This article reports on a historical investigation carried out on the conical object MIN000-3519 preserved in the mineralogy collections of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle at Paris (France). The mineralogist René-Just Haüy (1743-1822) included this object, cut in a single pyrite (FeS2) crystal, in his working collection with the references ‘Sulphured iron, mirror of the Incas, of Peru, M. de Jussieu’. All of the research lines followed lead the author to Joseph de Jussieu (1704-1779) and his shipments of botanical specimens (...) and various other samples from South America. As a member of the Godin-La Condamine-Bouguer geodesic expedition on the equator (1735-1743), he returned to France only after 36 years (1771), ill, exhausted and dispossessed of the scientific product of his Andean collections. This pyrite mirror is important because, in addition to appearing to be the only archaeological object that can be linked to Joseph's peregrinations in America, it resembles other specimens found at sites of the Cañaris culture (500-1500 AD) in Ecuador. Preserved within the de Jussieu family, this object would presumably have been given to Haüy by Joseph's heirs, his nephews Antoine-Laurent (1748-1836) or Laurent-Pierre (1792-1866), with whom he had close ties. (shrink)

Un siècle avant la parution posthume du Cours de linguistique générale de Ferdinand de Saussure, la linguistique moderne a émergé en Allemagne avec les études de Wilhelm von Humboldt pour la linguistique générale et (entre autres) de Franz Bopp, Jacob Grimm, August Schleicher et Karl Brugmann pour la grammaire historico-comparative des langues indo-européennes. Dès les années 1830, les instituts allemands de philologie et de linguistique ont attiré nombre de jeunes chercheurs de Scandinavie, de France, de Suisse, de Pologne, des USA, (...) etc. Et avec la diffusion de la nouvelle "Science allemande" à l'étranger des échanges intenses se sont épanouis tout au long du XIXe siècle. Ce volume collectif, riche de neuf contributions d'historiens de la linguistique de France, d'Allemagne, de Suisse et des Pays-Bas, vise à retracer certains de ces échanges parmi les plus instructifs, notamment entre Franz Bopp et Michel Bréal, Max Müller et William Whitney, le psychologue Wilhelm Wundt et Albert Sechehaye ou Georg von der Gabelentz et Antoine Meillet. Des voies fécondes étaient ainsi ouvertes à la linguistique du XXe siècle en Europe et en Amérique. (shrink)

Belgian sociologist Jean-Claude Paye has collected several of his recent essays about the suspension of the rule of law, the emergence of a permanent state of exception, abuses of authority, and the generalized condition of restriction of freedom in Western societies since 9/11 in a single volume, La fin de l'état de droit,1 now translated, updated, and published by Telos Press under the title Global War on Liberty. Paye's essays over the past five to six years have positioned him as (...) one of the leading critical voices of the post-9/11 era. His critique of the so-called democratic state—from the United…. (shrink)

Francois Recanati presents the basic features of the *indexical model* of mental files, and defends it against several interrelated objections. According to this model, mental files refer to objects in a way that is analogous to that of indexicals in language: a file refers to an object in virtue of a contextual relation between them. For instance, perception and attention provide the basis for demonstrative files. Several objections, some of them from David Papineau, concern the possibility of files to preserve (...) and add information about objects across contexts. How is it possible to think about the same object when the subject no longer is in the original context? How is it possible to think of a perceived object as already known? Can this be done without an explicit identity judgment? Recanati answers these questions by invoking mental files of non-basic kinds and by describing the cognitive dynamics in which they take part. (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.

We provide a Kripke semantics for a STIT logic with the "next" operator. As the atemporal group STIT is undecidable and unaxiomatizable, we are interested in strict fragments of atemporal group STIT. First we prove that the satisfiability problem of a formula of the fragment made up of individual coalitions plus the grand coalition is also NEXPTIME-complete. We then generalize this result to a fragment where coalitions are in a given lattice. We also prove that if we restrict the language (...) to nested coalitions the satisfiability problem is NP-complete if the number of agents is fixed and PSPACE-complete if the number of agents is variable. Finally we embed individual STIT with the "next" operator into a fragment of atemporal group STIT. (shrink)

It is argued that the Matthean Gospel partially reflects the unstable political and religious situation in which this document originated. Broad outlines are postulated of this probable religious situation. This article presents an investigation of the developments within the broader Jewish society during the time of the New Testament. This implies the investigation of developments within Judaism, which entails some fragmentation of Judaism and a development towards Formative Judaism. The 'Jesus movement' and eventually the Matthean community evolved among these developments.

In the last two decades, the philosophy of criminal law has undergone a vibrant revival in Canada. The adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has given the Supreme Court of Canada unprecedented latitude to engage with principles of legal, moral, and political philosophy when elaborating its criminal law jurisprudence. Canadian scholars have followed suit by paying increased attention to the philosophical foundations of domestic criminal law. Because of Canada's leadership in international criminal law, both at the level of (...) the International Criminal Court and of specific war crimes tribunals, they have also begun to turn their attention to international criminal law per se. This collection seeks to bring all these Canadian voices together for the first time, and evidence the fact that criminal law theory is no longer to be associated exclusively with the older British, German and American traditions. The topics covered include questions of philosophical methodology, the legitimate scope of domestic and international criminalization, rationales for criminal law defences in both domestic and international law, the philosophical underpinnings of specific crimes and forms of joint responsibility, as well as the theorization of criminal procedure and evidence law. ENDORSEMENTS "In continental Europe, academic commentary on the criminal law has long manifested large philosophical ambitions. Less so in common-law countries, where the dominance of jury trial and the piecemeal development of case-law, together with the famously robust attitudes of common lawyers, have militated against detailed philosophical engagement with doctrine. Over the last 20 years or so, however, new generations of philosophically-literate lawyers and legally-informed philosophers have overcome the historic resistance. Nowhere more so, it seems, than in Canada, where the common law and civilian traditions meet. In 'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory', François Tanguay-Renaud and James Stribopoulos have joined with 14 talented Canadian colleagues to showcase the tremendous breadth and depth of their contemporary national contribution to the subject. Ranging across topics as diverse as emergency, obscenity, and insanity, these essays - without exception insightful and penetrating -set a high standard for the rest of us to aspire to.'' John Gardner, University of Oxford "'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory' is an excellent collection of essays demonstrating the vigour, creativity and range of Canadian criminal justice scholarship. It covers a wide range of problems and issues both in the domestic and the international context. Core questions are examined in depth and new questions are brought to the fore. I recommend it very highly to criminal lawyers and philosophers of the criminal law." Professor Victor Tadros, University of Warwick "'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory 'is packed with outstanding contributions from criminal law theorists who are among the best not only in Canada, but in the whole English-speaking world. Broad and deep in its coverage, the collection offers fresh approaches to a wide range of cutting-edge issues in the field. It provides a resource readers will come back to repeatedly." Stuart Green, Professor of Law and Justice Nathan L Jacobs Scholar, Rutgers University. (shrink)

We take self‐governance or autonomy to be a central feature of human agency: we believe that our actions normally occur under our guidance and at our command. A common criticism of the standard theory of action is that it leaves the agent out of his actions and thus mischaracterizes our autonomy. According to proponents of the endorsement model of autonomy, such as Harry Frankfurt and David Velleman, the standard theory simply needs to be supplemented with the agent's actual endorsement of (...) his actions in order to make room for our autonomy. I argue that their proposal fails and that a more substantive enrichment of the standard theory is called for. (shrink)

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)

In this article, I revisit Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and contrast it with Herbert Simon's notion of bounded rationality. Through a discussion of the literature of economic sociology on status and Fligstein's political-cultural approach, I argue that this concept can be a source of fresh insights into empirical problems. I find that the greater the change in the social environment, the more salient the benefits of using habitus as a tool to analyze agents' behavior.

The aim of the paper is to develop the notion of partial probability distributions as being more realistic models of belief systems than the standard accounts. We formulate the theory of partial probability functions independently of any classical semantic notions. We use the partial probability distributions to develop a formal semantics for partial propositional calculi, with extensions to predicate logic and higher order languages. We give a proof theory for the partial logics and obtain soundness and completeness results.

A TED talk by Susan Savage-Rumbaugh entitled ‘The gentle genius of the bonobos’ tells the story of the learning ability of these gentle primates. Although these animals were never deliberately taught any skills – cognitive, linguistic or technical – they managed to learn a vast amount from the scientists in the program by just observing, experimenting and imitating them. And the key to this learning process was the significance these humans had in the lives of the bonobos. The relationship between (...) the scientists and the bonobos was therefore key to the learning experience and the learning process. This reminded me of the success stories I have witnessed within our therapist training program at the counselling centre where I have been lecturing. We used to train pastoral therapists within the narrative paradigm. Within this paradigm, reality is considered to be socially constructed, thus emphasising the relational nature of identity, agency and knowledge. Aligning the ‘teaching methodology’ with this epistemology invariably requires a participatory approach to training, which in our context led to the adoption of seminars rather than lectures, and a conversational style of learning. This article will now explore what the effect of relationship building as a deliberate prerequisite for learning might be on learner agency. (shrink)

In this article I have tried to analize the constitution of the notion of internai sensibility, before Reil’s and Cabanis’s works. Amongst the questions raised by this notion, I mainly discuss the question of the unity or diversity of internai sensations, and the question of their unconsciousness. As it appears, the notion is worked out in an anticartesian perspective, both in philosophy and physiology.

At the end of World War II, F. A. Hayek denounced the then-popular idea of central planning by arguing that, if pursued to its logical conclusion, it would entail totalitarianism. But there were at least two problems. First, judging by his example of Nazi Germany, state control over the economy appears to be a consequence, not a cause, of the monopolization of political power. Second, he conflated socialism and mere interference in the market with central planning. Therefore, history did not (...) so much falsify Hayek's prediction as bypass it: Once the vogue for central planning faded in the West, Hayek's book became irrelevant—except, ironically, in Germany. There, it was read as a manifesto for “good planning” through the rule of law. Alongside other “neoliberal” writers, Hayek had a profound (if little acknowledged) influence on the shape of the emerging Federal Republic and, through it, on the whole European institutional framework. (shrink)

Deux images vont servir de support à notre réflexion. Parues toutes deux à onze ans de distance dans des magazines humoristiques publiés à Istanbul, elles traitent du même thème : le regard porté par les habitants de la capitale ottomane, et notamment les hommes, sur les femmes – en l’occurrence les femmes « modernes ». La première (fig. 1) est extraite du magazine humoristique Cem qui doit son nom à son fondateur, Cemil Cem. Né en 1882 à Istanbul, celui-ci a (...) fait ses études au lycée franco-... (shrink)

Angels play a significant role in the characterisation of the Matthean Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew displays particular interest in angels. This article focuses on passages in Matthew that relate the role of angels directly to Jesus. Matthew distinguishes between the angel of the Lord and angels in general. This article examines the latter group keeping in view their support of Jesus. It shows that Matthew assumes knowledge of Jewish angelic traditions among his readers. He adds new perspectives to their (...) knowledge about the relation of angels with Jesus. He is depicted as meek and humble, refraining from using his authority to call on the assistance of angels for his own benefit. Yet angels come with reverence to serve him. In humility, he fully submits to the will of the Father by entering his passion. On the other hand, he is also depicted with eschatological glory as being accompanied by all the angels. Heavens are emptied to attend to the Son of Man on his glorious throne. With an entourage of all heavenly angels he will return as the eschatological judge not only to judge all the nations, but also the devil and his angels. (shrink)

Jesus’ instruction to the crowds in Matthew 23:3 to obey and do everything the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees tell them comes as a surprise. It is the only case in Matthew where the words of the Jewish leaders are seemingly portrayed in a positive light. If this portrayal indeed is positive, it seems to stand in tension with how Matthew construes these leaders and their teachings in the rest of the gospel (e.g. Mt 5:20; 15:3–6, 15:14; 16:11–12). (...) Jesus’ positive remark furthermore seemingly stands in contrast with Matthew 28:20, where Jesus claims all authority to himself and instructs his disciples to teach all the nations to obey everything he has commanded them. The question therefore arises as to how this seemingly positive reference of Jesus, which apparently stands in contrast with Jesus’ criticism in the rest of the gospel, should be interpreted. In answering this question, an intra-textual approach is followed. (shrink)

La réflexion liturgique de Dom Lambert Beauduin, développée en 1909 au congrès des Œuvres catholiques de Malines, mais aussi son engagement à mettre en œuvre les moyens favorisant un renouveau liturgique sont, encore aujourd’hui, riches d’enseignement. L’article définit les contours de la pédagogie liturgique de ce bénédictin, prêtre diocésain en contact avec les milieux populaires avant son entrée dans la vie monastique, et en souligne l’actualité.

Summary The 1935 conflict on the nature of relativistic degeneracy that pitted Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar against Arthur Stanley Eddington is part of astronomical lore. In recountings of the events surrounding the dispute, the complaint is frequently aired that Chandrasekhar, who faced the pre-eminent astrophysicist of his time, did not enjoy the support of the astronomical community, which opted to side instead with Eddington. We reconsider these statements in the light of the published record and argue that the reception of Chandrasekhar's ideas (...) was, if anything, rather favourable and that any perceived lack of support may have been due in great part to the inability to distinguish, on an observational basis, between the predictions of the competing theories. We further argue that the observational situation improved little over the subsequent thirty years, but that this did not prevent Chandrasekhar's version of relativistic degeneracy, and associated theory of electron-degenerate stars, from gaining a central position within the realm of stellar structure and evolution. We briefly compare this status to that enjoyed by general relativity before 1960. (shrink)