In this polyphonic dialogue, Gilles Châtenay, Eric Laurent, and Jacques-Alain Miller, responding to questions by Yann Moulier Boutang and Olivier Surel, ponder the consequences of the newest waves of digital processing of data related to the personal life, and of their increasing interconnection. In this “numerical tsunami” and in the political rhetoric that supports it by promoting maximal security and risk management, they identify a resurgence of utilitarianism, and, due to the technological power thus unleashed, a considerable danger (...) for privacy. Against this trend of rationalized totalization of data related to identities, they call for citizens’ resistance and for a sustained public debate on the issue. (shrink)

Staff reported paranormal experiences in connection with the outpatient Medical Assistance in Dying room at the hospital. This case study reports on staff experiences and illustrates how the Ethics team’s role expanded to deal with this novel situation by facilitating an interdisciplinary response.

This report describes the rationale, approaches, organization, and resource development leading to a large-scale deletion bin map of the hexaploid wheat genome. Accompanying reports in this issue detail results from chromosome bin-mapping of expressed sequence tags representing genes onto the seven homoeologous chromosome groups and a global analysis of the entire mapped wheat EST data set. Among the resources developed were the first extensive public wheat EST collection. Described are protocols for sequencing, sequence processing, EST nomenclature, and the assembly of (...) ESTs into contigs. These contigs plus singletons were used for selection of distinct sequence motif unigenes. Selected ESTs were rearrayed, validated by 5′ and 3′ sequencing, and amplified for probing a series of wheat aneuploid and deletion stocks. Images and data for all Southern hybridizations were deposited in databases and were used by the coordinators for each of the seven homoeologous chromosome groups to validate the mapping results. Results from this project have established the foundation for future developments in wheat genomics. (shrink)

Although Friedrich Nietzsche had no less to say about value than he did about truth, his writings reflect contradictory views about their interrelation. In several passages, Nietzsche explicitly remarks that no relation exists between phenomena and value, describing value as a derivative and secondary mode of interpretation arbitrarily ‘attached’ to primary, non-evaluative interpretations. Elsewhere and more understated, however, runs an opposing line of argumentation in which Nietzsche presents interpretation as emerging through evaluation and therefore as necessarily ‘colored’ by it. While (...) Gilles Deleauze's exegesis of Nietzsche struggles to maintain a certain faithfulness to this ambiguity, most contemporary inheritors of Nietzschean thought, including Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault, have embraced the claim of ‘no relation’ between value and interpretation. This article provides support, in part through the analytic of race, for the alternative hypothesis that holds the indissociable relation of value and interpretation. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with adaptive learning and coordination processes. Implementing agent-based modeling techniques (Learning Classifier Systems, LCS), we focus on the twofold impact of cognitive and environmental complexity on learning and coordination. Within this framework, we introduce the notion of Adaptive Learning Agent with Rule-based Memory (ALARM), which is a particular class of Artificial Adaptive Agent (AAA, Holland and Miller 1991). We show that equilibrium is approached to a high degree, but never perfectly reached. We also demonstrate that (...) memorization and learning capacities depend upon the relative discordance between the cognitive complexity of agents' mental models and the degree of stability of the environment. (shrink)

The concept of retro-avant-garde was first advanced by artists working in the late socialist and post-socialist contexts of Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and the territories of the ex-Yugoslavia. In general, its semantic field has been defined by a range of post-modern and mostly post-socialist art practices that draw formal, philosophical, and social inspiration from the politicized, powerfully utopian avant-gardes of the early decades of the twentieth-century, especially in the USSR and East-Central Europe. However, its paradoxical reference forward and backward in (...) time highlights the temporal dimensions of period concepts such as modernity, postmodernity, and avant-garde in ways that make retro-avant-garde worthy of theoretical reflection. I explore the nature of period concepts, which serve not only as historical metrics, but also as designations of basic characteristics of historicity, the configuration of the dimensions of past, present, and future in a given historical context and the limits and possibilities of historical experience and representation. I go on to explore the applicability to historiography of Gilles Deleuze's distinction, developed in his cinema theory, between "movement images" and "time images." In the case of historical thought, the distinction lies in whether the representation of time is thought to be a function of historical change or, on the contrary, whether the representation of historical change is qualified by the mode of time. I conclude by suggesting that if the avant-garde has primarily been conceptualized under the figure of "movement," retro-avant-garde reveals the degree to which classical avantgardism was dependent on an image of time: time itself as material to be artistically crafted and shaped into an historical experience appropriate to the modern age. (shrink)

Philosophe et penseur du politique, intellectuel marxiste et militant communiste, enseignant, directeur de collection... : à travers le rayonnement de son oeuvre et de sa personne, Louis Althusser a renouvelé la théorie politique et la philosophie de l'histoire, de Machiavel à Marx. Parmi ses contemporains, Michel Foucault exhorte : " Ouvrez les livres d'Althusser! ", Jacques Derrida évoque " la force rayonnante et provocante de sa pensée ", Gilles Deleuze salue l'" Althusser's Band ", et pour Roland Barthes, " (...) le seul modèle acceptable de la science est celui mis au jour par les études d'Althusser sur Marx ". Aliocha Wald Lasowski converse avec vingt écrivains et philosophes qui ont lu, rencontré, parfois travaillé avec Althusser, quand ils n'ont pas fait partie de ses proches. Où l'on mesure à quel point la pensée d'Althusser demeure d'une actualité brûlante. (shrink)

Il faudrait que le dialogue se fasse, non pas entre des personnes, mais entre les lignes, entre des chapitres ou des parties de chapitre. Ce seraient les vrais personnages. Perdre la mémoire : il faudrait plutôt dresser des " blocs ", les faire flotter. Un bloc d'enfance n'est pas un souvenir d'enfant. Un bloc nous accompagne, est toujours anonyme et contemporain, et fonctionne dans le présent - Oublier l'histoire : la question des devenirs, et de leur géographie. Un devenir-révolutionnaire est (...) plus important que l'avenir ou le passé de la révolution. Un devenir-femme, un devenir-animal sont plus importants que la différence des sexes et des règnes - Ne pas " faire le point " : plutôt tracer des lignes. Les lignes n'ont pas d'origine, et poussent par le milieu. On ne fait jamais table rase, on est toujours au milieu de quelque chose, comme l'herbe. Plus on prend le monde là où il est, plus on a de chance de le changer... Se séparer de l'appareil d'Etat et de tout système qui le prend pour modèle ou veut le conquérir : la présence diffuse de machines de guerre irréductibles au modèle d'Etat, toute une histoire populaire qui n'a pas été recueillie, un nomadisme même immobile. Devenir ou re-devenir marxiste : aucune analyse n'est possible si elle ne porte aussi sur les mécanismes industriels et surtout financiers dans un champ social. Non pas suprême instance, mais lignes, et régimes de signes, qui s'enchaînent avec les autres, et dont les flottaisons s'agencent avec d'autres flux. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The principle of nationality is widely believed to be philosophically disreputable and politically reactionary. As defined here, it embraces three propositions: national identities are properly part of personal identities; they ground circumscribed obligations to fellow‐nationals; and they justify claims to political self‐determination. To have a national identity is to think of oneself as belonging to a community constituted by mutual belief, extended in history, active in character, connected to a particular territory, and marked off from others by its members’distinct (...) traits. Such identities are inevitably partly mythical in nature, yet they answer a pressing modern need, the maintenance of solidarity in large, anonymous societies. They are allied to no particular political programme. They do not require the suppression of minority cultures within the political community. They do not justify a secessionist free‐for‐all. Nor finally does recognition of the role of sentiments in constituting national communities commit us to a subjectivist view of social obligations. Philosophers should recognise the value of these loyalties even if they cannot be rationally grounded in a strong sense. [1]. (shrink)

Confucius was an important Chinese philosopher who lived in the fifth century BC. The son of a poor nobleman, Confucius became a scholar of ancient Chinese music and literature. He spent most of his life as a traveling teacher. Much of his teaching focused on what made people happy and what made society run smoothly.

Contributors:Todd Alden, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, David Brown, Gilles Deleuze, Craig Ellwood, Bob Flanagan, Michel Foucault, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Mike Kelley, Joseph Kosuth, Chris Kraus, Julia Kristeva, Don Kubly, Sylvère Lotringer, Deran Ludd, John Miller, Eileen Myles, Darcy Jo Paley, Ann Rower, Sue Spaid, Frances Stark, Mark Stritzel, James Tyler.

- Comment une autre langue se crée dans la langue, de telle manière que le langage tout entier tende vers sa limite ou son propre " dehors "? - Comment la possibilité de la psychose et la réalité du délire s'inscrivent dans ce parcours? - Comment le dehors du langage est fait de visions et d'auditions non-langagières, mais que seul le langage rend possibles? - Pourquoi les écrivains sont dès lors, à travers les mots, des coloristes et des musiciens?

In the Statesman , Plato brings together--only to challenge and displace--his own crowning contributions to philosophical method, political theory, and drama. In his 1980 study, reprinted here, Mitchell Miller employs literary theory and conceptual analysis to expose the philosophical, political, and pedagogical conflict that is the underlying context of the dialogue, revealing that its chaotic variety of movements is actually a carefully harmonized act of realizing the mean. The original study left one question outstanding: what specifically, in the metaphysical (...) order of things, motivated the nameless Visitor from Elea to abandon bifurcation for his consummating non-bifurcatory division of fifteen kinds at the end of the dialogue? Miller addressed in a separate essay, first published in 1999 and reprinted here. In it, he opens the horizon of interpretation to include the new metaphysics of the Parmenides , the Philebus , and the "unwritten teachings." "This study demonstrates how the Statesman is the culminating expression of Plato's lifelong effort, both in Athens and in the Academy, to bring metaphysical insight to the unending political crisis of his times."The Philosopher in Plato's Statesman a trail-blazing work. While not every reader will agree with the lessons Miller himself draws from this approach, none should fail to be impressed by its interpretive power. All this is exciting stuff. The interpretive pathway on which Miller has embarked has the potential for changing the face of scholarship on the late Platonic dialogues. Parmenides [Publishing] is to be commended for making these two important contributions available under a single cover." -- Kenneth Sayre, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame "Miller casts considerable light on virtually every aspect of the dialogue. . . . All in all, this book is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the Statesman." -- Stanley Rosen, Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, Boston University MITCHELL MILLER is Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College. He is the author of Plato's Parmenides. (shrink)

Through close examination of the texts, the author shows how 15th-century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa developed an understanding of uncertainty that opened the way for human intelligence, despite its inherent weaknesses, to find out more about ourselves, the world, and what lies beyond.

Through an unusual blend of biography, philosophy, and history, James Miller shows how a solitary dreamer came to inspire a generation of radicals, profoundly ...

Thanks to mounting discussion about projected technologies’ possibly altering the species mentally and physically, philosophical investigation of what human beings are proceeds robustly. Many thinkers contend that whatever we are has little to do with how we should behave. Yet, tampering with what the human being is may tread upon human rights to be whatever one is. Rights given in widely recognized documents such as the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples assume what humans are and need depends (...) upon ontological assumptions about human existence. Godman turns to human ontology—just what kind of beings humans are (from an angle distinct from the other two books) and how these play into rights. She is concerned with how well the social sciences accord with what we are. Gunkel homes in on a more specific moral topic than Godman's general concern with identity’s role in rights: automata moral status and rights. He enjoins us to inquire into what human rights are before we take on the new technologies’ challenge to it. Schneider’s Artificial You, while not explicitly about rights, poses a rights quandary. Certain individuals with reputable resources and practical backing explicitly seek to evolve the species as they see fit. The urgency among these works concerns how we need a sharper idea of what we are, how we should act and be treated, and how our rights fare among potential human improvements. (shrink)

A principle is a starting point of departure as well as a rule. In science principles are either alleged evident rules or generalizations of already accepted laws, or formal determinations for objects tn a given domam. Thus two problems arise: first, does their nature have a conventional character? and sencond, what kind of truth is to be assigned to them. In philosophy principles are taken as a method of thinking as well as fundamental experiences. Even though they are points of (...) departure, their true meaning is known only after a philosophical job is done. Thus, paradoxically enough, we can say that in both science and philosophy a principle is at the same time in the begining and in the end. (shrink)

Excavates the experiential structure of Habermas’s communicative action.

THE MORAL SCEPTIC IS ONE WHO BELIEVES MORALITY CANNOT BE\nJUSTIFIED AND THEREFORE THERE ARE GOOD REASONS FOR BEING\nSUSPICIOUS OF IT, AND FURTHER, THAT ONE WHO CONTINUES TO\nMAINTAIN A MORAL POSITION IS BEING UNREASONABLE. THE AUTHOR\nMAINTAINS THAT EVEN THOUGH THE CONCEPT OF JUSTIFICATION\nDOES NOT APPLY, THE SCEPTIC IS MISTAKEN IN DRAWING THE\nCONCLUSIONS HE DOES. THE SCEPTIC CONTENDS THAT IN THE\nABSENCE OF REASONS, IT IS UNREASONABLE TO BELIEVE. IT IS\nCONCLUDED THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO REASON US FROM MORALITY\nINTO SCEPTICISM. (STAFF).

« Je considère ici le sens et le rôle de l'irrationnel dans certaines œuvres humaines, dans certaines créations majeures de l'esprit humain, et tout particulièrement dans les œuvres de la science. Dans cette perspective, je distinguerais trois types significatifs d'irrationnel. Le premier serait l'irrationnel comme obstacle, point de départ d'une reconquête de la rationalité. Le second, l'irrationnel comme recours, moyen de renouveler et de prolonger l'acte créateur. Le troisième, l'irrationnel par renoncement, ou si l'on veut par abandon, est au contraire (...) un véritable rejet du rationnel. C'est cette triple distinction qui servira de fil conducteur à nos réflexions sur l'irrationnel dans les œuvres, dans l'esprit d'un rationalisme ouvert et dynamique, en vue de reconnaître et de délimiter le rôle positif de l'irrationnel. » G. G. G. (shrink)

En 1960 Gilles Gaston Granger nous met déjà en garde contre deux erreurs symétriques possibles des sciences de l'homme : la modélisation spéculative sans pratique et le recours à l'expérience vulgaire sous prétexte que l'objet de ces sciences est l'homme individuel. Il nous permet ainsi de réfléchir, par une étude comparative avec les sciences de la nature, au statut épistémologique d'une connaissance de l'individuel dans les sciences de l'homme. Au-delà de la linguistique de Saussure, de l'anthropologie de Lévi-Strauss ou (...) de la psychanalyse de Freud par exemple, il nous interroge sur la possible transmutation des significations vécues en significations objectives grâce à l'apport équilibré d'une axiomatisation de concepts d'origine empirique et d'un travail clinique par contact avec l'homme concret. Gilles Gaston Granger nourrit l'espoir que, par le mariage difficile de la pensée combinatoire et de la pensée intuitive, naîtra une " poïematique ", réunion de la science, de l'histoire et de la philosophie des oeuvres humaines. (shrink)