In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 105-115 [Access article in PDF] Intimacy and Monumentality in Chandigarh, North India: Le Corbusier's Capitol Complex and Nek Chand Saini's Rock Garden Sharon Irish School of Architecture University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, by Vikramaditya Prakash. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002, 179pp., $35.00 cloth. The seventh century poet and philosopher Dharmakirti wrote of (...) the path we each must make: No one behind, no one ahead, The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone's path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.1The image in Figure 1 shows the bottom of a concrete ramp that angles back upon itself as it connects two levels of the government complex in Chandigarh and ends in a grassy hillside that has several dirt paths cutting across it. The concrete ramp begins just to the left of Le Corbusier's Assembly Hall (Figure 2). What I hope is evident from just two images is the contrast between the curving, unplanned path that pedestrians have made as they leave the bottom of the ramp, and the axial, monumental path implicit in the organization of the large concrete plaza in front of the Assembly Hall. One is informal and intimate because of the many footprints that have worn away the grass; the other is formal and monumental in its carefully controlled framing of a sculptural presence. They are two very different paths, offering different rewards as we wander upon them.As Vikramaditya Prakash's book, Chandigarh's Le Corbusier, emphasizes, the Capitol Complex derived from Le Corbusier's personal mythology, transmogrified somewhat by the site, the politics, and the climate. Le Corbusier "considered it the true mission of modern architecture to reestablish the aesthetic and poetic forms necessary for the liberation and deliverance of...modern man."2 Le Corbusier's monumentalism, then, was imposed on Chandigarh's landscape and the inhabitants with the assumption that he knew best what architecture was appropriate for "liberation." While there are many aspects of his designs to appreciate and admire, his buildings only indirectly address the visitor, preferring uncanny to intimate relationships.3 [End Page 105] Click for larger viewFigure 1 The bottom of the ramp leading into a path toward the Trench of Consideration, Capitol Complex, Chandigarh. Photo by the author. Click for larger viewFigure 2 Façade of the Assembly Building, Le Corbusier, 1953-61, Chandigarh. Photo by the author. [End Page 106]For six months in 1999, I lived in Chandigarh within a few blocks of Le Corbusier's government complex and another compelling place, the nearby and unrelated Rock Garden. While the paths at the Government Complex are, for the most part, empty, those in the Rock Garden are not and provide chances for intimate interactions that are only hinted at underneath Le Corbusier's concrete ramp. Poignant informality in Le Corbusier's government sector exists in areas that were never completed according to plan.4 Its predominant monumentality provides a useful contrast to the intimate spaces of the Rock Garden.In the 1950s, two men, Le Corbusier and Nek Chand Saini, began two very different projects within a kilometer of each other in Chandigarh. Le Corbusier's Capitol Complex started in the very highest government circles with Prime Minister Jawaharwal Nehru: the plan was to build a new state capital for a newly divided Punjab in a newly independent India. In architectural history, Chandigarh is well known and well studied due to its planning and design. Nek Chand's Rock Garden (under construction since 1958, and open to the public since 1976) began as an illegal private project by one man to give form to his imagination. This essay is my impressionistic response to these two projects.Monumental buildings often function powerfully as icons or as proud isolated structures. Visited on ceremonial occasions, they can provide visually compelling backdrops to large-scale... (shrink)

Offering a new answer to an age-old problem: the meaning of a just or equitable distribution of resources, Julian Le Grand examines the principal interpretations of equity used by economists and political philosophers. He argues that none captures the essence of the term as well as an alternative conception relating equity to the existence or otherwise of individual choice. Le Grand shows that this conception is not only philosophically well-grounded but is also directly relevant to key areas of distributional policy. (...) His theoretical argument is complemented by detailed discussion of the application of the central idea to specific areas of policy, including the distribution of health and health care, central government grants to local governments and the measurement of income for tax purposes. Equity and Choice is written by an economist, but is intended for political philosophers and social policy analysts as well as economists. Hence the key chapters are written in a non-technical fashion, with specialized material relegated to appendices. This book is a unique combination of philosophical, economic and policy analysis and represents a major contribution in all three areas. (shrink)

Robin Le Poidevin; II*—Egocentric and Objective Time, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 99, Issue 1, 1 June 1999, Pages 19–36, https://doi.org/10.

Next SectionThe present investigation looks for a solution to the problem of the influence of feelings and emotions on our ethical decisions. This problem can be formulated in the following way. On the one hand, emotions (fear, pity and so on) can alter our sense of discrimination and lead us to make our wrong decisions. On the other hand, it is known that lack of sensitivity can alter our judgment and lead us to sacrifice basic ethical principles such as autonomy, (...) beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. Only emotions can turn a decision into an ethical one, but they can also turn it into an unreasonable one. To avoid this contradiction, suggest integrating emotions with the decisional factors of the process of “retrospective thinking”. During this thinking, doctors usually try to identify the nature and impact of feelings on the decision they have just made. In this retrospective moment of analysis of the decision, doctors also question themselves on the feelings they did not experience. They do this to estimate the consequences of this lack of feeling on the way they behaved with the patient. (shrink)

Consider the agnostic who thinks that reason and evidence are neutral on the question of God’s existence, and as a result neither believes that God exists nor believes that God does not exist. Can such an agnostic live a genuinely religious life – even one in which God is the central animating idea? They might do so by accepting Pascal’s Wager: the expected rewards will always be greater if one bets on God’s existence than if one does not. Or they (...) might accept William James’s argument that religious beliefs are properly activated by our passional nature. But both of these routes involve abandoning the initial agnosticism, and so are open to charges of irrationality. In this paper I explore a third route to the religious life, suggested by Pascal’s discussion, one which uses fiction and make-believe as the central prop. It might seem that this too entails abandoning agnosticism in favour of the view that religion just is fiction. I suggest, however, that there is a phenomenon which I term “serious make-believe” in which one can remain agnostic about whether the object of make-believe is real or a useful fiction. Applied to religion, the result is a religious life that is both genuinely engaged and yet, by remaining agnostic, cannot be accused of irrationality. (shrink)

Many amateur sportsmen in the West, have today started undertaking long and intensive ordeals where their personal capacity to withstand increasing suffering is the prime objective. Running, jogging, the triathlon and trekking are the sorts of ordeal where people without any particular ability are not pitting themselves against others but are committed to testing their own capacity to withstand increasing pain. Constantly called upon to prove themselves in a society where reference points are both countless and contradictory and where values (...) are in crisis, people are now seeking a one-to-one relationship by redical means, testing their strength of character, their courage and their personal resources. Going right on to the end of a self-imposed ordeal gives a legitimacy to life and provides a symbolic plank that supports them. Performance itself is of secondary significance; it has a value only to the individual. There is no struggle against a third party, only a method for reinforcing personal will-power and over-coming suffering by going right to the limit of a personally imposed demand. The physical limit has come to replace the moral limit that present-day society is failing to provide. Overcoming suffering tempers the individual, providing a renewed significance and value to his life. (shrink)

Le sens du mot « culture » a changé. En 1938, Marrou formule ce qui lui semble être une évidence. « Culture... se limite au domaine intellectuel, spirituel ; elle laisse en dehors d’elle la vie économique, matérielle, la technique. » Cette évidence restera longtemps non interrogée. L’article « Culturalisme et culture » du Dictionnaire..

Le mot multimédia possède plusieurs sens précis et un sens général très vague. Mais ce brouillard sémantique masque deux histoires exemplaires, emmêlées mais distinctes. Dans l'une média signifie «manière de coder l'information», alors que dans l'autre le mot recouvre des branches des industries de la communication. La première est un cas exemplaire de pensée abstraite concrétisée, une bonne illustration de l'intérêt des recherches fondamentales théoriques. La seconde tradition, réincarnée dans le thème de la convergence au moment de la «bulle technologique», (...) fournit un très bon exemple de l'autonomie de l'économie par rapport à la technologie. La première histoire est celle d'un succès, la seconde celle de deux vagues d'échecs.The word has several multimedia precise meaning and a general sense very vague. But the fog hides two semantic inspiring stories, tangled but distinct. In one media means "way of coding information," while in the other the word covers the branches of the communications industries. The first is a case of abstract thought materialized, a good illustration of the interest of theoretical basic research. The second tradition, reincarnated in the theme of convergence when the "bubble" provides an excellent example of the autonomy of the economy relative to technology. The first story is one of success, the second that of two waves of failures. (shrink)

This article addresses the relations between philosophy and other disciplines from a historical and personal point of view, focusing on the post-war French university system. Historically, interdisciplinarity involving philosophy was practised in the French university long before it was named and promoted as such. The relationship was in the first instance one of recognition of outside achievement, followed by critique of certain unspoken and hitherto unchallenged presuppositions. The critique of the ideological foundations of science was sometimes a misplaced form of (...) ‘philosophism’, asserting a position of greater knowledge from which to ‘set someone to rights’, but the interrogation of assumptions concerning biology and gender constituted a necessary and progressive development in an ongoing dialogue. It is such a dialogue-based approach to philosophy, open to cooperation those from outside the field, that allows for an ethical development of the discipline in which the unforeseen may occur. (shrink)

Cosmology and the development of human society.

Dispositional monists believe that all properties are essentially causal. Recently, an overdetermination argument has been proposed by Trenton Merricks to support nihilism about ordinary objects. I argue that this argument can be extended to target both nihilism about ordinary objects and nihilism about physical particles when dispositional monism is assumed. It implies that a philosopher who both endorses dispositional monism and takes seriously the overdetermination argument should not believe in the existence of physical particles. I end up by discussing possible (...) objections. I suggest, then, that if we live in a world that is inhabited by causal properties but not by chairs and tables, then we also live in a world without electrons and quarks, a world of dispositional properties, that is, a world of causal fields. (shrink)

Mill n’a pas pensé la sécularisation comme un simple affaiblissement des religions traditionnelles, mais s’est préoccupé de leur remplacement comme fondement de la stabilité sociale. La Religion de l’Humanité doit réorienter sur le progrès humain les aspirations religieuses. Liée à la neutralisation de la portée morale des religions théistes et surnaturelles sur le plan métaphysique, en cohérence avec l’engagement pour une éducation nationale séculière, la dimension religieuse de l’utilitarisme éloigne aussi Mill de Bentham. La comparaison avec la version comtienne de (...) la religion de l’humanité permet d’aborder quelques difficultés soulevées par ce projet. (shrink)