Le génie de Blaise Pascal séduit toujours de nombreux chercheurs. Des âmes avides d'absolu font de ses écrits leur livre de chevet. Sans doute cette notoriété a-t-elle estompé les autres membres de cette famille somme toute remarquable. Etienne, le père, est un esprit universel. Juriste, délégué de la cité, il est aussi grand mathématicien, compositeur et organiste, religieux et père admirable. Gilberte, la sœur aînée, a un talent littéraire qui s'exprimera dans La vie de M. Pascal. Les dons poétiques de (...) Jacqueline, la cadette, étonnent dès l'enfance. Etienne, le neveu, écrira un précieux témoignage sur la méthode de son oncle. Marguerite, la nièce miraculée, vivra jusqu'à quatre-vingt-sept ans et rapportera ses souvenirs dans un livre sur Blaise. Leurs lettres, peu nombreuses et trop souvent ignorées, méritent une attention d'autant plus minutieuse qu'elles nous introduisent dans l'intimité de cette famille. Ce qui domine, c'est une union exceptionnelle qui survit au-delà de la mort après avoir traversé les heurts inévitables entre ces fortes personnalités. On s'émerveille de la diversité des vocations : chaste veuvage pour Etienne, maternité et vie de famille pour Gilberte, vie religieuse pour Jacqueline, consécration à Dieu dans le monde pour Blaise, ministère presbytéral pour Louis. André Bord nous raconte cette vie de famille étonnante en nous faisant découvrir plusieurs faits inédits. (shrink)

On trouve dans l'ouvrage de M. Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, une structure essentielle d'opposition entre «compter» et «méditer». Cette opposition prend son origine dans la dualité des interprétations du principe de raison, selon qu'on l' accentue dans le sens du nombre ou dans le sens de l'être. Contrairement à ce que soutient Heidegger, A. R. estime que l'interprétation du principe de raison selon Leibniz relève d'une troisième accentuation, qui exige la connivence du nombre et de l'être, et non leur (...) coupure. On repère au passage à quelle tradition gnostique Heidegger se réfère (Eckhart, Silesius, ou bien Dom Deschamps), et comment Leibniz offre, contre le pessimisme du «sol natal» et la mentalité élitique de Heidegger, l'esquisse d'un monde où les sciences et la métaphysique ont à la fois leur rôle à jouer. (shrink)

Increasingly, frontiers between business and philanthropy seem to be blurred. Reward-Based Crowdfunding platforms contribute to this blurring of lines since they propose funders to support both for-profit and philanthropic projects. Our empirical paper explores the case of Ulule, the leading crowdfunding platform in Europe. Our results, based on a statistical analysis of more than 3000 projects, show that crowdfunding platforms foster specific kinds of relationships relying on reciprocal giving, beyond the usual opposition between altruistic and selfish motivations. We use the (...) work of Marcel Mauss to account for this process of reciprocal giving, and we argue that Maussian theory of gift can be used more generally to describe funding activities in the context of early stage entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Semantics are given for modal extensions of relevant logics based on the kind of frames introduced in [7]. By means of a simple recipe we may obtain from a class FRM (L) of unreduced frames characterising a (non-modal) logic L, frame-classes FRM (L.M) characterising conjunctively regular modal extensions L.M of L. By displaying an incompleteness phenomenon, it is shown how the recipe fails when reduced frames are under consideration.

A group of engineering students at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, designed a course on engineering ethics. The core element of the developed Blue Engineering course are self-contained teaching-units, “building blocks”. These building blocks typically cover one complex topic and make use of various teaching methods using moderators who lead discussions, rather than experts who lecture. Consequently, the students themselves started to offer the credited course to their fellow students who take an active role in further developing the course (...) themselves. (shrink)

We investigate the upper semilattice Eq* of recursively enumerable equivalence relations modulo finite differences. Several natural subclasses are shown to be first-order definable in Eq*. Building on this we define a copy of the structure of recursively enumerable many-one degrees in Eq*, thereby showing that Th has the same computational complexity as the true first-order arithmetic.

The book forms a balanced structure in which the three conceptual pillars of Spinoza's natural law theory (individuality, natural laws, and power) are first analyzed from the viewpoint of his ontology and then from the viewpoint of his ...

This dissertation is a study of some recent theories of truth. The theories fall into three groups: The Revision Theories, the context-sensitive theories, and the "Chrysippian theories". ;The "Chrysippian theories" are based on the intuition that pathologicalities arising from the concept of truth can be recognized and acknowledged with the concept of truth itself. Thus, from the pathologicality of the Liar, for example, we can conclude that the Liar is not true. This leads to immediate difficulties since the Liar claims (...) just that--that it is not true--and it would thus seem to be true. The Chrysippian theories are designed to avoid these difficulties while preserving the motivating intuition. Haim Gaifman's Pointer Semantics, and Brian Skyrms' Intensional Fixed-Point Theory of Truth are examples of such theories. They are exposited and criticized. ;The context-sensitive theories dealt with are Tyler Burge's Indexical Theory of Truth and the theory of Jon Barwise and John Etchemendy. These theories claim that an ambiguity due to a contextual parameter is the reason for the difficulties we encounter. Burge offers a theory of Tarskian levels coupled with a pragmatic theory that explains the assignment of levels to occurrences of 'true'. Barwise and Etchemendy make explicit a situational parameter in their account of propositions. They consider the ambiguity with respect to the situation a propositions is about a main source of the paradoxes. ;Finally, the Revision Theories of Truth of Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap and two variations of this theory are considered. One is due to Aladdin Yaqub, the other, the "fully-varied theory", is due to Gupta and Belnap but remains largely unexplored. Revision theories are put forward as the most promising account of the difficulties. They are based on a definitional reading of all Tarski biconditionals. The circularity implied by such a reading is handled by Gupta's and Belnap's general theory of definitions. ;Yaqub's objections raised against the standard theory are examined, and his proposed solution is shown to be inadequate. The fully-varied Revision Theory is shown to provide a better solution. (shrink)

Two ways of describing a group are considered. 1. A group is finite-automaton presentable if its elements can be represented by strings over a finite alphabet, in such a way that the set of representing strings and the group operation can be recognized by finite automata. 2. An infinite f.g. group is quasi-finitely axiomatizable if there is a description consisting of a single first-order sentence, together with the information that the group is finitely generated. In the first part of the (...) paper we survey examples of FA-presentable groups, but also discuss theorems restricting this class. In the second part, we give examples of quasi-finitely axiomatizable groups, consider the algebraic content of the notion, and compare it to the notion of a group which is a prime model. We also show that if a structure is bi-interpretable in parameters with the ring of integers, then it is prime and quasi-finitely axiomatizable. (shrink)

La formule " plénitude ontologique du vide " signifie que le vide n'est pas un néant, un rien ou une absence définitive mais, au contraire, l'affirmation en son autosuffisance de la présence à l'état pur. Le vide est plein de la présence pure, mieux il s'identifie à elle. De l'atomisme antique à la révolution scientifique en passant par la Renaissance, de Démocrite à Newton, d'Aristote à Descartes en tant que ses plus éminents adversaires, le vide n'a cessé de hanter tant (...) le champ de la métaphysique que celui de la science, celui de l'expérience comme celui de l'imaginaire. Après avoir tenté de l'expulser de la physique au moyen de la notion d'éther, la cosmologie contemporaine redécouvre le rôle essentiel du vide dans le devenir et peut-être l'origine de l'univers. Aujourd'hui, c'est au tour de la métaphysique de soupeser à nouveaux frais le poids du vide dans le cadre de la problématique qui lui est propre. Après un siècle de dépassement, de déconstruction et autre célébration de la fin de la métaphysique, l'intention est de démontrer ici que, loin d'être oublieuse de la question de l'être, elle a pensé celle-ci avec une portée et une acuité sans égales. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

In the epigraph, Fisher is blaming two generations of theoretical biologists, from Darwin on, for ignoring Quetelet's statistical techniques and hence harboring confusions about evolution and natural selection. He is right to imply that Darwin and his contemporaries were aware of the core of Quetelet's work. Quetelet's seminal monograph, Sur L'homme, was widely discussed in Darwin's academic circles. We know that Darwin owned a copy (Schweber 1977). More importantly, we have in Darwin's notebooks two entries referring to Quetelet's work on (...) the cause of a large-scale global phenomenon where each year more boys were born than girls. The first entry is written sometime between April and July 1838. Darwin writes "Find out from the Statistical Society—where M. Quetelet has published his laws about sexes relative to age of Marriages" (C 268, Barrett et al., 1987, p. 324). The second is written sometime after October 16, 1838: "In the Atheneum Numbers 406, 407, 409, Quetelet papers are given, & I think facts there mentioned about proportion of sexes, at birth & causes" (Ibid, p. 379). So, even if Darwin did not read Sur L'homme directly it is likely (though not certain) that he read its review in the Atheneum. There is no doubt that Darwin eventually became familiar with Quetelet's work in statistics. The smoking gun is an essay that Darwin writes in 1874, entitled, "On the Males and Complemental Males of Certain Cirripedes, and on Rudimentary Structures" where he discusses Quetelet's laws of variation. (shrink)

Étude sur deux pensées philosophiques de l'existence qui furent influencées par le romantisme au milieu du XIXe siècle. L'auteur s'interroge sur la conception de l'homme que chacun des deux philosophes propose. D'après lui, leurs postulats sont parents par bien des aspects. L'existence est envisagée dans ses dimensions littéraires, philosophiques et religieuses.--Résumé de l'éditeur.

In this article, we first review the development of clinical ethics in pediatrics in the United States. We report that, over the last 40 years, most children’s hospitals have ethics committees but that those committees are rarely consulted. We speculate that the reasons for the paucity of ethics consults might be because ethical dilemmas are aired in other venues. The role of the ethics consultant, then, might be to shape the institutional climate and create safe spaces for the discussion of (...) difficult and sometimes contentious issues. Finally, we report how pediatric clinical ethics has evolved differently in a number of other countries around the world. (shrink)

Many hold that Hume was an atheist, that he despised the church, and that he was a devastating critic of religion. One cannot deny, however, the references to ‘true religion’ in his work, his sometimes seemingly favorable references to Deity, his call for religion in ‘every civilized community’, and his sense of ‘natural belief’. The following essay describes a speculative Humean ‘true religion’ and discusses its potential use-value for contemporary philosophy of religion. It begins, anecdotally, with a description of Hume's (...) happiness in France, which I attribute to the fact that Hume was not taken to be an atheist by the French reading public. The main argument is that while Hume was critical of ‘vulgar’ and ‘popular’ religion, his philosophical position did not deny our habit to accept a genuine theism that could, if informed by the calm passions, serve to ‘purify our hearts’ and bond us more closely together. Reconceiving Hume's ‘true religion’ in this way allows his insi.. (shrink)

This reconsideration of Hume’s classic essay “Of Miracles” via the lens of American pragmatist ways of thinking about history and power shifts our attention from Hume’s epistemic concerns about the legitimacy of witnesses and testimony to his distaste for sacred history, his critical stance regarding the social force of revelation, and his disdain for religious authority. To view Hume’s essay both as an articulation of a critical philosophy of history and as an exercise in moral dynamism (social power or, authority, (...) is a result of epistemic transactions), is to intervene in both Hume studies and Contemporary Pragmatism. (shrink)

For many years G. E. Moore asked himself what was wrong with sentences like ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday, but I don't believe that I did’, or ‘I believe that he has gone out, but he has not’. He discussed the problem in 1912 in his Ethics , and was still discussing it in 1944 in a paper to the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge—an event we know about from a letter of Wittgenstein that I shall quote in (...) a moment. Throughout these years of pondering, Moore retained a remarkably stable vocabulary for setting out his solution. Briefly, he held this: saying ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday, but I don't believe that I did’ is absurd, but not self-contradictory. Not self-contradictory, because ‘it may quite well be true’; yet absurd, because the speaker expressly repudiates, in the second part of the sentence, a belief which he implies by uttering the first part. The panoply of distinctions which subtends this doctrine—sentence v. utterance of sentence, saying v. implying, contradiction v. absurdity—was subjected to keen scrutiny a generation or so ago, and much of it has now passed into philosophical lore as a discussion of ‘Moore's Paradox’. (shrink)