Fruit de nombreuses annees de travail, L'essence de la manifestation est l'ouvrage majeur de Michel Henry. Frolant le millier de pages, il engloutit le lecteur qui plonge en lui, pour decouvrir une nouvelle et fulgurante philosophie de la subjectivite et de l'affectivite, tout en le menant dans les subtiles arcanes de l'histoire de la philosophie, genialement relue. Il n'en demeure pas moins que l'ouvrage est aussi une somme, qui demande sans doute quelques outils pour s'orienter dans sa complexite. Ce livre, (...) ecrit en commun par une generation renouvelee de chercheurs ayant travaille sur les archives du philosophe, voudrait aider le lecteur qui entreprend ou reprend la lecture de L'essence de la manifestation, en mettant en lumiere sa genese et sa structure, mais aussi le caractere fascinant d'un livre magistral de la philosophie d'expression francaise du 20eme siecle. (shrink)

Let's touch base -- Relocalizing the global -- Without the world or within -- Sharing responsibility: farewell to the sublime -- From lands to disputed territories -- Innovation not hype -- Secular at last -- In search of a diplomatic middle ground -- Appendix.

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)

Condemned to exist beyond his essence, since he is only what he does and can always become what he is not or not to be what he is any more, man is, for Sartre, condemned to freedom without condition which constitutes, not his nature, but his condition. Free of anything apart from not being free, since he chooses neither to be, nor the necessity to choose the being that he must make himself be, man, however, is always already determined by (...) his condition: thrown in to a world where he acknowledges his own condition. Far from calling into question the integrity of his autonomy of choice, this ontological conditioning is for the Being-itself the ground on which the need for his engagement appears and, therefore also the plenitude of his freedom. As tragic as that which one considers controlled by fate, for Sartre, the human condition thus means being condemned to freedom. (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)

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)

Ignoring most published evidence on wild chimpanzees, Tomasello et al.'s claim that shared goals and intentions are uniquely human amounts to a faith statement. A brief survey of chimpanzee hunting tactics shows that group hunts are compatible with a shared goals and intentions hypothesis. The disdain of observational data in experimental psychology leads some to ignore the reality of animal cognitive achievements.

Le present livre propose l'etude de la constitution, durant le haut Moyen Age latin, d'une position philosophique: le realisme de l'immanence a propos des universaux. Cette position est fondee sur la conviction qu'il existe, dans le monde qui nous entoure, certes des individus particuliers - ce tilleul, cette tortue -, mais aussi des entites universelles. Ces entites n'existent pas separees des individus, mais integralement realisees en eux, sans variation ni degre. Cet engagement philosophique resulte d'une exegese des Categories d'Aristote, reinterpretees (...) selon des philosophemes issus de la pensee de Porphyre. La genealogie de cette position est ici retracee en abordant successivement ses sources tant grecques que latines et ses ancetres patristiques (avant tout Gregoire de Nysse), puis son elaboration conceptuelle durant les premiers siecles du Moyen Age latin jusqu'a la critique qu'en donnera Pierre Abelard, et ce, par l'analyse de l'ontologie des quatre philosophes qui l'ont soutenue: Jean Scot Erigene, Anselme de Canterbury, Odon de Cambrai et Guillaume de Champeaux. Ce parcours permet de dessiner les contours d'un projet philosophique: comprendre, analyser et decrire le monde sensible au moyen des concepts issus de la logique aristotelicienne. (shrink)

■ Evidence from functional neuroimaging studies on resting state suggests that there are two distinct anticorrelated cortical systems that mediate conscious awareness: an “extrinsic” system that encompasses lateral fronto-parietal areas and has been linked with processes of external input (external awareness), and an “intrinsic” system which encompasses mainly medial brain areas and..

L'écologie politique est souvent associée aux pensées critiques de gauche sans que ses apports spécifiques à la critique sociale soient relevés. Dans quelle mesure la pensée et les pratiques écologistes bousculent-elles certaines idées encore productivistes ou dominatrices du socialisme? Si elles héritent de certaines idées, valeurs et formes politiques du socialisme dans toute sa diversité, elle réactualise aussi ses thèmes dans le contexte d'urgence environnementale et climatique : aliénation, domination et émancipation prennent un autre sens. Les analyses écologistes de ces (...) phénomènes renouvellent l'analyse des contradictions du capitalisme. Critique du productivisme et du dualisme nature-culture, écoféminisme et écosocialisme, décroissance et autogestion: comment les idées écologistes peuvent-elles nourrir la gauche aujourd'hui?"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Cultural Attraction Theory (CAT), also referred to as cultural epidemiology, is an evolutionary theory of culture. It provides conceptual tools and a theoretical framework for explaining why and how ideas, practices, artifacts and other cultural items spread and persist in a community and its habitat. It states that cultural phenomena result from psychological or ecological factors of attraction.

Though only established as a discipline since the 1970s, philosophy of biology has already triggered investigations about its own history The Oxford handbook of philosophy of biology, Oxford University Press, New York, pp 11–33, 2008). When it comes to assessing the road since travelled—the research questions that have been pursued—manuals and ontologies also offer specific viewpoints, highlighting dedicated domains of inquiry and select work. In this article, we propose to approach the history of the philosophy of biology with a complementary (...) data-driven perspective that makes use of statistical algorithms applied to the complete full-text corpus of one major journal of the field—Biology and Philosophy—from its launch in 1986 up until 2017. By running text-mining and topic-modeling algorithms, we identified 67 key research topics that span across these 32 years. We also investigated the evolution of these topics over time and their fluctuating significance in the journal articles. Our results concur with known episodes or traits of the discipline—for instance, the significance of evolution-related topics or the decrease of articles with a marked historical dimension—but also highlight a diversity of topics that is much richer than what is usually acknowledged. (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)

A l'occasion du soixantieme anniversaire d'Alain de Libera, une trentaine de collegues de France et de l'etranger ont souhaite, par une serie d'etudes d'histoire de la philosophie et de metaphysique, saluer son oeuvre scientifique et lui offrir un temoignage d'amitie. L'histoire de la metaphysique etant l'un des points cardinaux du travail philosophique d'Alain de Libera, a qui l'on doit notamment de magistraux ouvrages sur les universaux, il a semble judicieux d'etudier ces entites mineures mais neanmoins indispensables qui viennent completer la (...) substance pour constituer l'individu: les proprietes accidentelles. La question des accidents est ici etudiee sur la longue duree - d'Aristote a la metaphysique analytique contemporaine, avec une attention particuliere portee aux discussions medievales - et sous ses differents aspects: ontologique, semantique, epistemologique et psychologique. Sont ainsi abordes des problemes philosophiques aussi fondamentaux que ceux induits par les categories aristoteliciennes de qualite et de relation, les tropes, la causalite, l'individuation. (shrink)

Les sources proposent deux dates concurrentes pour l’archontat de Damasias : 582/1 et 580/79. Cette étude tente premièrement d’établir que ces propositions sont toutes deux correctes. En effet, le nom de Damasias devait figurer sur la liste des archontes pour les trois années durant lesquelles il exerça cette charge, et non uniquement pour la première. La seconde partie de l’étude propose une interprétation nouvelle des intervalles de temps qui, dans le chapitre XIII de la Constitution d’Athènes, scandent la période séparant (...) le départ de Solon de la désignation de Damasias, afin de les faire correspondre avec les deux termini établis plus haut. Pareille démarche oblige à remettre sur le métier la chronologie de l’archontat solonien qui constitue le point de départ du comput, question que nous aborderons à travers l’implication du législateur dans la première guerre sacrée. (shrink)

It is known today that Hegel's philosophy was at the center of the development of pragmatism. In particular, the relation of Dewey's philosophy to Hegel's has recently been studied with great attention1. Many studies have revealed that the German philosopher had a fundamental influence on the young John Dewey, particularly with regard to his theory of culture, for his logic, as well as for his psychology. These new readings propose a profoundly original view of Dewey and explain why he thought (...) of his philosophy as a "permanent Hegelian deposit".Our work aims to... (shrink)

Artificial stimulation of the peripheral vestibular system has been shown to improve ownership of body parts in neurological patients, suggesting vestibular contributions to bodily self-consciousness. Here, we investigated whether galvanic vestibular stimulation interferes with the mechanisms underlying ownership, touch, and the localization of one’s own hand in healthy participants by using the “rubber hand illusion” paradigm. Our results show that left anodal GVS increases illusory ownership of the fake hand and illusory location of touch. We propose that these changes are (...) due to vestibular interference with spatial and/or temporal mechanisms of visual-tactile integration leading to an enhancement of visual capture. As only left anodal GVS lead to such changes, and based on neurological data on body part ownership, we suggest that this vestibular interference is mediated by the right temporo-parietal junction and the posterior insula. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the medieval posterity of the Aristotelian and Pyrrhonian treatments of the infinite regress argument. We show that there are some possible Pyrrhonian elements in Autrecourt's epistemology when he argues that the truth of our principles is merely hypothetical. By contrast, Buridan's criticisms of Autrecourt rely heavily on Aristotelian material. Both exemplify a use of scepticism.

Christophe Bouton's Time and Freedom addresses the problem of the relationship between time and freedom as a matter of practical philosophy, examining how the individual lives time and how her freedom is effective in time. Bouton first charts the history of modern philosophy's reengagement with the Aristotelian debate about future contingents, beginning with Leibniz. While Kant, Husserl, and their followers would engage time through theories of knowledge, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and, Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas applied a phenomenological and existential (...) methodology to time, but faced a problem of the temporality of human freedom. Bouton's is the first major work of its kind since Bergson's Time and Free Will, and Bouton's "mystery of the future," in which the individual has freedom within the shifting bounds dictated by time, charts a new direction. (shrink)

We propose a class [I,S] of loss functions for modeling the imprecise preferences of the decision maker in Bayesian Decision Theory. This class is built upon two extreme loss functions I and S which reflect the limited information about the loss function. We give an approximation of the set of Bayes actions for every loss function in [I,S] and every prior in a mixture class; if the decision space is a subset of R, we obtain the exact set.

The notion of chemical evolution is controversially defined in reference to Darwinian evolution: for some, it is nothing but natural selection applied to chemical systems; yet, for others, it is precisely what happened before natural selection, the latter being the birthmark of life. Taking into account a plurality of evolutionary processes, I propose to construe chemical evolution as a composite theory within which natural selection might only be one of several evolutionary processes.

Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that everything is physical. According to this thesis, everything in the world, including chemical, biological, mental, and social entities and processes, is constituted by or results from physical entities and processes. In analytic philosophy, one might say that physicalism is the claim that everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical.

This article examines the link between oligarchy and the notion of representative democracy, which for Castoriadis also implies the bureaucratisation of society. However, in an argument with and against Castoriadis, one has to decipher modern oligarchies before launching into a radical critique of the principle of representation. There is a diversity of representative democracies, and the complexity of modernity comes from a mixture of oligarchy, representation and democracy. Even though the idea of democracy has evolved, we do not live under (...) representative democracies but under liberal oligarchies. Direct democratic procedures and representative elements can sometimes be gathered in order to create new forms of political commitment. The main problem is avoiding a concentration of powers, which cannot create the conditions for the emergence of democratic institutions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper reports on a multidisciplinary meeting held to discuss ethical issues in medical research in the developing world. Many studies, including clinical trials, are conducted in developing countries with a high burden of disease. Conditions under which this research is conducted vary because of differences in culture, public health, political, legal and social contexts specific to these countries. Research practices, including standards of care for participants, may vary as a result. It is therefore not surprising that ethical issues (...) emerge. This meeting sought to identify and discuss these issues from the perspectives of the many actors in such research, including community representatives, with a view to finding ethical and pragmatic solutions to these issues. Dialogue between these actors was also promoted, with a view to identifying the need to develop such dialogue in future. Drawing from the experiences of the speakers, the colloquium attempted to outline some answers to several key questions characterising the field today. Experiences related to epidemiologic research, vaccine trials, drug trials, diagnostic tests and to some fundamental ethical issues in health research. Speakers were from different countries, disciplines and professions. The meeting provided a forum for consultation and debate between different ethics actors. Both encouraging findings and challenges emerged. (shrink)

In recent cancer research, strong and apparently conflicting epistemological stances have been advocated by different research teams in a mist of an ever-growing body of knowledge ignited by ever-more perplexing and non-conclusive experimental facts: in the past few years, an 'organicist' approach investigating cancer development at the tissue level has challenged the established and so-called 'reductionist' approach focusing on disentangling the genetic and molecular circuitry of carcinogenesis. This article reviews the ways in which 'organicism' and 'reductionism' are used and opposed (...) in this context, with an aim at clarifying the debate. Methodological, epistemological and ontological implications of both approaches are discussed. We argue that the 'organicist/reductionist' opposition in the present case of carcinogenesis is more a matter of diverging heuristics than a claim about theoretical or ontological (ir)reducibility. As a matter of fact, except for the downward causation claim, which we question, we argue that the organicist arguments are compatible with the reductionist approach. Moreover, we speculate that both approaches, which currently focus on specific entities i.e., genes versus tissues, will need to shift their conceptual frameworks to studying complex arrays of relationships potentially ranging over several levels of entities, as is the case with 'systems biology'. (shrink)

DMet 10: Prime matter is the origin of all quantities. Hence it is the origin of every dimension of continuous quantity whatever. ...

Christophe Perrin ABSTRACT: What does it mean to ‘make love?’ Or, rather, what are we doing when we ‘make love?’ This expression makes of love a praxis on which the history of philosophy, rather modest, has said little. Philosophy has certainly evoked love, but always as a passion, an emotion, a feeling, and rarely as an...

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)

This chapter critically analyzes evolutionary epistemology as a theoretical framework for the study of science as a historical and cultural phenomenon. As spelled out by Campbell in the 1970s, evolutionary epistemology has an ambitious goal: it aims at understanding the complex relations between bio- logical evolution, especially the biological evolution of human cognition, and the cultural evolution of scientific knowledge. It eventually aims at forming an integrated causal theory of the evolution of science, starting with the evo- lution of human (...) cognition. In this chapter, the author considers Campbell’s project and specifies why it is still today a worthwhile project for explain- ing the evolution of science as a specific case of cultural evolution. But he also criticizes Campbell’s evolutionary epistemology for assuming that blind variation and selective retention are the processes through which science evolves. This assumption, the author argues, is at odds with much of what we know about scientific cognition and the history of science. He advocates (1) dropping the methodological constraint of looking for processes of blind variation and selective retention at the expense of other constructive processes and mechanisms of knowledge production; but (2) retaining the integrative point of evolutionary epistemology, which implies taking seriously the results of evolutionary psychology; and (3) retaining the populational framework for explaining the history of science, which means questioning why some scientific beliefs and practices eventually spread and stabilize in a scientific community. We end up with an updated research program for evolutionary epistemology, which faces new challenges. (shrink)

There is a plurality of theoretical approaches, methodological tools, and explanatory strategies in the social sciences. Different fields rely on different methods and explanatory tools even when they study the very same phenomena. We illustrate this plurality of the social sciences with the studies of crowds. We show how three different takes on crowd phenomena—psychology, rational choice theory, and network theory—can complement one another. We conclude that social scientists are better described as researchers endowed with explanatory toolkits than specialists of (...) some specific social domain. Social scientists’ toolkits are adapted for identifying and specifying the role of specific causal factors among the multiple factors that produce social phenomena. These factors can be, in a nonexclusive way, economic incentives, psychological processes, the ecology, or aspects of the social and cultural environment. The plurality of methods and theories in the social sciences flies in the face of the project to unify the sciences associated with the positivists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, the compatibility and consilience of theories and practices still have epistemic value: they enable the development of more powerful and robust theories and they allow the advent of interdisciplinary studies. We present the integrative stance as the will to improve compatibility and consilience across fields, yet recognize that the plurality of causes of social phenomena invite a diversity of methodological and theoretical tools. We conclude by characterizing naturalism as an integrative stance applied to fields that belong to the social science and to the natural sciences. (shrink)

We argue for an intimate relation between semantic externalism and semantic deference and propose a typology of speakers’ metasemantic views as revealed by their deferential attitudes. Building on this typology, we then offer a classification of metasemantic disagreements understood as verbal disputes between speakers who (consciously or unconsciously) hold divergent metasemantic views about the same word. In particular, we distinguish lower-order metasemantic disagreements between speakers who disagree on the exact source of meaning determination for a word yet agree on the (...) kind of deferential attitude this word is liable to, from higher-order metasemantic disagreements between speakers who do not even agree on the suitable kind of deferential attitude. We demonstrate the fruitfulness of our classification through the concrete implications it has for conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Le droit naturel soutient l’hypothèse d’une connexion nécessaire entre le droit et la morale. Pour les positivistes, cette thèse impliquerait l’invalidité de toute loi injuste. Lex iniusta non est lex. Cette maxime a malheureusement été la source de nombreux malentendus. À travers cette formule, le positivisme attribue au droit naturel une thèse que personne ne défend réellement. Notre objectif est de comprendre la genèse de ce malentendu et d’exposer la manière dont les théories contemporaines du droit naturel tentent de démêler (...) les confusions véhiculées par cette maxime. Le droit naturel ne conteste pas nécessairement la validité des lois injustes mais il permet, à partir de la signification « focale » des concepts juridiques, de comprendre en quoi ces lois sont à la fois juridiquement et moralement défectueuses. (shrink)

The sacrilegious proposition of the existence of cultures in whales and dolphins should open the discussion of cultures in other animals, allowing us to find what is unique in human cultures. The ethnographic approach used by all anthropologists is the key in this investigation and revealed that cultural differences are present in animals and could result from different learning mechanisms.