Les hommes ont émergé de l'animalité en dominant les choses et les animaux. Sur ce modèle, ils ont cru être encore plus puissants en dominant d'autres hommes. Ils ont imaginé que l'homme supérieur était celui qui dominait le plus. Nous vivons toujours dans cette illusion. Cette illusion n'est pas universelle mais il flotte dans l'esprit de tous une grande indécision à ce sujet. Pourtant, l'appétit de pouvoir fait de si grands dégâts, engendre de si grandes souffrances, qu'on ne peut en (...) rester à des intuitions contradictoires. Il est urgent de découvrir ce qui fait qu'un homme est un homme véritable et non une idole trompeuse. Pour cela, on n'a pas d'autre moyen que de remonter à la base ontologique, c'est-à-dire à ce qui fait la réalité de toute chose. Puisque l'homme est une partie du monde, ce qu'il a en propre ne peut s'éclairer que sur cette base commune. On croit désormais que la science suffit à répondre à cette préoccupation, nous avons à la dépasser en l'intégrant."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Il y a une pente universitaire à s'enfermer dans les textes en perdant de vue la réalité. C'est l'aboutissement d'un vice constitutif. En effet, depuis Aristote au moins, toutes les doctrines se sont développées sur la base d'un dédoublement ontologique entre un domaine des 'idées' et un domaine de la réalité elle-même. Ce dédoublement repose sur une imagination étrangère à l'expérience. Pour y voir plus clair, il faut s'appuyer constamment sur ce qui est donné tel qu'il est donné. Pour cela, (...) il faut déplacer l'attention depuis les contenus vers la manière dont nous les saisissons consciemment en confrontant l'expérience commune et la figure scientifique corrélative"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This book argues against the traditional understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide and puts forward a radical alternative. Through half a dozen case studies, it shows that what an utterance says cannot be neatly separated from what the speaker means. In particular, the speaker's meaning endows words with senses that are tailored to the situation of utterance and depart from the conventional meanings carried by the words in isolation. This phenomenon of ‘pragmatic modulation’ must be taken into account in theorizing about (...) semantic content, for it interacts with the grammar-driven process of semantic composition. Because of that interaction, the book argues, the content of a sentence always depends upon the context in which it is used. This claim defines Contextualism, a view which has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and of which the author of this book is one of the main proponents. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

This paper examines Plato’s views about the unity of argument and drama, and asks why Plato never made his views on this unity fully explicit. Taking the Gorgias as a case study it is argued that unity rests on the conception of refutative dialectic as justice and on the principle of self-consistency of thought and desire. As compared to the treatise, the dialogue form has the advantage of being able to defend these substantive views in action and thus to demonstrate (...) the performative contradictions in the ideas of one’s opponents. (shrink)

Un trait du langage qui menace de saper la sûreté de la pensée est sa tendance à former des noms propres auxquels aucun objet ne correspond. [...] Un exemple particulièrement remarquable de cela est la formation d’un nom propre selon le schéma «l’extension du concept a», par exemple «l’extension du concept étoile». À cause de l’article défini, cette expression semble désigner un objet; mais il n’y a aucun objet pour lequel cette expression pour-rait être une désignation appropriée. De là les (...) paradoxes de la théorie des ensembles, qui ont porté un coup mortel à la théorie des ensembles elle-même. J’étais moi-même sous cette illusion quand afin de fournir une fondation logique aux nombres, j’ai tenté de construire les nombres comme des ensembles. (shrink)

Exploring responsibility in the works of Nietzsche, Sartre, Levinas, Heidegger, and Derrida, Raffoul identifies decisive moments in the development of the concept, retrieves its origins, and explores new reflections on it.

In modal logic, propositions are evaluated relative to possible worlds. A proposition may be true relative to a world w, and false relative to another world w'. Relativism is the view that the relativization idea extends beyond possible worlds and modalities. Thus, in tense logic, propositions are evaluated relative to times. A proposition (e.g. the proposition that Socrates is sitting) may be true relative to a time t, and false relative to another time t'. In this paper I discuss, and (...) attempt to rebut, two classical objections to Relativism. The first objection, due to Frege, is the objection from incompleteness. I distinguish two possible relativist responses to that objection, one of which corresponds to the view I actually defend : Moderate Relativism. The second objection is due to Mark Richard, who argued that the objects of belief cannot be relativistic. I show that that objection can be met within the Moderate Relativist framework. In the last section, I deal with special forms of disagreement that have loomed large in recent discussions of Relativism. (shrink)

In response to Mandy Simons’ defence of a classical Gricean approach to pragmatic enrichment in terms of conversational implicature, I emphasize the following contrast. Conversational implicatures are generated by a global inference which uses as a premise the fact that the speaker has said that p, but only the triggering inference is global in cases of pragmatic enrichment. What generates the correct interpretation is a process of reconstrual, which locally maps the literal meaning of a constituent to a modulated meaning (...) and composes that meaning with that of the other constituents. That process is constrained by Gricean considerations but that is true of all pragmatic aspects of interpretation, whether pre-propositional or post-propositional. Just as indexical resolution, though pragmatic and constrained by Gricean considerations, does not fit the two-stage model through which Grice accounts for conversational implicatures, so pragmatic modulation can’t be accounted for in terms of that model despite the fact that, like conversational implicatures and unlike indexical resolution, modulation is pragmatically rather than semantically triggered. (shrink)

The Ainu are still in existence, but their reduced numbers, now around 20,000, indicate how marginal their presence is even in Hokkaido, their ancestral territory. Moreover, they have undergone much metissage, in both ethnic and cultural terms. Legally, the Ainu do not yet constitute an indigenous ethnic minority; they have only recently obtained some gestures of recognition from the government, such as the interruption of a dam project on a ritual site. In 1994, for the first time in history, an (...) Ainu, Kay ano Shigeru, was elected to the senate. The legislation concerning the Ainu lands, dating from 1899, has finally been revised. And with a boost from the International Year of Ethnic Minorities, in 1992, Ainu organizations managed to inflect the official Japanese doctrine that Japanese soil is home to only one community, that of the Japanese. (shrink)

Response to Carston's paper, 'How Many Pragmatic Systems Are There'?

It is argued there is nothing special or deviant about the use of 'now' to refer to a time in the past (or about the use of 'here' to refer to a distant place) — no need to appeal to pragmatic mechanisms such as context-shifting to account for such uses. Such uses are puzzling only if one (mistakenly) maintains that 'here' and 'now' are pure indexicals. In the paper it is claimed that they are more similar to demonstratives than to (...) pure indexicals. Updated material on this can be found in *Truth-Conditional Pragmatics*, Chapter 6, 2010. (shrink)

This paper — a sequel to my 'Open Quotation' (Mind 2001) — is my reaction to the articles discussing open quotation in the special issue of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics edited by P. De Brabanter in 2005.

[The existence of logical objects according to Frege].

If we accept the idea that the value of a “logic” depends on its ability to fit the usual meaning of the “logical constants” which it formalises and the inferences we draw on their basis, we may ask if the meaning of “possible” is well captured by normal modal logic. We are faced with the following puzzle: if is meaningful and non contradictory is it not a logical truth that ? First, it is shown why there is no logical law (...) of the form , being a neutral wff, and then some philosophical conclusions are drawn: “possible” relative to truth must be distinguished from possible “relative” to meaning, and the former only is formalised in modal logic. (shrink)

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.

In the present study, we examined how the religiousness of European Muslim immigrants is related to multiple collective identities , attachment to one or both cultures, and acculturation as a process realized through a variety of domains in personal and social life. Two groups were included: young Muslims born of immigration from Muslim countries and, for comparison, young non-Muslims born of immigration from other countries. In both groups, high religiousness predicted attachment to origin identity and culture; low religiousness and religious (...) doubting predicted identification with the host country and acculturation. Interestingly, the religiousness of Muslim immigrants also predicted high identification as citizen of the world, whereas the religiousness of the other immigrants was related to low European identity. Finally, some discrepancy between claiming new identities and effectively experiencing acculturation was found. Interpretations are provided on both a general level and a contextual level. (shrink)

_Philosophical reflections on the phenomenon of globalization._.