Book reviewed in this article: In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History. By John Van Seters. The Hidden God: The Hiding of the Face of God in the Old Testament. By Samuel E. Balentine. Theodicy in the Old Testament. Edited by James L. Crenshaw. Ce Dieu censé aimer la Souffrance. By François Varone. Evil and Evolution, A Theodicy. By Richard W. Kropf. ‘Poet and Peasant’ and ‘Through Peasant Eyes’: A Literary‐Cultural Approach (...) to the Parable in Luke. By Kenneth Bailey. The Biblical Foundations for Mission. By Donald Senior and Carroll Stuhlmueller. New Testament Foundations of Ministry. By Colin Kruse. Church, Ministry and Unity. By James E. Griffiss. Theology of Ministry. By Thomas Franklin O'Meara. Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology. By Colin E. Gunton. I believe in the Holy Spirit. By Yves Congar. Between Jesus and Paul. By Martin Hengel. From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and its Background. By Frances Young. Alan of Lille: The Frontiers of Theology in the Later Twelfth Century. By G.R. Evans. Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe. By Clarissa W. Atkinson. Church, Politics and Society: Scotland 1408–1929. Edited by N. Macdougall. Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. Collected Essays, Volume II. By Frances A. Yates. Seven‐Headed Luther: Essays in Commemoration of a Quincentury, 1483–1983. Edited by Peter Newman Brooks. Ökumenische Erschliessung Martin Luthers. Edited by Peter Manns and Harding Meyer. Luther's Ecumenical Significance, An Interconfessional Consultation. Edited by Peter Manns and Harding Meyer, in collaboration with Carter Lindberg and Harry McSorley. States of Mind: A Study of Anglo‐Irish Conflict 1780 to 1980. By Oliver MacDonagh. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth‐Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter Reform. By Gregory L. Freeze. Pusey Rediscovered. Edited by Perry Butler. Between Two Worlds: George Tyrrell's Relationship to the Thought of Matthew Arnold. By Nicholas Sagovsky. The Concept of Glaubenslehre. By Walter E. Wyman, Jr. The Existence and Nature of God. Edited by Alfred J. Freddoso. Faith and Reason. By Anthony Kenny. Logic and The Nature of God. By Stephen T. Davis. Personal Responsibility and Christian Morality. By Josef Fuchs. Morality and Conflict. By Stuart Hampshire. Realism and Imagination in Ethics. By Sabina Lovibond. Intentionality. By John R. Searle. Philosophical Papers, I: Practical Reason. By G.H. von Wright. Philosophical Papers, II: Philosophical Logic. By G.H. von Wright. A Model of Making: Literary Criticism and its Theology. By Ruth Etchells. The Return of the Goddess: Femininity, Aggression and the Modern Grail Quest. By Edward Whitmont. The Power of the Poor in History. By Gustavo Gutierrez, translated by Robert R. Barr. The God of the Xhosa. By Janet Hodgson. Our Hymn Tunes: Their Choice and Performance. By Donald Webster. The Almighty Wall: The Architecture of Henry Vaughan. By William Morgan. An Introduction to Plato's Laws. By R.E. Stalley. Plato's Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved. By Kenneth M. Sayre. Plato's ‘Parmenides’: Translation and Analysis. By R.E. Allen. Politics in the Ancient World. By M.I. Finley. (shrink)

In this survey paper, I start from two classical theses of speech act theory: that speech act content is uniformly propositional and that sentence mood encodes illocutionary force. These theses have been questioned in recent work, both in philosophy and linguistics. The force/content distinction itself – a cornerstone of 20‐century philosophy of language – has come to be rejected by some theorists, unmoved by the famous ‘Frege–Geach’ argument. The paper reviews some of these debates.

The variety-of-evidence thesis has been criticized by Bovens and Hartmann. This article points to two limitations of their Bayesian model: the conceptualization of unreliable evidential sources as randomizing and the restriction to comparing full independence to full dependence. It is shown that the variety-of-evidence thesis is rehabilitated when unreliable sources are reconceptualized as systematically biased. However, it turns out that allowing for degrees of independence leads to a qualification of the variety-of-evidence thesis: as Bovens and Hartmann claimed, more independence does (...) not always imply stronger confirmation. (shrink)

I argue that immunity to error through misidentification primarily characterizes thoughts that are 'implicitly' de se, as opposed to thoughts that involve an explicit self-identification. Thoughts that are implicitly de se involve no reference to the self at the level of content: what makes them de se is simply the fact that the content of the thought is evaluated with respect to the thinking subject. Or, to put it in familiar terms : the content of the thought is a property (...) which the thinking subject self-ascribes (as in the Loar/Lewis/Chisholm analysis). After answering an objection (to the effect that immunity can affect explicit de se thoughts), I extend the analysis to demonstrative thoughts, which also exhibit the property of immunity to error through misidentification. (shrink)

This article presents a relational criticism of the "morphogenetic theory" of M. Archer. This theory is founded and representative of the most influential mode of perception of the social universe of the last few decades: co-determinism (structure ↔ agency). Co-determinism's influence can be explained by its integration of modern general presuppositions like freedom, individualism, and the quest for a new social order. By identifying five basic principles of relational sociology, we see that Archer's co-deterministic theory offers a complicated solution to (...) avoid voluntarism and co-determinism, limits the potential of sociological imagination, cannot adequately see the fluidity of social processes, produces a certain reification of social structures and agency, and is based on an inconsistent use of egocentric and relational perspectives. These problems can be avoided if we use a relational approach (actor ↔ actor ⇒ structures) based on the study of complex and empirical trans-actions. (shrink)

(2013). The Elgar companion to recent economic methodology. Journal of Economic Methodology: Vol. 20, Methodology, Systemic Risk, and the Economics Profession, pp. 81-86. doi: 10.1080/1350178X.2013.774853.

Marcel Gauchet's theory of democracy focuses on the secularization of Western societies and the emergence of “autonomy” in them—Weber's “disenchantment of the world.” The nineteenth-century liberalism that resulted failed to generate a sense of collective purpose that could fill the gap left by the retreat of religion. Totalitarian ideologies achieved this by harnessing the passions unleashed by World War I, but at the cost of radicalization. Conversely, the (unexpected and lasting) post-1945 “social state” set the groundwork for modern individualism and (...) established new legitimacy for the regulatory and protective nation-state, conceptually bonded directly with its voter-citizens. Democracy is thus impossible to disentangle from social democracy—regardless of its actual effectiveness. If Gauchet is right, the left's embrace of “voice” over “exit” mixes a deep insight with flawed prescriptions, as it overlooks the national nature of the experience of citizenship, whereas classical liberals favoring the “exit” option risk undermining the core of the democratic compact. (shrink)

A major figure in the contemporary critical world, Jean-Francois Lyotard originally introduced the term 'postmodern' into current discussions of philosophy. The Postmodern Explained is an engaging collection of letters addressed to young philosophers, including the actual children of some of Lyotard's colleagues, that inform the trajectory of his thinking in the period before The Postmodern Condition through The Differend.

In the first part of this paper I sketch a theory of indexical concepts within a broadly epistemic framework. In the second part I discuss and dismiss an argument due to Jerry Fodor, to the effect that any epistemic approach to concept individuation (including the theory of indexical concepts I will sketch) is doomed to failure.

This is an experimental piece of writing by François Laruelle. Via its origins in both Greek and Judeo-Christian thought, philosophy has risen up from the abysses of the world and made its assault on human identity. Philosophy dominates man, and as long as he lives under the philosophical decision or ?Ontological Statute? he lives also within an impotence of thought and within an infinite culpability. Yet ultimately man is an inalienable reality, and nothing ? not even philosophy ? can substitute (...) itself for man and for his identity. There is no reversibility between man and philosophy. Man itself is the abolition of the Statute. (shrink)

Following the collapse of the communist states it was assumed that Marxist philosophy had collapsed with it. In Introduction to Non-Marxism, François Laruelle aims to recover Marxism along with its failure by asking the question "What is to be done with Marxism itself?" To answer, Laruelle resists the temptation to make Marxism more palatable after the death of metaphysics by transforming Marxism into a mere social science or by simply embracing with evangelical fervor the idea of communism. Instead Laruelle proposes (...) a heretical science of Marxism that will investigate Marxism in both its failure and power so as to fashion new theoretical tools. In the course of engaging with the material of Marxism, Laruelle takes on the philosophy of Marx along with important philosophers who have extended that philosophy including Althusser, Balibar, Negri as well as the attempt at a phenomenological Marxism found in the work of Michel Henry. Through this engagement Laruelle develops with great precision the history and function of his concept of determination-in-the-last-instance. In the midst of the assumed failure of Marxism and the defections and resentment that followed, Laruelle's non-Marxism responds with the bold declaration: "Do not give up on theory!". (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers, and now also one of the most contentious as revelations of the extent of his Nazism continue to surface. His ground-breaking works have had a hugely significant impact on contemporary thought through their reception, appropriation and critique. His thought has influenced philosophers as diverse as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Adorno, Gadamer, Levinas, Derrida and Foucault, among others. In addition to his formative role in philosophical movements such as phenomenology, hermeneutics and (...) existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-modernism, Heidegger has had a transformative effect on diverse fields of inquiry including political theory, literary criticism, theology, gender theory, technology and environmental studies. The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger is the definitive textbook to Heidegger's life and work, in fifty-nine original essays written by an international team of leading Heidegger scholars. This new edition presents comprehensive coverage of Heidegger life and contexts, sources, influences and encounters, key writings, major themes and topics, and reception and influence, and includes a chapter addressing the controversial Black Notebooks, National Socialism, and Antisemitism. This is the ideal research tool for anyone studying or working in the field of Heidegger Studies today. (shrink)

Although it was influential for several hundred years after it first appeared, doubts about the authenticity of the Platonic Alcibiades I have unnecessarily impeded its interpretation ever since. It positions itself firmly within the Platonic and Socratic traditions, and should therefore be approached in the same way as most other Platonic dialogues. It paints a vivid portrait of a Socrates in his late thirties tackling the unrealistic ambitions of the youthful Alcibiades, urging him to come to know himself and to (...) care for himself. François Renaud and Harold Tarrant re-examine the drama and philosophy of Alcibiades I with an eye on those interpreters who cherished it most. Modern scholars regularly play down one or more of the religious, erotic, philosophic or dramatic aspects of the dialogue, so ancient Platonist interpreters are given special consideration. This rich study will interest a wide range of readers in ancient philosophy. (shrink)

Ulysses, the strong illusionist, sails towards the Strait of Definitions. On his left, Charybdis defines “phenomenal consciousness” in a loaded manner, which makes it a problematic entity from a physicalist and naturalistic point of view. This renders illusionism attractive, but at the cost of committing a potential strawman against its opponents – phenomenal realists. On the right, Scylla defines “phenomenal consciousness” innocently. This seems to render illusionism unattractive. Against this, I show that Ulysses can pass the Strait of Definitions. He (...) should sail straight towards Scylla. Supposedly innocent definitions land a concept that makes illusionism attractive without committing a strawman. Indeed, this concept, which captures what the phenomenal realist means, is explicitly innocent but implicitly loaded. Beyond the Strait lies another danger: the Sirens of Redefinitions. They incite our hero to redefine his terms to salvage verbally (weak) phenomenal realism – judged preferable to overt strong illusionism. Ulysses should resist the Sirens’ songs and choose overt strong illusionism over its weak realist reformulation. (shrink)

Les philosophes anciens ont ecrit sur le rapport de la cite et du monde et c'est a eux que l'on doit les premieres theses cosmopolitiques. L'objet de l'essai de Jean-Francois Pradeau est d'exposer ces theses, en les rendant accessibles a des lecteurs qui ne les connaissent pas. Ainsi l'essai presente-t-il ce que des auteurs comme Diogene le cynique, Platon, les stoiciens ou encore le Pere de l'Eglise Saint Augustin ont pu dire de la citoyennete mondiale et du reve d'une cite (...) mondiale unique qui reunirait enfin tous les peuples. Les questions qu'agite cette histoire ancienne du cosmopolitisme sont pour beaucoup celles de notre epoque, qui a fait l'eloge pendant quelques decennies d'une forme d'emancipation cosmopolitique, qui a invente une Europe supranationale, mais qui parait aujourd'hui figee autour de ses frontieres. Les grecs anciens qui ont invente la formule citoyen du monde ont quelque chose a nous dire de la mondialisation. Ils nous rappellent avec une certaine simplicite que la vie humaine, qui est une vie politique, c'est-a-dire une vie qui n'est possible que dans les limites instituees d'une communaute civique, ne peut atteindre la tranquillite ou le bonheur sans apprecier a sa juste mesure la place qui lui convient dans le monde. Il est nefaste et finalement impossible de vivre sans se faire une certaine idee de ce monde et de son ordre, sans se representer, ne serait-ce que de maniere vraisemblable, ce qu'est l'univers et la place qui nous revient en son sein. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "Idéologie et théorie des signes".

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 42-70 [Access article in PDF] "O Happy Living Things" Frankenfoods and the Bounds of Wordsworthian Natural Piety Anne-Lise François With all the flowers Fancy e'er could feignWho breeding flowers will never breed the same. —John Keats, "Ode to Psyche" And I could wish my days to beBound each to each in natural piety. —William Wordsworth, "My heart leaps up" O happy living things! no tongue Their (...) beauty might declare:A spring of love gusht from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware!Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I bless'd them unaware. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" "O happy living things!"—vitamin-enriched grains; potatoes equipped to kill their predators; silk-producing goats; fast-growing salmon that hardly require feeding. Is it possible to predicate the breathless exclamation that escapes Coleridge's mariner, unaware not of water snakes but of the fantastic array of genetically modified creatures—animals and plants—currently under design or production by biotech industries? Already in May 2000 a New York Times article was announcing the imminent arrival of "fast-growing trout and catfish, oysters that can withstand viruses, and an 'Enviropig,' whose feces are less harmful to the environment because they contain less phosphorus." An article inset describes the emergent production of "pharm-animals":These domesticated beasts—cows, pigs, goats, sheep, and chickens—have been given the ability to produce pharmaceuticals and other valuable substances in their milk, eggs or semen. Endowed by scientists with foreign genes, often taken from humans, these animals, or bioreactors, as they are also known, earn their keep as living chemical factories. Two companies, the Genzyme Corporation of Cambridge, Mass., and PPL Therapeutics, a Scottish company, already have products from pharm animals being tested in clinical trials supervised by the Food and Drug Administration. Many other animals are [End Page 42] still in the development stage. For example, Nexia Biotechnologies in Canada is working on a goat that carries a gene from spiders allowing it to produce spider silk in its milk. When the spider silk, which consists of extremely strong, light proteins, is extracted from the goat's milk, the substance, potentially, can be used in applications like bulletproof vests. [Yoon] This last sentence is intriguing. The genetic revolution often bills itself as a second green revolution that will prevent starvation and alleviate disease, promising to feed the world's growing population in terms that tend to essentialize poverty and hunger as inevitable symptoms of a human condition, rather than understand them through the lens of specific colonial and postcolonial histories. But bulletproof vests? The indignant leftist response here would be to deride the collusion between biotechnology and the military-industrial complex—bulletproof vests leaving little doubt as to whose desires count as universal, timeless needs. Yet such a response is perhaps too quick to attribute reason to these genetic experiments in cross-species breeding, and too quick to accept the terms in which biotechnicians present themselves—as the instruments of reason, whether of global capitalism or universal human progress. Part of what this essay wishes to suggest is that to dream up such things and to think of wanting to do them—make a goat produce spider silk in its milk—involve particular fantasies, fantasies not simply about recreating the world in one's image, but about learning to desire the world again, to be excited by it or "surprised" by its existence, to borrow a phrase from Stanley Cavell. The journalist's parenthetical "potentially" indicates that no use has yet been determined, no burning need fuels such experiments, and hints at the boredom behind them—what William Wordsworth might have called the "state of almost savage torpor" in which desire itself has to be invented.As the New York Times writer's double metaphor of animal as laborer- and factory-in-one suggests—"these animals, or bioreactors, as they are also known, earn their keep as living chemical factories"—the binaries animal-human, machine-animal... (shrink)

_A mood for Philosophy_ __ _ _ _In this dialogue with Francois Laruelle Anne-Françoise Schmidt suggests that Laruelle's non-philosophy, which begins with an indecision, could be conceived as something that in the history of painting has been called figura serpentinata, "serpentine line". This line, which produces a kind of music by the use of concepts, is visible according her trough his whole work: from his first book on Ravaisson, _Phenomenon and Difference,_ through to his last one, _The Last Humanity: A (...) New Ecological Science_, published in French in 2015 and expected to appear in English in 2018._. (shrink)

On reproche fréquemment aux plaidoiries de ralentir le temps du procès et de ne pas avoir de vraie utilité. En réalité, conclusions écrites et observations orales sont complémentaires. Une justice accessible et à l’écoute suppose un temps d’échange adapté à la nature du procès, à la complexité de l’affaire et aux enjeux du dossier. Un juge actif pendant la phase orale permet aussi de rassurer le justiciable sur la prise en considération de son dossier. Dans le souci d’une bonne administration (...) de la justice, il existe différentes manières de rétablir une forme d’harmonie entre l’écrit et l’oral. À toutes les étapes du procès, en première instance, en appel et devant le juge de cassation, la boîte à outils est, désormais, bien achalandée pour faire du sur-mesure. ll reste à en faire la promotion et se saisir pleinement de ces outils. (shrink)

Comprendre est toujours rencontrer et mettre en évldence la difference spécifique; en ľ occurence, ce qui fait que ľ homme est ce qu'il est. Le chemin ici emprunté a choisi de conduire l'investigation à partir de la determination ď'un lieu, c’est a dire par le repérage du tracé des frontieres qui délimitent l'humain dans le monde et l'humain dans ľ homme. Toute frontiers opère un double mouvement: elle sópare deux regions et met en relation cela meme qu’elle sépare. Ce qui (...) est séparé est par consequent toujour á la foia proche et distant. Aussi bien, le lieu de la réalité humaine est délimité par la frontière qui la sépare du monde des simples vivants et de la simple vie. Par toute son existence, l’homme est cet être qui est de part en part un être biologique, et toute son existence se construit dans l'écart creusé et maintenu a l'endroit de la simple vie. Il n’у а раs d’homme sans la vie et l'humain commence, dans l'homme, au moment ou l'existence prend ses distances á l'éndroit de la simple vie. Par toute son existence, il appartient au monde de la communauté de ses semblables, et tout est en lui faqonné par son appartenance à cette communauté, mais c’est dans la proximité de ce semblable que l'homme découvre la realité des l'inhumain qui nait de l'irruption de la violence engendrée par la cohabitation. L'homme est enfin cet être qui se reconnait proche du divin et il ne découvre la grandeur de l'humain en lui qu'en découvrant dans l’eclat de la beauté et de la pensée comme une trace ď'une realité d’un autre ordre, ce qu’ il nomme le divin. Mais à ne pas savoir reconnaitre qu’il n’est qu’un homme et non pas un dieu, il se voue á la folie de la démesure et a se vouloir trop grand, il se perd. Le lieu propre de l'humain de l'homme doit donc être recherché en cette relation toujours complexe où le plus proche ne peut se laisser comprendre que dans la distance, et la proximité dans ľécart. Un tel lieu délimite l’espace propre de l'existence celui où elle est toujours nécessairement reque en son origine, puisque nul ne s’est jamais fait naitre lui-même, mais ou elle a à se prendre en charge: à prendre en charge sa propre destinée et à se réaliser comme existence. (shrink)

L'esthétique étant considérée en Occident comme la science du beau, celle de Marc-Mathieu Münch stipule qu'une oeuvre littéraire belle est celle qui suscite dans la psyché du lecteur-auditeur un effet de vie à travers le jeu cohérent des mots. Les études interartistiques (prenant en compte tous les domaines artistiques à la fois - littérature, musique, architecture, peinture) serait le lieu idéal d'évaluation d'une telle théorie.

Nanomaterials have attracted much interest in the medical field and related applications as their distinct properties in the nanorange enable new and improved diagnosis and therapies. Owing to these properties and their potential interactions with the human body and the environment, the impact of nanomaterials on humans and their potential toxicity have been regarded a very significant issue. Consequently, nanomaterials are the subject of a wide range of cutting-edge research efforts in the medical and related fields to thoroughly probe their (...) potential beneficial utilizations and their more negative effects. We posit that the lack of standardization in the field is a serious shortcoming as it has led to the establishment of methods and results that do not ensure sufficient consistency and thus in our view can possibly result in research outputs that are not as robust as they should be. The main aim of this article is to present how NanoDiaRA, a large FP7 European multidisciplinary project that seeks to investigate and develop nanotechnology-based diagnostic systems, has developed and implemented robust, standardized methods to support research practices involving the engineering and manipulation of nanomaterials. First, to contextualize this research, an overview of the measures defined by different regulatory bodies concerning nanosafety is presented. Although these authorities have been very active in the past several years, many questions remain unanswered in our view. Second, a number of national and international projects that attempted to ensure more reliable exchanges of methods and results are discussed. However, the frequent lack of publication of procedures and protocols in research can often be a hindrance for sharing those good practices. Subsequently, the efforts made through NanoDiaRA to introduce standardized methods and techniques to support the development and utilization of nanomaterials are discussed in depth. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with the partners of this project, and the interviews were analyzed thematically to highlight the determined efforts of the researchers to standardize their methods. Finally, some recommendations are made toward the setting up of well-defined methods to support the high-quality work of collaborative nanoparticle-based research and development projects and to enhance standardization processes. (shrink)