This paper explores the notion of ‘relational values’ from a phenomenological point of view. In the first place, it stresses that in order to make full sense of relational values, we need to approach them through a relational ontology that surpasses dualistic descriptions of the world structured around the subject and the object. With this aim, the paper turns to ecophenomenology's attempt to apprehend values from a first-person perspective embedded in the lifeworld, where our entanglement with other beings is not (...) a theoretical construction but a palpable reality. Overall, the article's main purpose is to show that, in our direct and raw experience, values do not appear as subjective judgments or as objective properties but as events in which we participate alongside other human and non-human beings. (shrink)

This article examines the position of the sixth century Alexandrian Neoplatonist scholar Olympiodorus on the existence of relations. A part of his commentary on chapter VII of the Categories dedicated to relatives (pros ti) contains valuable arguments about the reality of relations. Relations are necessary to guarantee the order of the world, the fitting arrangement of the body, and providence. In the last section, Olympiodorus’s claim about the order of the world is discussed against the background of the so-called “Porphyry’s (...) Tree”. The theoretical consequences of the relational dimension of this Porphyrian pattern are addressed. (shrink)

The present study provides a critical edition of the commentary on Aristotle's Topica I contained in Saint-Omer, Bibliothèque d'Agglomération, Ms. 609, alongside a discussion of its authorship and some preliminary observations regarding its content. It is argued that this commentary was written in the University of Louvain around 1502; that it may have been authored by a Louvain logician named Jean Fabri de Valenciennes ; and that its interpretation of Aristotle's text owes to the commentary on the Topica by Albert (...) the Great, who was one of the main authorities of the fifteenth-century via antiqua. (shrink)

For the last three decades, physicists have been moving beyond the boundaries of their discipline, using their methods to study various problems usually instigated by economists. This trend labeled ‘econophysics’ can be seen as a hybrid area of knowledge that exists between economics and physics. Econophysics did not spring from nowhere—the existing literature agrees that econophysics emerged in the 1990s and historical studies on the field mainly deal with what happened during that decade. This article aims at investigating what happened (...) before the 1990s by clarifying the epistemic background that might have paved the way to the emergence of econophysics. This historical exploration led me to highlight the active role played by the Santa Fe Institute by promoting interdisciplinary research on complexity in 1980s. Precisely, by defining three research themes on economic complexity, the SFI defined a research agenda and a way of extending physics\biology to economics. This article offers a possible archeology of econophysics to clarify what could have contributed to the development of a particular episteme in the 1980s easing the advent of econophysics in the 1990s. (shrink)

Le penseur byzantin du neuvième siècle Photius a consacré plusieurs courts traités à la question catégoriale, commentant neuf des dix catégories aristotéliciennes une à une. Il est aussi revenu dans deux courts textes – les Amphilochia 27 et 230 – sur la question de la prédication. Il s’interroge dans ces deux traités sur le mode de prédication propre aux termes « homme » et « humanité », analysant notamment le référent de ces termes. Ces réflexions contiennent plusieurs thèses significatives de (...) son ontologie particulariste. (shrink)

Depuis quatre décennies, les organisations non gouvernementales alertent l'opinion publique face au modèle de croissance destructrice des ressources écologiques de la planète. Quelles leçons tirer de l'histoire récente? Comment accélérer l'innovation sociale afin de construire un autre monde? Autant de questions auxquelles répondent avec conviction douze auteur·e·s dans un ouvrage mosaïque. Sans doute que tout est dans le sous-titre : la société civile, moteur de la transition écologique. A côté des États et des collectivités supra-nationales, ONU, Europe entre autres, les (...) acteurs de la société civile ont joué un rôle prophétique de lanceurs d'alertes et de créateurs d'alternatives durables. Non écoutés ou à tout le moins peu pris en compte, ils prennent le relais d'acteurs politiques classiques, défaillants et timides, voire contribuant significativement à l'aggravation du constat. Crise de la gouvernance politique? Certainement. Démarquage, différences et divergences face au capitalisme mondial et existentiel? Oui encore. (shrink)

Summary This article intends to propose new hypotheses concerning the origin of the ?Principe général? of mechanics of Jean Le Rond D'Alembert expressed in its Traité de dynamique in 1743. The examination of the statics of Pierre Varignon and its inheritance suggests that D'Alembert retains, through a case of oblique collision on a hard surface, a method of decomposition and equilibrium of forces which is close to its principle. On the other hand, this principle requires a definition of the equilibrium (...) widely spread in the 17th and 18th centuries, D'Alembert seeming then more to innovate from an epistemological point of view that on a technical one. Finally, the determination of rules of collision based at the same time on decompositions of movements at the level of the centre of mass and on appeal to a principle of relativity constitutes a know-how at the beginning of the 18th century which can be moved closer to methods developed by D'Alembert. These three aspects try then to replace the science of D'Alembert in a context by insisting on the essential role of the collisions of body and on that of the notion of equilibrium concerning the birth of its principle. (shrink)

As a discipline of its own, the philosophy of science can be traced back to the founding of its academic journals, some of which go back to the first half of the twentieth century. While the discipline has been the object of many historical studies, notably focusing on specific schools or major figures of the field, little work has focused on the journals themselves. Here, we investigate contemporary philosophy of science by means of computational text-mining approaches: we apply topic-modeling algorithms (...) to eight major philosophy of science journals, from the 1930s up until 2017. Based on the full-text content of some 15,897 articles, we identified 25 research themes and 8 thematic clusters that show how the research agenda of the philosophy of science has changed in its content over the course of the last eight decades, up to the philosophy of science we now know. We also show how each one of the journals contributed in its own way to this thematic evolution. (shrink)

La médiation pénale fait partie des procédures qui peuvent être proposées comme alternatives aux poursuites. Elle permet aux personnes de se réapproprier la résolution des conflits qui les concernent, en suivant une procédure plus souple et en favorisant à la fois la réparation, la responsabilisation et la resocialisation. L’article vise à analyser le sens et la portée de cette pratique à partir de la théorie pénale républicaine tirée des travaux de Philip Pettit et John Braithwaite. Une telle approche permet de (...) saisir les effets de la médiation sur la domination en lien avec l’infraction ainsi que ses vertus restauratives. Mais elle met également en lumière des formes de soumission et de dépendance qui peuvent altérer le processus de médiation. Si, dans une perspective républicaine, la médiation s’avère plus juste que la répression, elle peut aussi, dans certains cas, reproduire des rapports de domination auxquels l’institution judiciaire doit accorder une vigilance particulière. (shrink)

Une vie à Königsberg -- Son œuvre philsophique -- Kant, trahi ou servi par ses héritiers?

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a neuro-meditation program to support nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Forty-five nurses were classified into three groups based on their systolic blood pressure: normotensive, hypertensive and control. Using a parallel, randomly controlled design across a 4-week period, 10 × 30-min sessions using the Rebalance© Impulse were completed. Sleep was assessed by wrist actigraphy and subjective sleep questionnaires; perceived sleep quality, Ford Insomnia Response to Stress Test questionnaire and the Spiegel (...) Sleep Quality questionnaire. Blood pressure, resting heart rate, mean heart rate, heart rate variability index, cortisol, and alpha-amylase were also measured. Statistical analysis was completed using factorial ANOVA. Sleep improved in the G-hyp group; SSQ ; perceived sleep quality ; sleep efficiency and fragmentation index. In the G-nor group, sleep was improved to a lesser extent; perceived sleep quality. A significant time–group interaction was reported in resting heart rate, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure with these measures being significantly reduced in the G-hyp group. RMSSD increased in the G-nor group. This initial evidence suggests that neuro-meditation reduces excessive sympathetic activity, promoting enhanced sleep quality and autonomic control during periods of increased work-related stress.Clinical Trial RegistrationThe study was conducted at Bioesterel, Sophia-Antipolis, France as a clinical trial: Neuro-meditation improves sleep quality, https://www.drks.de/ui_data_web/DrksUI.html?locale=en, DRKS00025731. (shrink)

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a pervasive difficulty affecting number processing and arithmetic. It is encountered in around 6% of school-aged children. While previous studies have mainly focused on general cognitive functions, the present paper aims to further investigate the hypothesis of a specific numerical deficit in dyscalculia. The performance of 10- and 11-year-old children with DD characterised by a weakness in arithmetic facts retrieval and age-matched control children was compared on various number comparison tasks. Participants were asked to compare a (...) quantity presented in either a symbolic (Arabic numerals, number words, canonical dots patterns) or a nonsymbolic format (noncanonical dots patterns, and random sticks patterns) to the reference quantity 5. DD children showed a greater numerical distance effect than control children, irrespective of the number format. This favours a deficit in the specialised cognitive system underlying the processing of number magnitude in children with DD. Results are discussed in terms of access and representation deficit hypotheses. (shrink)

À partir de deux vignettes a priori sans rapport, l’auteur se propose de réfléchir aux effets des transformations sociales sur le rapport que les individus entretiennent avec la parentalité. Revendication d’autonomie, création et utilisation d’un réseau « coparental » autour de l’enfant ; il sera question de mesurer l’intérêt dans un cadre clinique de porter attention aux modalités de rencontre, ou de non-rencontre, entre la créativité des parents et leur environnement. L’auteur en arrivera à paraphraser D.W. Winnicott en proclamant qu’« (...) un parent, ça n’existe pas! ». (shrink)

The concept of “life” certainly is of some use to distinguish birds and beavers from water and stones. This pragmatic usefulness has led to its construal as a categorical predicate that can sift out living entities from non-living ones depending on their possessing specific properties—reproduction, metabolism, evolvability etc. In this paper, we argue against this binary construal of life. Using text-mining methods across over 30,000 scientific articles, we defend instead a degrees-of-life view and show how these methods can contribute to (...) experimental philosophy of science and concept explication. We apply topic-modeling algorithms to identify which specific properties are attributed to a target set of entities (bacteria, archaea, viruses, prions, plasmids, phages and the molecule of adenine). Eight major clusters of properties were identified together with their relative relevance for each target entity (two that relate to metabolism and catalysis, one to genetics, one to evolvability, one to structure, and—rather unexpectedly—three that concern interactions with the environment broadly construed). While aligning with intuitions—for instance about viruses being less alive than bacteria—these quantitative results also reveal differential degrees of performance that have so far remained elusive or overlooked. Taken together, these analyses provide a conceptual “lifeness space” that makes it possible to move away from a categorical construal of life by empirically assessing the relative lifeness of more-or-less alive entities. (shrink)

From John Maynard Keynes’s prediction of a fifteen-hour workweek to present-day speculation about automation, we have not stopped forecasting the end of work. Critical theory and political philosophy have turned their attention away from the workplace to focus on other realms of domination and emancipation. But far from coming to an end, work continues to occupy a central place in our lives. This is not only because of the amount of time people spend on the job. Many of our deepest (...) hopes and fears are bound up in our labor—what jobs we perform, how we relate to others, how we might flourish. The Return of Work in Critical Theory presents a bold new account of the human significance of work and the human costs of contemporary forms of work organization. A collaboration among experts in philosophy, social theory, and clinical psychology, it brings together empirical research with incisive analysis of the political stakes of contemporary work. The Return of Work in Critical Theory begins by looking in detail at the ways in which work today fails to meet our expectations. It then sketches a phenomenological description of work and examines the normative premises that underlie the experience of work. Finally, it puts forward a novel conception of work that can renew critical theory’s engagement with work and point toward possibilities for transformation. Inspired by Max Horkheimer’s vision of critical theory as empirically informed reflection on the sources of social suffering with emancipatory intent, The Return of Work in Critical Theory is a lucid diagnosis of the malaise and pathologies of contemporary work that proposes powerful remedies. (shrink)

Cette étude examine la philosophie naturelle de Nicolas Malebranche et son devenir au cours du XVIIIe siècle. Des savants énoncent ou discutent des principes, des lois et des méthodes explicatives dont l'origine est à chercher dans De la recherche de la vérité. La présence de Malebranche se manifeste alors par un occasionnalisme physique et par une critique de la force des corps au repos de Descartes, ce qui conduit à une conception nomologique de la causalité et à un rejet de (...) la force d'inertie, et par une interprétation des phénomènes physico-chimiques à l'aide de la théorie des petits tourbillons. Malebranche est ainsi à l'origine d'une des formes prises par la philosophie mécanique dont ce livre établit les caractéristiques essentielles."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

I argue that questions, methods and theories drawn from cognitive anthropology are particularly appropriate for the study of science. I also emphasize the role of cognitive anthropology of science for the integration of cognitive and social studies of science. Finally, I briefly introduce the papers and attempt to draw the main directions of research.

L’article présente le projet ORFEO (outils pour l’étude du Français écrit et oral). Ce projet a consisté à rassembler 4M de mots de Français oral et 6M de mots d’écrit à partir de ressources existantes. Les ressources orales ont été unifiées dans un format trs et alignées avec les fichiers sons au phonème. Les corpus sont présentés avec des métadonnées qui permettent de constituer des sous-corpus d’étude. Les données orales ont été segmentées et annotées en POS et relations de dépendance (...) semi automatiquement. La précision des annotations a fait l’objet d’une évaluation. L’ensemble est interrogeable à partir d’une plateforme adaptée du logiciel libre ANNIS. La ressource sera mise à disposition en open source courant 2017. (shrink)

Human expression is open-ended, versatile, and diverse, ranging from ordinary language use to painting, from exaggerated displays of affection to micro-movements that aid coordination. Here we present and defend the claim that this expressive diversity is united by an interrelated suite of cognitive capacities, the evolved functions of which are the expression and recognition of informative intentions. We describe how evolutionary dynamics normally leash communication to narrow domains of statistical mutual benefit, and how expression is unleashed in humans. The relevant (...) cognitive capacities are cognitive adaptations to living in a partner choice social ecology; and they are, correspondingly, part of the ordinarily developing human cognitive phenotype, emerging early and reliably in ontogeny. In other words, we identify distinctive features of our species' social ecology to explain how and why humans, and only humans, evolved the cognitive capacities that, in turn, lead to massive diversity and open-endedness in means and modes of expression. Language use is but one of these modes of expression, albeit one of manifestly high importance. We make cross-species comparisons, describe how the relevant cognitive capacities can evolve in a gradual manner, and survey how unleashed expression facilitates not only language use, but also novel behaviour in many other domains too, focusing on the examples of joint action, teaching, punishment, and art, all of which are ubiquitous in human societies but relatively rare in other species. Much of this diversity derives from graded aspects of human expression, which can be used to satisfy informative intentions in creative and new ways. We aim to help reorient cognitive pragmatics, as a phenomenon that is not a supplement to linguistic communication and on the periphery of language science, but rather the foundation of the many of the most distinctive features of human behaviour, society, and culture. (shrink)

What is it that led Ernst Troeltsch, who for a time belonged to Albrecht Ritschl’s school, to break from the professor he so admired? On the one hand, Troeltsch found fault with Ritschl’s historiography of early Lutheran theology. Where Ritschl saw Melanchthon as someone who had distorted Luther’s original reformatory insights, Troeltsch praised Melanchton for having clarified and systematized Luther’s thought. Troeltsch’s critique of Ritschl’s historiography is as closely connected to Troeltsch’s own theological program as was Ritschl’s interpretation of the (...) development of early Lutheran theology to his own theological intention. The second half of the article examines Troeltsch’s program by looking at the debate between Troeltsch and Julius Kaftan, a prominent Ritschlian in those years, on the supernatural basis of Christianity, the place and scope of metaphysics in theology, and the “absoluteness” of Christianity. (shrink)

We hypothesize that when honesty is not motivated by selfish goals, it reveals social preferences that have evolved for convincing strategically vigilant partners that one is a person worth cooperating with. In particular, we explain how the patterns of dishonest behavior observed in recent experiments can be motivated by preferences for social and self-esteem. These preferences have evolved because they are adaptive in an environment where it is advantageous to be selected as a partner by others and where these others (...) are strategically vigilant: they efficiently evaluate the expected benefit of cooperating with specific partners and attend to their intentions. We specify the adaptive value of strategic vigilance and preferences for social and self-esteem. We argue that evolved preferences for social and self-esteem are satisfied by applying mechanisms of strategic vigilance to one's own behavior. We further argue that such cognitive processes obviate the need for the evolution of preferences for fairness and social norm compliance. (shrink)

Dans cet article, j’entends décrire comment évolue la philosophie de la physique de Weyl au cours de la période 1918-1927. Je rappellerai en particulier qu’il développe différentes formes d’« apriorisme» entre 1918 et 1923: un apriorisme « spéculatif» avec sa théorie unifiée des champs (1918-1921), puis une conception des connaissances a priori largement inspirée de la Wesensanalyse de Husserl dans ses travaux sur le problème de l’espace (1921-1923). Je montrerai par ailleurs que le holisme de Weyl, i.e., la thèse selon (...) laquelle seule une théorie physique envisagée comme un tout peut faire l’objet de tests empiriques, occupe le devant de la scène dès 1924-1925 dans des textes qui portent sur les fondements des mathématiques. Ce holisme est étroitement lié à sa conception de la théorie physique comme construction symbolique de la réalité. Au bout du compte je caractériserai le point de vue holiste de Weyl en le comparant à certaines réflexions développées par Cassirer, Einstein et Hilbert à peu près au même moment. (shrink)