Nous sommes aujourd'hui confrontés, à travers les objets techniques comme la réalité virtuelle ou, plus quotidiennement les images des jeux vidéo, à un changement qui affecte non pas les objets de la perception mais la perception elle-même. Ce changement a un nom qui est aussi un des grands impensés de la philosophie du XXe siècle : la «perception artificielle». A travers les textes d'Edmund Husserl, Jacques Derrida et Bernard Stiegler et en s'appuyant sur des cas empruntés tant aux jeux vidéos (...) et aux dispositifs de simulation qu'au cinéma, Elsa Boyer se livre à une enquête philosophique à la fois radicale et profonde. Car c'est la perception elle-même que son artificialité l'amène à repenser, par-delà l'opposition entre le réel et l'imaginaire. Relisant Husserl après Derrida et confrontant le dernier au fantôme du premier, Elsa Boyer nous montre comment la réalité virtuelle nous oblige à (re)faire de la philosophie. (shrink)

The online dating application has in recent years become a major avenue for meeting potential partners. But while the digital public sphere has gained the attention of political philosophers, a systematic normative evaluation of issues arising in the ‘digital sexual sphere’ is lacking. I provide a philosophical framework for assessing dating app corporation conduct, capturing why people use these apps and their experience so often is unsatisfactory. Identifying dating apps as agents intervening in a social institution necessary for the reproduction (...) of society, with immense power over people's lives, I ask if they exercise their power in line with individuals’ interests. Acknowledging that people have claims to non-interference, equal standing, and choice improvement relating to intimacy, I find that the traditional, non-digital, sexual sphere poses problems to their realisation, especially for sexual minorities. In this context, apps’ potential for justice in the sexual sphere is immense, but unfulfilled. (shrink)

This paper examines what social auditing has to offer Oxfam and similar organisations involved in the collection of charitable donations for international development and relief operations in terms of improving the quality of their work, increasing their accountability to stakeholders, and their capacity to achieve impact in terms of their institutional goals. In looking at the particular case of Oxfam, it discusses issues in relation to the establishment of social auditing with relevance for similar organisations.The paper points out that since (...) Oxfam is not a profit-making organisation, but one based on a humanitarian impulse, there are many ways in which it already lives up to the ideals of social audit. The paper lists areas of governance and systems where Oxfam is currently responding to the major principles of social audit, and some of the issues encountered in doing so. These principles have been defined by Zadek (1997) as follows. (shrink)

Among various case studies addressing the reception of relativity, very few deal with Portugal at either the international or the national level. The national literature on the topic has mainly concentrated on the reactions to relativity of the Portuguese mathematical community. The absence of Portuguese astronomers alongside Eddington during the 1919 expedition to Principe, then a Portuguese island, has been implicitly equated with the astronomical community's lack of interest in the event. In reception studies dealing with general relativity, analysis has (...) tended to focus on the physics and mathematics communities, less on the astronomers. Given that relativity was born at the interface of physics, mathematics and astronomy, reactions of members of these scientific communities depended on differences in shared traditions, values, problems and expectations, as well as on individual practitioners' idiosyncrasies. This paper addresses the contributions of the overlooked Portuguese astronomical community, evaluates the actions and reactions of its members to the expedition and assesses their role in the process of appropriation of relativity. (shrink)

Platons Philosophie des Bildes est un ouvrage imposant et dense, qui propose une lecture générale du sens et de la fonction de l’image dans la philosophie de Platon. En dressant de ceux-ci un tableau synoptique à partir de la période « de maturité », il vise à faire apparaître une « unité remarquable » de la notion platonicienne d’image (« der platonische Bildbegriff »). Si Christoph Poetsch analyse les diverses formes de celle-ci, ainsi que les Gleichnisbilder (analogies et métaphores) les (...) p... (shrink)

Le interpretazioni di Walter Benjamin si estendono dall’estremo di considerarlo l’ultimo significativo uomo di lettere del periodo precedente alla seconda guerra mondiale fino all’estremo opposto di ritenerlo un rabbino hassidico. C’è accordo sul fatto che circa dal 1916-1920 Benjamin fu interessato alla teologia e alla metafisica ebraica e cristiana e che dal 1925 circa fino alla sua morte nel 1940 fu apertamente marxista e giunse fino alla quasi esclusione della metafisica. L’articolo individua le ambiguità della cosmologia teistica del primo Benjamin, (...) sostenendo che l’instabilità intrinseca delle sue considerazioni, specialmente su linguaggio, giudizio e allegoria, lo ha costretto ad abbandonare il platonismo giovanile e ad abbracciare una cosmologia in cui Dio è nascosto. Proprio come i primi atei si ispirarono alla speculazione di Duns Scoto secondo il quale un triangolo avrebbe avuto ancora tre angoli in un universo in cui Dio non esistesse, la visione di Benjamin di un mondo abbandonato da Dio lo condusse, nel corso degli anni Venti, al materialismo ateo. Poiché il materialista Benjamin continuò, nonostante se stesso, a incontrare tracce divine e teleologia nelle sue escursioni letterarie, concluse che doveva cacciare Dio ancora più lontano dalla sua creazione per permettere all’umanità di percepirla come realmente è. Questo atteggiamento si protrasse fino all’ultimo anno di vita di Benjamin, durante il quale scelse di abbracciare la teologia come lo spirito nascosto nella lettera del materialismo storico. Interpretations of Walter Benjamin have ranged from the last pre-war man of letters to a Hasidic rabbi. There is consensus that from roughly 1916-1920 Benjamin was interested in Jewish and Christian theology and metaphysics and that from about 1925 to his death in 1940 he was vocally Marxist to the near exclusion of metaphysics. This article identifies ambiguities in Benjamin’s early, theistic cosmology, arguing that the inherent instability of Benjamin’s accounts especially of language, judgment and allegory compelled him to discard his early Platonism and embrace a cosmology in which God is abscondite. Just as early atheists took inspiration from Duns Scotus’s speculation that a triangle would still have three angles in a universe in which God does not exist, Benjamin’s vision of a world abandoned by God led him, over the course of the 1920s, into atheistic materialism. When the materialist Benjamin continued, despite himself, to encounter divine traces and teleology in his literary excursions, he concluded that he had to chase God even further from his creation in order for humanity to perceive the latter as it really was. This state of affairs continued until the last year of Benjamin’s life, during which he chose to embrace theology as the hidden spirit lurking within the letter of historical materialism. (shrink)

Qoheleth speaks most profoundly to men and women most disillusioned with a world governed by efficiency, technology, and profit. To them, the sage offers both an affirmation of faith and a call to value the concrete and the sensuous.

In search of human uniqueness Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9472-6 Authors Elsa Addessi, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Via Ulisse Aldrovandi, 16/b, 00197 Rome, Italy Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Over recent decades, developments in network governance have seen governments around the world cede considerable authority and responsibility to commercial migration intermediaries for recruiting and managing temporary migrant labour. Correspondingly, a by-product of network governance has been the emergence of soft employment regulation in which voluntary codes of conduct supplement hard legal employment standards. This paper explores these developments in the context of temporary migrant workers employed in Australian horticulture. First the paper analyses the growing use of temporary migrant labour (...) in this industry. It then describes how different types of intermediaries interact with this workforce. The paper then outlines both hard and soft employment regulations, and contrasts them with actual employment conditions, questioning how a network governance approach has affected this vulnerable workforce. The paper concludes that changes in network governance of migration and employment relations have emasculated formal legal regulation, leaving market forces to operate without effective or ethical constraints at the expense of the public good. (shrink)

John and Curran have convincingly shown that Scanlonian contractualism is a valuable resource for evaluating pandemic response policies, and that we should reject cost–benefit analysis in favour of a contractualist framework. However, they fail to consider the part of contractualism that Scanlon constructed precisely to deal with the question of when the state can restrict individuals from making choices that are harmful to themselves and others: the value of choice view. In doing so, they leave it open for opponents of (...) lockdowns to misuse contractualism to justify mistaken policies. This is because the most powerful contractualist objections to locking down are likely to be based on the VoC. When we apply the value of choice view, we see that a lockdown policy’s justifiability depends on the extent to which particular values of choice are found to be threatened by the policy in question, and what safeguards policy-makers have put in place to increase the value of choice and protect people from the harmful consequences of lockdown. Without the VoC, it is harder to explain why lockdowns, to be non-rejectable, must have certain features. With the VoC, the case for contractualism over cost benefit analysis can be made even stronger. (shrink)

La danse a peu fait l'objet de la philosophie. Pourtant, immanente au corps du danseur, la philosophie de la danse decoule non seulement d'une rencontre entre la danse et les problemes philosophiques, mais apporte egalement la possibilite d'un renouvellement de leur traitement en vertu de sa nouveaute. Le corps danseur est ainsi fondamental: a partir de la pratique, de l'experience, de la vie des danseurs, la philosophie parvient a restituer l'intense subtilite de leur existence. Parallelement, l'exercice de la pensee pratique (...) dans la continuite du corps incite a prendre en compte la materialite, la sensibilite, et donc a repenser, d'une certaine maniere, l'ame. Cet essai, ecrit dans un langage clair, s'adresse a la fois aux philosophes et aux danseurs, aux praticiens de ces disciplines ainsi qu'au public amateur. (shrink)

The modernization of agriculture in Northern countries has led to a loss of crop diversity, as well as a loss of knowledge, know-how and rights of farmers regarding on-farm seed breeding. In France, the Réseau Semences Paysannes (RSP) brings together collectives of actors (farmers, bakers, citizens, gardeners) mobilized in a quest to reclaim these aspects. Within the framework of the decentralized participatory breeding program conducted in collaboration with INRAE, farmers have co-constructed knowledge in terms of dynamic management of heterogeneous wheat (...) populations. Yet, as the RSP network grows, these actors face new types of challenges regarding collective action. To address them, we proposed to consider peasant seeds as « common unknowns » rather than « common goods » and we adapted and applied an innovative design approach drawing upon the KCP (Knowledge-Concept-Proposals) method. This approach consisted in implementing, from 2019 to 2021, five decentralized design workshops with local seed breeding collectives. The replication of design workshops in different contexts provided a framework for interaction among RSP members, allowed the sharing of both scientific and experiential knowledge. Noteworthily, it fostered the generation of many proposals for enhancing collective action, and led to the development of operational proposals with a view to implement them in the future. This methodology-oriented paper mainly describes the decentralized design approach implemented, its outputs and outcomes, as well as its interests and limits in the context of crop diversity management. It also analyses how the workshop outputs enriches previous works in the field; in particular how such a participatory design approach leads to produce original operational solutions to respond to challenges identified in the literature. (shrink)

Okeanos is at once a mythological figure and a philosophical concept appearing in many ancient accounts of the world. A frequent object of allegoresis, his cosmological role and his name posed an enigma to Homer’s readers, especially those with a rationalizing bent. This paper proposes that the paradoxical representation of Okeanos as a primordial generative power and a geographical limit may be explained by the influence of etymological speculation, which was a popular heuristic method used by Greek intellectuals from the (...) archaic period throughout antiquity. (shrink)

David Sedley entreprend dans cet ouvrage dense – et aussi original que son récent commentaire du Cratyle (voir supra) – d’apporter une lumière véritable­ment nouvelle sur un dialogue platonicien aussi complexe qu’amplement com­menté. Il ne prétend pas écarter le contenu de détail des analyses du Théétète produites dans les dernières décennies mais se fixe néanmoins un objectif ambitieux : dégager un aspect radicalement inaperçu de ce dialogue et, en parti­culier, les raisons véritables pour l...

Now that the usage and meaning of urban spaces have been dramatically challenged by the global pandemic, several debates and reflections are going on around the manner in which cities – both as concerns the public and the private spaces – have been designed. The article observes how “urban-human face” representations have served different models of urbanity across times and cultures. Using a framework deriving from semiotics of culture, according to which the city represents a model of the world, the (...) article attempts to interpret how portraits of faces have been modelling the city through different urban faciality mechanisms. The focus is on a sample of what we call ‘urban-human faces’, ranging from Soviet propaganda posters to the digital #selfiecity project. The expression refers to series of representations that bring together the city and the face. It can be argued that both the city and the face, produced at a specific historical and cultural moment, with their figurative and plastic elements, deploy the struggle for the city ownership and authorship. Nonetheless, the commensurability of the city and the face can be just based on the fact that both semiotic configurations represent an excess with the help of cartographic reproduction (the city) and the portrait (the face), respectively. A city can be represented by a face to the extent to which it is also multifaceted as a polylogue. On the basis of such instable commensurability, the article will ultimately attempt to bring together the semiotics of the face and the semiotics of the city. (shrink)

The stakeholder approach offers the opportunity to consider corporate responsibility in a wider sense than that afforded by the stockholder or shareholder approaches. Having said that, this article aims to show that this theory does not offer a normative corporate responsibility concept that can be our response to two basic questions. On the one hand, for what is the company morally responsible and, on the other hand, why is the corporation morally responsible in terms of conventional and post-conventional perspectives? The (...) reason why the stakeholder approach does not offer such a definition, as we shall see, is because the normative stakeholder approaches tend to confuse the social validity with the moral validity or legitimacy. It leads us to a conventional definition of corporate moral responsibility (CMR) that is not relevant to the pluralistic and global framework of our societies and economies. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate this intuition. (shrink)

La obra de Ernesto Laclau sumó valiosas contribuciones a la literatura filosófico-política escrita en español, inspirada en el marxismo clásico y afligida por la reflexión sobre el destino de la democracia contemporánea en Occidente. Más aún, en la segunda fase de su obra, que va desde mediados de la década de los ochenta hasta su muerte en 2014, su trabajo presenta un mérito especial tratándose de un pensador latinoamericano y profesor en Essex durante varios años, pues a la vez que (...) recogió las llaves de la tradición marxista, la versión lacaniana del psicoanálisis y algunos recursos de la teoría del discurso en la perspectiva crítica, elaborando junto a Chantal Mouffe su refinada teoría de la hegemonía, prestó aguda observación a los procesos políticos de los escenarios periféricos a Europa y Estados Unidos, obstinado en ampliar sus análisis sobre las posibilidades de articulación real entre socialismo y democracia. (shrink)

Philosopher Elsa Dorlin looks across the global history of the left to trace the politics, philosophy, and ethics of self defense.

De l'anonyme le plus discret au professeur le plus admiré, nombre d'entre nous cherche son quart d'heure de gloire. Ce penchant, exposé, exploité et nourri par la présence des médias et des réseaux sociaux dans notre quotidien devient un phénomène de société majeur. Quelle est l'origine de ce besoin de visibilité, de cette quête insatiable de notoriété, de cette soif inextinguible de reconnaissance? Après quoi court ce monde qui tourne autour de la popularité? Pour répondre à ces questions, Elsa (...) Godart en appelle à la philosophie. Elle sonde les caractéristiques typiques d'une époque exhibitionniste et développe l'idée selon laquelle cette quête de célébrité, et plus largement de 'reconnaissance,' cache le vide de nos vies, nos manques-à-être, nos absences, nos vacuités, nos disparitions, nos oublis et nos contresens. Mais plutôt que de chercher à exister à tout prix, ne serait-il pas temps de recommencer à vivre?"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Based on therapeutic meetings with individuals who have experienced sexual violence and abuse, the challenge is how do we help these couples to establish sexual relationships on their own terms, without interference of defence or coping strategies they have used to protect themselves against the overwhelming experiences of violence or abuse in the past? This article will focus on therapeutic work with such couples and how to interact with them and support their efforts to establish satisfying sexual relationships, based on (...) sexological experience as well as experience from work with traumatisation. The basis for our treatment is a modified version of William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s approach. The technique of sensate focus is central, modified by trauma theory, including the understanding of dissociation, and the need to integrate memories from different levels: somatic, emotional, and cognitive. The traumatised client needs special attention to the experiences of predictability and safety and respect due to their history of being transgressed against. The therapists must be aware of the issue of dissociation; different dissociated inner parts can play different roles in the interaction between client and therapist. While couples therapy is a necessary frame for this therapy, the therapist often needs to work with issues unique to each individual. Each partner must be able to identify their own responses and their own sexual needs and preferences. It may therefore be valuable to have a co-therapist. The central goal is for the clients to identify responses to stimulation as a here and now experience in a setting that feels safe and welcome. (shrink)

En 1685, le Code noir défendait « aux esclaves de porter aucunes armes offensives ni de gros bâtons » sous peine de fouet. Au xixe siècle, en Algérie, l'État colonial français interdisait les armes aux indigènes, tout en accordant aux colons le droit de s'armer. Aujourd'hui, certaines vies comptent si peu que l'on peut tirer dans le dos d'un adolescent tout en prétendant qu'il était agressif, armé et menaçant. Une ligne de partage oppose historiquement les corps « dignes d'être défendus (...) » et ceux qui, désarmés ou rendus indéfendables, sont laissés sans défense. Ce « désarmement » organisé des subalternes et des opprimés au profit d'une minorité jouissant d'un droit permanent à porter des armes et à en user impunément pose directement, pour tout élan de libération, la question du recours à la violence pour sa propre défense. Du jiu-jitsu des suffragettes aux pratiques insurrectionnelles du ghetto de Varsovie, des fusils des Black Panthers aux patrouilles queer, Elsa Dorlin retrace une généalogie philosophique de l'autodéfense politique. Derrière l'histoire officielle de la légitime défense, il est ici question du récit des « éthiques martiales de soi », ces histoires ensevelies où le Sujet ne préexiste pas à sa propre défense, où le fait de se défendre en attaquant apparaît à la fois comme la condition de possibilité d'un soi et la matière des mythologies politiques. Cette histoire – une histoire de la violence – conditionne la définition même de la subjectivité moderne. Elle s'écrit à la lumière d'une relecture critique de l'histoire de la philosophie politique, où Hobbes et Locke sont à confronter avec Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault ou Judith Butler. (shrink)

A radical thinking of space remains for phenomenology a difficulty, which Heidegger has been concerned with. He developed an existential conception of the spatiality of Dasein in Being and Time, which he abandoned in his later philosophy; according to its “turn,” this philosophy proposes a notion of emptiness to describe spatial experience. The paper endorses the view that this notion makes possible a thinking of space in its essence. Pursuing further the reflection concerning the empty space, Maldiney advocates the influence (...) of the East Asian tradition on this issue. However, given that none of these authors considers dance as an art susceptible to disclose space in its essential vacuity, this paper aims to argue that there is a true choreographic empty space. (shrink)