The aim of this article is to develop a new classification of stakeholders based on the concept of corporate and social engagement. Engagement is analyzed as an organizational learning process between the managers of an organization and its stakeholders. It is a necessary condition to improve the organization’s impact on its economic, social, and natural environment. Applied to the membership of a French mutual bank in order to identify the members’ varying levels of engagement, this new mapping technique may help (...) managers to adapt their practices to the degree of engagement of each identified group of members, and to modify their financial products and communications to foster engagement among as many of these groups as possible. (shrink)

I now come to an idea that is important to me and that I address in an article from 1957 entitled “Où va le roman?” Both André Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre made use of the novel early in their careers before abandoning it. Is this development inevitable? Against the naturalist novel, which eliminates the subject in favor of the object, we see the rise, after the Second World War, of the metaphysical novel, which will, on the contrary, gradually destroy (...) its object. I contend in this article that Malraux’s and Sartre’s transcendence of the novel—in Malraux’s The Voices of Silence (Les Voix du silence) and in Sartre’s engagement with an overly rational subjectivism—neither can nor should become a rallying cry. I .. (shrink)

This book explores the nature and implications of positive, creative, and loving mimesis and brings together the interdisciplinary fields of Girardian studies and creativity studies in new and original ways. Scientists, philosophers, psychologists, theologians and ancient thinkers are brought into thought provoking and insightful dialogue with Girardian conceptions of mimetic desire, scapegoating, and hominization.

Linear logic, introduced by Girard, is a refinement of classical logic with a natural, intrinsic accounting of resources. This accounting is made possible by removing the ‘structural’ rules of contraction and weakening, adding a modal operator and adding finer versions of the propositional connectives. Linear logic has fundamental logical interest and applications to computer science, particularly to Petri nets, concurrency, storage allocation, garbage collection and the control structure of logic programs. In addition, there is a direct correspondence between polynomial-time (...) computation and proof normalization in a bounded form of linear logic. In this paper we show that unlike most other propositional logics, full propositional linear logic is undecidable. Further, we prove that without the modal storage operator, which indicates unboundedness of resources, the decision problem becomes PSPACE-complete. We also establish membership in NP for the multiplicative fragment, NP-completeness for the multiplicative fragment extended with unrestricted weakening, and undecidability for fragments of noncommutative propositional linear logic. (shrink)

En philosophie comme en d'autres domaines, la puissance de l'Absolu semble bien à présent nous être refusée. Sa relève s'est vue opposer non seulement la violence de la révolte, mais la pluralité invincible des perspectives finies et la reconnaissance raisonnable de l'irréductible multiplicité du patrimoine spirituel de l'humanité. Tout se passe comme si nous avions pris conscience que l'intrigue première n'était pas celle de la pensée et de ses catégories essentielles, mais celle de la liberté et de ses attitudes existentielles. (...) Les questions ultimes ne disparaissent pas pour autant, mais elles échappent désormais aux prétentions magistrales d'une théorie unique. C'est seulement du dialogue, toujours à reprendre, des libertés en quête de raison que peut renaître, sans trop d'illusions, la visée d'un sens de l'existence qui ne peut que se diffracter en perspectives multiples. C'est dans cet esprit que Francis Guibal met en vis-à-vis Cornelius Castoriadis et André Stanguennec sur " histoire et libertés " ; Henri Bergson et Franz Rosenzweig sur " expérience et transcendance " ; Jacques Derrida et Jean-Luc Nancy sur " déconstruction et création " ; René Girard, Paul Ricoeur et Catherine Chalier sur " Le religieux en héritage(s) ". (shrink)

Experiences of absence are common in everyday life, but have received little philosophical attention until recently, when two positions regarding the nature of such experiences surfaced in the literature. According to the Perceptual View, experiences of absence are perceptual in nature. This is denied by the Surprise-Based View, according to which experiences of absence belong together with cases of surprise. In this paper, I show that there is a kind of experience of absence—which I call frustrating absences—that has been overlooked (...) by the Perceptual View and by the Surprise Based-View and that cannot be adequately explained by them. I offer an alternative account to deal with frustrating absences, one according to which experiencing frustrating absences is a matter of subjects having desires for something to be present frustrated by the world. Finally, I argue that there may well be different kinds of experiences of absence. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the effect of sound on visual motion perception. One model involves the illusion created when two identical objects moving towards each other on a two-dimensional visual display can be seen to either bounce off or stream through each other. Previous studies show that the large bias normally seen toward the streaming percept can be modulated by the presentation of an auditory event at the moment of coincidence. However, no reports to date provide sufficient evidence to (...) indicate whether the sound bounce-inducing effect is due to a perceptual binding process or merely to an explicit inference resulting from the transient auditory stimulus resembling a physical collision of two objects. In the present study, we used a novel experimental design in which a subliminal sound was presented either 150 ms before, at, or 150 ms after the moment of coincidence of two disks moving towards each other. The results showed that there was an increased perception of bouncing when the subliminal sound was presented at or 150 ms after the moment of coincidence compared to when no sound was presented. These findings provide the first empirical demonstration that activation of the human auditory system without reaching consciousness affects the perception of an ambiguous visual motion display. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive and detailed exploration of the relationship between the thought of G.W.F. Hegel and that of John McDowell, the latter of whom is widely considered to be one of the most influential living analytic philosophers. It serves as a point of entry in McDowell’s and Hegel’s philosophy, and a substantial contribution to ongoing debates on perceptual experience and perceptual justification, naturalism, human freedom and action. The chapters gathered in this volume, as well as McDowell’s responses, make (...) it clear that McDowell’s work paves the way for an original reading of Hegel’s texts. His conceptual framework allows for new interpretive possibilities in Hegel’s philosophy which, until now, have remained largely unexplored. Moreover, these interpretations shed light on various aspects of continuity and discontinuity between the philosophies of these two authors, thus defining more clearly their positions on specific issues. In addition, they allow us to see Hegel’s thought as containing a number of conceptual tools that might be useful for advancing McDowell’s own philosophy and contemporary philosophy in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:INDIFFERENCE AND ENVY: THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF MODERN ECONOMY Paul Dumouchel University ofQuébec-Montréal 1. Girard and economics René Girard himself has not written very much on economics, at least explicitly. Though his works are full ofinsights into and short remarks on the sacrificial origin of different economic phenomena or the way in which mimetic relations and commercial transactions are often intertwined and act upon each other.1 Unlike (...) religion, psychology, psychoanalysis, literature and anthropology, the analysis of modem and traditional economies from the point ofview ofmimetic theory has never been carried out by Girard himself, but for the most part by other people, for example, in the French speaking world, which I know best, essentially by Michel Aglietta and André Orléan in La violence de la monnaie (1982) and by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and myself in L'enfer des choses (1979) and as well as others, such as, by Mark Anspach, Andrew Feenberg, P. Lantz, A. Orléan, G-H. de Radkowsky and Lucien Scubla in various works on economy, economic anthropology, or the place and role of money in literary texts.2 In a way, this is somewhat surprising since the relationship between mimetic and economic phenomena, at least in a broad sense, was seen quite early on. For example, soon after the original publication Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961) the French Marxist Lucien Goldman wrote in his Pour une sociologie du Roman (1964) that Girard's work was the most important book to read in order to understand 1 For example, Mensonge romantique (18-23); Des choses cachées (82-88). 2 See Anspach, Feenberg, Lantz, Orléan [passim], de Radkowski. 150Paul Dumouchel the effects of economic alienation on literature since Georg Lukács's Theory of the Novel (1920). Moreover in a footnote in Les origines du capitalisme (1971) Jean Baechler suggested that those wishing to understand the nature of the infinite desire for acquisition which capitalists economies have institutionalized should read Girard's book.3 Whatever the reason for Girard's relative disinterest in economic phenomena others have not been prevented from tackling this problem and it bears witness in a special way to the dynamism and intellectual power ofthe mimetic theory that its application to the field ofeconomics has essentially, ifnot entirely, been due to the work of others rather than to the efforts of René Girard himself. 2. The substantivist-formalist debate In the late 1 940's and early 1 950's a debate began that divided (and still divides) the community ofeconomists and ofanthropologists interested in economic phenomena. It concerns the nature ofeconomy and is generally referred to as the substantivist-formalist debate. It was first formulated in the works of the Austrian economist, Karl Polanyi.4 In The Great Transformation (1945), a book on the history ofthe formation and organization ofthe market economy in Europe from the late 1 8th to early 20th centuries, Polanyi already argued that the modem market economy was a rare historical accident. Furthermore Polanyi said, unlike what liberal and economic ideologies pretend, thatthere is nothingnatural aboutthe market. It does not correspond to any spontaneous human tendency to barter and exchange, and it does not arise by itself as soon as certain conditions are satisfied. Onthe contrary, modem markets have been put into place through sustained and voluntary state policies which consciously destroyed traditional solidarities, authorized the unlimited sale of land and labor and literally created the labor market, for example, in England through the Reform Bill of 1834 that repealed the existing Poor Laws which had prevented the free circulation of labor. The system formed by market economies, the balance of power among European states and the gold 3 Interestingly, 24 years later, in the second vastly enlarged edition of that work, Le capitalisme, (1995) the reference to Girard has disappeared though the text ofthe original work, which now constitutes the second part of the book, is otherwise reprinted in its integrity. 4 Actually Polanyi in The Livelihood ofMan (1977) sees the origin of the debate in Carl Mengers, Principles ofEconomics [1871]. Let us say then that it found its first modern formulation in the work of Polanyi. Indifference andEnvy... (shrink)

Nottelman (2016) and Peels (2023) identify several categories of ignorance: factive, objectual, and practical, with erotetic ignorance —understood as the lack of knowledge of answers to questions—viewed as reducible to factive ignorance. This paper argues that erotetic ignorance is not in fact reducible to factive ignorance. More precisely, erotetic knowledge does not solely involve a relationship between a subject and a true proposition or set of propositions; instead, it involves a relationship between a subject, a true proposition or set of (...) propositions and epistemic goals of inquiry. (shrink)

Burge famously argued that one can have thoughts involving a concept C even if one’s understanding of C is incomplete. Even though this view has been extremely influential, it has also been taken by critics as less than clear. The aim of this paper is to show that the cases imagined by Burge as being ones in which incomplete understanding of concepts is involved can be made clearer given an account of direct concept ascriptions—such as “Peter has the concept of (...) arthritis”—according to which these ascriptions are to be analysed in terms of ascriptions of the knowledge of what something is. The upshot is that the cases imagined by Burge can be explained is terms of the idea of subjects knowing in part what something is. (shrink)

Feedback appears to be a fundamental characteristic of the phenomena of life. Elsewhere it only appears in man-made machines. These machines are always presented as being a meeting ground for laws immanent both in matter and in man. A new science has been created to study the applications of feedback: cybernetics. As feedback is closely related to questions concerning the transmission of information, cybernetics has rapidly given rise to a theory of information. The latter, with its applications, has taken on (...) an absolutely essential role in our modern world wherever problems of administration occur. (shrink)

Burns proposes an intriguing hypothesis by suggesting that the “schizophrenia genes” might not be regulatory genes themselves, but rather closely associated with regulatory genes directly involved in the proper growth of the social brain. We point out that this account would benefit from incorporating the effects of localized lesions and aberrant hemispheric asymmetry on cortical connectivity underlying the social brain. In addition, we argue that the evolutionary framework is superfluous.

We argue that the pivotal role assigned by Northoff to the principle of top-down modulation in catatonia might successfully be applied to other symptoms of schizophrenia, for example, hallucinations. Second, we propose that Northoff's account would benefit from a more comprehensive analysis of the cognitive level of explanation. Finally, contrary to Northoff, we hypothesize that “top-down modulation” might play as important a role as “horizontal modulation” in affective-behavioral alterations.

Pourquoi Averroès? Pourquoi Averroès juriste? Parce que dans le cadre du débat avec ceux qui soutiennent le caractère indubitable du texte sacré, Averroès affirme la primauté de la raison. Il a ainsi mis en avant le questionnement, le doute dans la recherche de la vérité. Ce doute toléré dans le cercle restreint des philosophes était inacceptable en droit (la charia) qui s'applique à tous les membres de la communauté des musulmans. D'où sa condamnation et son exil. La redécouverte de la (...) pensée d'Averroès pourrait permettre au monde arabo-musulman de s'extraire du chaos. (shrink)

"La nouvelle nous est parvenue que pas une étymologie de Heidegger, pas même Léthé et Aléthès, n'était exacte. Mais le problème est-il bien posé?Tout critère scientifique d'étymologie n'a-t-il pas d'avance été répudié, au profit d'une pure et simple Poésie? On croit bon de dire qu'il n'y a là que des jeux de mots. Ne serait-il pas contradictoire d'attendre une quelconque correction linguistique d'un projet qui se propose explicitement de dépasser l'étant scientifique et technique vers l'étant poétique? Il ne s'agit pas (...) d'étymologie à proprement parler, mais d'opérer des agglutinations dans l'autre-langue, pour obtenir des surgissements dans la langue". (Gilles Deleuze Critique et clinique, 1993, p. 122 à 124). Ces lignes de Deleuze expriment parfaitement et par avance l'objection que l'on pourrait opposer à notre ouvrage. Cependant, et tout en conservant à Deleuze un respect entier pour sa belle oeuvre, nous ne pensons pas que des "agglutinations" dans la langue suffisent à faire passer dans un registre poétique. Le détail de notre démonstration philosophique et philologique a voulu montrer que Heidegger, en faisant comme s'il "entendait" la pensée grecque de l'origine, est entré dans une région que ne peuvent plus atteindre ni philosophie, ni philologie, ni même poésie, parce qu'elle se retire dans l'invérifiable. (shrink)

It is held by many philosophers that it is a consequence of epistemic contextualism that speakers are typically semantically blind, that is, typically unaware of the propositions semantically expressed by knowledge attributions. In his ?Contextualism, Invariantism and Semantic Blindness? (this journal, 2009), Martin Montminy argues that semantic blindness is widespread in language, and not restricted to knowledge attributions, so it should not be considered problematic. I will argue that Montminy might be right about this, but that contextualists still face a (...) serious and related problem: that it is a consequence of epistemic contextualism that subjects are typically unaware of contents conveyed by knowledge attributions, independently of whether these are semantic or non-semantic contents. Even if semantic blindness is widespread in language, it does not seem that content unawareness of this sort is. (shrink)

RésuméCet article expose et analyse la notion de référentielà laquelle Gonseth avail consacré son dernier livre. II distingue un référentiel personnel qui comporte deux aspects et un référentiel de groupe qui lui aussi présente diverses modalités . Entre les référentiels personnels et les référentiels de groupe s'établit une symbiose existentielle favorisant les interactions. Cette notion de référentiel peut être utilisée avec profit pour décrire et interpréter les relations que ľhomme entretient avec ses semblables, avec les collectivités dont il fait partie (...) et avec le milieu naturel dans lequel il se trouve engagé.SummaryThis article presents and analyses the notion of reference frame, to which Gonseth devoted his last book. A personal reference frame involving two aspects is distinguished from a group reference frame which also takes various forms . Personal and group reference frames are in an existential symbiosis fostering interactions. This notion of reference frame may be used to advantage in describing and interpreting the relations between man and his fellow man, his organizations, and his natural environment. (shrink)

Les recherches présentées dans cet ouvrage s'inscrivent dans deux grandes familles épistémologiques, celle des approches narratives et celle de l'analyse de l'activité. Les auteur(e)s convoquent les principes théoriques et méthodologiques de ces deux approches pour interroger la place du sujet dans le travail éducatif à partir de plusieurs points de vue : l'intersubjectivité d'une situation éducative et la spécificité de la rencontre qu'elle génère ; le rôle des outils narratifs et réflexifs dans l'émancipation de l'individu ; la prise en compte (...) de la temporalité dans l'élaboration et l'analyse de ces outils ; l'importance d'une posture de recherche collaborative prenant en compte l'ensemble des sujets impliqués dans cette rencontre. Impulsé par l'équipe Profeor du laboratoire CIREL et ouvert à d'autres auteurs experts de ces champs, l'ouvrage propose un dialogue entre ces deux familles épistémologiques, souvent abordées de façon distincte, ainsi qu'entre chercheurs, professionnels de l'éducation et de la formation et apprenants."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

We consider motivations for acknowledging that people participate in multiple levels of economic agency. One of these levels is characterized in terms of subjective utility to the individual; another, frequently observed, level is characterized in terms of utility to social groups with which people identify. Following Bacharach, we describe such groups as ‘teams’. We review Bacharach’s theory of such identification in his account of ‘team reasoning’. While this conceptualization is useful, it applies only to processes supported by deliberation. As this (...) is only one of a range of causal mechanisms underlying behaviour by humans and other strategic agents, a more general account is desirable. We then argue that Stirling’s account of ‘conditional games’ achieves the desired generalization. (shrink)