Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Imagerie Ce´re´brale (LENA), Hoˆpital de La Salpeˆtrie`re, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

In the psychological sciences, mindfulness practices are increasingly being used, studied, and theorized, but their indigenous theoretical foundations in Buddhist accounts of the dynamics and psychology of personal identity tend to be overlooked. This situation is mirrored in the discipline of philosophy: here, Buddhist views on personal identity are beginning to draw attention, but almost invariably in a way which entirely blanks out the role of mindfulness practices in cultivating Buddhist insights on selfhood. The aggregate result is a failure, in (...) the West, to reflect upon and seriously consider Buddhist theory and Buddhist practice in an integrated, holistic fashion. In its effort to overcome the compartmentalization of Buddhist theory (in philosophy) versus Buddhist practice (in psychology) and to embrace the challenges this might pose to fundamental Western beliefs about the self, this paper is intended both as a plea for and an exercise in greater, more venturesome cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

PLoS ONE 3(3): e1897. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.

Danchin argues that if scientists can reach a level of understanding of genomes, they will be able to resolve the major biological puzzle of the 21st century: the enigma of the living machine that creates the living machine.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Applied Geography, A World Perspective reviews progress in applied geography in different regions of the world. It does this through the eyes of an international panel of highly regarded academic practitioners. The book offers new prospects on the use of established approaches and explores exciting new territories. Together, the contributors provide a comprehensive picture of applied geography today. This book is of relevance to faculty and graduate students in the fields of geography, planning, public policy, regional science and other related (...) social and behavioural sciences. (shrink)

Trois cents ans après sa naissance, Kant reste l'un des rares philosophes auxquels toute pensée au présent doit, à un moment ou un autre, se confronter. Il y a du Kant, approprié ou récusé, dans les problèmes, thèses et débats d'aujourd'hui. Son actualité ne signifie pas nécessairement la permanence de la pertinence de ses analyses. Elle désigne le fait qu'il se trouve engagé dans et par les questionnements présents. L'actualité de Kant est celle d'un Kant depuis aujourd'hui, celle d'un Kant (...) contemporain. Et il est tout aussi contemporain dans son inactualité : c'est dans son écart à notre présent qu'il peut servir à le manifester, comme il peut inquiéter ses évidences et peut-être l'ouvrir à son avenir. Cet ouvrage rassemble huit contributions consacrées à cette (in)actualité de Kant. Elles envisagent les positions kantiennes qui permettent d'éclairer certaines discussions de notre temps, qui elles-mêmes nourrissent des lectures renouvelées du philosophe. Elles s'intéressent par ailleurs à la manière dont le rapport contemporain à Kant peut prendre la forme d'un retour, qu'il s'agisse d'un retour de Kant, d'un retour à Kant, d'un retour critique sur Kant, voire d'un recours à lui."--Back cover. (shrink)

Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole were philosophers and theologians associated with Port-Royal Abbey, a centre of the Catholic Jansenist movement in seventeenth-century France. Their enormously influential Logic or the Art of Thinking, which went through five editions in their lifetimes, treats topics in logic, language, theory of knowledge and metaphysics, and also articulates the response of 'heretical' Jansenist Catholicism to orthodox Catholic and Protestant views on grace, free will and the sacraments. In attempting to combine the categorical theory of (...) the proposition with a Cartesian account of knowledge, their Logic represents the classical view of judgment which inspired the modern transformation in logic and semantic theory by Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and recent philosophers. This edition presents a new translation of the text, together with a historical introduction and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

Antoine Pecquet wrote in the eighteenth century during the reign of Louis XV. Although he included Pascal among those he admired, he considered Alexander Pope his true mentor. In Part 1 of "Diverse Thoughts on Man," Pecquet reflects on Man's responsibilities as an individual: in Part 2, on Man's responsibilities as a member of society. Among these responsibilities he includes human and social concerns, such as parental and filial obligations, and the transfer of wealth between generations. In the tradition (...) of Montaigne, Pecquet intended his "Diverse Thoughts on Man" to help his readers learn more about themselves. Although he felt that those who would profit most from his book were readers who had not greatly pondered about themselves, he believed that every reader could find something of value in it. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage analyse le rapport aussi riche que complexe que le criticisme entretient avec l'empirisme, dont la problématique travaille de l'intérieur la philosophie kantienne, et qui la contraint à s'établir pour partie sur son propre terrain.

The capacity to stabilize the content of attention over time varies among individuals, and its impairment is a hallmark of several mental illnesses. Impairments in sustained attention in patients with attention disorders have been associated with increased trial-to-trial variability in reaction time and event-related potential deficits during attention tasks. At present, it is unclear whether the ability to sustain attention and its underlying brain circuitry are transformable through training. Here, we show, with dichotic listening task performance and electroencephalography, that training (...) attention, as cultivated by meditation, can improve the ability to sustain atten- tion. Three months of intensive meditation training reduced variability in attentional processing of target tones, as indicated by both enhanced theta-band phase consistency of oscillatory neural responses over anterior brain areas and reduced reaction time variability. Furthermore, those individuals who showed the greatest increase in neural response consistency showed the largest decrease in behav- ioral response variability. Notably, we also observed reduced variability in neural processing, in particular in low-frequency bands, regardless of whether the deviant tone was attended or unattended. Focused attention meditation may thus affect both distracter and target processing, perhaps by enhancing entrainment of neuronal oscillations to sensory input rhythms, a mechanism important for controlling the content of attention. These novel findings highlight the mechanisms underlying focused attention meditation and support the notion that mental training can significantly affect attention and brain function. (shrink)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The discovery of the concrete basis for genes, and especially the clarification of mechanisms regulating gene expressions (in particular those that bear on the stepwise processing of hereditary information from the sequences of DNA nucleotides to the proteins) was to give flesh to the concept of a genetic program, for these regulations introduce relationships of order between the various elements of information contained in the genes. These order relations are then revealed during the time-dependent expression of the genetic program. They (...) can lead, in the case of a given program, to a plethora of particular outcomes, because the number of possible combinations rapidly becomes enormous. Since the discoveries of Jacob and Monod, it is clear that the genes specifying the regulatory functions will be responsible for phenotypic variability, especially for the apparently ideal adaptation of a living organism to its environment, and more generally for all the genotype-bound manifestations as they unfold in time. -/- Thus we are led to consider three particular characteristics that allow for the representation of living beings: a program, which summarizes the hereditary constraints and is, in fact, the abstract notion underlying the definition of all individuals in a given class (species); an initial state of the system that represents the context in which the program must express itself at the time of the individual's birth; and a particular outcome of each program, which coincides with individual development. The set of all outcomes constitutes the genetic envelope and allows the essential characteristics of the program to be obtained by induction. Theoretically, a structured set equivalent to the aforementioned one could be reconstructed by providing the program, the initial state, and the totality of the events of the external environment, producing any interaction whatever with the individual. -/- As a consequence, the observation of a phenotype does not tell in any straightforward way, what is the direct consequence of the expression of a particular gene, or of a specific feature of the environment. A phenocopy is a particular example of a phenotype that is the result of a gene expression mimicking a particular gene-directed phenotype, without however corresponding to a pparticular mutation of a known gene. (shrink)

This paper seeks to lay down the theoretical groundwork for the emergence of holistic cross-cultural philosophical investigations of personal identity ¾ investigations that approach the theoretical, phenomenological, psychological, and practical-ethical dimensions of selfhood as indissociable. My strategy is to discuss three closely connected conceptual distinctions that the Buddhist approach to personal identity urges us to draw, and a lucid understanding of which is essential for the emergence of appropriately comprehensive and thus genuinely cosmopolitan discussions at the cross-road between Western and (...) Buddhist philosophical traditions. The first, primary distinction is that between the “visceral sense of self” and the “substance view of self”. This in turn gives rise to two derivative distinctions, namely between “harbouring VSS” and “believing SVS”, and between “overcoming VSS” and “rejecting SVS”. After discussing these distinctions, I consider and respond to three philosophical objections to features of Buddhist approach to selfhood that are thrown into sharper relief when attention is paid to these three distinctions. I then discuss some of the ways the foregoing may inform research in cross-cultural philosophy of personal identity. This discussion focuses on: the primacy of the first-person stance in matters of personal identity; the relationship between numerical identity and narrative identity; interdisciplinarity in the study of selfhood; and personal identity and egoism. (shrink)

Deux décennies après les premières vagues de démocratisation en Afrique, le temps n'est-il pas venu d'instruire le " procès " de la démocratie ?

The lasting effects of the debate over canon-formation during the 1980s affected the whole field of Humanities, which became increasingly engaged in interrogating the origin and function of the Western canon. In philosophy, a great deal of criticism was, as a result, directed at the traditional narrative of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophies—a critique informed by postcolonialism as well as feminist historiography. D. F. Norton, L. Loeb and many others1 attempted to demonstrate the weaknesses of the tripartite division between rationalism, empiricism and (...) critical philosophy.2 As time went on, symptoms of dissatisfaction with what has... (shrink)

Nietzsche once proclaimed himself the 'Buddha of Europe', and throughout his life Buddhism held enormous interest for him. While he followed Buddhist thinking in demolishing what he regarded as the two-headed delusion of Being and Self, he saw himself as advocating a response to the ensuing nihilist crisis that was diametrically opposed to that of his Indian counterpart. In this book Antoine Panaïoti explores the deep and complex relations between Nietzsche's views and Buddhist philosophy. He discusses the psychological models (...) and theories which underlie their supposedly opposing ethics of 'great health' and explodes the apparent dichotomy between Nietzsche's Dionysian life-affirmation and Buddhist life-negation, arguing for a novel, hybrid response to the challenge of formulating a tenable post-nihilist ethics. His book will interest students and scholars of Nietzsche's philosophy, Buddhist thought and the metaphysical, existential and ethical issues that emerge with the demise of theism. (shrink)

Examines the theories of translation by German romantics in the early 19th century, from Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and A.W. Schlegel to Schleiermacher, and compares them briefly to the contemporary, but contrasting, theories by Herder, ...

Ce compte rendu a déjà paru dans les Cahiers de géographie du Québec Vol. 62, n° 176, septembre septembre 2018, p. 343-366. L. Gwiazdzinski, La Ville 24 heures sur 24. Regards croisés sur la société en continu, Paris, Rhuthmos, 256 p. Présenté en préambule comme un plaidoyer pour la disponibilité « en continu » de la ville, ainsi que le titre du livre le signifie clairement, le propos de Luc Gwiazdzinski s'appuie sur le constat des formes diverses et multiples d'évolution (...) des modes de vivre la - Recensions. (shrink)

Publie en 1683 comme un preambule a la refutation du Traite de la nature et de la grace de Nicolas Malebranche, l'ouvrage Vraies et fausses idees d'Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) a connu un etonnant destin. Cette defense tres argumentee de la conception cartesienne des idees est peu a peu devenue un texte incontournable dans les debats de philosophie de la connaissance, cite et commente aussi bien par les auteurs classiques que dans les debats anglosaxons contemporains. Ce volume en propose la (...) premiere edition critique annotee en francais. Des annexes apportent en outre quelques outils pour se reperer dans l'important corpus de textes de philosophie de la connaissance rediges par Arnauld. (shrink)

Recent brain imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have implicated insula and anterior cingulate cortices in the empathic response to another’s pain. However, virtually nothing is known about the impact of the voluntary generation of compassion on this network. To investigate these questions we assessed brain activity using fMRI while novice and expert meditation practitioners generated a loving-kindness-compassion meditation state. To probe affective reactivity, we presented emotional and neutral sounds during the meditation and comparison periods. Our main hypothesis (...) was that the concern for others cultivated during this form of meditation enhances affective processing, in particular in response to sounds of distress, and that this response to emotional sounds is modulated by the degree of meditation training. The presentation of the emotional sounds was associated with increased pupil diameter and activation of limbic regions (insula and cingulate cortices) during meditation (versus rest). During meditation, activation in insula was greater during presentation of negative sounds than positive or neutral sounds in expert than it was in novice meditators. The strength of activation in insula was also associated with self-reported intensity of the meditation for both groups. These results support the role of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. The comparison between meditation vs. rest states between experts and novices also showed increased activation in amygdala, right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in response to all sounds, suggesting, greater detection of the emotional sounds, and enhanced mentation in response to emotional human vocalizations for experts than novices during meditation. Together these data indicate that the mental expertise to cultivate positive emotion alters the activation of circuitries previously linked to empathy and theory of mind in response to emotional stimuli.. (shrink)

Blaise Pascal is a marquee name, yet little read outside France. Antoine Compagnon provides an ideal introduction to one of the great intellects, contextualizing Pascal in his own time and offering insightful readings of the Pensées and the Provincial Letters. Compagnon proves a welcoming guide to Pascal's challenging and rewarding thought.