Les travaux de Patrice Bret occupent une place centrale en histoire des sciences et en histoire des techniques. Ce livre entend les mettre à l'honneur, qu'il s'agisse de l'histoire des savoirs académiques, du régime techno-politique du XVIIIe siècle, des interactions entre savants et praticiens à l'heure de la chimie lavoisienne, des circulations culturelles et des traductions ou encore de la place des femmes de sciences. Les contributions réunies dans ce volume illustrent, par leur diversité, l'influence de Patrice (...) Bret dans la communauté historienne. Nous proposons ainsi de mettre en perspective son oeuvre en la replaçant dans un contexte intellectuel, scientifique et épistémologique. Un constat s'impose : loin de distinguer entre les approches conceptuelles, érudites et méthodologiques, Patrice Bret joue un rôle de premier plan dans un milieu scientifique qui a choisi de conjuguer le renouvellement des questionnements avec la production d'instruments de recherche et les interrogations de repérage, de dénomination, d'identification, seules à même de contrer les récits téléologiques qui ont longtemps prévalu dans ce domaine. Si l'histoire des sciences et l'histoire des techniques sont de nos jours à l'avant-poste du renouvellement de la science historique, c'est aussi grâce au rôle de passeur de Patrice Bret. (shrink)

Parent pauvre de la formation polytechnicienne à l’époque de Poincaré, la chimie resta en dehors des centres d’intérêt du savant malgré l’importance sociale qu’elle acquit à la fin du xixe siècle. Le mathématicien, physicien et philosophie y fut confronté assez fortuitement en 1907 comme président de la Commission scientifique d’étude des poudres de guerre créée après l’explosion du cuirassé Iéna car Marcellin Berthelot, qui avait été pressenti comme éminent spécialiste des poudres et explosifs mourut dans l’intervalle. Dans un contexte international (...) tendu entre la France et l’Allemagne depuis l’annexion de l’Alsace-Moselle en 1871 et alors que la crise marocaine relança l’esprit de revanche, cet accident catastrophique porta un rude coup à la confiance du pays dans ses moyens de défense. Le gouvernement jugea alors que seul Poincaré avait l’autorité scientifique nécessaire pour rassurer l’opinion publique sur la sécurité des poudres sans fumée issues de l’industrie chimique inventées par son camarade de promotion Paul Vieille et maintenir l’ennemi à distance. Les archives de la Commission et la correspondance administrative de Poincaré témoignent de son investissement. Sa correspondance personnelle avec Henry Le Chatelier, autre ingénieur X-Mines spécialiste des poudres et explosifs, permet de mieux cerner son appréhension des problèmes complexes posés par les nouvelles poudres et de dévoiler sa stratégie pour contourner les blocages institutionnels dus à la rivalité entre le service producteur des Poudres et salpêtres et les services consommateurs de l’Artillerie et la Marine et aux attaques contre le monopole des poudres de la part des industriels et de leurs partisans au Parlement. (shrink)

(1993). Le Dernier des procédés révolutionnaires: La fabrication et l'expertise de la Poudre Ronde (1795–1830) Annals of Science: Vol. 50, No. 4, pp. 325-347.

Le Dépôt général de la Guerre, chargé de fournir les cartes nécessaires aux armées, connut sous la Révolution une période d'instabilité. La politique ambitieuse de Calon, son directeur, se heurta à la rivalité d'autres institutions civiles et militaires. Une période de lente reconstruction s'ouvrit avec le pouvoir napoléonien qui posa les bases rationnelles de la cartographie moderne et mit fin à la précarité du statut des ingénieurs-géographes en militarisant leur corps. La création simultanée d'une Ecole d'application des ingénieurs-geographes assura dès (...) lors une formation cohérente et de haut niveau dans le sillage de l'Ecole polytechnique, remplaçant les cours créés au Dépôt par Calon qui avaient jusqu'alors conservé jalousement leur autonomie. Puissant, qui y fut pendant vingt ans le professeur de mathématiques, introduisit l'analyse à l'école. Son oeuvre fut consacrée par son élection à l'Académie des Sciences au siège de Laplace et par le succès de la nouvelle carte de France au 1/80 000. L'ensemble de la période est marqué par la prise de conscience des enjeux de la géographie, par la mise en place des outils scientifiques de la cartographie et par la professionnalisation des ingénieurs-géographes. Disposant de son école et de son journal au même titre que les grands corps techniques, le Dépôt général de la Guerre était alors, entre l'Ecole polytechnique et le Bureau des Longitudes, une institution savante reconnue par la communauté scientifique.The Dépôt général de la Guerre, in charge of military mapping, experienced a period of change during the French Revolution. The new trends which then arose are explored here. Firstly, its director Calon failed in setting up an ambitious policy for geography, which challenged other civilian or military institutions. The courses he instituted to train surveyors collapsed. A time of slow reconstruction followed under Napoleonic rule, when the rational bases of modern cartography were laid as the ingénieurs-géographes were given a firm military status. In fact, a training school was created within the Ecole Polytechnique system, instead of the obsolete independent training courses. Henceforth, a high-level, coherent education was provided. Puissant, who was to teach mathematics there for twenty years, introduced analysis into the new school. His geodesic work was honoured by his succeeding Laplace at the Académie des Sciences, and by the success of the new 1:80 000 map of France. Eventually, the awareness of the importance of geography, the establishment of modern scientific tools in cartography, and the professionalization of the ingénieurs-géographes mark the whole period. The Dépôt général de la Guerre had its own school and journal, like any other corps of the technical Establishment. Thus it was a true scientific institution between the Ecole Polytechnique and the Bureau des Longitudes, and the scientific community recognized it as such. (shrink)

SUMMARYEighteenth-century scientific translation was not just a linguistic or intellectual affair. It included numerous material aspects requiring a social organization to marshal the indispensable human and non-human actors. Paratexts and actors' correspondences provide a good observatory to get information about aspects such as shipments and routes, processes of translation and language acquisition, texts acquisition and dissemination.The nature of scientific translation changed in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Beside solitary translators, it also happened to become a collective (...) enterprise, dedicated to providing abridgements or enriching the learned journals with full translations of the most recent foreign texts. That new trend clearly had a decisive influence on the nature of the scientific press itself. A way to set up science as a social activity in the provincial capital of Dijon, translation required a local and international network for acquiring the linguistic and scientific expertise, along with the original texts, as quickly as possible. Laboratory results and mineralogical observations were used to compare material facts with those described in the original text. By providing a double kind of validation – with both the experiments and the translations – the laboratory thus happened to play a major role in translation. (shrink)

Marie-Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville (1720-1805), aujourd’hui méconnue, a pourtant laissé des œuvres scientifiques et littéraires appréciées en son temps. Rien ne destinait cette femme de la noblesse financière et parlementaire, souffrant d’une éducation négligée et mariée à l’âge de 14 ans, à se passionner pour des domaines aussi variés que la physique, la chimie, la médecine, la botanique, la littérature, la morale, les langues ou encore l’histoire. C’est ce parcours atypique et ses motivat...

As the central figure of the third generation of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy, UEDA Shizuteru 上田閑照 has not only followed in the footsteps of his predecessors, NISHIDA Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and NISHITANI Keiji 西谷啓治, but has taken several strides forward in their shared pursuit of what can be called a “philosophy of Zen.” The “of” in this phrase should be understood as a “double genitive,” that is, in both its objective and subjective senses. Ueda not only philosophizes about (...) Zen, he also philosophizes from Zen. Like Nishida and Nishitani before him, he has devoted himself to the practice of Zen as well as to the study of Western philosophy. However, what does it mean to speak, much less philosophize, about Zen experience? Ueda has in fact concentrated much of his attention on questions concerning the relation between Zen and philosophy or, more generally, between experience and language. Any development of a “philosophy of Zen,” Ueda recognizes, must begin with the question of what it means to “speak of experience.” What does it mean to express, that is, to speak from and about experience? This question has been at the heart of Ueda’s philosophical path from the beginning. His many works on this topic include a seminal early essay “Zen and Language,” later re-titled “The Language of Zen”, articles written in German including “Awakening in Zen Buddhism as a Word-Event”, and a recent article, “Language in a Twofold World,” which Ueda put together to represent his thought in a major anthology of Japanese philosophy. In these and other works, Ueda convincingly demonstrates that the question of the relation between language and experience has always been a pivotal issue for the Zen tradition itself. He also shows how this tradition can help us, in the wake of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, to return afresh to this fundamental question. (shrink)

The concept of ‘problem’ has been recently promoted by the official academic institutions and put at the centre of a new field of research, self-styled ‘transdisciplinary studies’, in order to provide a foundation to a resolutely transdisciplinary approach to research and thought in general. The paper notes that the same move (i.e. connecting a problem-centred approach to thought with transdisciplinary method) can be found in Deleuze’s philosophy, which provides us with what the technocratic image of thought advocated by transdisciplinary studies (...) ultimately cannot provide: a positive concept of problems where those are not negative moments but originary and active matrices of thought. It then argues that Deleuze owes this concept to the French epistemological tradition, and more specifically to Bachelard, where it is nothing other than the concept of structure. It ends by explicating what particular version of structuralism Deleuze was thus led to construct in order to account for the role of problems in a radically transdisciplinary account of thought: it is the fact that all structures are multi-structured that grounds the essentially transdisciplinary nature of thought. The fact that we could think differently is precisely what makes us think. (shrink)

In their debate about whether Cultural Studies is helpful for understanding public ignorance, Chris Wisniewski and Mark Fenster view ignorance as inevitably plaguing the public in mass democratic society; and they see ?the public? as an abstract entity. However, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology rightly contests these positions. A thorough investigation of the concrete social conditions of political ignorance reveals that ignorance is unevenly dispersed throughout social space and that its relevance depends on social position, such as that of the advantaged and (...) disadvantaged. Such a comprehensive approach to public ignorance is required for advancing political participation among the least advantaged. (shrink)

Shahriar S. Afshar claimed that his 2007 modified version of the double-slit experiment violates complementarity. He makes two modifications to the standard double-slit experiment. First, he adds a wire grid that is placed in between the slits and the screen at locations of interference minima. The second modification is to place a converging lens just after the wire grid. The idea is that the wire grid implies the existence of interference minima, while the lens can simultaneously obtain which-way information. More (...) recently, Cramer argued that the experiment bolstered the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum mechanics. His argument scrutinizes Bohr’s complementarity in favor of TIQM. We analyze this experiment by simulation using the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and find that it agrees with the wave-particle duality relation given by Englert, Greenberg and Yasin. We conclude that the use of Afshar’s experiment to provide a testbed for quantum mechanical interpretations is limited. (shrink)

Heidegger often asserted that Germany, as “the land of poets and thinkers,” has a central world-historical role to play in any possible recovery from the technological nihilism of the modern epoch. And yet, on numerous occasions, Heidegger also demonstrated a serious interest in dialogue with the East Asian traditions of Daoism and Zen Buddhism. How are Heidegger’s entrenched ethnocentrism and his interest in East-West dialogue related? While neither can be wholly confined to one or another period in his thought, this (...) article shows how, in the late 1930s, Heidegger begins to recover from the most ethnocentric period of his thought, and how he starts thinking of his reflections on the Western history of being as a preparation for what he came to call “the inevitable dialogue with the East Asian world.”. (shrink)

This book, the first of its kind, offers a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy and practice of Zen Buddhism. It is written by an academic philosopher who, for more than a dozen years, practiced Zen in Japan while studying in universities with contemporary heirs of the Kyoto School. The book lucidly explicates the philosophical implications of Zen teachings and kōans, and critically compares Zen with other Asian as well as Western religions and philosophies. It carefully explains the original context and (...) sense of traditional Zen teachings and practices, and compellingly applies them to our twenty-first century lives. In addition to explaining the practice of Zen meditation, its twenty-four chapters treat perennial philosophical topics such as the self, nature, art, morality, language, peace, and death, as well as basic Buddhist teachings such as the four noble truths, the middle way, the no-self and true self doctrines, karma, mind and no-mind, rebirth, Nirvana, and the various meanings of the term “Buddha.” The chapters frequently engage Zen in interreligious dialogue with Christianity and with other religions and schools of Buddhism. The Zen inspired modern philosophies of the Kyoto School are introduced in one chapter and frequently referenced throughout the book. The concluding chapter reviews the entire path of Zen practice and enlightenment with an in-depth commentary on the beloved Zen classic, The Ten Oxherding Pictures. The book can be read in its entirety as a coherently organized introduction to the philosophy and practice of Zen, or chapters can be read independently according to the reader’s specific interests. While based on decades of scholarly study as well as practice and teaching, it is written in an accessible and engaging style. It is designed to be read by college students and lifelong learners as well as scholars and practitioners of the world’s great philosophical and spiritual traditions. (shrink)

This paper aims at specifying the complex links which two major and polemically related 18th-century linguistic theories James Harris' universal grammar in Hermes (1751) and John Horne Tooke's system of etymology in the Diversions of Purley (1786, 1804) bear to empiricism. It describes both the ideologicalethical determining factors of the theories and the epistemological consequences dependent upon their respective philosophical orientation (Harris using classical Greek philosophy against empiricism, Tooke criticizing Locke's semantics along Hobbesian lines). The effects within the linguistic theories (...) are examined through a comparison of the theories of determination which follow from divergent theses concerning abstraction. The analysis proposed in this paper exemplifies once more the historical question of the exact location of the compatibility/incompatibility between empiricist and non-empiricist linguistic theories. (shrink)

Ueda Shizuteru 上田閑照, one of the most consequential and celebrated Japanese philosophers of the last hundred years, passed away on June 28, 2019, at the age of 93. A professor of religious studies at Kyoto University, he was not only a leading scholar of Meister Eckhart and Nishida Kitarō, he was a highly original philosopher in his own right and widely recognized as the central figure in the third generation of the Kyoto School. Moreover, he was not only one of (...) the foremost philosophical interpreters of Rinzai Zen Buddhism, he was himself an inka certified lay master. (shrink)

Educating young people about how to interact with patients at the end of their lives is challenging. A qualitative study based on Husserl’s phenomenological approach was performed to describe the learning experience of secondary education students after watching, analysing, and reflecting on two videoclips featuring Cameron Duncan, a young man suffering from terminal cancer. Students from three vocational centres providing training in ancillary nursing, pharmacy, and dependent care in the Community of Madrid visited the Palliative Care Hospital. A total of (...) 110 students, with a median age of nineteen years, participated in the study. The students’ learning experience through the videoclips reveals the essential aspects required in palliative care, since the character suffers in every dimension of his being: physically as well as psychologically, socially, and spiritually. Therefore, this requires healthcare professionals to understand their experience, putting themselves in their place, to provide affectionate care and to display communication skills leading to a quality helping relationship. Four comprehensive educational categories were identified in the study. The students learned the importance of: 1) providing comprehensive and affectionate care to patients, 2) the need for communication skills in caring for patients, 3) being aware of the end of life and time left, 4) valuing life and fighting for what one wishes to attain. A visit to a PC hospital and the viewing of videoclips and reflection upon these, represents a useful strategy for secondary education healthcare students. The study indicates that videoclips are an innovative method for becoming aware of the various issues pertaining to palliative care. (shrink)

L'art est la chair de la vie. Il incarne la vie intérieure comme renonciation. L'art est en effet la réalité même de l'affect en tant que ce dernier s'annonce comme étant, dans son essence universelle, à la fois aspiration et renoncement à l'absolu. C'est cette thèse que le philosophe Patrice Guillamaud avait déjà défendue à propos du cinéma et qu'il développe ici à propos de l'ensemble des différents arts. Il s'agit ainsi d'un nouveau système des Beaux-Arts. Celui-ci met en (...) évidence les différentes essences de l'art à partir des différentes manières dont celui-ci fait participer la vie aux différentes sphères de la réalité que sont notamment la pensée, la nature et l'histoire. De la littérature à la musique, en passant par la peinture et l'architecture, l'art est la vie comme renonciation. De Proust à Schönberg, de Botticelli au Corbusier et de Dostoïevski à Beckmann, c'est la même essence universelle de la vie qui se livre dans chacune des grandes oeuvres de l'art. (shrink)

Thierry Patrice, 57 ans, médecin, nommé professeur à 32 ans, Lauréat de la Faculté, est internationalement connu pour ses travaux concernant l'action de la lumière sur les tissus vivant en cancérologie. Il a reçu plusieurs Prix pour l'étude du rôle de l'oxygène dans différentes maladies, dont le diabète, mais aussi lors du vieillissement.

The problem of the will has long been viewed as central to Heidegger's later thought. In the first book to focus on this problem, Bret W. Davis clarifies key issues from the philosopher's later period--particularly his critique of the culmination of the history of metaphysics in the technological "will to will" and the possibility of Gelassenheit or "releasement" from this willful way of being in the world--but also shows that the question of will is at the very heart of (...) Heidegger's thinking, a pivotal issue in his path from Being and Time (1926) to "Time and Being" (1962). Moreover, the book demonstrates why popular critical interpretations of Heidegger's relation to the will are untenable, how his so-called "turn" is not a simple "turnaround" from voluntarism to passivism. Davis explains why the later Heidegger's key notions of "non-willing" and " Gelassenheit " do not imply a mere abandonment of human action; rather, they are signposts in a search for an other way of being, a "higher activity" beyond the horizon of the will. While elucidating this search, his work also provides a critical look at the ambiguities, tensions, and inconsistencies of Heidegger's project, and does so in a way that allows us to follow the inner logic of the philosopher's struggles. As meticulous as it is bold, this comprehensive reinterpretation will change the way we think about Heidegger's politics and about the thrust of his philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

An adequate analysis of experiences and situations specific to women, especially mothering, requires consideration of women's difference. A focus on women's difference, however, jeopardizes feminism's claims of women's equal individualist subjectivity, and risks recuperating the inequality and oppression of women, especially the view that all women should be mothers, want to be mothers, and are most happy being mothers. This book considers how thinkers including Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Nancy Choderow and Adrienne Rich struggle to negotiate this dilemma of (...) difference in analyzing mothering, encompassing the paradoxes concerning embodiment, gender and representation they encounter. Patrice Di Quinzio shows that mothering has been and will continue to be an intractable problem for feminist theory itself, and suggests the political usefulness of an explicitly paradoxical politics of mothering. (shrink)

An adequate analysis of experiences and situations specific to women, especially mothering, requires consideration of women's difference. A focus on women's difference, however, jeopardizes feminism's claims of women's equal individualist subjectivity, and risks recuperating the inequality and oppression of women, especially the view that all women should be mothers, want to be mothers, and are most happy being mothers. This book considers how thinkers including Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Nancy Choderow and Adrienne Rich struggle to negotiate this dilemma of (...) difference in analyzing mothering, encompassing the paradoxes concerning embodiment, gender and representation they encounter. Patrice Di Quinzio shows that mothering has been and will continue to be an intractable problem for feminist theory itself, and suggests the political usefulness of an explicitly paradoxical politics of mothering. (shrink)

Authors sometimes treat the promise of de-extinction as a forgone conclusion. But if we take Kasperbauer’s approach and assess the moral acceptability of de-extinction by weighting benefits to species against the suffering of individuals, the promise of de-extinction deserves greater critical attention. Accepting de-extinct individuals as replacements for extinct predecessors assumes species are separate from environment and can be reduced to DNA. In this response to Kasperbauer’s essay, I examine how the acceptability of de-extinction might shift if we instead view (...) species as the persistence of processes—the successful know-how of living in relation to other unfolding processes. (shrink)

Every statement about language is also a statement by and about psyche. Guided by this primary assumption, and inspired by the works of Carl Jung, in _Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language_, Bret Alderman delves deep into the symbolic and symptomatic dimensions of a deconstructive postmodernism infatuated with semiotics and the workings of linguistic signs. This book offers an important exploration of linguistic reference and representation through a Jungian understanding of symptom and symbol, using techniques including amplification, dream (...) interpretation, and symbolic attitude. Focusing on Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty, Alderman examines the common belief that words and their meaning are grounded purely in language, instead envisioning a symptomatic expression of alienation and collective dissociation. Drawing upon the nascent field of ecopsychology, the modern disciplines of phenomenology and depth psychology, and the ancient knowledge of myth and animistic cosmologies, Alderman dares us to re-imagine some of the more sacrosanct concepts of the contemporary intellectual milieu informed by semiotics and the linguistic turn. Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of depth psychology. However, the interdisciplinary approach of the work ensures that it will also be of great interest to those researching and studying in the areas of ethology, ecopsychology, philosophy, linguistics and mythology. (shrink)

Accounts of mothering have both contributed to feminist theory's development and depended on certain of its central concepts. Some of its critics, however, argue that feminist theory is undermined by the problems of exclusion and essentialism. Here I distinguish between these two problems and consider their implications for questions about mothering. I conclude that exclusion and essentialism do not present insurmountable obstacles to theorizing motherhood, but do suggest new directions for such theorizing.