RésuméLa sémiotique a inventé ou utilisé plusieurs modèles logiques pour représenter la structure élémentaire de la signification. Le carré sémiotique est sans doute l’un des plus célèbres de ces modèles. Il faut se demander, devant l’importance des phénomènes triadiques, si les modèles dyadiques sont (toujours) adaptés à leur description ou s’il ne faudrait pas se tourner (aussi) vers des modèles triadiques. Or, les modèles triadiques de la structure élémentaire de la signification nous apparaissent bien moins nombreux. À notre connaissance, seule (...) la sémiotique de Peirce et le templum de Boudon occupent cet espace autrement laissé vacant. Nous voulons ici à la fois présenter et exemplifier le templum et le compléter, en nous inspirant du carré sémiotique, pour le faire évoluer vers un « prisme sémiotique ». Nous proposerons également d’autres modèles logiques, comme le pentalemme et le cube sémiotiques. Au passage, nous étudierons plusieurs questions et problèmes – dont la décidabilité – entourant les modèles logiques. Nous ferons quelques applications sommaires de certains modèles, sur le temps, l’espace et la transcendance principalement. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article a pour objectif d’introduire la géoesthésique, une approche des sciences de la culture traitant des interactions entre l’espace et la réception sémiotique. Le tournant spatial des arts et des sciences de la fin du vingtième a inspiré la création de plusieurs nouvelles approches liées à l’espace et au territoire. La Géopoétique de Kenneth White, la Géocritique de Westphal et plus tard de Prieto et Tally, la Géoesthétique de Quirós et Imhoff et éventuellement même la géosymbolique travaillée par (...) Mario Bédard et Christiane Lahaie (2008). C’est en remarquant l’absence, parmi toutes ces approches, d’une approche dont le point central serait, non pas l’espace, mais la réception, et son lien avec l’espace, que Louis Hébert nous a suggérer de concevoir et de rédiger les prémisses d’une telle approche. La géoesthésique serait ainsi une approche pratique et expérimentale grâce à laquelle on pourrait observer l’impact que peut avoir l’espace sur la réception sémiotique d’un élément donné ou l’influence d’une réception sémiotique donnée sur la perception d’un espace fixe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 717 the work of Arthur Danto. Here the stimulus to reflection is those elements in modern art which " make a farce of traditional art and art theories hy giving us artworks indiscernible from objects found on grocery shelves or in lavatories." If, as Danto suggests, whatever is to count as art is simply what an " artworld " decrees, then the distinction between artefact and (...) artwork can disappear completely (except in terms of somebody's bank balance). The trouble with the remaining essays in this collection is that their authors have not appropriated a truth given lapidary expression in Woods' essay on Kant: "Attention to the works of genius throughout the ages cultivates the sensus communis and establishes a community involved in the beautiful." Thus, while Ted Cohen is right to consider television a possible artistic medium, the objects of televisual appreciation he considers usually witness to a breakdown of a community involved in the beautiful, while the frequently nugatory objects discussed in John Brough's "Who's Afraid of Marcel Duchamp? " testify to the disintegration of the sensus communis concerned. Finally, if Paul Weiss is right in his "Creativity and Beauty" not only to designate beauty " the excellence pertinent to the creation of a work of art," but also to house it together with the quartet of truth, goodness, glory, and justice, then we can get a sense of how wisdom in both philosophy and artistic practice might he restored: through a re· discovery of the interdependence of the transcendentals. But perhaps only the Judaeo-Christian revelation now holds the key to this possibility. AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P. Blackfriars Cambridge, England Through the Tempest: Theological Voyages in a Pluralistic Culture. By LANGDON GILKEY. Ed. Jeff B. Pool. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991. Pp. xx + 252. Langdon Gilkey: Theologian for a Culture in Decline. By BRIAN J. WALSH. Lanham, MD: University Press of America/Institute for Christian Studies, 1991. Pp. xii + 324. $47.50 (cloth); $22.50 (paper). With the exception of two mid-1970s papers, Through the Tempest is a collection of some of the addresses and essays written in the 1980s hy Langdon Gilkey, Shailer Mathews Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Title and subtitle are meant to re· 718 BOOK REVIEWS fleet three elements of Gilkey's temper. First, the tempest corresponds to his dramatic vision of the twentieth-century world, with its wars, up· heavals, and destructive forces. Second, the preposition through expresses the sober hope that for all the darkness that surrounds our century, we are actually moving toward a destination beyond the turmoil. And third, his explorations and assessments of the many facets of contemporary culture are theological voyages. In these pages readers will find many of the themes Gilkey has tackled over the years, such as God, Jesus, Creation, Providence, spirituality, the function of symbols, ethics, suffering and death, Christianity and other religions, faith and science, church and public policy. Among the most original pieces are, to my mind, Ch. 10, on the different attitudes to ethics in Christianity and Buddhism, and Ch. 14, which clarifies many aspects of suffering. The general readership made up of those interested in religion will probably enjoy these lectures, while specialists in theology or human studies are likely to find them merely impressionistic and too vague both in their cultural analyses and in their conceptual discussions. Further, there is a discrepancy between Gilkey's assessment of the human predicament and :the theological solutions he puts forward. On the one hand, the mood and the content of his assessment is neo· orthodox (inspired by his master Reinhold Niebuhr). For instance, chapters 11 and 13, on evil and sin, are typical of an acute awareness of the dark side of human conduct. As he follows this vein, Gilkey raises pertinent, profound, and difficult questions. On :the other hand, his prescriptions do not match the depth of his diagnoses. Despite his efforts at overcoming theological liberalism, he often remains confined within the limits of the Western Enlightenment. For example, like most eighteenth-century thinkers, he rejects "a level of grace beyond nature " (54). What he repudiates is in all likeliness the modern separation between nature and supernature, and... (shrink)

One of the main reasons for providing formal semantics for languages is that the mathematical precision afforded by such semantics allows us to study and manipulate the formalization much more easily than if we were to study the relevant natural languages directly. Michael Tye and R. M. Sainsbury have argued that traditional set-theoretic semantics for vague languages are all but useless, however, since this mathematical precision eliminates the very phenomenon (vagueness) that we are trying to capture. Here we meet this (...) objection by viewing formalization as a process of building models, not providing descriptions. When we are constructing models, as opposed to accurate descriptions, we often include in the model extra ‘machinery’ of some sort in order to facilitate our manipulation of the model. In other words, while some parts of a model accurately represent actual aspects of the phenomenon being modelled, other parts might be merely artefacts of the particular model. With this distinction in place, the criticisms of Sainsbury and Tye are easily dealt with—the precision of the semantics is artefactual and does not represent any real precision in vague discourse. Although this solution to this problem is independent of any particular semantics a detailed account of how we would distinguish between representor and artefact within Dorothy Edgington's degree-theoretic semantics is presented. (shrink)

The contemporary discussion of non-conceptual content inaugurated by Gareth Evans and John McDowell has generated a range of differing views as to Kant's position on the issues raised. I argue that for Kant perception is prior to thought and that it is as being prior that perception connects us to reality in outer intuition. I then argue that for Kant thought relates to perception by being the rule for perceptual procedures. This accounts for thought's extending in scope beyond what we (...) actually perceive to all that is manifest in space and time. As against Merleau-Ponty this Kantian understanding of thought beyond perception does not distort the nature of reality which remains essentially that which can be engaged. (shrink)

I WISH to defend the claim that imagining what it would be like to be in "someone else's shoes" can serve to explain that person's actions. This commonsense view has considerable plausibility, but requires clarification to be philosophically defensible; discussions of explanation often assume that understanding requires a theory of the thing understood. If understanding requires a theory, then however much imagining what it would be like to be in another person's situation might sooth one's curiosity, it cannot provide real (...) understanding. I shall argue that imagining oneself in someone else's situation does more than that: it allows actions to be explained without recourse to a theory of human behavior. The resulting explanations are real explanations, not just some reassuring facsimile thereof. (shrink)

Vient ensuite une approche du style des philosophes dans son rapport à la construction même d'un système argumentatif autant qu'à divers modes d'expression : langage et littérarité donc, afin de sonder les voies de la création chez ...

SummaryThe outbreak of war in 1914 found Britain unprepared for a lengthy conflict. British science and industry were particularly ill-prepared to meet the demands of static warfare. Within two years, however, mobilization had made appreciable strides, and, as Britain's munitions industries moved from crisis to confidence, Britain's chemical industry was transformed by an arsenal of ‘garrison chemists’, with skills either born of necessity or borrowed from overseas. At the same time, Britain's chemical leadership traced a path that led them from (...) voluntarist to corporate methods, from private to public initiatives, and from individual to collective behaviours. This paper suggests four key stages in this mobilization, and hints at the significance of the war for the emergence of new sub-disciplines, for the careers of chemists, for academic-government relations in research, and for the image, status, and international position of British chemistry on the threshold of the postwar world. (shrink)

This paper addresses the “inefficiency loophole” in the Bell theorem. We examine factorizable stochastic models for the Bell inequalities, where we allow the detection efficiency to depend both on the “hidden” state of the measured system and also its passage through an analyzer. We show that, nevertheless, if the efficiency functions are symmetric between the two wings of the experiment, one can dispense with supplementary assumptions and derive new inequalities that enable the models to be tested even for highly inefficient (...) experiments. (shrink)

This book has a twofold purpose: the first is to trace the development of cosmology, the study of the universe, and the second is to demonstrate the limitation of science. Dr. Peacock questions the idea that the universe is infinite, showing that science can answer the hows of the universe, but not the whys.

It's well known that we have lost touch with Nature. It is not so much that Nature has retreated, or that we have dismissed it, destroyed it, or denied it.

Morphogenetic fields of thought, flux and transformation, energy and light are the manifestations that inform a new sensibility for creating realities and exploring the world. We are seeing the emergence of a new moistmedia culture and the possibilities of a syncretic art that combines aspects of a vast transdisciplinary field. Historically, syncretism has destabilized political and religious orthodoxies, reconciling and harmonizing formerly discrete antagonists; its etymology derives from the coming together of opposed tribes to resist a common enemy. In contemporary (...) culture, the enemy is habit - the uncritical repetition of behaviours, perceptions, categories and values. Just as cybernetics analogizes differences between systems, so syncretism finds likeness between unlike things. If cybernetics underlies the technology of new media art, syncretism informs the psyche. In the context of telematics, it is a matter of heuristics and heteronymia. The digital moment in art is passing as it approaches the status of orthodoxy; the period of discovery through extreme speculation, invention and untrammelled creativity is in danger of giving way to academicism and commercialization, whether in cyberspace, on the Web or through the mobile. Art's twentieth-century preoccupation with the body is giving way to the technoetic exploration of new territories of mind. This may involve revisiting the pathways to personal transformation and transcendence of older cultures, where the syncretism of knowledge and beliefs, as for example in Brazil, is explicit. Art needs to adopt syncretic strategies to embrace emerging models of mind and matter, cyberception, living process and computational systems, moist-media, quantum reality, the nanofield, and ecological, social and spiritual issues. This may lead to significant changes in the way we regard our own identity, our relationship to others, the nature of memory, the exploration of consciousness, and the phenomenology of time and space. (shrink)

There is an apparent ambiguity in Thomas Hobbes’s account in Leviathan1 of the source of the sovereign’s right to punish. Hobbes appears to both claim and deny that the prospective sovereign is granted the right to punish by prospective subjects. In claiming that the sovereign is granted the right to punish, we understand Hobbes to hold that the acquisition of the right follows from authorization—a process by which a representative is commissioned to act on the behalf of another person. In (...) denying that the sovereign is granted the right to punish, we understand Hobbes to hold that the possession of the right is merely the product of the mass relinquishment of natural rights; the prospective sovereign alone does .. (shrink)

America is experiencing a cultural malaise. As art historians Arthur Pontynen and Rod Miller show in this penetrating new book, our current cultural struggles result from repeated attempts to deny the qualitative foundation for culture that distinguishes civilization from barbarism. Tracing American art, science, and philosophy from the colonial era to the present, Western Culture at the American Crossroads reveals how a distinctively American culture emerged and where it went wrong. Culture cannot be merely a matter of personal or (...) group preferences; it must be dedicated to the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. But as Pontynen and Miller skillfully chronicle, modernism and postmodernism have developed dangerously limited understandings of science and reason that do not simply limit art but actually lead to bitter conflict and violence. The authors discuss dozens of works of art and architecture -- many of them featured in this beautifully illustrated work. But Western Culture at the American Crossroads in no mere art history treatise; it connects many dots in American intellectual history, demonstrating how what a culture believes relates to how it acts and what art it produces. Standing athwart trends that reduce culture to a matter of lifestyle and "taste," Western Culture at the American Crossroads makes a powerful case that the free and responsible pursuit of wisdom desperately needs to be renewed. Pontynen and Miller ultimately reveal the emerging threats not only to American and Western culture but to the very possibility of culture itself. - Publisher. (shrink)

In theories which contribute to the understanding of uncertainty in entrepreneurial action, scholars have traditionally attributed a negative connotation to uncertainty. This paper seeks to posit an understanding of uncertainty derived from Greek and Indian philosophy, where action of the human agent is not deterred by uncertainty, and rather, occurs despite uncertainty. This idea may be beneficial in making future entrepreneurs less apprehensive about uncertainty, by helping them locate the lessons from philosophy. I look at existing ideas that explore uncertainty (...) in entrepreneurial motivation, and present a multidisciplinary approach which sees uncertainty as a force that increases intent of action, rather than deterring it by drawing on the understanding of consequence and action in Aristotelean thought and Hindu philosophy, and extend the concepts of tuche and karma to posit a theoretical position which sees uncertainty as a factor that encourages entrepreneurial action and motivation. The understanding of uncertainty in management literature has been approached primarily from two disciplinary positions - economics and organisational theory. In economics, the classical understanding of uncertainty which commenced with Frank Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921), was largely abandoned in later years for a more quantifiable approach of calculating risk. Uncertainty, characteristically nebulous and difficult to grapple with, is unquantifiable. It is defined, in fact, by Knight, as something which cannot be predicted and quantified. Thus, in academics, where almost all disciplines try to make sense of the way the world works, uncertainty has always been a problematic concept. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between the works of Agamben and Jacques Derrida. Arthur Willemse explains how Agamben’s thought renders Derridean terminology inoperative—by suspending the suspense of signification. He argues that this is Agamben’s way of undoing a theological structure of thought that philosophy has unknowingly appropriated.