of videogames from a goodmanian standpoint. After some preliminary clarifications and definitions, I examine the ontological status of videogames. Against several existing accounts, I hold that what grounds their identity qua work types is code. The rest of the paper is dedicated to the epistemology of videogaming. Drawing on Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin's works, I suggest that the best model to defend videogame cognitivism appeals to the notion of understanding.

In this paper, I will look at the relationship between Weitz’s claim that art is an “open” concept and Dickie’s institutional theory of art, in its most recent form. Dickie’s theory has been extensively discussed, and often criticized, in the literature on aesthetics, yet it has rarely been observed – to my knowledge at least – that the fact that his theory actually incorporates, at least to some extent, Weitz’s claim about the “openness” of the concept of art, precisely accounts (...) for what I take to be the main flaws in the theory. In what follows I present arguments for that claim, looking briefly at the position of both authors with respect to the concept of art, then showing how they relate to each other, and what implications this has for Dickie’s institutional theory, and more generally for the traditional project of characterising art. (shrink)

In this article, we first present the platform and the Dislog language, designed for discourse analysis with a logic and linguistic perspective. The platform has now reached a certain level of maturity which allows the recognition of a large diversity of discourse structures including general-purpose rhetorical structures as well as domain-specific discourse structures. The Dislog language is based on linguistic considerations and includes knowledge access and inference capabilities. Functionalities of the language are presented together with a method for writing discourse (...) analysis rules. Efficiency and portability of the system over domains and languages are investigated to conclude this first part. In a second part, we analyse the different types of arguments found in several document genres, most notably: procedures, didactic texts and requirements. Arguments form a large class of discourse relations. A generic and frequently encountered form emerges from our analysis: ?reasons for conclusion? which constitutes a homogeneous family of arguments from a language, functional and conceptual point of view. This family can be viewed as a kind of proto-argument. We then elaborate its linguistic structure and show how it is implemented in . We then investigate the cooperation between explanation and arguments, in particular in didactic texts where they are particularly rich and elaborated. This article ends with a prospective section that develops current and potential uses of this work and how it can be extended to the recognition of other forms of arguments. (shrink)

This paper advocates a new reading of Nelson Goodman’s new riddle of induction. According to Ian Hacking, this famous problem conveys a “pure nominalism”, as it grounds Goodman’s denial regarding the existence of natural kinds. While this interpretation is somewhat convincing, it suffers the major flaw of not corresponding to what Goodman himself understood by “nominalism”. Nominalism, in a goodmanian sense, is indeed primarily a technical demand, which stems from the so-called “calculus of individuals”. I argue that this mereological definition (...) of nominalism allows to understand the new riddle of induction afresh. As a result, Goodman’s riddle is “hyper-nominalist”, i.e., nominalist in a distinct and stronger sense than what Hacking suggested. (shrink)

De tout temps, les hommes d'Etat ont eu pour préoccupation majeure de réaliser l'intégration de leurs citoyens. C'est ce souci qui conduit, dès -334, Alexandre le Grand, élève d'Aristote, à l'élaboration d'une pensée unique et universelle pour assurer la cohésion de son Empire à l'échelle planétaire. La pensée devient alors, par sa fonction d'intégration, une entreprise gérée par l'Etat qui la fait évoluer selon des procédés appelés à se transmettre d'Empire à Empire. L'enquête menée par l'auteur, en suivant la (...) formation de la pensée universelle en milieux grec et romain, sa rivalité avec le judaïsme, sa rencontre avec le christianisme et sa confrontation avec l'Islam révèle les enjeux de fond qui expliquent la genèse de la pensée en Occident et les temps forts de son évolution. C'est à la lumière de ces enjeux que se sont trouvés éclairés les grands phénomènes de l'Histoire tels que la construction de l'Europe, les Renaissances et les profondes transformations mentales, culturelles et sociales qu'elles provoquent dans les sociétés d'Occident, l'explosion des hérésies, (des albigeois, des vaudois... ) et leur répression, les guerres saintes (le djihad, les croisades), l'antijudaïsme précurseur de l'antisémitisme, l'inquisition... Poursuivie jusqu'à Saint Louis, l'enquête a confronté l'auteur à trois espaces: l'Orient sunnite et chiite, l'Espagne musulmane et l'Occident chrétien et à plusieurs courants de pensée. En cela cet ouvrage pose un jalon essentiel dans l'exploration de l'histoire de l'Occident dans ses rapports avec l'histoire universelle, l'histoire du Saint-Siège et celle des minorités à laquelle Denise Bonan accorde une grande place. " Autant de sujets de discussion, souligne Jean Glénisson dans sa préface, pour les historiens et les philosophes qui trouveront dans cet ouvrage le lieu de rencontres stimulantes. ". (shrink)

L'opposition paraît irréductible entre ceux qui soutiennent qu'il n'y a pas de vérité ou que celle-ci ne peut être commune ("à chacun la sienne") et ceux qui affirment la possibilité de cette vérité, même si notre intelligence ne l'appréhende jamais dans toute sa plénitude. Incontestablement, au sein du monde occidental contemporain, les premiers tiennent le haut du pavé, les seconds se trouvant fréquemment confrontés à la suspicion de nourrir des projets de totalitarisme ou de guerre sainte. Renouer avec le vrai, (...) qui est l'adéquation de la pensée et du réel, c'est refuser tout à la fois l'individualisme qui fait du moi la mesure de toute chose, le grégarisme qui soumet ce moi à l'opinion publique fluctuante et l'idéalisme qui impose au moi comme au nous le carcan de réformes ou de révolutions pensées en chambre. "Cette ancienne trinité que composent la vérité, la bonté et la beauté n'est peut-être pas simplement une formule vide et flétrie comme nous le pensions aux jours de notre jeunesse présomptueuse et matérialiste" déclarait Alexandre Soljenitsyne en 1970 dans son discours pour le Nobel de littérature. Telle est la conviction que ce livre entend défendre et illustrer. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Nelson Goodman’s pluriworldism, understood as the claim that there exists a plurality of actual worlds. This proposal has generally been quickly dismissed in the philosophical literature. I argue that we ought to take it more seriously. As I show, many of the prima facie objections to pluriworldism may receive straightforward answers. I also examine in detail Goodman’s argument for the conclusion that there are many worlds and attempt to show how it might be supported. Eventually, (...) I discuss some underexplored challenges to pluriworldism. (shrink)

Les cinq super-héros présentés ici, Alexandre, Salomon, les djinns, l’ange de la mort et al-Khadir, disposent tous de grands pouvoirs qu’ils utilisent chacun dans un temps et un espace spécifiques. Les djinns, vestiges de divinités païennes sans lendemain, affectent uniquement le déroulement de la vie terrestre. A l’inverse, l’ange de la mort, bien présent dans l’imaginaire, agit par rapport à un référent mythique, situé dans l’Au-delà et pour l’éternité. Les premiers sont pragmatiques, le second est moralisateur. Alexandre et (...) Salomon s’opposent au saint homme al-Khadir. Les deux rois sont mandatés par Dieu contre les démons, ils utilisent deux espaces et temporalités, terrestres et célestes, temporelles et intemporelles, qui justifient leurs privilèges, leur violence et consolident leur légitimité politique. Al-Khadir propose d’accéder, via le renoncement, à des attributs divins, et installe le temps du mythe dans l’espace ordinaire des hommes. Al-Khadir, le plus populaire des super-héros, a marqué profondément l’islam mystique, qui, rêvant de disposer comme lui de science infuse et d’immortalité, se détourne des richesses et du pouvoir corrupteurs, mais aussi, plus gravement, de la recherche du savoir et du travail. (shrink)

Entry on "Authenticity" for the fourth edition of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics, edited by Bruce Jennings. Discusses the concept in the context of end-of-life decision-making, human enhancement, and the treatment of mental disorder.

Idealization is a necessity. Stripping away levels of complexity makes questions tractable, focuses our attention, and lets us develop comprehensible, testable models. Applying such models, however, requires care and attention to how the idealizations incorporated into their development affect their predictions. In epistemology, we tend to focus on idealizations concerning individual agents' capacities, such as memory, mathematical ability, and so on, when addressing this concern. By contrast, this dissertation focuses on social idealizations, particularly those pertaining to salient social categories like (...) race, sex, and gender. In Chapter II, Privilege and Superiority, we begin with standpoint epistemology, one of the earliest efforts to grapple with the ways that social structures affect our epistemic lives. I argue that, if we interpret standpoint epistemologists' claims as hypotheses about the ways that our social positions affect access to evidence, we can fruitfully employ recent developments in evidence logic to study the consequences. I lay the groundwork for this project, developing a model based on neighborhood semantics for modal logic. Adapting this framework to standpoint epistemology helps to clarify the meaning of terms like "epistemic privilege" and "superior knowledge" and to elucidate the differences between various accounts of standpoint epistemology. I also address a longstanding criticism of these views: Longino's (1990) bias paradox, which suggests that there is no objective position from which to judge the goodness of a particular standpoint. Chapter III, Evidence in a Non-Ideal World, turns to the broader social context, looking at how ideology affects the availability of evidence. Throughout the chapter, I take the formation, justification, and maintenance of racist, sexist, and otherwise oppressive beliefs as a central case. I argue that these beliefs are, at least sometimes, formed as a result of evidential distortion, a structural feature of our epistemic contexts that skews readily available evidence in favor of dominant ideologies. Because they are formed this way, such beliefs will appear justified on prominent accounts of justification, both internalist and externalist. As a result, epistemic norms that fail to account for such non-ideal conditions will deliver verdicts that are not only counter-intuitive, but also morally unpalatable. This, I argue, reveals a kind of structural epistemic injustice, especially where oppressive ideology is involved and suggests the need for epistemic norms that are sensitive to agents' social contexts. Much of the discussion in Chapters II and III depends on social categories like race and gender, arguing that they have a distinctive influence on our epistemic lives. In Chapter IV, I Know You Are, But What Am I?, my co-author and I focus on social categories themselves, distinguishing between self-identity, social identity, and social role. We self-identify as gay or straight, men or women, couch-potatoes or gym rats. Sometimes, these identities affect our social roles---the way we are perceived and treated by others---and sometimes they do not. This relationship between our internal identities and our preferred public perceptions begs for explanation. On our account, this relationship is captured by what we refer to as 'social identity'---roughly, internal identities made available to others. We argue that this account of social identity plays an illuminating role in structural explanation of discrimination and individual behavior, dissolves puzzles surrounding the phenomenon of 'passing', and explains certain moral and political obligations toward individuals. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

As facilidades proporcionadas pela tecnologia moderna representam maior liberdade ao indivíduo, pois aumentam as possibilidades de ação. Contudo, os olhares se voltam para ações do homem na sociedade contemporânea, as direções das pesquisas são conduzidas pelo homem, no entanto o uso para o bem ou mal não está na técnica e sim centrada nas escolhas do ser humano. A tecnologia moderna possui rapidez na difusão do conhecimento, bem como proporciona a possibilidade de melhoramento e aperfeiçoamento da técnica, porém com esse (...) avanço o ser humano se fascina em sua liberdade e onipotência ante as novas tecnologias, que cada vez mais ameaçam a própria vida, em seu sentido essencial. A revolução genética, por exemplo, avança com desconfiança em razão da imprevisibilidade de seus resultados. Portanto, a técnica moderna, enquanto objeto tecnológico, é o resultado da transformação das necessidades do homem em objetos e a sua dependência em relação às novas tecnologias causa várias patologias que podem levar a vida ao seu extermínio. (shrink)

O texto indaga acerca do núcleo das confrontações do pensamento contemporâneo, para mostrar qual é o lugar que corresponde, nesse contexto, à Levinas. Neste sentido, mostraremos, em primeiro lugar, o motivo principal pelo qual, tem-se produzido, nos últimos anos, uma revalorização do pensamento de Levinas, a saber, a virada ética contemporânea; em segundo lugar, ilustraremos uma das noções básicas da proposta filosófica levinasiana, que se encontra em íntima relação com os problemas que o pensamento contemporâneo tem desenvolvido: racionalidade ética como (...) abertura à diferença não indiferente – alteridade. (shrink)

It is a common experience to be surprised by an artwork. In this paper, I examine how and why this obvious fact matters for philosophical aesthetics. Following recent works in psychology and philosophers such as Davidson or Scheffler, we will see that surprise qualifies as an emotion of a special kind, essentially “cognitive” or “epistemic” in its nature and functioning. After some preliminary considerations, I wish to hold two general claims: the first one will be that surprise is somehow related (...) to aesthetic appreciation, because it is often the ground to judge of a work’s value. The second point will be that a functional analysis of surprise provides support for cognitivist accounts of aesthetics. If this picture is right, surprise would generally play an important part in aesthetic experience and should also be seen as a paradigm to study the cognitive powers of art. (shrink)

La totalité n’est-elle que réduction à l’Un et sclérose de la pensée? Pour Alexandre de Halès et saint Bonaventure, la totalité bien comprise n’est pas incompatible avec une multiplicité réelle et favorise à la fois la consistance ontologique et l’intelligibilité de celle-ci. À partir d’une réflexion sur le « tout parfait » (Aristote) et le « tout de puissances » (Boèce), Alexandre forge un concept de totalité compatible avec la présence d’immensité divine et même, dans le cas (...) de Bonaventure, avec l’infinité et la simplicité de Dieu. Apparaît ainsi une conception hospitalière de la totalité, qui rejaillit sur la cosmologie et l’anthropologie. (shrink)

Does the centralization of the Web change both the diffusion of knowledge and the philosophical definition of knowledge itself? By exploring the origins of the Semantic Web in the philosophy of Carnap and of Google’s machine learning approach in Heidegger, we demonstrate that competing philosophical schools are deeply embedded in artificial intelligence and its evolution in the Web. Finally, we conclude that a decentralized approach to knowledge is necessary in order to bring the Web to its full potential as project (...) for the spread of human autonomy. (shrink)

Note du traducteur: La transcription rend fidèlement l’orthographe de l’inédit autographe de Helmholtz, et cela jusqu’à l’oubli du « t » dans le mot « nicht », erreur que l’auteur ne semble pas avoir remarquée ou à laquelle il ne devait pas accorder d’importance, vu qu’il s’agissait, probablement, d’une ébauche très avancée du rapport qui aurait dû, ou pu, être copiée, après correction, pour l’envoi en Italie.Dans la transcription ainsi que dans la traduction, l’espace laissé en blanc d’une...

Neste ensaio, pretendemos sugerir algumas vantagens da apresentação do ceticismo na forma de um argumento cético geral, discutir o princípio de fechamento utilizado neste argumento, mostrar que o confiablismo externalista é incapaz de explicar as implicações deste argumento geral e defender uma posição internalista cancelabilista como a mais adequadamente munida de ferramentas para avaliação dos desafios céticos.

Avec Brilliant Imperfection, Eli Clare réussit à accomplir le même tour de force effectué près de vingt ans plus tôt avec son essai désormais classique Exile & Pride, soit de déployer finement une analyse intersectionnelle où le genre, la race, la classe, l'orientation sexuelle, les capacités-pour ne nommer que ces éléments-sont mobilisés pour explorer, dans ce troisième ouvrage de l'auteur, la notion de "cure." Tant par son contenu que son format non orthodoxe, qui allie mémoire et analyses historiques, auto-ethnographie et (...) critiques politiques, poésie et réflexions théoriques, Brilliant Imperfection défie les conventions et injonctions aussi bien des sociétés dominantes que des mouvements et études... (shrink)