The debate over rival conceptions of political legitimacy tends to focus on first-order considerations—for example, on the relative importance of procedural and substantive values. In this essay, I argue that there is an important, but often overlooked, distinction among rival conceptions of political legitimacy that originates at the meta-normative level. This distinction, which cuts across the distinctions drawn at the first-order level, concerns the source of the normativity of political legitimacy, or, as I refer to it here, the grounds of (...) political legitimacy. If we focus on the grounds of political legitimacy, there are three main conceptions of political legitimacy: will-based, belief-based, and fact-based conceptions. I present an objection to each of those main conceptions and defend a hybrid account of the grounds of political legitimacy. (shrink)

The macro-level debate on the economic impact of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is still unsettled. This article explores micro-level evidence by examining what Fortune Global 250 firms themselves report about their economic impact. Such reporting embodies corporate attempts to account for their economic implications, in addition to the environmental and social aspects of their activities that have traditionally received more attention in the context of corporate responsibility. Firms' reports turn out to provide a rich illustration of the mechanisms through which MNEs (...) (can) affect economic development (including sheer size, technology transfer, and backward linkages) and of how such impacts are being operationalized and measured. The authors test which MNEs are most likely to disclose information on the various mechanisms and find that it is influenced by region, sector, and size but not by profitability. Implications of this exploratory study for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Political decisions have the potential to greatly impact our lives. Think of decisions in relation to abortion or climate change, for example. This makes political legitimacy an important normative concern. But what makes political decisions legitimate? Are they legitimate in virtue of having support from the citizens? Democratic conceptions of political legitimacy answer in the affirmative. Such conceptions righly highlight that legitimate political decision-making must be sensitive to disagreements among the citizens. But what if democratic decisions fail to track what (...) there is most reason to do? What if a democratically elected government fails to take measures necessary to protect its population from threats related to climate change? Peter argues that the legitimacy of political decisions doesn't just depend on respect for the citizens' will; and defends a novel hybrid conception of political legitimacy, called the Epistemic Accountability conception. According to this conception, political legitimacy also depends on how political decision-making responds to evidence for what there is most reason to do. Grounds for Political Legitmacy starts with an overview of the main ways in which philosophers have thought about political legitimacy, and identifies the epistemic accountability conception as an overlooked alternative. It then develops the epistemic accountability conception of political legitimacy and discusses its implications for legitimate political decision-making. Considering the norms that should govern political debate, it examines the role of experts in politics, and probes the responsibilities of democratically elected political leaders and as well as of citizens. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage collectif réunit quatorze contributions d’anthropologues, dont les recherches ont intégré la dimension du genre dans les questions de parenté. Elles ont été menées dans des aires géographiques très diverses, tant en Amérique du Sud et du Nord qu’en Asie. Les études se sont centrées, pour la plupart, sur l’observation de sociétés restreintes contemporaines, tout en faisant référence à l’histoire et aux mythes qui déterminent leur mode de construction du genre. En réunissant tous ce...

My aim in this paper is to provide an epistemological argument for why public reasons matter for political legitimacy. A key feature of the public reason conception of legitimacy is that political decisions must be justified to the citizens. Critics of the public reason conception, by contrast, argue that political legitimacy depends on justification simpliciter. Another way to put the point is that the critics of the public reason conception take the justification of political decisions to be based on reasons (...) that are agreement-independent. I call such reasons objective reasons. Public reasons are, however, agreement-dependent. The debate between defenders and critics of a public reason conception of political legitimacy focuses on whether objective reasons or public reasons are the right basis for the justification of political decisions. My defense of the public reason conception will grant to its critics that there are objective reasons and allow that such reasons can affect the legitimacy of political decisions. But I will show, focusing on epistemic constraints on the justification of political decisions, that it does not follow that the justification of those decisions is necessarily agreement-independent. In the epistemic circumstances that are typical of political life, public reasons will be required for the justification of political decisions. (shrink)

This paper reports on a manual monitoring of online representations of LGBT persons in the Republic of Cyprus for the period April 2015–February 2016. The article contextualizes the prevalence of “hate speech” in online Greek Cypriot comments against LGBT individuals, and, more generally, against non-heterosexuals. Adopting a Foucauldian position vis-à-vis the social and discursive construction of sexuality, we outline, first, the socio-historical context with a focus on LGBT rights in the Republic of Cyprus and the nationalistic project construing sexualities. We (...) then examine the different levels of discursive discrimination practices, providing a snapshot of the types of “hate speech” referring to this topic typically found in such an environment. The focus is on identification of the frames used to construct LGBT identities, and their perception.We use in our title the word subject as defined by post-modernists and by Butler in particular : subject refers to “a socially produced ‘agent’ and ‘deliberator’ whose agency and thought is made possible by a language that precedes that ‘I’. In this sense the ‘I’ is produced through power ”. This paper focuses on the socially produced definition of the LGBT community in the context under study. We thus address the way in which sexuality is constructed within a compulsory and hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity. We analyze our data i.e. comments focused on the LGBT community, with corpus linguistic tools as well as through a qualitative examination of the identified frames. Our analysis confirms an interface between nationalism and compulsory hegemonic heteronormativity in the Republic as well as the influence of the Orthodox Church and its beliefs. (shrink)

Ce texte est l'introduction d'un recueil d'articles édité par Fabienne Pomel, Cloches et horloges dans les textes médiévaux . Mesurer et maîtriser le temps, Rennes, PUR, 2012. On en trouvera une présentation ici et une recension là. Nous remercions Fabienne Pomel et les Presses universitaires de Rennes de nous avoir donné l'autorisation de le reproduire ici. Introduction L'horloge, particulièrement, en tant qu'objet nouveau et rare, représente une merveille technique, tandis que la cloche peut (...) - Histoire – Nouvel (...) article. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on the difficulty in judging what is called covert hate speech. We emphasize the need for a multidimensional framework when analysing covert hate speech in situ, and the need to consider the multifaceted dimension of such speech act to assess its performativity. To explain such need, we apply the test of the Rabat Plan of Action and adopt a pragmatic perspective to analyse a specific covert hate speech act, considering such speech act as both an (...) expressive and potentially performative act. We focus on the prosecution of hate speech against a woman holding a poster during an anti-safe pass demonstration. Her poster inferred a link between conspiracy theory, the government strategy addressing the Covid pandemic and many other collectives, primarily the Jewish community. Our analysis of the sign adopts a radically context-dependent methodology combining a pragmatic approach and the Rabat Plan of Action test. We then contrast our analysis with the legal and media perspective on the issue. We conclude by suggesting the benefit of integrating pragmatic analysis with application of normative set of rules such as the Rabat Plan of Action test, even though the fluidity of meaning always poses a challenge to any authority tasked with judging such communicative events. (shrink)

On ne peut que saluer la parution de cet ouvrage important, dont le sous-titre exprime d’emblée l’originalité et la force : élucider le sens de la notion aristotélicienne de dynamis par l’étude de son histoire ou de sa genèse (cf. p. 7 et 32). Cette méthode de travail répond à la volonté de débrouiller les fils d’une ambiguïté bien connue de la notion aristotélicienne de puissance, qui se partage entre deux acceptions principales, explicitées en Metaph. Θ : d’une part, la (...) puissance kata kines... (shrink)

Des contributions interrogeant, depuis l'Antiquité jusqu'à la pensée contemporaine, la notion de degrés de l'être, une option théorique récurrente dans l'histoire de la métaphysique, qui permet d'accueillir la diversité des êtres en y discernant des nuances, un ordre ou des structures, mais qui implique également que certaines choses seraient davantage des êtres que d'autres. ©Electre 2023.

This paper deals with the Aristotelian notion of topical matter mentioned in a few passages of the Metaphysics and ascribed to the celestial bodies. Taking into account the metaphysical context of each occurrence of this notion, it tries to determine for what metaphysical use this notion has been developed and what impact it has on the ousiological analysis of the celestial substances. It suggests that the notion of topical matter, although intended to provide a convenient tool that makes possible a (...) metaphysical, i.e. universal study of sensible substances, by allowing to subordinate every sensible substance to similar principles, in fact prevents celestial substances from being defined as ordinary hylomorphic compounds and leads to conceive them as a particular type of substances. (shrink)

Les années 1968 sont riches en ruptures et créations pour les plasticiennes vivant en France, sous la double influence des remises en cause des avant-gardes artistiques et du mouvement féministe. Parallèlement aux ruptures effectives dès le milieu des années 1960 dans les parcours individuels, des collectifs de femmes artistes se forment entre 1972 et 1978. Cet article analyse les théories, pratiques et activités des principaux groupes, en soulignant leurs points communs et leurs divergences.

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 1 Seiten: 389-391.

« Les choses ont décidément changé en dix ans, les transformations du présent amènent à relire les textes passés, et la poésie française n’apparaît plus comme un grand désert de femmes. Il faut s’en réjouir » (p. 12). C’est avec ce commentaire enthousiaste que Christine Planté clôt l’avant-propos à la deuxième édition de l’anthologie qu’elle dirige, Femmes poètes du xixe siècle. Si l’édition de 1998 permit de faire découvrir une poésie de femmes que le lecteur ignorait, la nouvelle édition de...

This is an excerpt from the contentThe reasons that drive individuals to develop new technologies and to disseminate them in new products and processes, and the capacity to develop original solutions to technological problems, can be analysed with the concepts typical of individual and social cognitive psychology. Various aspects of cognitive activity address innovation. In particular, the capacity to grasp the latent questions and needs of the market that lies behind the possibility to identify opportunities for new products or services; (...) the means of generating solutions that can respond effectively to the realisation of these new opportunities; problem solving processes in the identification of new procedures that underpin process inventions and new manufacturing techniques; the risk of innovative behaviour and the contexts that can favour a greater or lesser propensity to develop innovative solutions. The best historical example of the two stages of the identification of the problem/opportunity and the generation of. (shrink)

Dans son interprétation du Timée, Calcidius rapporte un exposé de Numénius sur la manière dont Pythagore, suivi par Platon, conçoit l’origine du monde. À cette occasion, Numénius identifie la matière à trois entités : la dyade indéterminée, la nécessité et l’âme mauvaise du monde évoquée dans les Lois (fr. 52 Des Places). L’article montre en quoi ces trois analogies permettent de comprendre le rôle qu’il attribue à la matière dans l’origine du mal, et ce même avant l’incarna­tion de l’âme, d’après (...) les témoignages sur sa pensée fournis par Jamblique (fr. 43 Des Places) et Énée de Gaza (fr. 49 Des Places). Il analyse le contexte philo­sophique et exégétique de ces analogies, montrant combien la pensée de Numénius est profondément ancrée dans les cadres fournis par l’école platonicienne, tant pour ses choix herméneutiques que pour ses débats avec les autres écoles (le stoïcisme essentiellement ici). (shrink)

Dans son dialogue Sur le Bien (19 F = fr. 11 dP), Numénius écrit que le dieu qui est « deuxième et troisième est un ». Par là, il désigne un dieu considéré selon deux aspects qui correspondent à la double orientation de son attention. Dans le second, il est tourné vers le monde et joue le rôle de démiurge. Selon la plupart des chercheurs, ce démiurge serait à identifier à l’âme du monde que les fragments parvenus du dialogue ne (...) mentionnent pas. L’article montre que cette interprétation ne rend peut-être pas compte du propos de Numénius. Il indique les raisons théoriques et polémiques expliquant qu’en réalité, même si le démiurge a la fonction de l’âme du monde, Numénius ne l’identifie pas avec celle-ci. Il veut définir les principes qu’il identifie à l’être, conçu comme incorporel. Le mouvement intrinsèque à l’âme et l’immanence qui la caractérise, d’après la tradition platonicienne que suit Numénius et la tradition stoïcienne à laquelle il s’oppose, interdisent de donner à cette âme le statut de pur intelligible – le lui accorder serait précisément céder à l’immanentisme et au corporalisme stoïciens. Enfin, il n’est pas davantage utile de reconnaître dans le second aspect du deuxième dieu, un moment nommé « troisième dieu » dans le dialogue, le troisième dieu que Numénius aurait identifié au monde d’après le témoignage de Proclus (29 T = fr. 21 dP). Ce troisième dieu-là peut réellement correspondre au monde dont Platon fait un dieu, à condition que ce monde soit considéré comme le produit du seul intellect, ordre (κόσμος) qui comporte certes une âme, et même un intellect en elle, mais qui n’est réduit ni à l’une ni à l’autre. (shrink)

In a poetic conversation with Thierry Zarcone, the painter and calligrapher Fabienne Verdier exposes her deep and harmonious connection to nature. She tells of her garden, her house and her osmosis with nature. Painting is to her an art of living and being that recalls the Tao masters as well as some Christan mystics.

Fabienne Peter on whether difficult political decisions should be made by experts.

We show that the Proper Forcing Axiom implies the Singular Cardinal Hypothesis. The proof uses the reflection principle MRP introduced by Moore in [11].

This paper reports on a manual monitoring of online representations of LGBT persons in the Republic of Cyprus for the period April 2015–February 2016. The article contextualizes the prevalence of “hate speech” in online Greek Cypriot comments against LGBT individuals, and, more generally, against non-heterosexuals. Adopting a Foucauldian position vis-à-vis the social and discursive construction of sexuality, we outline, first, the socio-historical context with a focus on LGBT rights in the Republic of Cyprus and the nationalistic project construing sexualities. We (...) then examine the different levels of discursive discrimination practices, providing a snapshot of the types of “hate speech” referring to this topic typically found in such an environment. The focus is on identification of the frames used to construct LGBT identities, and their perception.We use in our title the word subject as defined by post-modernists and by Butler in particular : subject refers to “a socially produced ‘agent’ and ‘deliberator’ whose agency and thought is made possible by a language that precedes that ‘I’. In this sense the ‘I’ is produced through power ”. This paper focuses on the socially produced definition of the LGBT community in the context under study. We thus address the way in which sexuality is constructed within a compulsory and hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity. We analyze our data i.e. comments focused on the LGBT community, with corpus linguistic tools as well as through a qualitative examination of the identified frames. Our analysis confirms an interface between nationalism and compulsory hegemonic heteronormativity in the Republic as well as the influence of the Orthodox Church and its beliefs. (shrink)

This book offers a systematic treatment of the requirements of democratic legitimacy. It argues that democratic procedures are essential for political legitimacy because of the need to respect value pluralism and because of the learning process that democratic decision-making enables. It proposes a framework for distinguishing among the different ways in which the requirements of democratic legitimacy have been interpreted. Peter then uses this framework to identify and defend what appears as the most plausible conception of democratic legitimacy. According to (...) this conception, democratic legitimacy requires that the decision-making process satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness. (shrink)

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient (...) Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the “criminal” was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice. Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to _Discipline and Punish_, _Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling_ will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought. (shrink)

We present two results which shed some more light on the deep connection between ZFA and the standard ZF set theory: First of all we refine a result of Forti and Honsell in order to prove that the universe of ZFA can also be obtained as the least fixed point of a continuous operator and not only as the greatest fixed point of the powerset operator. Next we show that it is possible to define a new absolute Gödel operation in (...) addition to the standard ones in order to obtain the “constructible” model of ZFA as the least fixed point of the continuous operator of Gödel closure with respect to the standard and the new Gödel operations. (shrink)

Mauro Bonazzi has shown how Numenius based his theology on his interpretation of Plato’s Timaios and Politeia. However, by giving the title On the Good to his own dialogue, Numenius inserts it in the line of the teaching that, according to the tradition, Plato would have orally given on this topic. After focusing briefly on this teaching and its problems, the paper examines how Numenius appropriated it, as it reached him. It will appear that Numenius conceives of the oral tradition (...) as the Pythagorean core of Plato’s teaching, a core that, according to him, its transmitters did not understand properly, and that he claims to find himself in a good interpretation of that which he has direct access to : the writings of the Master. (shrink)

A Triadic Theology is often attributed to Numenius. This presentation of his thought must be clarified. In Fragment 19 F, he mentions three gods, but the third one turns out to be the second aspect of the second god. In the testimonies, he mentions a third intellect (30 T = Proclus, In Tim. III 103, 28‑32 D.) and a third god, who is identified with the world (29 T = Proclus, In Tim. I 303, 27‑304, 5 D.) The third intellect (...) of 30 T seems to have to be identified with the third god as second aspect of the second god of 19 F. However, the third god of 29 T is quite different from them. In our opinion, it really corresponds to the generated and divine world represented in the Timaeus. This world is endowed with a rational soul in which an intellect is located, the source of all divinity. Such would be the third god of Numenius, ontologically distinct from the second one. This definition makes it impossible to turn it into a third principle at the origin of the world. A paradoxical proof of this interpretation is given by the Christians. When, in Platonism, they try to show the existence of a divine Triad that can be compared with the Christian Trinity, they do not quote Numenius. Cyril uses him to explain the relation between Father and Son (CJ III 35/23 F). But when he wants to find in him some Trinitarian assertions, he rewrites his text (CJ VIII 29/19 F). It is not surprising that Eusebius preferred Plotinus, reread by Porphyry, to find an equivalent to the Christian Trinity in a Platonic Triad. Thus, Numenius names three gods. But the identity of the third one must be clarified according to the context of his discourse and cannot be considered as a third principle. Numenius keeps a place for a third god because of his fidelity to the Pythagoreanism he attributes to Socrates, that he reads in the Timaeus and finds in Hesiod’s Theogony interpreted through the light of the Cratylus. He is however attached to a duality of divine principles, perhaps because of a fidelity to a more ancient Pythagoreanism he thinks more genuine than that of his predecessors as well as of his contemporaries. (shrink)

Si Numénius, en platonicien de son temps, a utilisé le Timée et la République pour élaborer et étayer sa pensée métaphysique et cosmologique, il est devenu coutume de penser qu’il a également eu recours au Parménide dans sa description du premier principe. Il peut même paraître tentant d’identifier chez lui ce principe à l’Un. L’examen attentif de son œuvre ne fournit cependant que peu d’indices en ce sens et convainc même qu’elle ne permet pas une telle interprétation. Malgré ces conclusions, (...) l’hypothèse persiste pour des raisons qui tiennent principalement à l’histoire de la philosophie et aux recherches qu’elle suscite. Elle est en effet souvent reprise pour trois raisons, présentées comme corollaires : le statut propre à Numénius de platonicien pythagorisant, prédécesseur de Plotin ; les affinités réelles entre sa pensée et celle du Commentaire anonyme au Parménide ; les parallèles également entrevus entre ses formules et celles de la source supposée commune au Zostrien et au Contre Arius de Marius Victorinus, conçue quant à elle comme fort proche du Commentaire anonyme. Autrement dit, sont invoquées trois raisons nées moins de l’étude de l’œuvre de Numénius elle-même que de la recherche des sources d’autres textes en mal d’auteur et d’origines bien définies, recherche se fondant en partie sur les prétendus liens entre Numérius et ses « pairs » en pythagorisme. L’étude proposée comporte trois parties indépendantes, examinant chacune de ces trois raisons avec les hypothèses qui lui sont associées. Après une esquisse des principaux tenants de la pensée de Numénius, cette première partie aborde les rapports parfois perçus et ceux encore perceptibles entre son œuvre et le Parménide. Elle montre que Numénius n’a visiblement pas utilisé le dialogue de Platon pour élaborer sa propre doctrine des deux premiers principes et a même pu adopter une relative distance à l’égard de l’Un de la première hypothèse, suivant en cela une injonction qu’il a pu penser percevoir chez Platon lui-même. Dès ce premier examen, il apparaît que l’œuvre parvenue de Numénius ne suggère pas de bouleverser la conception la plus courante de l’histoire du platonisme en faisant de Numénius le précurseur de Plotin dans l’interprétation métaphysique du Parménide. L’interrogation sur son rapport à ce dialogue fournit même a contrario les critères d’une interprétation réellement néoplatonicienne de la seconde partie de celui-ci. Un prolongement de cette étude montre toutefois que Numénius a pu inspirer Plotin dans son interprétation de certaines formules du Parménide historique lui-même. (shrink)

Si l’homme est un être doté de raison et se distingue des autres animaux par sa capacité à réfléchir sur ses actes tant avant de les poser qu’après, il lui arrive cependant d’être irrationnel. Tandis que certains s’en désolent, considérant les différentes formes d’irrationalité comme autant d’expressions de notre inaptitude à atteindre la sagesse, d’autres semblent plutôt s’en réjouir, estimant que la possibilité de ne pas se conformer à ce que dicte ou suggère la raison est une preuve de notre (...) radicale liberté. Mais quel que soit le jugement moral, explicite ou implicite, porté sur ces phénomènes, la plupart des philosophes ne se contentent pas de les constater. Ils tentent de les cerner, d’en comprendre les mécanismes, parfois de les justifier. Comment et pour-quoi? Telles sont les questions auxquelles voudrait répondre ce numéro portant sur la délibération et l’irrationalité dans l’histoire. (shrink)