It is often claimed that emotions are linked to formal objects. But what are formal objects? What roles do they play? According to some philosophers, formal objects are axiological properties which individuate emotions, make them intelligible and give their correctness conditions. In this paper, I evaluate these claims in order to answer the above questions. I first give reasons to doubt the thesis that formal objects individuate emotions. Second, I distinguish different ways in which emotions are intelligible and argue that (...) philosophers are wrong in claiming that emotions only make sense when they are based on prior sources of axiological information. Third, I investigate how issues of intelligibility connect with the correctness conditions of emotions. I defend a theory according to which emotions do not respond to axiological information, but to non-axiological reasons. According to this theory, we can allocate fundamental roles to the formal objects of emotions while dispensing with the problematic features of other theories. (shrink)

The most salient aspect of memory is its role in preserving previously acquired information so as to make it available for further activities. Anna realizes that something is amiss in a book on Roman history because she learned and remembers that Caesar was murdered. Max turned up at the party and distinctively remembers where he was seated, so he easily gets his hands on his lost cell phone. The fact that information is not gained anew distinguishes memory from perception. The (...) fact that information is preserved distinguishes memory from imagination. But how do acquisition and retrieval of information contribute to the phenomenology of memory?The exclusive aim of this chapter is to sketch a map of the phenomenology of memory. It is structured as follows. In section 1, I introduce the contrast between content (what is remembered) and psychological attitude (remembering). This distinction will be helpful in disentangling issues in the phenomenology of memory. Section 2 is devoted to the contribution of memory content to phenomenology, section 3 to the contribution of the attitude of remembering. (shrink)

This paper suggests that the enactive approach to ethics could benefit from engaging a dialogue with the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher who has given ethics a decisive role in the understanding of our social life. Taking the enactive approach of Colombetti and Torrance as a starting point, we show how Levinas’ philosophy, with the key notions of face, otherness, and responsibility among others can complement and enrich the enactive view of ethics. Specifically, we argue that Levinas can provide, (...) on the one hand, a phenomenological characterisation of ethics itself, of its nature and fundamental meaning, and on the other, an account of how sociality, affectivity and embodiment, as presented in Colombetti and Torrance’s work, combine to bring about the ethical experience. However, we also point out that introducing Levinas to the enactive approach could be challenging. It is not obvious how sense-making and value-making, as centred on the precariousness and potential death of the subject, would account for the ethical experience as grounded on the precariousness and potential death of the other. (shrink)

Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and theories in different domains of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology and the social sciences.

Some of the most eminent and enduring philosophical questions concern matters of priority: what is prior to what? What 'grounds' what? Is, for instance, matter prior to mind? Recently, a vivid debate has arisen about how such questions have to be understood. Can the relevant notion or notions of priority be spelled out? And how do they relate to other metaphysical notions, such as modality, truth-making or essence? This volume of new essays, by leading figures in contemporary metaphysics, is the (...) first to address and investigate the metaphysical idea that certain facts are grounded in other facts. An introduction introduces and surveys the debate, examining its history as well as its central systematic aspects. The volume will be of wide interest to students and scholars of metaphysics. (shrink)

The connection between shame, guilt and morality is the topic of many recent debates. A broad tendency consists in attributing a higher moral status and a greater moral relevance to guilt, a claim motivated by arguments that tap into various areas of morality and moral psychology. The Pro-social Argument has it that guilt is, contrary to shame, morally good since it promotes pro-social behaviour. Three other arguments claim that only guilt has the requisite connection to central moral concepts: the Responsibility (...) Argument appeals to the ties between guilt and responsibility, the Autonomy Argument to the heteronomy of shame and the Social Argument to shame's link with reputation. In this paper, we scrutinize these arguments and argue that they cannot support the conclusion that they try to establish. We conclude that a narrow focus on particular criteria and a misconception of shame and guilt have obscured the important roles shame plays in our moral lives. (shrink)

Say that two sentences are factually equivalent when they describe the same facts or situations, understood as worldly items, i.e. as bits of reality rather than as representations of reality. The notion of factual equivalence is certainly of central interest to philosophical semantics, but it plays a role in a much wider range of philosophical areas. What is the logic of factual equivalence? This paper attempts to give a partial answer to this question, by providing an answer the following, more (...) specific question: Given a standard propositional language with negation, conjunction and disjunction as primitive operators, which sentences of the language should be taken to be factually equivalent by virtue of their logical form? The system for factual equivalence advocated in this paper is a proper fragment of the first-degree system for the logic of analytic equivalence put forward in the late seventies by R. B. Angell. I provide the system with two semantics, both formulated in terms of the notion of a situation’s being fittingly described by a linguistic item. In the final part of the paper I argue, contra a view I defended in my “Grounding and Truth-Functions”, that the logic for factual equivalence I advocate here should be preferred to Angell’s logic if one wishes to follow the general conception of the relationships between factual equivalence and the notion of grounding put forward in the 2010 paper. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the concept of human dignity and critically assess whether such a concept, as used in the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, is indeed a useful tool for bioethical debates. However, I consider this concept within the context of the development of emerging technologies, that is, with a particular focus on transhumanism. The question I address is not whether attaching artificial limbs or enhancing particular traits or capacities would dehumanize or undignify persons but (...) whether nonbiological entities introduced into or attached to the human body contribute to the “augmentation” of human dignity. First, I outline briefly how the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights uses the concept of dignity. Second, I look at the possibility of a universal bioethics in relation to the concept of human dignity. Third, I examine the concept of posthuman dignity and whether the concept of human dignity as construed in the declaration has any relevance to posthuman dignity. (shrink)

Recent metaphysics has turned its focus to two notions that are—as well as having a common Aristotelian pedigree—widely thought to be intimately related: grounding and essence. Yet how, exactly, the two are related remains opaque. We develop a unified and uniform account of grounding and essence, one which understands them both in terms of a generalized notion of identity examined in recent work by Fabrice Correia, Cian Dorr, Agustín Rayo, and others. We argue that the account comports with antecedently (...) plausible principles governing grounding, essence, and identity taken individually, and illuminates how the three interact. We also argue that the account compares favorably to an alternative unification of grounding and essence recently proposed by Kit Fine. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers are attracted by the Indispensability Claim, according to which emotions are indispensable in acquiring knowledge of some important values. The truth of this claim is often thought to depend on that of Emotional Dogmatism, the view that emotions justify evaluative judgements because they (seem to) make us aware of the relevant values. The aim of this paper is to show that the Indispensability Claim does not stand or fall with Emotional Dogmatism and that there is actually an attractive (...) alternative way of developing it. We first argue that the Indispensability Claim requires a deflationary account of the cognitive bases of emotions, which we call the Simple View and defend against a variety of criticisms. Armed with the Simple View, we show that the Indispensability Claim is made true by three roles of the emotions: they help us access the relevant evidence, provide a needed hook-up between evidence and judgement, and contribute to evaluative understanding. (shrink)

This monograph is a detailed study, and systematic defence, of the Growing Block Theory of time (GBT), first conceived by C.D. Broad. The book offers a coherent, logically perspicuous and ideologically lean formulation of GBT, defends it against the most notorious objections to be found in the extant philosophical literature, and shows how it can be derived from a more general theory, consistent with relativistic spacetime, on the pre-relativistic assumption of an absolute and total temporal order. -/- The authors devise (...) axiomatizations of GBT and its competitors which, against the backdrop of a shared quantified tense logic, significantly improves the prospects of their comparative assessment. Importantly, neither of these axiomatizations involves commitment to properties of presentness, pastness or futurity. The authors proceed to address, and defuse, a number of objections that have been marshaled against GBT, including the so-called epistemic objection according to which the theory invites skepticism about our temporal location. The challenge posed by relativistic physics is met head-on, by replacing claims about temporal variation by claims about variation across spacetime. -/- The book aims to achieve the greatest possible rigor. The background logic is set out in detail, as are the principles governing the notions of precedence and temporal location. The authors likewise devise a novel spacetime logic suited for the articulation, and comparative assessment, of relativistic theories of time. The book comes with three technical appendices which include soundness and completeness proofs for the systems corresponding to GBT and its competitors, in both their pre-relativistic and relativistic forms. -/- The book is primarily directed at researchers and graduate students working on the philosophy of time or temporal logic, but is of interest to metaphysicians and philosophical logicians more generally. (shrink)

Bodily (dis)pleasures and emotions share the striking property of being valenced, i.e. they are positive or negative. What is valence? How do bodily (dis)pleasures and emotions relate to one another? This chapter assesses the prospects of two popular theses regarding the relation between bodily (dis)pleasures and emotions in light of what we can reasonably think about valence. According to the first thesis, the valence of bodily (dis)pleasures is explanatory prior vis-à-vis the valence of emotions. According to the second, emotions contain (...) bodily (dis)pleasures. I argue that bodily (dis)pleasures are intentional states whose valence is to be understood in terms of evaluative experience, and bring to light the similarities and dissimilarities between their intentional structure and that of emotions. On this backdrop, I offer reasons to conclude that we should adopt neither of the two theses. (shrink)

I assume that truth-making is to be understood in terms of grounding, and I show how, on that assumption, various general properties of truth-making follow from certain features of grounding.

The evaluations involved in shame are, intuitively at least, of many different sorts. One feels ashamed when seen by others doing something one would prefer doing alone (social shame). One is ashamed because of one’s ugly nose (shame about permanent traits). One feels ashamed of one’s dishonest behavior (moral shame), etc. The variety of evaluations in shame is striking; and it is even more so if one takes a cross-cultural perspective on this emotion. So the difficulty – the “unity problem” (...) of shame- turns out to be the following: is there a common trait shared by all shame evaluations that will allow us to differentiate these evaluations from those that feature in other negative self-reflexive emotions like anger at oneself or self disappointment? Some progress is perhaps accomplished if we say that, in shame, a given trait or behavior is evaluated as degrading or as revealing one’s lack of worth. Still, even if we agree with this last claim, truth is that these answers are less illuminating than we might wish. A theory of shame should surely further elucidate the aspect of one’s identity relevant for shame, namely, the self of shame. In this connexion, philosophers have referred to “self-esteem,” “self-respect” or the “social self,” significantly disagreeing thus on which aspect of one’s identity is at stake in shame. After critically discussing the different solutions to the problem, we offer our own. Shame, we claim, consists in an awareness of a distinctive inability to discharge a commitment that goes with holding self-relevant values. This conception solves the unity problem while illuminating other aspects of this emotion. (shrink)

Psychologists have emphasized children's acquisition of information through firsthand observation. However, many beliefs are acquired from others' testimony. In two experiments, most 4yearolds displayed sceptical trust in testimony. Having heard informants' accurate or inaccurate testimony, they anticipated that informants would continue to display such differential accuracy and they trusted the hitherto reliable informant. Yet they ignored the testimony of the reliable informant if it conflicted with what they themselves had seen. By contrast, threeyearolds were less selective in trusting a reliable (...) informant. Thus, young children check testimony against their own experience and increasingly recognise that some informants are more trustworthy than others. (shrink)

Si un philosophe a fondé son oeuvre sur la conscience historique, c'est bien Raymond Aron. Le rapprochement entre Aron et la post-modernité pourrait surprendre. Il en va tout autrement si l'on considère la conception historique de la post-modernité : celle-ci suit logiquement les Temps Modernes. Elle comprend alors les deux siècles de tensions idéologiques qui ont suivi 1789, jusqu'à la chute du mur de Berlin. Raymond Aron a commenté et pensé les convulsions apocalyptiques du dernier siècle post-moderne. D'où l'idée de (...) le considérer sous plusieurs angles : face au basculement du monde, la critique des idéologies (D. Steinmetz-Jenkins), la théorie des relations internationales (O. Rosenboim), son jugement sur la "tragédie algérienne" (O. Dard). Mais Aron est aussi sensible aux permanences, à ce qui ne bascule pas : c'est un penseur de la nation et des identités régionales, qui s'interroge sur sa propre judéité (G. De Ligio). La philosophie d'Aron, où l'historien est créateur et incarné, présente une analogie avec la théologie chrétienne : Pierre Manent décrit la relation d'Aron au christianisme. Enfin, Aron reste un intellectuel tout engagé dans la défense de la liberté, ce qu'explorent deux contributions : sur ce qu'il doit au libéralisme d'Edmund Burke (M. Oppermann), et sur sa recherche d'une stratégie modérée chez l'historien Hans Delbrück (J. Mouric). Encadrées par l'introduction de Fabrice Bouthillon et la conclusion de Pascal David, ces études esquissent les traits d'une pensée subtile : sceptique contre le dogmatisme des idéologies totalitaires, mais non relativiste, attachée à l'historicité, sans tomber dans le déterminisme historique. Ce volume est issu de la journée d'études du 18 novembre 2014 à l'Université de Bretagne occidentale à Brest."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

A long-standing debate surrounds the question as to what justifies memory judgements. According to the Past Reason Theory, these judgements are justified by the reasons we had to make identical judgements in the past, whereas the Present Reason Theory claims that these justifying reasons are to be found at the time we pass the memory judgements. In this paper, I defend the original claim that, far from being exclusive, these two theories should be applied to different kinds of memory judgements. (...) The Past Reason Theory offers the most appealing account of justified propositional memory judgements, while the Present Reason Theory provides the best approach to justified episodic memory judgements. One outcome of my discussion is thus that memory is not epistemologically unified and my argument in favour of this conclusion connects with the issues of internalism, reliabilism and the basing relation. (shrink)

I give a semantic characterisation of a system for the logic of grounding similar to the system introduced by Kit Fine in his “Guide to Ground”, as well as a semantic characterisation of a variant of that system which excludes the possibility of what Fine calls ‘zero-grounding’.

When we remember, we often know that we do. How does this memory identification proceed? After having articulated some constraints on an attractive account of memory identification, this paper explores three types of accounts that respectively appeal to features of memory content, of memory as an activity, and of memory as an attitude. It offers reasons to favour an attitudinal account giving pride of place to the feeling of familiarity.

Ce texte a pour but de mettre en confrontation la conception ruyérienne de la philosophie avec la conception wittgensteinienne. L’opposition majeure consiste dans l’idée défendue par Ruyer selon laquelle on ne saurait concevoir ce qu’est l’esprit sans définir un domaine, intérieur au sujet, qu’on peut identifier avec sa subjectivité. Une telle idée est comprise par Ryle comme un mythe, celui de l’intériorité. Il y a en revanche une volonté commune (mais bien différente) à Ruyer et Wittgenstein de s’émanciper de la (...) science. Deux thèmes permettent alors de comparer les objectifs de Ruyer et ceux des philosophes wittgensteiniens : le thème des mythes en philosophie et celui de la traduction. (shrink)

This paper explores substantive accounts of emotional phenomenology so as to see whether it sheds light on key features of emotions. To this end, we focus on four features that can be introduced by way of an example. Say Sam is angry at Maria’s nasty remark. The first feature relates to the fact that anger is a negative emotion, by contrast with positive emotions such as joy and admiration (valence). The second feature is how anger differs from other emotions such (...) as sadness, fear and joy (individuation). The third concerns the objects of anger and the sense in which anger discloses the significance of Maria’s remark to Sam (intentionality). Finally, there is anger’s relation to behaviour (motivation). Does focussing on emotional phenomenology encourage specific accounts of these features? We shall see that there are reasons to think it does. Still, are these reasons of sufficient import to dispel the scepticism of those who think that nothing of consequence plays out at the personal level of emotional experience? Given the role of emotional experience in our evaluative practices, we shall conclude that they are. Our discussion is structured as follows: section 1 focuses on feeling approaches to phenomenology, section 2 on componential approaches, section 3 on perceptual approaches and section 4 on attitudinal approaches. Section 5 concludes with some observations regarding the significance of emotional phenomenology. (shrink)

La question n'est plus : 'L'écologie, pour ou contre?' Le label vert a partout remplacé le label rouge (ou bleu ciel). La question est : 'Quelle écologie?' Or il y a là un problème, et même un 'problème à cornes,' selon la formule de Nietzsche : peut-on vraiment fonder l'écologie sur la Nature, dont la notion est si ambivalente? Elle n'a pas attendu l'homme pour produire cinq extinctions massives. Laissée à elle-même, elle éteindra tout, y compris les étoiles. Par ailleurs, (...) s'il faut bien sauvegarder les espèces dans leur admirable diversité, est-ce uniquement dans un but de conservation? La seule conservation eût été la finalité de la Nature que la vie n'aurait même pas dû commencer: une pierre dès le départ était plus performante. Et si le sens du vivant ne se trouvait pas tant dans la conservation que dans l'exposition de soi--et une exposition glorieuse--, jusqu'au sacrifice? Si la Madone était plus vraie que la Méduse? Fabrice Hadjadj nous offre ici une puissante méditation sur le vivant, l'interdépendance spirituelle de l'homme et des bêtes, la relation entre écologie et eschatologie. A travers une approche à la fois philosophique et biblique, il pense une tragédie heureuse, où il ne s'agit pas de donner pour durer, mais de durer pour donner encore.. En bref, il prend le taureau par les cornes."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In 1977, R. B. Angell presented a logic for analytic containment, a notion of relevant implication stronger than Anderson and Belnap's entailment. In this paper I provide for the first time the logic of first degree analytic containment, as presented in [2] and [3], with a semantical characterization—leaving higher degree systems for future investigations. The semantical framework I introduce for this purpose involves a special sort of truth-predicates, which apply to pairs of collections of formulas instead of individual formulas, and (...) which behave in some respects like Gentzen's sequents. This semantics captures very general properties of the truth-functional connectives, and for that reason it may be used to model a vast range of logics. I briefly illustrate the point with classical consequence and Anderson and Belnap's tautological entailments. (shrink)

In this paper, we clarify what proponents of the Growing Block Theory (GBT) should and what they should not say, and what they consistently can say. Once all the central tenets of the view are on the table, we address both David Braddon-Mitchell’s and Trenton Merricks’ recent eulogies for GBT, based on what is representative of a certain type of argument meant to show that GBT is internally incoherent. We argue that this type of argument proceeds from a mistaken assumption (...) about GBT’s core, viz. that GBT works with an untensed notion of what, in the metaphysically most fundamental sense, there is. We conclude that this type of argument accordingly misfires and that for all we know, we might be living on the brink of reality. (shrink)

Pour de nombreuses théories contemporaines, la nature est devenue le Deus ex machina. Nos sentiments, nos comportements et notre pensée dépendraient de la vie, des mutations, de la sélection naturelle, de la sélection de groupe. Adaptation, mutations, fonctions, utilité, rapport coût/bénéfice, régulation affective ou sociale : ce lexique n'est plus inconnu pour l'amateur. Cet ouvrage prétend repenser l'évolution de l'homme dans un contexte plus différent...

According to the antirealist view of history, history is something historians construct in the present. Although the warrants they may gather in favour of past events do not form a coherent class, such warrants constitute the assertibility conditions of our statements about the past. They are by nature partial, gradual and defeasible. The antirealist is then faced with two problems. One is to account for a notion of historical significance, either in terms of causal links, broad patterns, or justified historiographic (...) generalizations. A second one is to secure a bound to the holistic construal of historical cognitive content. A coherent antirealist about history must explain why historical claims are in the market for truth, without taking the position of an ideal observer looking at the past from an a-historical fixed point outside time. (shrink)

We argue that the main objections against two central tenets of a Jamesian account of the emotions, i.e. that (1) different types of emotions are associated with specific types of bodily feelings (Specificity), and that (2) emotions are constituted by patterns of bodily feeling (Constitution), do not succeed. In the first part, we argue that several reasons adduced against Specifity, including one inspired by Schachter and Singer’s work, are unconvincing. In the second part, we argue that Constitution, too, can withstand (...) most of the objections raised against it, including the objection that bodily feelings cannot account for the outward-looking and evaluative nature of emotions. In both sections, we argue that the kinds of felt bodily changes posited by a Jamesian account of emotions are best understood in terms of felt states of action-readiness. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists often distinguish episodic or personal memory from propositional or semantic memory. A vexed issue concerns the role, if any, of memory “impressions” or “seemings” within the latter. According to an important family of approaches, seemings play a fundamental epistemological role vis-à-vis propositional memory judgments: it is one’s memory seeming that Caesar was murdered, say, that justifies one’s judgment that he was murdered. Yet, it has been convincingly argued that these approaches lead to insurmountable problems and that memory (...) seemings are not wellsuited to play this justifying role. As a result, many contemporary accounts of propositional memory dispense with these seemings altogether. Is the idea that memory seemings play a key role in propositional memory really the result of bad theorizing? My aim is to shed light on this issue, which I will approach as follows. In Section 1, I contrast episodic memory with propositional memory so as to clarify the nature of the latter. According to the account I put forward, episodic memory consists in the preservation of acquaintance with objects and events, whereas propositional memory consists in the preservation of thought contents. In Section 2, I turn my attention to the contrast between propositional memory contents and propositional memory as an attitude. I argue that they play different roles. Memory contents satisfy a past awareness constraint and a causal constraint; the attitude of remembering explains why we are inclined to endorse these contents. This distinction leads me to explore the attitude of remembering, and I argue, in Section 3, that the most appealing account of this attitude is in terms of feelings of familiarity. In Section 4, I turn my attention to the epistemology of propositional memory and revisit the claim that propositional memory judgments are justifi ed by memory seemings. In so doing, I contend that the attitude of remembering plays an exclusively explanatory role and does not contribute to the epistemology of propositional memory judgments. I conclude by drawing a more general lesson regarding the respective roles of attitudes and contents. (shrink)

I introduce a proof system for the logic of relative fundamentality, as well as a natural semantics with respect to which the system is both sound and complete. I then “modalise” the logic, and finally I discuss the properties of grounding given a suggested account of this notion in terms of necessity and relative fundamentality.

The benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medicine are unquestionable and it is unlikely that the pace of its development will slow down. From better diagnosis, prognosis, and prevention to more precise surgical procedures, AI has the potential to offer unique opportunities to enhance patient care and improve clinical practice overall. However, at this stage of AI technology development it is unclear whether it will de-humanize or re-humanize medicine. Will AI allow clinicians to spend less time on administrative tasks and (...) technology related procedures and more time being present in person to attend to the needs of their patients? Or will AI dramatically increase the presence of smart technology in the clinical context to a point of undermining the humane dimension of the patient–physician relationship? In this brief commentary, we argue that technological solutions should be only integrated into clinical medicine if they fulfill the following three conditions: (1) they serve human ends; (2) they respect personal identity; and (3) they promote human interaction. These three conditions form the moral imperative of humanity. (shrink)

There are several ways of conceiving objectivity -- scientific objectivity in particular -- and, accordingly, several ways of defending or attacking particular construals of it. According to one conception sometimes labelled "realism", objectivity in science is a semantic, modal and metaphysical notion: a scientific theory is objective insofar as it tells the truth about the way the world is independently of its epistemic accessibility to us. So, for instance, the Newtonian theory of gravition is objective insofar as it tells the (...) truth about the motion of particles submitted to gravitational forces. What it tells us, the realist contends, holds or is the case whether or not the physical world is accessible to us. The conception is semantic insofar as the notion of truth is involved, modal insofar as the conception of the possibility of a mind-independent natural world is involved and metaphysical insofar as a conception of a certain way the world is is involved. Philosophers as diverse as Berkeley, Kant and Dummett's antirealist will then ask: if this were the case, how could we know anything about it? How could we even form a bona fide conception of its possibility? (shrink)

This paper presents a propositional version of Kit Fine's (quantified) logic for essentialist statements, provides it with a semantics, and proves the former adequate (i.e. sound and complete) with respect to the latter.

In this article, we develop a non-rights-based argument based on beneficence (i.e., the welfare of individuals and communities) and justice as the disposition to act justly to promote equity in health care resource allocation. To this end, we structured our analysis according to the following main sections. The first section examines the work of Amartya Sen and his equality of capabilities approach and outlines a framework of health care as a fundamental human need. In the subsequent section, we provide a (...) definition of health equity based on the moral imperative to guarantee that every individual ought to have the freedom to pursue health goals and well-being. In the later part of the article, we outline a non-right approach to health care based on three pillars: (1) human flourishing, (2) justice as a disposition not a process, and (3) solidarity. (shrink)

In this article, we present, assess and give reasons to reject the popular claim that shame is essentially social. We start by presenting several theses which the social claim has motivated in the philosophical literature. All of them, in their own way, regard shame as displaying a structure in which "others" play an essential role. We argue that while all these theses are true of some important families of shame episodes, none of them generalize so as to motivate the conclusion (...) that shame is an essentially social emotion. We consider each thesis in turn, explaining in the process their connections with one another as well as the constraints on a theory of shame they help uncover. Finally, we show how a non-social picture of shame is not only capable of meeting these constraints, but has the further virtue of shedding light on those situations in which others seem to play no role in why we feel shame. (shrink)

In the third of his Logical Investigations, Husserl draws an important distinction between two kinds of parts: the dependent parts like the redness of a visual datum or the squareness of a given picture, and the independent parts like the head of a horse or a brick in a wall. On his view, the distinction is to be understood in terms of a more fundamental notion, the notion of foundation. This paper is an attempt at clarifying that notion. Such attempts (...) have already been undertaken by Peter Simons and Kit Fine, and the paper also contains elements of comparison of our three sets of views. (shrink)

The Hippocratic Oath, the Hippocratic tradition, and Hippocratic ethics are widely invoked in the popular medical culture as conveying a direction to medical practice and the medical profession. This study critically addresses these invocations of Hippocratic guideposts, noting that reliance on the Hippocratic ethos and the Oath requires establishingwhat the Oath meant to its author, its original community of reception, and generally for ancient medicine what relationships contemporary invocations of the Oath and the tradition have to the original meaning of (...) the Oath and its original reception what continuity exists and under what circumstances over the last two-and-a-half millenniums of medical-moral reflections what continuity there is in the meaning of professionalism from the time of Hippocrates to the 21st century, and what social factors in particular have transformed the medical profession in particular countries. This article argues that the resources for a better understanding of medical professionalism lie not in the Hippocratic Oath, tradition, or ethos in and of themselves. Rather, it must be found in a philosophy of medicine that explores the values internal to medicine, thus providing a medical-moral philosophy so as to be able to resist the deformation of medical professionalism by bioethics, biopolitics, and governmental regulation. The Oath, as well as Stephen H. Miles' recent monograph, The Hippocratic Oath and the Ethics of Medicine, are employed as heuristics, so as to throw into better light the extent to which the Hippocratic Oath, tradition, and ethics can provide guidance and direction, as well as to show the necessity of taking seriously the need for a substantive philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty, malgre ce que peut suggerer une lecture trop rapide, a refuse de placer son entreprise sous le signe de l'anti-metaphysique. Certes, il a tenu compte des critiques anterieures adressees a la metaphysique, cependant il occupe une position originale et singuliere dans le champ philosophique contemporain. Partant des travaux de la psychologie gestaltiste de la perception, encore largement ignores en France aujourd'hui, et sur lesquels le present ouvrage s'est largement appuye, Merleau-Ponty a ete conduit a renouveler l'ontologie traditionnelle, pour elargir (...) ensuite le domaine de la metaphysique a de nouveaux objets, jusqu'a remonter au mystere de l'espace et du temps. Un certain nombre de deplacements et de reagencements sont ainsi operes, qui temoignent d'une reappropriation vivante de la metaphysique, a partir d'une finitude que Merleau-Ponty dit non pas - bornee - mais - militante -.". (shrink)

Fabrice Virgili (Q) : Elisabeth Elgán, comme historienne des mouvements sociaux et du féminisme suédois dans les années 1970, vous avez bien voulu à l’occasion du 2e Congrès de l’Institut du genre qui s’est réuni à Angers à la fin août 2019 revenir sur le #MeToo en Suède. Pouvez-vous d’abord nous rappeler dans quel contexte apparaît ce #? Elisabeth Elgán (EE) : Il est encore un peu tôt pour avoir des recherches approfondies sur ce mouvement, il s’agit donc d’une (...) réflexion fondée sur mes prop... (shrink)

English summary: Ruyer argued that metaphysics spanned the spaces or gaps of knowledge that escaped from scientific teaching. Attentive to the latest scientific advancements, Ruyer produced a monism that placed a finalism attached to existing forms at the center of the universe, creating an original philosophical theology. After a brief biography, this book presents Ruyers work and thought, his principal texts in which he emerges as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. French description: Il y deux (...) manieres de se convaincre qu'on peut retirer une connaissance profonde de l'etude des sciences de la nature. Ou l'on croit que les sciences decrivent avec exactitude l'univers (et l'homme lui-meme). Ou l'on tient avec Ruyer qu'en suivant mot a mot, et pas a pas, les enseignements des sciences, on enjambe des espaces de connaissance qui leur echappent et qui sont l'objet de la metaphysique. Attentif aux dernieres avancees du savoir, Ruyer decouvre la possibilite de retourner le materialisme et de produire un monisme qui place au centre de l'univers, non plus la matiere, mais le finalisme attache aux formes existantes. Cette metaphysique qui est exposee notamment dans le Neo-finalisme, rejette le dualisme, se passe du sujet cartesien et aboutit a une theologie originale. Apres une breve biographie de Ruyer, le present ouvrage etudie les constantes et les evolutions de sa pensee, puis analyse ses oeuvres principales, ou l'on reconnaitra sans peine un des penseurs majeurs du XXe siecle. (shrink)

The purpose of the book is to clarify the notion of existential dependence and cognate notions, such as supervenience and the notion of an internal relation. I defend the view that such notions are best understood in terms of the concept of metaphysical grounding, i.e. the concept of one fact obtaining in virtue of other facts, where ‘in virtue of’ has a distinctively metaphysical meaning.