Voltaire’s classic novel Candide relates the misadventures of a young optimist who leaves his sheltered childhood to find his way in a cruel and irrational world. Fast-paced and full of dark humor, the novel mocks the suggestion that “all is well” and challenges us to create a better world. This Broadview Edition follows the text of a 1759 English translation that was released concurrently with Voltaire's first French edition. Candide is supplemented by Voltaire's most important poetic and (...) humanistic writings on God and evil, the Poem upon the Destruction of Lisbon and We Must Take Sides. The editor's introduction situates the novel in its philosophical and intellectual setting; the appendices include other writings by Voltaire, as well as related writings by Bayle, Leibniz, Pope, Rousseau, and others that place the work in its poetic, philosophical, and humanistic contexts. (shrink)

Voltaire, the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), was one of the most influential leaders of the French Enlightenment. His defense of individual freedom of conscience and his criticisms of religious fanaticism and oppressive orthodoxy had a telling effect on Western history, inspiring several leading founders of America's new laws. This is the first English translation of many of his key texts from his famous pamphlet war for tolerance, written from 1750 to 1768, originally published under pseudonyms to (...) avoid imprisonment and to educate the average citizen. Included are "The Sermon of Rabbi Akib" (a searing attack on anti-Semitism), "Prayer to God" (from the famous Treatise on Tolerance), the hugely popular "Catechism of the Honest Man," "The Dinner at Count Boulainvillier's," and other witty, sometimes acerbic pieces that point out the errors in the Bible, the corruption of the clergy, and the religiously-inspired persecutions, both of his day and across the ages. Many of these pamphlets were burned in a losing battle by the authorities. With a lengthy introduction and copious notes by the editor and translator, plus an appendix including first-hand accounts of the battle by noted mathematician and French revolutionary Condorcet, Frederick the Great, Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, and others, this excellent compilation will be a welcome addition to the libraries of anyone with an interest in human rights and freedom of thought. (shrink)

Presentation, par Marie-Helene Cotoni Parcours critique : une anthologie R. Pomeau : Histoire d'une oeuvre de Voltaire : le Dictionnaire philosophique portatif Y. Florenne : Voltaire, ou de la raison et de la deraison par alphabet Etiemble : Preface au Dictionnaire philosophique R. Pomeau : La documentation de Voltaire dans le Dictionnaire philosophique J. Cazeneuve : La philosophie de Voltaire d'apres le Dictionnaire philosophique J.Deprun : Le Dictionnaire philosophique et Malebranche M. Delon : Voltaire (...) entre le continu et le discontinu A. Becq : Le "catechisme chinois" Ch. Mervaud : Philosophie et ecriture breve : le Dictionnaire philosophique portatif R. Desne : Voltaire etait-il antisemite? J.-M. Moureaux : Ordre et desordre dans le Dictionnaire philosophique M.-H. Cotoni : Voltaire et la Bible R. Granderoute : Le Bestiaire du Dictionnaire philosophique portatif Ch. Mervaud : Les cannibales sont parmi nous. L'article Anthropophages du Dictionnaire philosophique P. Retat : Le Dictionnaire philosophique de Voltaire : concept et discours du dictionnaire Bibliographie. (shrink)

This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan culture during the long eighteenth century. The author explores two symbolically central figures—the dismembered black slave and the black rapist/lover who is “duly punished”—by undertaking an intertextual reading of two sets of illustrations of Voltaire's Candide (1759) designed by Moreau le Jeune. Separated by the French and Haitian Revolutions, Moreau's two sets of Candide illustrations (1787 and 1803) register an important shift in the French cultural (...) imaginary. The figure of the maimed black male slave was put directly in circulation in French visual culture during the eighteenth century. In contrast, interracial sexuality remained “unrepresentable” in French visual culture throughout the century. By the time Haiti declared its independence (1804), this taboo was contravened by Moreau's metaphorical substitution of the figure of the monkey in 1803 to picture the black male as a bestial rapist. (shrink)

Voltaire historien de la philosophie. De l'Antiquité au Grand Siècle Renan Laruc, Porphyre de Tyr, héros voltairien; Marc-André Nadeau, Défense et critique de Montaigne dans les Lettres philosophiques; Véronique Le Ru, Voltaire, lecteur de Descartes; Gerhardt Stenger, Un philosophe peut en cacher un autre: Malebranche et Spinoza dans Tout en Dieu; Lorenzo Bianchi, Voltaire lecteur et critique de Bayle; Miguel Benitez, Locke, Voltaire et la matière pensante; Claire Fauvergue, Voltaire et l'idée d'automate. Voltaire et (...) la philosophie des Lumières Debora Sicco, Voltaire champion de Chastellux contre Montesquieu ; Marie Leca-Tsiomis, Voltaire, philosophe selon Diderot; Sévérine Denieul, Casanova lecteur et critique de Voltaire; Main Sandrier, Lectures athées de Voltaire: la duplicité du philosophe; Rodrigo Brandào, Job, Voltaire et Kant ou deux perspectives sur la souffrance et le mal; Linda Gil, Condorcet éditeur de Voltaire: une lecture dialogique dans les OEuvres complètes. Voltaire philosophe: histoire, morale et politique Jean Goldzink, Déisme et récits voltairiens ; Maria das Graças de Souza, Voltaire philosophe de l'histoire: autour de l'Essai sur les moeurs; Vladimir de Oliva Mota, Les fondements transcendants de la morale chez Voltaire; Maria Laura Lanzillo, La philosophie politique de Voltaire. De sa théorie de l'État à sa conception de la tolérance; Baldine Saint Girons, Voltaire et l'autocritique de la philosophie. La postérité philosophique de Voltaire Alain Sager, Voltaire à la lumière du concept d'ironie chez Kierkegaard; Guillaume Métayer, Voltaire philosophe, via Nietzsche? La préhistoire de l'épistémè; Danilo Bilate, Les "nouvelles Lumières" et l'attitude voltairienne chez Nietzsche; Abderhaman Messaoudi, Voltaire philosophe. Les enjeux d'une réévaluation."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Towards the middle of the 18th century, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis proposed the “principle of least action” as a fundamental law of physics and as a proof of the existence of God. Samuel König and other contemporary authors criticized Maupertuis’ work. There ensued a fierce discussion concerning this subject, in which Leonhard Euler, the king Frédéric II of Prussia and Voltaire took part. This paper discusses that debate, emphasizing its extrascientific features and analyzing the interests that motivated the actions (...) of the people involved in that episode. Key words: Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, François Marie Arouet Voltaire, Johann Samuel König, Frédéric II – king of Prussia, principle of least action, history of physics, scientific controversies. (shrink)

The article deals with a unique even within the age of European Enlightenment humanist essence and human rights activity of the great French philosopher, writer, poet Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire. The author focuses his attention on a new aspect of the well-known thinker - the unselfish and persistent protection of victims of religious intolerance, obscurantism, judicial tyranny. According to the author, Voltaire’s advocacy was the result of his political and legal socialization. This idea is supported by the (...) facts of Voltaire’s earlier life: the assistance to the villagers of Ferney, the intercession for the serfs from the oppression of the clergy, the humanist’s poems against tyranny and religious intolerance, against any violence and cruelty. Voltaire’s valuable judgments of natural law, legitimacy, justice and dignity of a person convincingly support the author’s hypothesis. (shrink)

During a smallpox epidemic in April 1721, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu asked Dr. Charles Maitland to "engraft" her daughter, thus instigating the first documented inoculation for smallpox (_Variola_ virus) in England. Engrafting, or variolation, was a means of conferring immunity to smallpox by placing pus taken from a smallpox pustule under the skin of an uninfected person to create a local infection. The introduction of infectious viral matter, however, could trigger fullblown smallpox, and the practice was controversial for both this (...) reason and the pervasive conviction that it was immoral to intentionally infect a human body. Eventually, engrafting was phased out altogether in favor of vaccination, a much safer procedure established by Edward Jenner in the late eighteenth century. Montagu's decision was influenced by her experiences in Constantinople, where she had spent a year, and where engrafting was commonplace. As a smallpox survivor herself, Montagu had taken an interest in Turkish inoculation practices, and had had her son Edward engrafted while in Turkey. She was not the first person to import the idea of smallpox inoculation to England, nor the first English person to have their child inoculated (other English children had been inoculated while visiting Turkey), yet she quickly became known for importing and popularizing smallpox inoculation. At the request of her acquaintances, she took her inoculated daughter with her on a round of visits into elite households to demonstrate the safety of the procedure. The reputation she gained was both positive and negative: monuments were erected in her honor, encomiastic poems were published, and Voltaire declared her "a woman of as fine a genius, and endued with as great a strength of mind as any of her sex in the British Kingdoms"; however, anti-inoculationists ridiculed her, some society figures regarded her warily, and Alexander Pope satirized her in his poetry.

Montagu’s pioneering role in the smallpox debate is undoubtedly significant: she instigated the first smallpox inoculation on English soil, and she was largely responsible for making the practice acceptable in elite circles. My interest in this essay is in the nature and significance of Montagu’s reputation as an inoculation pioneer. I will argue that her reputation was based on the particular combination of her social position as a Whig and an aristocratic woman; her interest in progressive and enlightened forms of social, political, and scientific thought; her standing in influential literary circles; and, not least, the force of her own personality. In broad terms, I offer Montagu’s involvement in the smallpox debate as a case study in a new kind of public role becoming available to elite women in the early eighteenth century — a role that caused considerable discomfort among her peers and in the medical community, and one that stimulated a widespread controversy in print publications of the day. (shrink)

La figure et l’œuvre de Françoise d’Aubigné, veuve Scarron et marquise de Maintenon, se sont trouvées longtemps prisonnières des mythes qu’ont inspirés dès le xviie siècle la vie romanesque et le destin exceptionnel de l’épouse morganatique du Roi-Soleil. La Palatine, Saint-Simon, Michelet ont bâti la légende noire, les Dames de Saint-Louis, Mme de Caylus et Mlle d’Aumale, puis La Beaumelle en ont édifié l’hagiographie, Voltaire et Sainte-Beuve tracé des portraits plus nuancés, mais insuffisa...

C’est à partir de deux exemples concrets, celui des employés de banque et des chauffeurs de taxi collectif à Beyrouth que nous nous proposons d’interroger l’« absence » de la question du temps de travail dans les revendications sociales au Liban. Une absence qui serait l’indice de la prégnance d’un autre rapport au temps : on serait en présence de régimes de temporalités hétérogènes les uns aux autres, à la mesure de la fragmentation de la société entre des mondes sociaux (...) où le travail est soumis à des contraintes radicalement opposées. (shrink)

Health‐care and public sector institutions are high‐risk settings for workplace bullying. Despite growing acknowledgement of the scale and consequence of this pervasive problem, there has been little critical examination of the institutional power dynamics that enable bullying. In the aftermath of large‐scale failures in care standards in public sector healthcare institutions, which were characterised by managerial bullying, attention to the nexus between bullying, power and institutional failures is warranted. In this study, employing Foucault's framework of power, we illuminate bullying as (...) a feature of structures of power and knowledge in public sector institutions. Our analysis draws upon the experiences of a large sample (n = 3345) of workers in Australian public sector agencies – the type with which most nurses in the public setting will be familiar. In foregrounding these power dynamics, we provide further insight into how cultures that are antithetical to institutional missions can arise and seek to broaden the debate on the dynamics of care failures within public sector institutions. Understanding the practices of power in public sector institutions, particularly in the context of ongoing reform, has important implications for nursing. (shrink)

Medical explanations have often been thought on the model of biological ones and are frequently defined as mechanistic explanations of a biological dysfunction. In this paper, I argue that topological explanations, which have been described in ecology or in cognitive sciences, can also be found in medicine and I discuss the relationships between mechanistic and topological explanations in medicine, through the example of network medicine and medical genetics. Network medicine is a recent discipline that relies on the analysis of various (...) disease networks in order to find organizing principles in disease explanation. My aim is to show how topological explanations in network medicine can help solving the conceptual issues that pure mechanistic explanations of the genetics of disease are currently facing, namely the crisis of the concept of genetic disease, the progressive geneticization of diseases and the dissolution of the distinction between monogenic and polygenic diseases. However, I will also argue that topological explanations should not be considered as independent and radically different from mechanistic explanations for at least two reasons. First, in network medicine, topological explanations depend on and use mechanistic information. Second, they leave out some missing gaps in disease explanation that require, in turn, the development of new mechanistic explanations. Finally, I will insist on the specific contribution of topological explanations in medicine: they push us to develop an explanation of disease in general, instead of focusing on single explanations of individual diseases. This last point may have major consequences for biomedical research. (shrink)

The ethical issues of health research are well documented. Ethical issues in occupational therapy research are beginning to attract the interest of researchers. However, no research has documented the ethical issues experienced by occupational therapists conducting research in academic settings in Quebec. This is revealed by the literature review that was the basis for this qualitative research, the results of which are presented here. This article also presents the results of a qualitative research conducted with eleven women occupational therapy researchers (...) in Quebec. A phenomenologically inspired qualitative approach was used. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to discuss the ethical issues experienced in occupational therapy research. Three units of meaning emerge from the narrative data, namely that ethical issues are related to: 1) the research environment; 2) people and their interactions; or 3) the occupation that is research. Overall, the results of the study and the literature review agree that health researchers, including occupational therapy researchers, operate in an environment that is not conducive to scientific discovery and responsible conduct of research. Ethical issues in research are primarily systemic in nature, contributing to the creation of unhealthy work environments that not only harm interpersonal relationships, but also adversely affect researchers’ occupational health and well-being and negatively affect researchers’ personal and family lives. Four new findings emerge from the study: 1) the academic world values individualism; 2) occupational therapists are rebellious towards research ethics boards; 3) clinical and academic environments are too disconnected; and 4) quantitative approaches can contribute to the exclusion of vulnerable populations. (shrink)

This paper deals with two issues. First, it identifies structured propositions with logical procedures. Second, it considers various rigorous definitions of the granularity of procedures, hence also of structured propositions, and comes out in favour of one of them. As for the first point, structured propositions are explicated as algorithmically structured procedures. I show that these procedures are structured wholes that are assigned to expressions as their meanings, and their constituents are sub-procedures occurring in executed mode. Moreover, procedures are not (...) mere aggregates of their parts; rather, procedural constituents mutually interact. As for the second point, there is no universal criterion of the structural isomorphism of meanings, hence of co-hyperintensionality, hence of synonymy for every kind of language. The positive result I present is an ordered set of rigorously defined criteria of fine-grained individuation in terms of the structure of procedures. Hence procedural semantics provides a solution to the problem of the granularity of co-hyperintensionality. (shrink)

Recent efforts in a range of scientific fields have emphasised research and methods concerning individual differences and individualisation. This article brings together various scientific disciplines—ecology, evolution, and animal behaviour; medicine and psychiatry; public health and sport/exercise science; sociology; psychology; economics and management science—and presents their research on individualisation. We then clarify the concept of individualisation as it appears in the disciplinary casework by distinguishing three kinds of individualisation studied in and across these disciplines: Individualisation ONE as creating/changing individual differences (the (...) process that generates differences between individuals: intrapopulation or intraspecific variation/heterogeneity); Individualisation TWO as individualising applications (the tailoring or customising of something—information, treatment, a product or service, etc.—for an individual or specific group of individuals); and Individualisation THREE as social changes influencing autonomy, risk, and responsibilities (the process discussed under the rubric of sociological individualisation theory). Moreover, we analyse conceptual links between individualisation and individuality, and characterise different sorts of individuality that the disciplines study. This paper aims to promote interdisciplinary research concerning individualisation by establishing a common conceptual-theoretical basis, while leaving room for disciplinary differences. (shrink)

Discussion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is currently dominated by two opposing interpretations of the work: a metaphysical or realist reading and the 'resolute' reading of Diamond and Conant. Marie McGinn's principal aim in this book is to develop an alternative interpretative line, which rejects the idea, central to the metaphysical reading, that Wittgenstein sets out to ground the logic of our language in features of an independently constituted reality, but which allows that he aims to provide positive philosophical insights into (...) how language functions. McGinn takes as a guiding principle the idea that we should see Wittgenstein's early work as an attempt to eschew philosophical theory and to allow language itself to reveal how it functions. By this account, the aim of the work is to elucidate what language itself makes clear, namely, what is essential to its capacity to express thoughts that are true or false. However, the early Wittgenstein undertakes this descriptive project in the grip of a set of preconceptions concerning the essence of language that determine both how he conceives the problem and the approach he takes to the task of clarification. Nevertheless, the Tractatus contains philosophical insights, achieved despite his early preconceptions, that form the foundation of his later philosophy. -/- The anti-metaphysical interpretation that is presented includes a novel reading of the problematic opening sections of the Tractatus, in which the apparently metaphysical status of Wittgenstein's remarks is shown to be an illusion. The book includes a discussion of the philosophical background to the Tractatus, a comprehensive interpretation of Wittgenstein's early views of logic and language, and an interpretation of the remarks on solipsism. The final chapter is a discussion of the relation between the early and the later philosophy that articulates the fundamental shift in Wittgenstein's approach to the task of understanding how language functions and reveal the still more fundamental continuity in his conception of his philosophical task. (shrink)

In rehabilitation, there is a growing interest in ethics. That said, few meta-ethical reflections have been conducted to date. Therefore, a review and critical analysis of the use of the concept of “ethical issue” is warranted. To this end, a systematic and critical review of the literature discussing ethical issues in rehabilitation was conducted. This review, based on the method developed by McCullough and colleagues, identified and analyzed 80 articles. Several characteristics and gaps in the conceptualization of the ethical issue (...) concept were noted. Three main findings emerge from the study: 1) the corpus of texts studied is dominated by descriptive ethics; 2) ethical conceptualisation is marginal, in that ethical concepts are generally stated without being defined; and 3) the corpus is characterized by the use of amalgams and by the multiplication of imprecise ethical concepts that are often used as synonyms while referring to distinct phenomena. These conceptual gaps create conceptual confusion and imprecision that can undermine ethics research, teaching and clinical ethics, and discredit the discipline of ethics. (shrink)

"Margaret L. King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant—but by no means the most obvious—texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and striking (...) insights into the intellectual transformation which has done more than any other to shape the world in which we live today. It is _simply the best introduction to the subject now available_."_ —Anthony Pagden, UCLA, and author of _The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters_ Contents:_ Chronology, Introduction _Chapter One - Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697_ _Idols, or false notions: _Francis Bacon, _The New Instrument_ _I think, therefore I am: _René Descartes, Discourse on Method _God, or Nature: _Baruch Spinoza, _Ethics_ _The system of the world: _Isaac Newton, _Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy_ _He searched for truth throughout his life: _Pierre Bayle, _Historical and Critical Dictionary_ _Chapter Two - _The Learned Maid: 1638–1740 _A face raised toward heaven:_ Anna Maria van Schurman, _Whether the Study of Letters Befits a Christian Woman_ _The worlds I have made:_ Margaret Cavendish, _The Blazing World_ _A finer sort of cattle:_ Bathsua Makin, _An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen_ _I warn you of the world:_ Madame de Maintenon, _Letter: On the Education of the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr_, and _Instruction: On the World_ _The daybreak of your reason:_ Émilie Du Châtelet, _Fundamentals of Physics_ _Chapter Three - _A State of Perfect Freedom: 1689–1695 _The chief criterion of the True Church:_ John Locke, _Letter on Toleration_ _Freedom from any superior power on earth:_ John Locke, _Second Treatise on Civil Government_ _A white paper, with nothing written on it:_ John Locke, _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ _Let your rules be as few as possible:_ John Locke, _Some Thoughts Concerning Education_ _From death, Jesus Christ restores all to life:_ John Locke, _The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures_ _Chapter Four - All Things Made New: 1725–1784_ _In the wilderness, they are reborn:_ Giambattista Vico, _The New Science_ _Without these Names, nothing can be known,_ Carl Linnaeus, _System of Nature_ _All the clouds at last are lifted:_ Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, _The Successive Advancement of the Human Mind_ _A genealogical or encyclopedic tree of knowledge:_ Jean le Rond d’Alembert, _Preliminary Discourse_ _Dare to know! :_ Immanuel Kant, _What Is Enlightenment?_ _Chapter Five - Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779_ _The narrow limits of human understanding:_ David Hume, _Anof a Book Lately Published_ _The soul is but an empty word:_ Julien Offray de La Mettrie, _Man a Machine_ _All is reduced to sensation:_ Claude Adrien Helvétius, _On the Mind_ _An endless web of fantasies and falsehoods:_ Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, _Common Sense_ _Let each believe that his own ring is real:_ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, _Nathan the Wise_ _Chapter Six - Crush That Infamous Thing: 1733–1764_ _This is the country of sects:_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Letters_ _Disfigured by myth, until enlightenment comes:_ Voltaire, _The Culture and Spirit of Nations_ _The best of all possible worlds:_ Voltaire, _Candide_ _Are we not all children of the same God?:_ Voltaire, _Treatise on Tolerance_ _If a book displeases you, refute it! :_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Dictionary_ _Chapter Seven - Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776_ _Things must be so ordered that power checks power,_ Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, _The Spirit of the Laws_ _Complete freedom of trade must be ensured:_ François Quesnay, _General Maxims for the Economic Management of an Agricultural Kingdom_ _The nation's war against the citizen: Cesare_ Beccaria, _On Crimes and Punishments_ _There is no peace in the absence of justice:_ Adam Ferguson, _An Essay on the History of Civil Society_ _Led by an invisible hand:_ Adam Smith, _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ _Chapter Eight - Encountering Others: 1688–1785_ _Thus died this great man:_ Aphra Behn, _Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave_ _Not one sins the less for not being Christian: _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, _Embassy Letters_ _Do you not restore to them their liberty?:_ Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, _Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies_ _Some things which are rather interesting:_ Captain James Cook, _Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World_ _The inner genius of my being:_ Johann Gottfried von Herder, _Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind_ _Chapter - Nine Citizen of Geneva: 1755–1782_ _The most cunning project ever to enter the human mind: _Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality_ _The supreme direction of the General Will:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract _Two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps,_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Julie, or the New Heloise_ _Build a fence around your child’s soul:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Emile, or On Education_ _This man will be myself:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Confessions_ _Chapter Ten - Vindications of Women: 1685–1792_ _No higher design than to get her a husband:_ Mary Astell, _Reflections on Marriage_ _The days of my bondage begin:_ Anna Stanisławska, _Orphan Girl_ _A dying victim dragged to the altar:_ Denis Diderot, _The Nun_ _Created to be the toy of man:_ Mary Wollstonecraft, _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ _Man, are you capable of being just?:_ Olympe de Gouges, _Declaration of the Rights of Woman as Citizen_ _Chapter Eleven - American Reverberations: 1771–1792_ _I took upon me to assert my freedom:_ Benjamin Franklin, _Autobiography_ _Freedom has been hunted round the globe:_ Thomas Paine, _Common Sense_ _Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights:_ Thomas Jefferson and Others, _Declaration of Independence_ _A safeguard against faction and insurrection:_ James Madison, _Federalist No. 10_ _An end to government by force and fraud:_ Thomas Paine, _The Rights of Man_ _Chapter Twelve - Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794_ _A partnership of the living, the dead, and those unborn:_ Edmund Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ _The future destiny of the human species:_ Nicolas de Condorcet, _A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Mind_ Texts and Studies, Index. 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This article draws on the cultural materialist paradigm articulated by Raymond Williams to offer a radical historicization of the idea of identity, with a view to clarifying and resolving some of the issues animating the ‘identity politics’ debates currently dividing left academia and activism. First, it offers clarity on the concept ‘identity politics’, demonstrating that we should reserve the term to refer only to politics that mobilize specifically and meaningfully around the concept of identity. Second, and in virtue of this, (...) it provides new insights into five central questions that have driven the identity politics debates: Do identity politics always tend towards essentialism?; Do identity politics inevitably promote a politics of recognition over redistribution?; Do identity politics inevitably create political cleavages rather than solidaristic forms of political action?; What is the relationship between ‘identity politics’ and ‘call-out culture’?; And, are the problems of identity politics resolved by reference to intersectionality? (shrink)

During the eighteenth century, the specter of atheism was a major concern among many intellectuals in Europe. Many of the leading figures of the period such as François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire refuted atheism at every turn. These debates centered on living organisms, particularly questions about generation. Efforts to explain the process of generation raised biological, religious, and political questions. One popular theory put forward to address the question of generation was preformation, the belief that “germs” had been in (...) existence since God created the world. This chapter first discusses the rise of preformationist thinking in the late seventeenth century before turning to the biological evidence that challenged preexistence in the mid-eighteenth century and analyzing the reaction it triggered among the preformationists. It also examines the work of Voltaire and Denis Diderot to illustrate how the generation debates are linked to the materialism question. The chapter concludes by showing how these controversies about nature and biology became entangled with politics in eighteenth-century France. (shrink)

In [12], P. Scowcroft and L. van den Dries proved a cell decomposition theorem for p-adically closed fields. We work here with the notion of P-minimal fields defined by D. Haskell and D. Macpherson in [6]. We prove that a P-minimal field K admits cell decomposition if and only if K has definable selection. A preprint version in French of this result appeared as a prepublication [8].

This book argues that the extraordinary force of the image in contemporary life--the contemporary imaginary--can be traced back to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries.

Desire After Affect offers a detailed analysis of the affective turn and its consequences for the humanities.

This article addresses how bodily integrity has been mobilised in the context of genital cutting of male infants and the extent to which the concept is taken into account in legal decision-making in the United Kingdom. While bioethicists have debated whether interventions on children's bodies are more appropriately determined on the basis of hypothetical consent or in the child's best interest, it is clear that in law the relevant test is whether interventions are in the child's best interest. As the (...) issue of nonconsensual genital cutting of infants has become more contested, courts have been asked to adjudicate on the best interests of infants in situations where their caregivers disagree about procedures. Although this body of jurisprudence remains (surprisingly) small, in this article we argue that, while there are now discernible trends in such cases (e.g. deferring decision-making until the child has the requisite capacity to decide, engaging with certain human rights norms), too often judicial reasoning about a child's best interests remains largely empty of reasoned content, and in certain respects is regressing. Using the recent case of Re P to exemplify this logic, and drawing on our previous work advocating the value of embodied integrity, we argue that judges should adopt a more substantive framework of values in judging the child's corporeal and other interests in such cases. This would move best interests assessments beyond a mere formalistic exercise and lead to better reasoned legal judgements. (shrink)

Frege takes the view that “like ethics, logic can also be called a normative science.” The parallel that he detects depends upon his commitment to the idea of objective constraints on thought and action, against which particular acts or particular pieces of reasoning can be judged. The point of the comparison is to get us to see that logic is not an empirical science, concerned with laws of thought in a psychological sense; rather, the laws of logic are ‘prescriptions for (...) making judgement’. Hookway also detects a parallel, but it prompts him to move in the opposite direction: the point of the parallel is to bring us to appreciate the role of human emotional responses in our ordinary cognitive assessments of the truth of propositions, the soundness of inferences, the relevance of doubts, the appropriateness of questions, and so on. He argues that appreciation of this point enables us to solve some central epistemological problems, in particular, the problem of epistemological scepticism. I argue that Hookway shows, at best, that without our emotional convictions, our ordinary practices could not get off the ground, but that this, on its own, does not amount to a satisfying reply to the sceptic. (shrink)

Colombia padece la imagen de que, desde sus inicios como colonia española hasta el presente, el país ha sido controlado por la oligarquía. Este ensayo examinará las evidencias que apuntan a esta alegación y confirmará que en sus inicios la Nación sí fue dominado por un grupo élite y reducido. Sin embargo, en años modernos, la oligarquía persiste pero que un grupo más extendido--una para-oligarquía o el Establecimiento--tiene mayor incidencia en las determinaciones en el progreso del país a través de (...) los factores psico-sociales de cooptación y transfuguismo. (shrink)

To test if dreams contain remote or never-experienced motor skills, we collected during 6 weeks dream reports from 15 paraplegics and 15 healthy subjects. In 9/10 subjects with spinal cord injury and in 5/5 with congenital paraplegia, voluntary leg movements were reported during dream, including feelings of walking , running , dancing , standing up , bicycling , and practicing sports . Paraplegia patients experienced walking dreams just as often as controls . There was no correlation between the frequency of (...) walking dreams and the duration of paraplegia. In contrast, patients were rarely paraplegic in dreams. Subjects who had never walked or stopped walking 4–64 years prior to this study still experience walking in their dreams, suggesting that a cerebral walking program, either genetic or more probably developed via mirror neurons is reactivated during sleep. (shrink)

Pauline Kleingeld has argued persuasively that Kant’s Principle of Autonomy draws an analogy between two relationships: 1) that between an individual agent and their maxim, and 2) that between a legislator and their legislation. She also suggests that Kant’s evolving views on the normative significance of popular elections made his analogy inapt, which explains its disappearance from his later writings. This comment concurs with Sorin Baiasu that the merits of Kant’s analogy were untouched by his evolving political views. The analogy (...) presupposes that when lawmakers legislate, they do so as representatives of the people, but even Kant’s mature writings posit that unelected lawmakers are representatives of the people in the necessary sense. Facts about whether a lawmaker acquired legislative authority by election, heredity, or conquest do have normative implications in the larger context of Kant’s political theory, but such facts are necessarily temporally upstream of the relation between legislator and legislation, just as facts about how an agent became rational are upstream of the relation between individual agent and maxim. Because the analogy focuses exclusively on these two relationships, it cannot be damaged by such upstream facts. Moreover, we should consider the possibility that Kant’s Principle of Autonomy compares a human will to the united general will of the people itself rather than to the will of a fallible public official or institution. On this alternative reading, it is even more clear that Kant’s evolving views on the significance of elections could have no possible relevance to the Principle of Autonomy. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in emotions, organizational scholars have largely ignored the moral emotion of schadenfreude, which refers to pleasure felt in response to another’s misfortune. As a socially undesirable emotion, it might be assumed that individuals would be hesitant to share their schadenfreude. In two experimental studies involving emotional responses to unethical behaviors, we find evidence to the contrary. Study 1 revealed that subjects experiencing schadenfreude were willing to share their feelings, especially if the misfortune was perceived to be deserved. (...) Study 2 extends this work by incorporating schadenfreude targets of different status. Consistent with the “tall poppy syndrome,” subjects were more willing to share schadenfreude concerning high status targets than low status targets when the perceived severity of the target’s misconduct was low. This status effect disappeared at higher levels of perceived deservingness, however. Reported willingness to share schadenfreude was strongest at these levels but did not differ significantly between high and low status targets. These findings build on the social functional account of emotions, suggesting that sharing schadenfreude may signal normative cues to others regarding workplace behaviors that are deemed to be unethical. (shrink)

In the years 1961-1972 Marie-Thirhse d'Alverny published in "Archives d'Histoire Doctrinale et Littiraire du Moyen Age 11 fascicles of a study of the codicological tradition of the Latin Avicenna. In these she identifies and describes more than 150 Latin manuscripts of the Avicennan corpus preserved in European libraries, thus laying the foundation for work later published in the "Avicenna Latinus series. These fascicles are photomechanically reprinted here, together with hitherto unpublished material concerning another 30 manuscripts compiled from Professor d'Alverny's (...) papers by Simone van Riet and Pierre Jodogne. The compilers have also added a list of corrigenda as well as an index of manuscripts discussed and an index of names and works. (shrink)

Cet article est une tentative pour mesurer les conséquences démographiques, pour l�Empire, de la perte des provinces orientales du fait de la conquête musulmane. Les sources, surtout les sources grecques, sont rares et donnent seulement quelques informations ponctuelles sur les transferts forcés de population, sur quelques individus quittant le califat et rejoignant l�Empire à dessein et enfin sur la destinée de quelques renégats. Comme d�habitude à cette époque, en raison du quasi monopole des sources ecclésiastiques, les renseignements sont plus nombreux (...) sur le clergé et le flot ininterrompu d�exilés depuis l�Anastasis à Jérusalem jusqu�à Constantinople et Sainte-Sophie. (shrink)