But nathelees, syn I knowe youre delit, / I shal fulfille youre worldly appetit.1 Chaucer’s Wife of Bath centers on a wonderfully fruitful paradox: she claims for women and for herself the right to “maistrie” and “sovereynetee” in marriage, but she does so by articulating the discourse imparted to her by the “auctoritee” of anti-feminism.2 Indeed, this paradoxical challenge to and reiteration of anti-feminist ideas has left Chaucer’s readers debating for decades which way the irony cuts: is the Wife to (...) be understood as a proto-feminist, or is she merely “a delightful buffoon inadvertently lampooning herself for the ironic pleasure of a knowing, male audience”?3 How we choose to answer this question .. (shrink)

Innovative readings and creative reinterpretations of significant works in the field of ancient philosophy.

Read again in light of the current French social conflict around the part-time theater and cinema workers, the book by L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, seems to have been quite prescient when describing work as organized store and more through short-term projects. But the lack of social security in this system is supposed by the authors to conte front the artist-critics who were interested mostly in individual freedom and expressivity, store than from the infrastructural organization (...) of capitalism. Solutions are sought by analogy with the rides that protect salaried workers, particularly the idea of a guaranteed income or social wage. (shrink)

Que l’éthique ait pu soutenir le capitalisme n’est pas une idée nouvelle : on la trouve déjà chez Marx, puis chez Weber qui analyse les « affinités électives » entre l’éthique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme. Il semble cependant qu’aujourd’hui, on assiste à un phénomène qui relèverait d’une « économisation » du concept d’éthique. Le lieu de « production » de l’ « éthique » paraît bien être la sphère économique elle-même, et notamment l’entreprise qui en serait l’un des principaux (...) vecteurs de diffusion. C’est en ce sens que l’on parlera d’ « offre éthique ». Si l’éthique en « s’économisant » s’adresse à l’individu en tant qu’être de besoin, ne va-t-elle pas devenir, au même titre que les biens culturels , un bien marchand ? L’entreprise est-elle fondée à produire une éthique économique ?The support provided by ethics to capitalism is not new : the idea was expressed by Marx, then by Weber analyzing the « elective affinities » between protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism. Nevertheless, it seems that, in the contemporary period, another phenomenon is appearing : the « economization » of the concept of ethics. From now on, ethics would be produced by the economic sphere itself, and particularly by business. In such a configuration, the question raised are the following ones : is this evolution leading to a « marketization » of ethics parallel to the one put in evidence by Arendt concerning the cultural goods ? Is business legitimate to produce an economic ethics ? (shrink)

La confrontation des vestiges du péribole du sanctuaire d'Apollon à Delphes et des données relatives aux chantiers de réfection fournies par le Compte des Trésoriers CID II 81 invite à situer les travaux au mur Est entre les portes Β et F (cette dernière se trouvant au Nord de l'emplacement du futur portique d'Attale) et à les mettre en relation avec la reconstruction du temple et le réaménagement du téménos.

En accompagnement de la reprise des fouilles, nous présentons de nouvelles données relatives aux trois monuments les plus occidentaux de la terrasse de la Marmaria, obtenues à l’occasion de l’inventaire des blocs hors œuvre, présents sur le site, et d’une relecture des sources textuelles antiques. La fonction d’hestiatorion de SD 44 est ainsi confirmée. Une nouvelle datation est proposée pour l’édifice de calcaire SD 43 dont l’architecture ne correspond pas à celle d’un temple, mais plutôt à celle d’une salle d’assemblée. (...) La date de la tholos SD 40 est également abaissée, ce qui la met en relation avec le Philippéion d’Olympie. Ces acquis auront à être précisés par la poursuite de l’étude architecturale, mais ils invitent déjà à réévaluer la place que la Macédoine des Argéades tenait à Delphes. (shrink)

Dans les analyses sociologiques et philosophiques qu'à suscitées récemment le « phénomène du téléphone portable », les promesses de l'innovation sont souvent tenues à tort pour la réalité des usages. Une enquête fondée sur l'observation des pratiques concrètes autour du portable nous a permis de montrer sous quelle forme les possibilités ouvertes par l'innovation interviennent dans l'expérience de l'outil: comment la promesse de joignabilité est déjouée par les stratégies de chacun, comment, à partir d'un agrégat de fonctions, les utilisateurs réinventent (...) un objet métamorphique doté d'une unité forte, ou encore comment les représentations que se font les utilisateurs des possibles techniques les amènent à dénier la réalité de l'outil, dans le cas de la photographie sur portable par exemple...Le cinéma expérimental mobile, ainsi que les films de fiction exploitent cet écart entre les possibles de l'outil et la réalité des pratiques, qui est caractéristique de la relation à cet objet.In sociological and philosophical raised recently as the "phenomenon of the mobile phone," the promise of innovation are often held mistaken for the actual practice. A survey based on the observation of actual practices around the notebook has allowed us to show what form the opportunities offered by innovation involved in the experience of the tool: how the promise of reachability is thwarted by the strategies of each how, from an aggregate function, users metamorphic reinvent an object with a strong unit, or how the representations that are users of possible techniques lead to denying the reality of the tool in the case of photography such as portable ... Experimental cinema mobile, as well as films exploit this potential gap between the tool and the actual practices, which is characteristic of the relationship to the object. (shrink)

It has been thirty years since the end of political apartheid in South Africa in 1994. Those decades have been marked by single-party dominance under the African National Congress (ANC), and the expansion of democratic rights and public goods like education, as well as neoliberal economic policies, growing inequality and, in recent years, corruption and maladministration scandals. On the heels of a historic election in May 2024, one which marked the end of the ANC's electoral dominance and was shaped, in (...) part, by government mismanagement of the energy sector and extensive infrastructural decline, it is a timely moment to consider the history of South Africa's state and its relation to industries of extraction and energy production. Two new books do just that. Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures, by Gabrielle Hecht, takes a long view of the impact of extractive industries, arguing that contemporary South Africa may offer a cautionary tale of the devastating impacts of the Anthropocene, one that ‘foretells planetary futures’ in the way that the state has failed to reckon with the enduring communal and environmental impacts of the mining industry. Apartheid's Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence, by Faeeza Ballim, historicizes the development of South Africa's electricity sector under the apartheid state and traces the roots of the current energy crisis back to the pursuit of authoritarian high modernism in the mid-twentieth century. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Volume: 2013 Issue: 196 Pages: 215-227.

Drawing on face-to-face and online ethnographic, survey and interview data with participants in distributed computing projects around the world, this book sheds light on the organizational and social structures of voluntary distributed computing projects, communities and teams, with close attention to questions of motivation in projects that offer little or no traditional forms of reward, either financially or in terms of participants' careers. With its focus on non-market, non-hierarchical cooperation, this book is a case study of networked individuals around the (...) world who are part of a new social production of information. (shrink)

This third volume completes the text of the cycle of 294 English Wycliffite sermons; the first two volumes appeared in 1983 and 1987 respectively. The 120 sermons here were intended to provide material for all the weekday occasions for which the Sarum rite offers a separate gospel reading; such complete coverage of ferial days is unparalleled in English medieval homiliaries, and seems unknown elsewhere in contemporary European cycles of sermons. The introduction to the present book, which is intended to be (...) used along with the material in the previous volumes, describes the state of the text in these manuscripts and their relation to each other. Two further chapters consider questions relating to the whole cycle: the fidelity of the biblical translation in the sermons to the Vulgate texts; and the complicated issue of the relation between these English sermons and the Latin sermons of John Wyclif himself. A fourth volume will provide a commentary on the individual sermons, consider the recurrent issues discussed within them, and offer suggestions concerning the origins of the collection. (shrink)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore artificial moral agency by reflecting upon the possibility of a Moral Turing Test and whether its lack of focus on interiority, i.e. its behaviouristic foundation, counts as an obstacle to establishing such a test to judge the performance of an Artificial Moral Agent. Subsequently, to investigate whether an MTT could serve as a useful framework for the understanding, designing and engineering of AMAs, we set out to address fundamental challenges within (...) the field of robot ethics regarding the formal representation of moral theories and standards. Here, typically three design approaches to AMAs are available: top-down theory-driven models and bottom-up approaches which set out to model moral behaviour by means of models for adaptive learning, such as neural networks, and finally, hybrid models, which involve components from both top-down and bottom-up approaches to the modelling of moral agency. With inspiration from Allen and Wallace as well as Prior, we elaborate on theoretically driven approaches to machine ethics by introducing deontic tense logic. Finally, within this framework, we explore the character of human interaction with a robot which has successfully passed an MTT. Design/methodology/approach – The ideas in this paper reflect preliminary theoretical considerations regarding the possibility of establishing a MTT based on the evaluation of moral behaviour, which focusses on moral reasoning regarding possible actions. The thoughts reflected fall within the field of normative ethics and apply deontic tense logic to discuss the possibilities and limitations of artificial moral agency. Findings – The authors stipulate a formalisation of logic of obligation, time and modality, which may serve as a candidate for implementing a system corresponding to an MTT in a restricted sense. Hence, the authors argue that to establish a present moral obligation, we need to be able to make a description of the actual situation and the relevant general moral rules. Such a description can never be complete, as the combination of exhaustive knowledge about both situations and rules would involve a God eye’s view, enabling one to know all there is to know and take everything relevant into consideration before making a perfect moral decision to act upon. Consequently, due to this frame problem, from an engineering point of view, we can only strive for designing a robot supposed to operate within a restricted domain and within a limited space-time region. Given such a setup, the robot has to be able to perform moral reasoning based on a formal description of the situation and any possible future developments. Although a system of this kind may be useful, it is clearly also limited to a particular context. It seems that it will always be possible to find special cases in which a given system does not pass the MTT. This calls for a new design of moral systems with trust-related components which will make it possible for the system to learn from experience. Originality/value – It is without doubt that in the near future we are going to be faced with advanced social robots with increasing autonomy, and our growing engagement with these robots calls for the exploration of ethical issues and stresses the importance of informing the process of engineering ethical robots. Our contribution can be seen as an early step in this direction. (shrink)

In Holism: A Shopper's Guide Fodor and LePore contend that there could be punctate minds; minds capable of being in only a single type of representational state. The Kantian idea that the construction of perceptual representations requires the synthesizing activity of the mind is invoked to argue against the possibility of punctate minds. Fodor's commitment to an inferential theory of perception is shown to share crucial assumptions with the Kantian view and hence to lead to the same conclusion. The argument (...) from the need for synthesis is then extended beyond the perceptual case to mental representation in general. (shrink)

Does Cantorian set theory alter our intuitive conception of number? Yes. In particular, Cantorian set theory revises our intuitive conception of when two sets have the same size (cardinal number). Consider a variant of Galileo’s Paradox, which notes that the members of the set of natural numbers, N, can be put in one-to-one correspondence with the members of the set of even numbers, E.

This book is the result of intensive and continued discussions about the social role of language and its conceptualisations in societies other than Northern (European-American) ones. Language as a means of expressing as well as evoking both interiority and community has been in the focus of these discussions, led among linguists, anthropologists, and Egyptologists, and leading to a collection of essays that provide studies that transcend previously considered approaches. Its contributions are in particular interested in understanding how the attitude of (...) the individual towards societal processes and strategies of norming is negotiated emotionally, and how individual interests and attitudes can be articulated. Discourses on public spaces are in the focus, in order to analyse those strategies that are employed to articulate dissent (for example, in the sense of face-threatening acts). This raises a number of questions on the spatial and public situatedness of emotions and language: How is the public space dealt with and reflected in language as property, heritage, and as a part of ascribed identities? Which role do emotions play in this space? How is emotion employed there as part of place making in relation to identity constructions? What is the connection between emotion, performance and emblematic spaces and places? Which opportunities of the violation of norms and transgression do such public spaces offer to actors and speakers? These questions intend to address the communicative representation of core cultural processes and concepts. (shrink)

In this text the author takes up Luce Irigaray’s call upon women to image their ‘God’: a quality or attribute that makes them divine women when they realize it in their lives. She presents ‘human dignity’ as such a ‘divine’ quality and as a value that is understood by many to be the ultimate of our human being. Inspired by Ina Praetorius’ expression that seven billion dignitaries walk the earth, the author connects the different aspects of the concept of human (...) dignity with the image of the dignitary, arguing that this image evokes the idea that the subject is free to move and is meant to flourish according to their capabilities. The author also discusses the difficulties of the idea of human flourishing as an ideal for humanity, especially in the context of disability and illness. She offers the notion of ‘becoming, infinitely’ as an alternative for flourishing. (shrink)

Depuis près d'un demi-siècle, Madame Hélène Ackermans a coopéré très activement à l'organisation de l'École des sciences philosophiques et religieuses des F.U.S.L. Avec Monseigneur Henri Van Camp, elle a donné à la tribune des leçons publiques sa renommée internationale; auprès de l'actuel comité de direction, elle n'a cessé de prodiguer ses multiples compétences et ses conseils avisés. En hommage à son travail, il a été demandé à quelques-uns des penseurs avec lesquels Madame Hélène Ackermans a noué des liens d'amitié, de (...) réfléchir au rôle de la philosophie dans la Cité. (shrink)