Cet article mène une lecture raisonnée des œuvres de Levinas allant de 1930 à 1961, dans le but d’expliquer la genèse et la logique de l’usage éthique de Descartes jusqu’à Totalité et infini où il se cristallise. Levinas, dans ses premiers textes sur la phénoménologie, confronte les pensées nouvelles de Husserl et Heidegger à l’idéalisme cartésien au détriment de celui-ci. Mais il met peu à peu en lumière la pertinence descriptive du cogito et de l’idée de l’infini, qu’il reprend dans (...) ses propres recherches philosophiques. En reprenant l’ordre cartésien formant le mouvement général des trois premières Méditations métaphysiques, Totalité et infini dessine le cadre définitif de l’interprétation de Descartes : l’usage de Descartes est la reprise dans l’éthique de l’intrigue liant le cogito à l’infini. (shrink)

Cet article est une version révisée d’un texte prononcé le 26 novembre 2018 à l’occasion de la journée organisée par l’université de Caen Normandie en hommage à Robert Legros, autour de son nouvel ouvrage intitulé Levinas. Une philosophie de l’altérité. Il mène une lecture critique de l’ouvrage guidée par une question essentielle : l’éthique de Levinas peut-elle prétendre au statut de phénoménologie, ou est-elle irrémédiablement liée à une théologie? En parcourant les chapitres du livre sur le temps, la relation à (...) autrui, le propre de l’homme et la politique, l’article examine la façon dont Robert Legros démontre le caractère universel des descriptions de l’humanité par Levinas – et ce en dépit de la référence nécessaire au langage de la Bible pour dire la responsabilité envers le visage. (shrink)

Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, Daniel Dennett asserts in this first full scale presentation of...

Daniel C. Dennett is a brilliant polemicist, famous for challenging unexamined orthodoxies. Over the last thirty years, he has played a major role in expanding our understanding of consciousness, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theory. And with such groundbreaking, critically acclaimed books as Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist), he has reached a huge general and professional audience. In this new book, Dennett shows that evolution is the key to resolving the ancient problems (...) of moral and political freedom. Like the planet's atmosphere on which life depends, the conditions on which our freedom depends had to evolve, and like the atmosphere, they continue to evolve-and could be extinguished. According to Dennett, biology provides the perspective from which we can distinguish the varieties of freedom that matter. Throughout the history of life on this planet, an interacting web and internal and external conditions have provided the frameworks for the design of agents that are more free than their parts-from the unwitting gropings of the simplest life forms to the more informed activities of animals to the moral dilemmas that confront human beings living in societies. As in his previous books, Dennett weaves a richly detailed narrative enlivened by analogies as entertaining as they are challenging. Here is the story of how we came to be different from all other creatures, how our early ancestors mindlessly created human culture, and then, how culture gave us our minds, our visions, our moral problems-in a nutshell, our freedom. (shrink)

Essays discuss reason, self-control, self-definition, time, cause and effect, accidents, and responsibility, and explain why people want free will.

In the final essay, the "intrinsic" nature of "qualia" is compared with the naively imagined "intrinsic value" of a dollar in ...

Several authors have argued that causes differ in the degree to which they are ‘specific’ to their effects. Woodward has used this idea to enrich his influential interventionist theory of causal explanation. Here we propose a way to measure causal specificity using tools from information theory. We show that the specificity of a causal variable is not well-defined without a probability distribution over the states of that variable. We demonstrate the tractability and interest of our proposed measure by measuring the (...) specificity of coding DNA and other factors in a simple model of the production of mRNA. (shrink)

This research examines how the fit between employees moral development and the ethical work climate of their organization affects employee attitudes. Person-organization fit was assessed by matching individuals' level of cognitive moral development with the ethical climate of their organization. The influence of P-O fit on employee attitudes was assessed using a sample of 304 individuals from 73 organizations. In general, the findings support our predictions that fit between personal and organizational ethics is related to higher levels of commitment and (...) job satisfaction and lower levels of turnover intent. Ethical P-O fit was related to higher levels of affective commitment across all three ethical climate types. Job satisfaction was only associated with ethical P-O fit for one of the three P-O fit variables and turnover intentions were significantly associated with two of the ethical P-O fit variables. The most consistent effect was found for the Conventional - Caring fit variable, which was significantly related to all three attitudes assessed. The weakest effect was found for the Preconventional - Instrumental fit variable, which was only predictive of affective commitment. The pattern of findings and implications for practice and future research are discussed. (shrink)

Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks—from the way monkeys in a troop communicate to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this article, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks and his formal measure (...) of information. Although Skyrms refers to both how information flows through networks and that signals carry information, we show that his formal measure only captures the latter. We then suggest that to capture the notion of flow in signalling networks, we need to treat them as causal networks. This provides the formal tools to define a measure that does capture flow, and we do so by drawing on recent work defining causal specificity. Finally, we suggest that this new measure is crucial if we wish to explain how evolution creates information. For signals to play a role in explaining their own origins and stability, they can’t just carry information about acts; they must be difference-makers for acts. _1_ Signalling, Evolution, and Information _2_ Skyrms’s Measure of Information _3_ Carrying Information versus Information Flow _3.1_ Example 1 _3.2_ Example 2 _3.3_ Example 3 _4_ Signalling Networks Are Causal Networks _4.1_ Causal specificity _4.2_ Formalizing causal specificity _5_ Information Flow as Causal Control _5.1_ Example 1 _5.2_ Examples 2 and 3 _5.3_ Average control implicitly ‘holds fixed’ other pathways _6_ How Does Evolution Create Information? _7_ Conclusion Appendix >. (shrink)

An enlightening discussion that will motivate students to think critically, the book opens with Plantinga's assertion that Christianity is compatible with evolutionary theory because Christians believe that God created the living world, and it is entirely possible that God did so by using a process of evolution.

In the last twenty years, a large number of studies have investigated judgments of the identity of various objects (e.g., persons, material objects, institutions) over time. One influential strand of research has found that identity judgments are shaped by normative considerations. People tend to believe that moral improvement is more compatible with the continuity of identity of a person than moral deterioration, suggesting that persons are taken to be essentially morally good. This asymmetry is often referred to as the “Phineas (...) Gage effect”. However, normativity extends beyond morality. In particular, it is unknown whether changes in aesthetic value have a similar impact on identity judgments. We investigate whether works of art would be analogously seen as essentially aesthetically valuable. We ran four studies (N=1264) to explore whether aesthetic considerations have a similar influence on judgments of the identity of artworks. We presented the participants with stories describing either a painting or a musical work which undergoes changes and becomes either more or less aesthetically valuable. Overall, we found only mixed evidence for the Phineas Gage effect in relation to the aesthetic value of artworks. Other factors, such as moral value, seem to have a bigger impact on judgments of persistence. (shrink)

Reviews the history of teaching in the United States over three hundred years, and describes aspects of recruitment, organization, and logic particular to the profession.

Recent findings suggest that multiple event properties contribute to shape the phenomenology of episodic future thoughts, but the specific role of each property is not yet fully understood. This study shows that different phenomenological features are predicted by distinct event properties. The vividness of an episodic future thought largely depends on the familiarity of its constitutive elements , while the visual perspective adopted is instead related to the temporal distance of the imagined event. Cognitive feelings such as the sense of (...) pre-experiencing the future depend on sensory–perceptual qualities, and are further modulated by the personal importance attributed to the event. These findings suggest that the essence of episodic future thought—the sensation of mentally visiting one’s personal future—lies, in part, in the relevance of imagined events with respect to personal goals. (shrink)

Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996a) found that human infants are sensitive to statistical regularities corresponding to lexical units when hearing an artificial spoken language. Two sorts of segmentation strategies have been proposed to account for this early word‐segmentation ability: bracketing strategies, in which infants are assumed to insert boundaries into continuous speech, and clustering strategies, in which infants are assumed to group certain speech sequences together into units (Swingley, 2005). In the present study, we test the predictions of two computational (...) models instantiating each of these strategies i.e., Serial Recurrent Networks: Elman, 1990; and Parser: Perruchet & Vinter, 1998 in an experiment where we compare the lexical and sublexical recognition performance of adults after hearing 2 or 10 min of an artificial spoken language. The results are consistent with Parser’s predictions and the clustering approach, showing that performance on words is better than performance on part‐words only after 10 min. This result suggests that word segmentation abilities are not merely due to stronger associations between sublexical units but to the emergence of stronger lexical representations during the development of speech perception processes. (shrink)

In bioethics, the first decade of the twenty-first century was characterized by the emergence of interest in the ethical, legal, and social aspects of neuroscience research. At the same time an ongoing extension of the topics and phenomena addressed by neuroscientists was observed alongside its rise as one of the leading disciplines in the biomedical science. One of these phenomena addressed by neuroscientists and moral psychologists was the neural processes involved in moral decision-making. Today both strands of research are often (...) addressed under the label of neuroethics. To understand this development we recalled literature from 1995 to 2012 stored in the Mainz Neuroethics Database (i) to investigate the quantitative development of scientific publications in neuroethics; (ii) to explore changes in the topics of neuroethics research within the defined time interval; (iii) to illustrate the interdependence of different research topics within the neuroethics literature; (iv) to show the development of the distribution of neuroethics research on peer-reviewed journals; and (v) to display the academic background and affiliations of neuroethics Researchers ... (shrink)

In the philosophical literature, self-deception is mainly approached through the analysis of paradoxes. Yet, it is agreed that self-deception is motivated by protection from distress. In this paper, we argue, with the help of findings from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, that self-deception is a type of affective coping. First, we criticize the main solutions to the paradoxes of self-deception. We then present a new approach to self-deception. Self-deception, we argue, involves three appraisals of the distressing evidence: (a) appraisal of the (...) strength of evidence as uncertain, (b) low coping potential and (c) negative anticipation along the lines of Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. At the same time, desire impacts the treatment of flattering evidence via dopamine. Our main proposal is that self-deception involves emotional mechanisms provoking a preference for immediate reward despite possible long-term negative repercussions. In the last part, we use this emotional model to revisit the philosophical paradoxes. (shrink)

Cet essai présente une description de plusieurs travaux inédits de Jacques Derrida au sujet de Marx et d'Althusser datant des années 1960 et 1970. Au-delà du travail philologique, il s'agit aussi d'une étude théorique de notions telles que 'idéologie', 'fétichisme', 'reproduction', 'division du travail', 'différence sexuelle', 'domination', 'économie politique', 'matérialisme dialectique', ou 'production culturelle' — tout autant à travers les textes marxistes que dans les lectures déconstructives qu'en propose alors Derrida. Durant les années 1970, dans le cadre de son séminaire, (...) Derrida s'efforce de penser une autre économie politique, au-delà de l'économie du propre qu'il identifie aussi bien chez les économistes classiques que chez leurs critiques marxistes. Ces lectures détaillées et combattives de textes marxistes restent aujourd'hui inédites. Leur prise en compte contribue à redéfinir l'image de Derrida et de la déconstruction, en témoignant de ses discussions très avancées de Marx, d'Althusser, et de la pensée marxiste — et ce dès la fin des années 1960 et le début des années 1970, plus de 20 ans avant la publication de Spectres de Marx (1993). -/- Une version plus courte de cet article fut traduite en espagnol par Ramiro Parodi, et publiée en 2019 dans le numéro 7 de la revue Demarcaciones — numéro consacré au 25ème anniversaire de la publication de Spectres de Marx. (shrink)

Background Interest in biobanking for collection of specimens for non-communicable diseases research has grown in recent times. This paper explores the perspectives of Nigerians on donation of specimen for the biobanking research. Methods We conducted 16 Focus Group Discussions (FGD) with individuals from different ethnic, age and socio-economic groups in Kano (North), Enugu (Southeast), Oyo States (Southwest) and Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory (Central) of Nigeria. We used topic guides and prompt statements to explore the knowledge and understanding of interviewees (...) to general issues about biobanking of biospecimens, their use and specifically about role of biobanking in non-communicable diseases research. Results A total of 123 individuals participated in 16 focus group discussions in 2011. Our participants had limited knowledge of the concept of biobanking but accepted it once they were educated about it and saw it as a worthwhile venture. Half of our study participants supported use of broad consent, a quarter supported restricted consent while the remaining quarter were in favour of tiered consent. Most discussants support shipment of their samples to other countries for further research, but they prefer those collaborations to be done only with competent, ethical researchers and they would like to receive feedback about such projects. The majority preferred health care as a benefit from participation, particularly for any unexpected condition that may be discovered during the course of the research instead of financial compensation. Participants emphasized the need to ensure that donated samples were not used for research that contradicts their religious beliefs. Conclusions Our study demonstrates that our participants accepted biobanking once they understand it but there were different attitudes to elements of biobanking such as type of consent. Our study highlights the need to carefully document population attitudes to elements of modern scientific research and the consenting process. (shrink)

Allen (2001) proposed the “Getting Things Done” (GTD) method for personal productivity enhancement, and reduction of the stress caused by information overload. This paper argues that recent insights in psychology and cognitive science support and extend GTD’s recommendations. We first summarize GTD with the help of a flowchart. We then review the theories of situated, embodied and distributed cognition that purport to explain how the brain processes information and plans actions in the real world. The conclusion is that the brain (...) heavily relies on the environment, to function as an external memory, a trigger for actions, and a source of affordances, disturbances and feedback. We then show how these principles are practically implemented in GTD, with its focus on organizing tasks into “actionable” external memories, and on opportunistic, situation-dependent execution. Finally, we propose an extension of GTD to support collaborative work, inspired by the concept of stigmergy. (shrink)

Este ensayo presenta una descripción de los escritos inéditos de Jacques Derrida sobre Marx y Louis Althusser en la década de 1970, y un estudio de conceptos como ideología, diferencia sexual, reproducción, violencia, dominación o hegemonía en perspectiva deconstructiva. Se trata de pensar en una otra economía, más allá de la economía del cuerpo propio. El artículo fue publicado en el Volumen 7 de la Revista Demarcaciones, "a 25 años de Espectros de Marx.".

We consider three possible reasons why humans might accord a privileged status to emotional information when mentally traveling backward or forward in time. First, mental simulation of emotional situations helps one to make adaptive decisions. Second, it can serve an emotion regulation function. Third, it helps people to construct and maintain a positive view of the self.

This study examined narrative identity in a group of 81 patients with schizophrenia and 50 healthy controls through the recall of self-defining memories. The results indicated that patients’ narratives were less coherent and elaborate than those of controls. Schizophrenia patients were severely impaired in the ability to make connections with the self and extract meaning from their memories, which significantly correlated with illness duration. In agreement with earlier research, patients exhibited an early reminiscence bump. Moreover, the period of the reminiscence (...) bump, which is highly relevant for identity development, was characterized by fewer achievements and more life-threatening event experiences, compared with controls. A negative correlation was found between negative symptoms, number of self-event connections and specificity of narratives. Our results suggest that schizophrenia patients have difficulties to organize and extract meaning from their past experiences in order to create coherent personal narratives. (shrink)

In this article, we delve in debates around the usefulness of the notion of epistemic injustice in psychiatry to show that the concept has been misportrayed in the literature. We suggest that epistemic injustice should revolve around phenomenology and regard first and foremost the failure of mental health professionals to acquire and utilize information that service users are experts in, i.e. first-person testimony pertaining to what it is like to be them. We use this conceptualization to demonstrate the unique benefits (...) that the concept of epistemic injustice can bring to psychiatric practice, and we illustrate these through specific case studies, focusing particularly on autism. (shrink)

The practice of self-diagnosing, amplified by the spread of psychiatric knowledge through social media, has grown rapidly. Yet, the motivations behind this trend, and, critically, its psychological repercussions remain poorly understood. Self-ascribing a psychiatric label always occurs within a broader narrative context, with narratives serving as essential interpretive tools for understanding oneself and others.In this paper, we identify four principal motivators for people pursuing self-diagnosis, pertaining to 1. waiting time and cost of mental health resources, 2. recognition, 3. identity formation, (...) and 4. destigmatization. We compare these motivators against the backdrops of psychiatric narratives, including DSM-based (operationalism), bio-medical, and Neurodiversity narratives, to evaluate the psychological implications of self-ascriptions. We show that while self-ascription aligns with many motivations, it also carries the risk of essentialism across all analyzed narratives, which can over-simplify and sometimes misrepresent people’s attempts to find meaning through psychiatric labels. Essentialism makes narratives less comprehensive, responsive, and resourceful.We contend that self-ascriptions are not inherently problematic; instead, they show the need for greater focus and understanding in psychiatric practices and the importance of incorporating people’s experiences and perspectives in clinical settings. However, both the narratives and the social climate from which they emerge may need adjustments to make self-ascriptions meaningful, comprehensive, and resourceful tools. (shrink)

In this 2004 interview — translated into English and published in its entirety for the first time — Jacques Derrida reflects upon his practices of writing and teaching, about the community of his readers, and explores questions related to corporeity and textuality, sexual difference, desire, politics, Marxism, violence, truth, interpretation, and translation. In the course of the interview, Derrida discusses the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Blanchot, Hélène Cixous, Jean Genet, Paul Celan, and many others.

Abstract In initial teacher training, the micro-teaching activities and retroaction have for goals to develop reflexive practitioners and competent professionals with a high professional identity. The double analyze of the teacher’s action – observation of teacher gestures and analysis of retroaction - requires two complementary methods to make the links between interactive and postactive phase. In this article, the authors describe the different training activities, and explain the research approach with an illustration of a concrete case. En formation initiale des (...) enseignants, les activités de micro-enseignement et de rétroaction vidéo ont pour objectif de former des praticiens réflexifs et des professionnels compétents dotés d’une identité forte. La double lecture de l’action, via l’observation des gestes professionnels et l’analyse des traces de réflexivité survenues contenu lors des entretiens de rétroactions, nécessite de mettre en place deux méthodes complémentaires, ceci afin de faire les liens entre phase interactive et phase postactive. Dans cet article, après avoir détaillé le dispositif de formation, les auteurs exposent leurs démarches en les illustrant par le cas concret d’une future enseignante. (shrink)

This thought piece dealing with the Covid-19 ‘crisis’ was written – in the form of a diary that runs from February to July 2020 – for a special issue of Derrida Today entitled ‘Fire, Flood, Pestilence and Protest’, edited by Nicole Anderson, and published in November 2020. The piece deals with matters of biopolitics, telecommunication, death and mourning through Derrida and Agamben, and interrogates the eventness of what is called an ‘event’.

This article constitutes a substantial introduction to the thematic issue “Matters.” After introducing briefly the scattered constellation described by some as “new materialism” or “the material turn,” as well as its main concepts and methods, I offer a deconstructive reflection on “the turn” by challenging a series of theoretical gestures meant to coalesce the turn to materiality in contemporary continental philosophy—starting with the exclusion of the much maligned “linguistic turn” and the opposition to an “old” concept of matter presented as (...) passive, inert, and mechanistic. I analyze how these two exclusions—precarious as they may be—allow for a relative coalescence of the new “scene” while betraying its essential heterogeneity and self-inadequacy. I thus interrogate the conditions that make the position of a “new” materialism possible, giving it force and necessity, while questioning what the production of this so-called novelty potentially obfuscates. After raising a series of questions related to new materialism’s conceptuality, I introduce the contributions that make up the thematic issue. I also provide a substantial bibliography to help the reader navigate the material turn as well as its various critiques from the perspectives of philosophical history, object-oriented ontology, social and ethico-political theory, deconstruction, critical race studies, or other perspectives on materialist theory. (shrink)