Les grands genies sont certes inepuisables, mais ils ne sont tels que par la mediation de leurs interpretes, veritables createurs a la seconde puissance qui les eveillent a une vie nouvelle. Henri Gouhier possedait une etonnante capacite de detecter dans chacun des auteurs qu'il analysait, de Descartes a Bergson, en passant par Pascal, Malebranche, Rousseau, Comte - pour ne citer qu'eux! - ce quelque chose de different par quoi il donnait aux lecteurs de les voir autrement. La dimension du speculaire (...) est ici fondamentale, qui s'articule a celle du speculatif. Les metaphores optiques sont recurrentes dans son lexique, et revelent, proprement, sa methode. Tel un photographe, il avait l'obsession de la mise au point. Une philosophie, disait-il, n'a de sens que par reference a une certaine vision du monde dont elle est l'expression. (shrink)

Henri Gouhier, dans son étude classique Fénelon philosophe, qualifiait l’archevêque de Cambrai de « philosophe de la prière ». En effet, l’amour de Dieu est inscrit « comme son principe et sa fin » dans l’essence de la philosophie fénelonienne1. La destination suprême de cette dernière est de s’accomplir dans la contemplation dont l’élévation,..

L'examen du vocabulaire de la « contemplation » chez Descartes rend manifeste sa spécificité comme proprement philosophique, à distance de la contemplation mystique et d'une quelconque « expérience extatique ». Cependant la contemplation du vrai, dès lors qu'elle atteint son acmé comme contemplation de l'idée de Dieu, est saisie expérientielle de l'existence de son objet, tandis que, dans la mesure où elle se situe à la frontière de la raison et de la foi — ligne de partage qui unit la (...) métaphysique et la théologie révélée - elle peut assurément être qualifiée d'ouverture sur une autre scène, celle de la vision béatifique. The scrutiny of vocabulary about contemplation with Descartes turns its specificity into something explicitly manifest, i.e., at an equal distance between mystical contemplation and any extatic experience as such. Yet, contemplation of the true, as long as it reaches its acme as being the contemplation of the idea of God, becomes an experiential grasping of the existence of its object, whereas, as it is located on the borderline between reason and faith -i.e. a dividing line which links metaphysics and revealed theory - it may as well be qualified as an opening on towards some other scene, i.e. that of beatific vision. (shrink)

Depuis quelques années l’on assiste à un renouveau dans l’étude des grands courants du libertinisme2. Les historiens de la philosophie, en particulier, savent l’importance du dialogue que nouent un Descartes, un Malebranche ou un Pascal, pour ne citer qu’eux, avec « le libertin ». Autant de cas de figures complexes où est forgée l’image subjective d’un adversaire. Le paradoxe..

We argue that the growing prevalence of statistical machine learning in everyday decision making – from creditworthiness to police force allocation – effectively replaces many of our humdrum practical judgments and that this will eventually undermine our capacity for making such judgments. We lean on Aristotle’s famous account of how phronesis and moral virtues develop to make our case. If Aristotle is right that the habitual exercise of practical judgment allows us to incrementally hone virtues, and if AI saves us (...) time by taking over some of those practical judgments, or if its pattern recognition capacities are very good at learning that kind of behavior – we risk innovating ourselves out of moral competence with the introduction of AI. (shrink)

Who are the Jews? What do they believe? Why is Israel so important to them? What's all this about self-hating Jews? These are just some of the questions that engage a Reform rabbi and a Humanist philosopher in their lively and intriguing conversations. From Antisemitism to Zionism, from animal slaughter kosher-style to the Zeitgeist of Jewish disparaging humour, rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok gives us the flavours, traditions and 'feel' of Jewish life and identity enmeshed in the importance of the Holy Land, (...) while philosopher Peter Cave gets him to dig deeper, revealing philosophical perplexities, unsettling questions -- and even Wittgenstein. The book is unique for it challenges unconscious assumptions such as the Jewish conviction that Judaism must survive and that Hitler must not secure a posthumous victory -- as well as widening eyes to searching questions concerning a nation's identity and what justifies territorial rights. Because Jewish humour plays a crucial role in Jewish life, this wide-ranging and thought-provoking exploration includes Jewish jokes and Dan's Jewish cartoons, all designed to add some spice to the dish of what it is like to be a Jew in these modern times. The dialogues introduce the non-Jewish to the Jewish world of argument, anguish and identity -- and will lead Jews to discover some fresh approaches and challenges to their interests and worries. For both Jews and non-Jews, this book casts lights -- with an engaging and accessible tone -- for, clearly, this rabbi and philosopher enjoy the cut and the thrust. (shrink)

The article deals with the notion of the genetic code and its metaphorical understanding as a “language”. In the traditional view of the language metaphor of the genetic code, combinations of nucleotides are signs of amino acids. Similarly, words combined from letters represent certain meanings. The language metaphor of the genetic code, 171–200, 2011) assumes that the nucleotides stay in the analogy to letters, triples to words and genes to sentences. We propose an application of mathematical linguistic methods on the (...) notion of the genetic code. We provide quantitative analysis of mRNA strings and natural language texts. This analysis is sensitive to the detection of the code units hierarchy. We also take into consideration a representative quantitative analysis of DNA, RNA and proteins. Our analysis of mRNA confirms an assumption that the design of the genetic code cannot analogize DNA bases and letters. The notion of the letter is much more appropriate if analogized with triplets or amino acids, 187–191, 2017). (shrink)

As a part of user experience, user emotion has rarely been studied in mobile libraries. Specifically, with the proposed emotional model in combination with the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance Emotion Model and the Five Factor Model, we evaluate user emotions on the mobile library’s three IS features. An experience procedure with three tasks has been designed to collect data. 50 participants were enrolled, and they were asked to fill in questionnaires right after the experience. The correlations among the PAD emotions were examined. Specifically, (...) users have a low perception of pleasure, high perception of arousal, and low perception of dominance. However, these three emotional states were not always significantly correlated with each other. This study extends mobile library research by focusing on users’ emotional experience. Specifically, the detailed PAD emotions have been examined. This study provides a new approach for application developers and managers to evaluate the user experience of an application. (shrink)

The Continuum Companion to Hume is a comprehensive and accessible guide to Hume's life and work includes 21 specially commissioned essays, written by a team of leading experts, covering every aspect of Hume's thought. The Companion presents details of Hume's life, historical and philosophical context, a comprehensive overview of all the key themes and topics apparent in his work, including his accounts of causal reasoning, scepticism, the soul and the self, action, reason, free will, miracles, natural religion, politics, human nature, (...) women, economics and history, and an account of his reception and enduring influence. This is an essential reference tool for anyone working in the fields of Hume Studies and Eighteenth-Century Philosophy. (shrink)

In this account, we explain the meaning of a priori voting power and outline how it is measured. We distinguish two intuitive notions as to what voting power means, leading to two approaches to measuring it. We discuss some philosophical and pragmatic objections, according to which a priori (as distinct from actual) voting power is worthless or inapplicable.

Moral identity has been touted as a foundation for understanding moral agency in organizations. The purpose of this article is to review the current state of knowledge regarding moral identity and highlight several promising avenues for advancing current understandings of moral actions in organizational contexts. The article begins with a brief overview of two distinct conceptual perspectives on moral identity—the character perspective and the social-cognitive perspective—that dominate extant literature. It then discusses varying approaches that have been taken in attempting to (...) measure moral identity. The final two sections of the article review empirical findings regarding the antecedents and consequences of moral identity, respectively. Mechanisms and situational factors that are pertinent to moral agency in organizations are emphasized in both sections. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a novel solution to the much discussed " answering machine puzzle " and similarly problematic cases for the Kaplanian view of temporal indexicals. The solution we propose consists in an appeal to a well-established and (for many still) useful framework: Reichenbach's theory of tense and aspect. Starting from some more recent articulations of the theory in its application to temporal adverbials, we show how it can be applied to 'now' so that to provide an easy (...) and intuitive solution to the puzzle. In addition, the proposed solution, while departing in several important respects from the Kaplanian orthodoxy, it remains conservative in that it preserves some of Kaplan's central tenets about 'now', thus making it less radical than many of the alternative solutions found in literature. (shrink)

Many formal linguists hold that English pitch accent has a single function: marking focus. On the other hand, there is evidence from corpus work and from psycholinguistics that pitch accent is attracted to expressions which are unpredictable. We present a two-factor pragmatic account in which both focus and predictability contribute to the placement of accent in an English intonational phrase. On examples of so-called “second occurrence focus” and related phenomena, our account gives superior results to the one-factor accounts of Rooth (...) and B¨ uring and to Selkirk’s rival two-factor account. (shrink)

Arguing about Judaism differs from other introductions to Judaism. It is unique, not solely in its engaging dialogues between a Reform rabbi and a humanist, atheist philosopher, but also in its presentation of and challenges to the fundamental religious beliefs of the Jewish heritage and their relevance to today's Jewish community. The dialogues contain both Jewish narratives and philosophical responses, with topics ranging from the nature of God to controversies over sexual relations, animal welfare and the environment -- from antisemitism (...) to the state of Israel and Zionism. Although the rabbi and philosopher argue strongly, clearly enjoying the cut and thrust of debate, they do so with sensitivity, charm and respect, revealing the rich intricacies of the Jewish religion and contemporary Jewish life. While essential reading for those studying Judaism and Jewish history, the book aims to stimulate debate more generally amongst Jews and non-Jews, the religious and the atheist -- all those with a general interest in religion and philosophy. (shrink)

Sensorimotor theorists of perception have argued that eye movement is a necessary condition for seeing on the basis that subjects whose retinal images do not move undergo a form of blindness. I show that the argument does not work.

This study investigates whether firms with fraudulent financial reporting time their earnings announcements strategically and finds that fraudulent firms are more likely to disclose their earnings in the after-market hours during their fraud periods to postpone fraud detection. Cross-sectional tests show that firms with lower visibility are more likely to adopt and benefit from this timing strategy. In addition, fraudulent firms are found to time their conference calls strategically and package their earning news with forecasts to flood the market with (...) information and lower the fraud detection rate. Results also show that unethical managers may benefit from insider trading when their firms use a timing strategy to lower the detection rate. This study sheds light on a potential strategy that unethical managers may adopt to camouflage their fraudulent financial reporting. These results are robust to a variety of settings of samples and model specifications. (shrink)

The claim presented here is that aesthetic considerations are an essential part of place narrative, and are thus essential to ethical environmental decision-making. Holland’s narrative-based approach to nature conservation is taken as a starting point from which an argument is developed to show how his approach can be extended to include the aesthetic. Aesthetic experience of place is important because it gives us knowledge by acquaintance of the place, because it gives meaning to our relationship to the place, and because (...) it reveals and gives insight to meaningful relationships within the place. The narrative approach allows these experiences and meanings, which are problematic to other approaches, to be captured and included in environmental decision-making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:134 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it —­Genesis 3:6 Abstract Aesthetics has emerged as an important battleground in the moral quest for a lower carbon society. Especially in the case of proposed wind farms (an environmentally benign technology in terms of low carbon emissions), (...) opponents frequently refer to the unsightly machines creating negative landscape impacts and ruining the view. This essay seeks to reflect on the particular ways in which visual aesthetics are framed and mobilized in this moral debate. Exploring the dividing lines between pictoral and more-­ than-­ representational approaches I ask if the moral dilemmas in our landscape decisions (e.g. individual rights to beauty or collective duties toward future generations) are obscured by physical or visual realms. The largely invisible nature of wind, electricity and climate change, set within the physical and tangible nature of landscapes and turbines, challenges us to experience the aesthetics of landscapes-­ with-­ machines through more creative and engaging means that are not limited to visibility, nor deaf to morality. SIN, DUTY, AND THE AESTHETICS OF NATURE As the first act of sin in the bible, Eve’s consumption of a visually aesthetic fruit led to humans being banned from the Garden of Eden. Looking at the above sentence more closely, we could even argue that “good for food” is not a positive condition (e.g. tasty, nourishing), but Justice in the Eye of the Beholder? ‘Looking’ Beyond the Visual Aesthetics of Wind Machines in a Post-­Productivist Landscape DAN VAN DER HORST Dan van der Horst / Justice in the Eye of the Beholder? 135 rather the absence of a negative (e.g. inedible), whilst “also desirable” may sound like the hunger for wisdom was only a secondary, additional attraction. The sentence thus draws attention to the key role of aesthetics in the making of a moral decision; would Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit if it was not “pleasing for the eye”? Aesthetic judgments may be informed by a range of factors, but as this bible quote illustrates, morality is key among them. Associations between right and wrong on the one side and beauty or ugliness on the other, are not exactly rare in written history, be they religious, literary or scholastic works. As a marked contribution to the latter, Immanuel Kant has paid particularly close attention to the links between aesthetics and morality, arguing amongst others that any universal agreement in judgments of the sublime must rest on an appeal to moral feelings.1 But universality is not the only logical link between aesthetic judgementandmorality.Peoplecanfeelasenseof‘duty’tofindcertainthings beautiful e.g. because that is the aesthetic judgment of the group they aspire to belong to.2 Whilst this sense of duty can refer to social conditioning and group belonging, it also has resonance for landscape aesthetics at a time of anthropogenic climate change (a universal threat) when we must “learn to love the low carbon landscape.”3 This presents a point of departure from the debate on the moral obligation of preserving aesthetically pleasing landscapes (as we tend to do through legal designations, e.g. national parks), an ethical logic which leads, to use the words of Holmes Rolston, “from beauty to duty.”4 Moreover a posi­ tive aesthetical appreciation of a landscape because it accommodates low carbon technologies, would potentially require an inverse ethical logic, i.e. from duty to beauty.5 Notwithstanding the clear conceptual links between moral and aesthetic judgment, in everyday life it may be far less clear what kind of moral issues may underpin particular expressions of aesthetic sensibility. This can be particularly problematic for the deployment of environmental technologies (i.e. technologies pursued to reduce pollution ) that have significant landscape footprints. That is where we can find universal moral claims demanding environmental action for the common good rubbing up against aesthetic landscape judgments in places where such developments are proposed. This produces an unsatisfactory situation in which the deployment of clean technologies ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 10 / ISSUE 1 / 2018 136 is delayed, tensions within local communities may increase... (shrink)

In view of an enhancement of our implementation on the computer, we explore the possibility of an algorithmic optimization of the various proof-theoretic techniques employed by Kohlenbach for the synthesis of new effective uniform bounds out of established qualitative proofs in Numerical Functional Analysis. Concretely, we prove that the method of “colouring” some of the quantifiers as “non-computational” extends well to ε-arithmetization, elimination-of-extensionality and model-interpretation.

In this article, we discuss Greek and Roman conceptions of liberty. The supposedly ‘neo-Roman’ view of liberty as non-domination is really derived from negative Greek models, we argue, while Roman authors devised an alternative understanding of liberty that rested on the equality of legal rights. In this ‘paleo-Roman’ model, as long as the law was the same for all, you were free; whether or not you participated in making the law was not a constitutive feature of liberty. In essence, this (...) Roman theory was a theory of freedom as the rule of law and the guarantee of equal rights, especially due process rights. For this Roman concept of ‘legal liberty,’ as we call it, political participation was neither necessary nor sufficient. Theorized by Cicero and historicized by Livy, the Roman understanding of freedom flourished in early-modern times, proving important to paradigmatic republican authors such as Machiavelli and Rousseau as well as to Hobbes, whose work we discuss as a helpful point of comparison. (shrink)

This article uses Carl Plantinga’s and Noël Carroll’s theorizations regarding cinematic disgust to analyze Carl Franklin’s 1995 film noir, Devil in a Blue Dress. Plantinga argues for a link between disgust and ideology that helps to reveal deeper cultural significance in film, which Carroll’s work likewise supports. Plantinga further argues that disgust in art may be strangely attractive as well as repulsive, thereby eliciting reflection. I argue that combining these elements with philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s explanation of how moral revolutions (...) happen by means of honor codes helps to clarify not only viewer sympathy and solidarity for this film’s African-American protagonist, but also viewer moral disgust at another important white character’s racism. In particular, the film encourages its more thoughtful white viewers to reconsider as well as potentially change their affective responses, ideological predispositions, and habits of perception and attention regarding race, thereby facilitating fundamental moral change and even the possibility of moral revolution. (shrink)