Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Au cours de ses cent dix ans d’existence la Revue de synthèse a connu des périodes différentes chaque fois caractérisées par des prédilections, des actions et des modes de publication particuliers. Au fil de ce long itinéraire, elle a préservé un lieu de référence pour la réflexion historiographique et pour le dialogue entre les sciences. Elle a aussi été un aiguillon pour l’histoire intellectuelle, l’histoire des sciences et de l’ épistémologie. L’article retrace cet itinéraire et en propose des clés utiles (...) aujourd’hui. (shrink)

Cinq études sur l'un des textes fondamentaux de la pensée hégélienne. La "Philosophie du droit" et la philosophie de l'histoire hégélienne, par Eric Weil. La forme logique et systématique de la "Philosophie du droit", par Karl-Heinz Ilting. Dialectique et conflit - Elément d'une sociologie des conflits dans la "Philosophie du droit" de Hegel, par Eugène Fleischmann. Le prince hégélien, par Bernard Bourgeois. De quelques malentendus entre Hegel et les juristes, par Jean-Louis Gardies.

This book analyzes crucial episodes in the history of American higher education in order to discover the best way to rescue the humanities. It urges apologists to stop focusing on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of poorly defined skills and envisions a globalized approach to education based on humanistic masterworks.

a) La doctrine de la connaissance défendue par Hilbert au cours du développement de la théorie de la démonstration est constituée dès la Conférence de Paris de 1900. Elle précède donc la théorie de la démonstration.b) L’application du principe fondamental de l’épistémologie hilbertienne (« Au commencement est le signe ») à la caractérisation de la négation logique est l’un des problèmes principaux de la théorie de la démonstration.c) Pour pouvoir caractériser la négation en termes de manipulation de signes, il faut (...) abandonner la méthode axiomatique et donc sacrifier l’essentiel de la doctrine hilbertienne de la connaissance. (shrink)

The notion of digital virus covers, in our view, two points: computer viruses that infect our computers and technological solutionism, the unreasonable passion that consists in considering that the solution to all social problems lies in the digital world. Yet the digital world is as vulnerable as the biological world. Moreover, it is dangerous because it pushes us into a digital bondage that undermines democracy. The solution to the crisis is not less democracy, but more democracy. More precisely, we will (...) argue that digital devices do not strengthen democratic communication, they promote a digital connection that hinders deliberation and threatens the very idea of democracy. (shrink)

Constitutionalism says that qualitatively different objects can be made of the same matter at once. Critics claim that we should expect such objects to be qualitatively indistinguishable. E.J. Lowe thinks this complaint is based on the false assumption that differences in the way things are at a time must always be grounded in how things are at that time, and that we can answer it by pointing out that different kinds of coinciding objects are subject to different composition principles. I (...) argue that he is mistaken on both counts. (shrink)

In so-called Christian countries an increasing number of people openly reject Christian morality. It is a commonplace that they do this for values that can be shown to be Christian. How did this state of affairs come about? An examination of the beginning of Christian ethical thought shows that, within great personal variety, certain patterns or concepts remain constant. Righteousness, discipleship, faith and love are traced in this book from the New Testament through to Augustine. There is a necessary tension (...) between high ideals and practical performance, or between perfection and contingency. When this tension is lost, Christian ethics can easily go wrong. The amoral perfectionism of second-century Gnostics is remarkably similar to the mysticism of communal movements; the opposite threat of legalism has always been present in conservative forms of Christianity. Dr Osborn is concerned to explain rather than to defend, to look at the way conclusions are reached, and to show the rich diversity of early Christian thought. Successive chapters deal with the New Testament, Clement of Alexandria, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom and Augustine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 205-207 [Access article in PDF] The Relevance of Phenomenology Eric Matthews Keywords phenomenology, introspective psychology, Merleau-Ponty, melancholia Martin wyllie's paper raises very impor-tant issues about the relevance of phe-nomenology to psychiatry, but the language in which he presents phenomenology unfortunately makes it sound (contrary to his own intentions) too much like empirical introspective psychology. The aim of this commentary is to improve (...) the presentation of phenomenology, drawing particularly on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to develop Wylie's position and to bring out better the relevance of this approach to our understanding of mental disorder in general and of melancholia/depression in particular.I am essentially in sympathy with Martin Wyllie's account of the phenomenology of what he prefers to call melancholia (and indeed have discussed it with him on numerous occasions). His present paper, as well as containing many valuable insights on that topic, also raises important questions about the relevance of phenomenology to the theory and practice of psychiatry, and it is on those questions that I aim to concentrate in this commentary, in the hope of developing further what Martin has begun. To do this, it is necessary first of all to set out a more thorough account of what is meant, in this context, by phenomenology.Phenomenology is often presented as if it were a kind of empirical introspective psychology, and Martin's choice of language unfortunately sometimes (certainly not always) gives the impression that he shares that understanding of the term. For instance, he says that a phenomenological description of "lived time" tells us " 'what it is like' to experience 'lived time'" (2005, 173); and in other places uses causal terms about the relation between different aspects of lived experience, for example, that are more appropriate to an empirical, scientific, study. This is certainly one accepted use of phenomenology, but it is not what was meant by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the two philosophers whom he clearly has most in mind in his paper; and, more important perhaps, it is not the sort of phenomenology likely to shed the most light on the psychiatry of melancholia.In my commentary, therefore, I try to set out as clearly and briefly as I can an alternative and more appropriate account of relevant aspects of phenomenology, in the form with which I am most familiar, that which it takes in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology was, just as Husserl, its founder, had described it, "the study of essences" (Merleau-Ponty 2002, vii). That is, it was not an empirical study of the contingent contents of any individual's experience, but an investigation of the universal structures of human experience as such. But at the same time (and here we see a distinctive approach of Merleau-Ponty's own, derived from his reading of Heidegger and the [End Page 205] later Husserl), "phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence" (2002, vii). Human experience is not, for him, that of a "transcendental subject", standing outside the world and simply observing it: human being is, in the phrase he derived from Heidegger, "being-in-the-world". That is, we exist within the world, actively engaging with it, and our experience of it directly "opens on to" the world which we experience.The world is thus "objective" in the sense that it is always already there—we do not create it, we inhabit it, and the world we inhabit necessarily extends beyond our experience of it. But the world we inhabit necessarily has a "subjective" meaning for us, just because we inhabit it and actively engage with it. To take a simple example, we necessarily see some items in the world as food because we experience hunger. These subjective meanings are just as much part of the world as we experience it as the measurable properties of objects in which science is interested. They give sense to the idea that the world is our world, that "subjective" and "objective" are not polar opposites, but are necessarily entangled in our... (shrink)

For many years Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein have been placed side by side. Little of that work has tried to explicitly compare the two. Direct comparisons can, however, be made between Weil and Wittgenstein, which can show that the ways they approached philosophy shared numerous traits and ideas. Both thinkers rejected philosophical systems, both admitted that serious philosophical work did not try to reject all contradictions internal to it, and, in fact, both sought to make facing contradictions and seeming (...) contradictions central to their method. Both wrote of the world with a sense of mystery that surrounds human life, a sense of transcendent good. Both engaged the problems with talking about such a good that cannot be neatly fit into language. Both also saw the task of philosophy as one concerned with meaning. Both also saw philosophy as a matter of “work on oneself.” This essay will examine what it means to say that philosophy is a matter of work on oneself. To do so, I want to examine primarily two essays, one from each philosopher, essays which bear remarkable similarity to each other in the sort of problem they deal with.They are section xi of Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment, and Weil's “Essay on the Concept of Reading.”. (shrink)

Modesty is omnipresent in health care, particularly in the care of highly dependent persons and which involves a significant intrusion into their intimacy. However, it is still little discussed in health care ethics. This article presents a conceptual exploration of the notion of modesty and its manifestations in healthcare, more specifically their moral dimension and the challenges they pose for health care institutions. Since modesty calls for the protection of the integrity, dignity and vulnerability of the person being cared for, (...) it seems to us to have a moral purpose, and therefore deserves not only more attention from the ethics of care, but perhaps even to be introduced as a virtue. (shrink)

In 1960, in "The Problem of Method," which serves as the introduction not only to Critique of Dialectical Reason but to all of his recent work, Sartre enrolls himself solemnly under the banner of Marxism, which he considers the unsurpassable philosophy of our era. Today, a dozen years later, the Sartrean position has become open to challenge, it is true, because its deconstruction is underway, but it has not yet been dismissed as absurd. Existentialism, by immolating itself on the altar (...) of praxis, has taken with it phenomenology and the Existenzphilosophie that emerged from it. Heidegger, for example, can be read as the last defender of the bourgeois order fetishized as Being, forced by the triumphal march of the... (shrink)

Two papers on global morality and ethics—by David Loye and Solomon H. Katz—are hereby placed into an evolutionary context. Simply stated though no less true, ethical evolution will likely be the next great evolutionary leap forward into the future—if humankind is to have a future.

What does it mean to say that a particular war is just or unjust, that terrorism is always wrong, or that torture can sometimes be morally justified? What are the moral bases for the possession or use of nuclear weapons, intervening in other nations' civil wars, or being a bystander to genocide? Such questions take us to the heart of what is morally right and wrong behaviour in our world. Global Violence: Ethical and Political Issues provides readers with the analytical (...) tools to better understand the suppositions that underlie the debates about such questions, as well as equipping them to advance their own reasoned and informed moral analyses of these topics. The book engages different normative approaches from the fields of ethics, international relations and political philosophy and uses them to examine a set of case studies on the subjects of inter-state and civil war, nuclear weapons, terrorism, torture and genocide. (shrink)

t. 1. Récits de la conquête du temps -- t. 2. La capitale du temps. 1. L'état des choses.

The Material Culture of the Northern Sea Peoples in Israel. By Ephraim Stern. Harvard Semitic Museum Publications, Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant, vol. 5. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2013. Pp. ix + 74, illus. $29.50.

In 2012, we published a computational automaton, based on the most comprehensive gene regulatory network (GRN) model yet available (Peter, Faure, and Davidson 2012). This model had been synthesized over the previous years from extensive experimental studies on specification mechanisms in the endomesodermal territories of the sea urchin embryo. The GRN model explicitly indicated the dynamically changing interactions occurring at the cis-regulatory control sequences of almost 50 genes, mostly encoding transcription factors (the proteins that specifically recognize cis-regulatory DNA sequence and (...) cause expression or inactivity of the genes these sequences control). The GRN model encompasses all regulatory genes .. (shrink)