Tocqueville n'aimait pas la République. Il lui reprochait de porter atteinte aux libertés. Il lui préférait la monarchie parlementaire. Pourtant, après la révolution de 1848, il s'y rallie. Son acte est pragmatique. Dans la crise politique, et faute d'alternative royaliste, la République est, selon lui, le seul régime capable d'empêcher l'anarchie et la tyrannie. Mais son ralliement se fait à la condition qu'elle soit libérale et conservatrice. Pour installer une république modérée, Tocqueville s'efforce d'influencer la rédaction de la Constitution de (...) 1848, soutient la candidature à l'élection présidentielle de Cavaignac, défend une politique de paix et imagine une solution pour éviter un coup d'État bonapartiste. Néanmoins, l'Empire a remplacé la République. Mais ces combats ont préparé l'avenir : ils ont permis le compromis de 1875 et donc la IIIe République. Sans l'aimer, Tocqueville a fait autant pour la République que ses partisans. (shrink)

Considered an institution mainly devoted to astrology and medicine by Simon de Phares and by some historians who believe that he was reliable, the college founded in 1371 by Charles V’s first physician, Gervais Chrétien, was in fact primarily dedicated to theological students. It was not before 1377 that there were created there two bursaries for scholares regis, specialising in ‘licit mathematical sciences’, and two medical fellowships. Yet the influence of the activity of these fellows seems to have been rather (...) moderate and—as far as we can learn from the material still extant, notably from manuscripts that belonged to Maître Gervais’ College and to some of its members—this institution was devoted much more to theological studies than to medicine and the quadrivium. (shrink)

On savait que c’était l’entité la plus complexe de l’univers connu. Mais le feu d’artifice de découvertes récentes dépasse l’entendement et fait exploser tous les schémas. Votre cerveau est (beaucoup) plus fabuleux que vous le croyez. Il est : totalement élastique, même âgé, handicapé, voire amputé de plusieurs lobes, le système nerveux central peut se reconstituer et repartir à l’assaut des connaissances et de l’action sur le monde ; totalement social, un cerveau n’existe jamais seul, mais toujours en résonance avec (...) d’autres. Mieux : nous sommes neuronalement constitués pour entrer en empathie avec autrui et aller à son secours. Ce livre aborde ces questions passionnantes avec cinq spécialistes. (shrink)

Patrice Bergeron,Fabrice Blée,Marc Dumas,Raymond Lemieux,Jean Richard,Gérard Siegwalt.

In this paper, Knetsch's exchange paradigm is analyzed from the perspective of pragmatics and social norms. In this paradigm the participant, at the beginning of the experiment, receives an object from the experimenter and at the end, the same experimenter offers to exchange the received object for an equivalent object. The observed refusal to exchange is called the endowment effect. We argue that this effect comes from an implicature made by the participant about the experimenter's own expectations. The participant perceives (...) the received item as a gift, or as a present, from the experimenter that cannot be exchanged as stipulated by the social norms of western politeness common to both the experimenter and the participant. This implicature, however, should not be produced by participants from Kanak culture for whom the perceived gift of a good will be interpreted as a first act of exchange based on gift and counter-gift. This exchange is a natural, frequent, balanced, and indispensable act for all Kanak social bonds whether private or public. Kanak people also know the French social norms that they apply in their interactions with French people living in New Caledonia. In our experiment, we show that when the exchange paradigm takes place in a French context, with a French experimenter and in French, the Kanak participant is subject to the endowment effect in the same way as a French participant. On the other hand, when the paradigm is carried out in a Kanak context, with a Kanak experimenter and in the vernacular language, or in a Kanak context that approaches the ceremonial of the custom, the endowment effect is no longer observed. The same number of Kanak participants accept or refuse to exchange the endowed item. These results, in addition to providing a new explanation for the endowment effect, highlight the great flexibility of decisions according to social-cultural context. (shrink)

Torture, abus sexuels, traite des personnes, esclavage, crimes de guerre, génocides : les figures de l'intolérable se sont multipliées depuis deux siècles, jusqu'à saturer l'espace public contemporain de faits socialement réprouvés et juridiquement sanctionnés. Ce que l'on affirme ainsi injustifiable est vu généralement comme un mal radical, voire absolu, comme le franchissement d'une limite. Pourtant, le regard vers un passé encore proche nous apprend qu'il s'agit toujours d'une limite historiquement constituée, donc frappée de relativité temporelle, et toutes ces transgressions n'ont (...) pas la même valeur ou la même gravité, suggérant ainsi une hiérarchie morale. À l'encontre d'une vision essentialiste des droits de l'homme, les études présentées dans ce livre rendent compte de la façon dont se sont formées les frontières de l'espace moral contemporain. Après avoir tracé les fondements anthropologiques de ce qui constitue l'intolérable des sociétés humaines, l'ouvrage s'attache à cette période de basculement que représente la Révolution française. Puis les auteurs analysent quelques-unes des figures les plus significatives de notre modernité morale : le travail des enfants et la maltraitance infantile, la gestion des corps morts et l'empreinte psychique de la violence, le traitement différentiel des épidémies à l'échelle planétaire. Ainsi se dessine une généalogie des intolérables de notre monde, mais aussi, en contrepoint, notre remarquable tolérance à l'égard des inégalités et des injustices les plus profondes, à commencer par celles qui différencient la valeur des vies humaines. (shrink)

Recognition memory performance reflects two distinct memory processes: a conscious process of recollection, which allows remembering specific details of a previous event, and familiarity, which emerges in the absence of any conscious information about the context in which the event occurred. Slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep are differentially involved in the consolidation of different types of memory. The study assessed the effects of SWS and REM sleep on recollection, by means of the “remember”/”know” paradigm. Subjects studied three (...) blocks of 12 words before a 3-h retention interval filled with SWS, REM sleep or wakefulness, placed between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. Afterwards, recognition and recollection were tested. Recollection was higher after a retention interval rich in SWS than after a retention interval rich in REM sleep or filled with wakefulness. The results suggest that SWS facilitates the process of recollection in recognition memory. (shrink)

s political theory apparently leads us to choose between patriotism and cosmopolitism. The two major works published in 1762, On the Social Contract and Emile , would represent the two sides of the alternative. However, the opposition between patriotism and cosmopolitism is the ultimate development of an internal tension between two aspects of Rousseau’s political concept of people: the intersubjectivity that permits the formation of the general will; and the individual’s devotion to the state. On the one hand, the political (...) community appears as a distributive totality. On the other hand, it is viewed as a collective totality. When generalized, intersubjectivity leads to the formation of both the social concept of people and the moral concept of humanity, while patriotism requires the individual’s loyalty to the nation. In order to maintain the coherence of the very political concept of people and to solve the main political problem - which is to reconcile security and liberty - it is necessary to overcome the dichotomy between cosmopolitism and patriotism. Emile and Rousseau’s original plan for On the Social Contract are consistent on that point. Key Words: cosmopolitism • general will • intersubjectivity • nation • patriotism • people. (shrink)

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by atypical perception, including processing that is biased toward local details rather than global configurations. This bias may impact on memory. The present study examined the effect of this perception on both implicit (Experiment 1) and explicit (Experiment 2) memory in conditions that promote either local or global processing. The first experiment consisted of an object identification priming task using two distinct encoding conditions: one favoring local processing (Local condition) and the other favoring global (...) processing (Global condition) of drawings. The second experiment focused on episodic (explicit) memory with two different cartoon recognition tasks that favored either local (i.e., processing specific details) or a global processing (i.e., processing each cartoon as a whole). In addition, all the participants underwent a general clinical cognitive assessment aimed at documenting their cognitive profile and enabling correlational analyses with experimental memory tasks. Seventeen participants with ASD and 17 typically developing (TD) controls aged from 10 to 16 years participated to the first experiment and 13 ASD matched with 13 TD participants were included for the second experiment. Experiment 1 confirmed the preservation of priming effects in ASD but, unlike the Comparison group, the ASD group did not increase his performance as controls after a globally oriented processing. Experiment 2 revealed that local processing led to difficulties in discriminating lures from targets in a recognition task when both lures and targets shared common details. The correlation analysis revealed that these difficulties were associated with processing speed and inhibition. These preliminary results suggest that natural perceptual processes oriented toward local information in ASD may impact upon their implicit memory by preventing globally oriented processing in time-limited conditions and induce confusion between explicit memories that share common details. (shrink)

This paper deals with the relationships between ethics and the environment in Rousseau’s thought. The concept of environment is understood in its various dimensions. What is at stake is the natural, as well as the social and political, environment of human beings. The notion of ethics is also understood in a broad sense. We do not set ethics, understood as the search for happiness (or for the good life) against morality, understood as the fulfillment of duty. However, we take up (...) two main questions. The first question concerns the influence of the environment, both natural and social, upon the ethical development of human beings. The second question concerns the responsibility of human beings towards nature. We examine what Rousseau teaches us regarding these two questions. Finally, we envisage liberty from the point of view of the relationships between nature and the political order. Human liberty is a matter of rights. It depends upon the republican nature of the state. However, liberty is also a sentiment that is intimately related to the living experience of nature. In order to understand what Rousseau means by liberty, we must grasp this intimate relationship between nature and politics. (shrink)

La période est à la transgression. Transgresser est en effet la nécessité même de l'ordre. Tel est le principe de base de tout pouvoir dès lors qu'il se proclame souverain. Autrement dit, il n'est de pouvoir que transgresseur. Telle est aussi l'énigme de la puissance attribuée à l'État depuis son élaboration principielle par Jean Bodin jusqu'aux énoncés de Carl Schmitt dont la formule "est souverain celui qui décide de la situation exceptionnelle", a permis au XXe siècle de donner un (...) autre contenu, dictatorial, à la question de la souveraineté. L'évolution récente de cette notion prise au piège de la fondation des grands ensembles plurinationaux telle l'Union européenne, réactualise la question de l'adéquation de la souveraineté avec la nation. C'est dans cette logique qu'une archéologie de cette notion paraît indispensable pour évaluer sa double évolution dont la première, transcendante et de type vertical, la fait descendre de la toute-puissance divine jusqu'à son incarnation populaire à travers ses séquences ecclésiales (le souverain pontife), royales, nationales et populaires. Une seconde évolution à partir de la Révolution française, que l'on peut qualifier d'horizontale, l'instaure sur le versant de son incarnation imaginée au sein de la nation, souveraineté nationale, ou au plan de l'universalité des citoyens, souveraineté populaire. Qu'elle soit fondée sur une représentation imaginée collective de soi, la nation, ou sur une identité citoyenne étendue à tous, le peuple, la question de la souverainetén'est soluble que dans cette double identité, nationale et populaire à travers la question de la démocratie qui apparaît ici fondamentale pour restituer au souverain-peuple la légitimité des choix qu'il opère au travers de la délégation de ses compétences aux représentants qu'il se donne. En fin de compte, la souveraineté est avant tout toute-puissante, et ainsi, il n'y a de puissance politique que découlant d'elle. (shrink)

¿Qué es un héroe de la emancipación? Rousseau comparaba el héroe antiguo, un guerrero triunfante que vence a los enemigos de su país, con el verdadero héroe, aquel que es capaz de posponer su singularidad en vistas a promover la acción común del pueblo soberano. De acuerdo con Miguel Abensour, la Revolución francesa redefine el heroísmo político como la capacidad de iniciar algo cuyo resultado es aún imprevisible, estableciendo así una nueva sociedad en la cual las figuras del héroe y (...) del legislador coinciden, anudando una enigmática relación entre esclavitud y libertad, y estableciendo un orden que sobrepasa las divisiones generadas por los intereses injustos. Pero si "el héroe es el verdadero sujeto de la modernidad" , ¿no es la posibilidad del heroísmo en la prosaica sociedad moderna y postrevolucionaria la llave de salida del siglo XIX? ¿Qué pensar de una figura heroica como la de Simón Bolívar, el usurpador del título de Libertador, según Benjamin Constant; el Napoleón de las retiradas, según Marx? ¿El partero de la emancipación, según escriben Pierre Leroux y Jean Reynaud en la Nueva Enciclopedia? ¿La luminaria de la emancipación del pueblo americano caído en la esclavitud, como dirá Juan Montalvo? Who is a hero of emancipation? Rousseau contrasted the ancient hero, a triumphant worrier who defeats the enemies of his country, with the true hero, the one who is able to surrender his singularity in order better to promote the collective agency of a sovereign people. The French revolution, according to Miguel Abensour, redefines political heroism as the ability to initiate something in the unpredictability of the result, establishing therefore a new society in which the figures of the hero and the legislator coincide, broaching an enigmatic relationship between bondage and freedom, and establishing an order that supersedes the divisions generated by unjust desires. But if "the hero is the true subject of modernity" is not the possibility of heroism in a prosaic modern post-revolutionary society the key issue of the nineteenth century? What to think of a heroic figure like Simon Bolivar, - the usurper of the title Libertador ? The Napoleon of the retreats ? The accoucheur of the emancipation, ? The emancipating luminary of the American people fallen in bondage ? (shrink)

Centrée sur la trajectoire universitaire et philosophique de Jean-Pierre Cléro, cette série d'entretiens menée par Patrice Vibert (qui fut son étudiant) revient sur une vie essentiellement occupée par l'enseignement et la recherche entre les années 1970 et 2020. Dans ces pages, les auteurs mettent en relief, sur un certain nombre de notions, les méandres d'un parcours philosophique susceptibles d'éclairer les étudiants qui se destinent aujourd'hui à une recherche comparable, mais dans des circonstances très différentes. Si l'étude des passions, (...) puis le passage de celle-ci à la logique des fictions, constituent le fil conducteur de l'ensemble, le chemin qu'il suit à travers les probabilités, la psychanalyse, la perception, la théorie des jeux et l'éthique, médicale est plus labyrinthique qu'il n'y paraît. (shrink)

In the early 1990s, Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking was criticized for harboring a latent ethnocentrism. Ruddick responded to these critiques in the 1995 edition of her book, but her response has not yet been addressed in the feminist philosophical literature. This essay addresses this lacuna in the scholarship on Ruddick. In the last installment of this critique, Alison Bailey and Patrice DiQuinzio suggested that the only way for Ruddick to avoid the ethnocentrism charge would require her near-universalistic claims about (...) mothering to be rejected in favor of “particularized, localized accounts of mothering.” In this essay I'll show that this claim goes too far. After reviewing Lugones's and Bailey's critiques of Ruddick, along with Ruddick's response, I propose a “modified universalism” that addresses the concerns raised by Ruddick's critics while preserving key elements of her theory. (shrink)

Aucune discussion d'ensemble des ecrits de Lyotard sur l'art n'avait ete entreprise. Or sa reflexion sur les arts - musique, cinema, peinture surtout - est une part essentielle de son oeuvre, comme en temoignent les analyses proposees dans Discours, figure, Que peindre?, Moralites postmodernes, L'Inhumain et Les Ecrits sur l'art contemporain et les artistes. Moins remarque pourtant est le fait que Lyotard a collabore avec des peintres (Monory, Guiffrey, Adami, Sam Francis, Appel, Buren, etc). Il a ete commissaire d'une exposition (...) en 1985 qui a fait date, " Les Immateriaux ", au Centre Georges-Pompidou. Plusieurs textes du volume ainsi qu'un entretien inedit avec Bernard Blistene sont consacres a cette manifestation. Pour ce livre Francoise Coblence et Michel Enaudeau ont sollicite non seulement des lecteurs avertis de Lyotard (Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Elisabeth de Fontenay, Jean-Michel Rey, Jean-Loup Thebaud, Herman Parret, Anne Cauquelin, Gerald Sfez, Jean-Claude Rolland, Claudine Eizykman et Guy Fihman, Jean-Francois Nordmann, Jean-Patrice Courtois), mais aussi de plus jeunes chercheurs (Gaelle Bernard, Frederic Fruteau de Laclos, Claire Pages, Jerome Glicenstein, Maud Pouradier, Evelyne Toussaint) qui decouvrent pour leur propre compte le travail de Lyotard sur les arts. Les contributions rassemblees analysent les concepts forges par Lyotard, tels que " figural ", "libidinal ", " sublime ", " immateriau ", " matiere ", " impresentable " " affect ", " ecriture ". A travers eux, cette pensee de l'art veut rompre avec l'esthetique au sens academique du terme pour voir ou entendre dans les oeuvres l'evenement de la couleur ou du son. C'est donc bien d'un enjeu " ontologique " qu'il y va : l'art est seul a nous presenter la frappe sensible de l'etre. (shrink)

Devant un film de Jean Cocteau ou de Pasolini, devant un scénario de Jacques Prévert ; devant les photos de Georges Azenstarck, celles des prêtres-ouvriers par Joël Peyroux, celles des albums de familles en banlieue ; devant les toiles de Patrice Giorda ou d'Ernest Pignon-Ernest mais aussi devant une page des Cantos d'Ezra Pound ou d'un texte d'Antonin Artaud, qui ne s'est posé la question : qu'est-ce qu'on y voit? Et plus interrogateur encore : qu'est-ce qu'on y lit? (...) Les sources d'inspiration, d'enthousiasmes ou de fureur de Gérard Mordillat sont nombreuses. Et c'est bien l'oeil qui toujours a nourri sa littérature. Ce recueil prend les ouvres à bras-le-corps, les dissèque, les malmène, pour en livrer toute la profondeur. Homme de lettres et homme d'images, Gérard Mordillat nous livre ici son regard de critique, au sens le plus noble du terme, avec la force et la fougue que l'on trouve dans ses romans. Au regard de textes écrits séparément mais tous gouvernés par cette même question : le mot et l'image seraient-ils frères de sang de l'écriture? Gérard Mordillat interroge les ouvres picturales, photographiques, littéraires ou cinématographiques qui, depuis toujours, sous-tendent et ses films et ses livres. (shrink)

Jean-Claude Gardin examines the practical questions of how archaeological information can best be recorded, stored and disseminated.

According to the author the nature of promise presents a twofold problem. First refers to the question why and how an utterance may cause action; second – to the question why and how this action may cause a duteous state, or action. The conclusions drawn from these analyses can facilitate legal statements concerning the nature of promise.

Georges Kalinowski, né en 1916 à Lublin, est dédédé le 21 octobre 2000 à Dijon, où, depuis la mort de son épouse, il s'était retiré auprès de sa fille, son gendre et ses petits-enfants.

Artificial intelligence has often been seen as an attempt to reduce the natural mind to informational processes and, consequently, to naturalize philosophy. The many criticisms that were addressed to the so-called “old-fashioned AI” do not concern this attempt itself, but the methods it used, especially the reduction of the mind to a symbolic level of abstraction, which has often appeared to be inadequate to capture the richness of our mental activity. As a consequence, there were many efforts to evacuate the (...) semantical models in favor of elementary physiological mechanisms simulated by information processes. However, these views, and the subsequent criticisms against artificial intelligence that they contain, miss the very nature of artificial intelligence, which is not reducible to a “science of the nature”, but which directly impacts our culture. More precisely, they lead to evacuate the role of the semantic information. In other words, they tend to throw the baby out with the bath-water. This paper tries to revisit the epistemology of artificial intelligence in the light of the opposition between the “sciences of nature” and the “sciences of culture”, which has been introduced by German neo-Kantian philosophers. It then shows how this epistemological view opens on the many contemporary applications of artificial intelligence that have already transformed—and will continue to transform—all our cultural activities and our world. Lastly, it places those perspectives in the context of the philosophy of information and more particularly it emphasizes the role played by the notions of context and level of abstraction in artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Après avoir rappelé ce qu’est la version informatique du trans-humanisme et ses liens à la Singularité technologique, nous développons ici une réflexion sur le futur de l’Humanité, de l’humanisme et des humanités dans le contexte du développement rapide des technologies de l’information. La première partie rappelle les nombreuses annonces publiques qui prédisent une prochaine fin de l’Humanité. Nous analysons ensuite ce que signifie la fin de l’Humanité en distinguant d’abord la fin de l’espèce humaine de la fin de l’existence humaine. (...) La troisième partie étudie la signification d’une fin de l’humanisme, l’humanisme étant compris ici comme une philosophie qui considère que l’être humain est la valeur suprême. La dernière partie traite de la fin des humanités et conclut sur l’émergence d’un humanisme numérique qui donne un nouvel élan aux humanités. (shrink)

This volume argues that contemporary narratives resist such influences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an ecology of attention based on poetic options that develop an ethics of the particularist type. The contributors draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: including psychology and sociology, but more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the Ethics of Care and Vulnerability. This volume is designed as an innovative contribution to the nascent field (...) of the study of attention in literary criticism, an area that is full of potential. Its scope is wide, as it embraces a great deal of the Anglophone world, with Britain, Ireland, the USA, but also Australia and even Malta. Its chapters focus on well-established authors, like Kazuo Ishiguro (whose work is revisited here in a completely new light) or more confidential ones like Melissa Harrison or Sarah Moss. (shrink)

This volume argues that contemporary narratives resist such influences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an ecology of attention based on poetic options that develop an ethics of the particularist type. The contributors draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: including psychology and sociology, but more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the Ethics of Care and Vulnerability. This volume is designed as an innovative contribution to the nascent field (...) of the study of attention in literary criticism, an area that is full of potential. Its scope is wide, as it embraces a great deal of the Anglophone world, with Britain, Ireland, the USA, but also Australia and even Malta. Its chapters focus on well-established authors, like Kazuo Ishiguro (whose work is revisited here in a completely new light) or more confidential ones like Melissa Harrison or Sarah Moss. (shrink)

Social Invisibilities -- Embedded Visibilities -- Of (Wo)men and Machines -- Disabled Brains.

Alain Badiou, Thomas Benatouil, Elie During, Patrice Maniglier, David Rabouin, and Jean-Pierre Zarader _Matrix, machine philosophique_ Paris: Ellipses, 2003 ISBN 2-7298-1841-3 191 pp.

First systematic presentation and assessment of the groundbreaking journal Cahiers pour l’Analyse. Concept and Form is a two-volume monument to the work of the philosophy journal the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966–69), the most ambitious and radical collective project to emerge from French structuralism. Inspired by their teachers Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, the editors of the Cahiers sought to sever philosophy from the interpretation of given meanings or experiences, focusing instead on the mechanisms that structure specific configurations of discourse, from (...) the psychological and ideological to the literary, scientific, and political. Adequate analysis of the operations at work in these configurations, they argue, helps prepare the way for their revolutionary transformation. The first volume comprises English translations of some of the most important theoretical texts published in the journal, written by thinkers who would soon be counted among the most inventive and influential of their generation. The second volume collects newly commissioned essays on the journal, together with recent interviews with people who were either members of its editorial board or associated with its broader theoretical project. Contributors include Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Edward Baring, Jacques Bouveresse, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard, Peter Hallward, Adrian Johnston, Serge Leclaire, Patrice Maniglier, Tracy McNulty, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, Knox Peden, Jacques Rancière, François Regnault, and Slavoj Žižek. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:African Athena: New Agendas ed. by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Tessa RoynonMary R. LefkowitzDaniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon, eds., African Athena: New Agendas. Classical Presences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. xiv + 469 pp. 6 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $160.The inspiration for this book derives from a 2008 conference at the University of Warwick that was held in recognition of the twentieth anniversary of the (...) publication of the first volume of Black Athena. African Athena is the title Martin Bernal once said that he “should have used” for his multivolume project, but his publisher “insisted on” using Black because it would “sell” (“Black Athena and the APA,” Arethusa 22 [1989]: 31–32). In his autobiographical afterword to this volume, he admits that the title Black Athena “may well have had the effect” of exposing critics of his books to charges of racism, as indeed it did. So the use of the alternate title for the present volume represents a welcome shift in emphasis from issues of race to issues of culture and nationality, and the reception of Greek and Roman ideas by later writers. Some of the essays in the volume are based on papers given at the Warwick conference; other contributors were specially invited. The chapters in the first part of the book are primarily historiographical in nature, while most of the essays in the second part consider the literary and historical productions of particular authors. The editors provide an introductory overview of each contribution, with a helpful survey of some of the other recent work in this emerging field, and offer some brief general remarks. But it is not [End Page 347] clear why certain important topics (e.g., the works of Jean Terrasson or Cheikh Anta Diop) were not treated in more depth. Of course, no collection can have the coherence of a work by an individual author, and the essays in this volume seem largely independent of one another. If there was any discussion among the authors who presented their papers in the conference, or commentary on them by Bernal himself, few traces of such interchange appears in the published book. Readers are left to make such connections as best they can.There are, however, some commonalities among the papers. Most concentrate on reception, and do not consider the historical issues that have made Black Athena the subject of such heated debate. That does not mean that the editors or most of the authors believe that the debate has been in any way resolved; rather, it appears that they have sought to avoid discussion of the historical issues involved in Bernal’s reconstruction of the ancient past, seeking instead to concentrate on the “ongoing relevance of the issues Bernal raises.” Although works by Bernal’s most outspoken critics are mentioned, there is only occasional reference to what they actually said and no specific discussions of the particular reasons why most scholars of the ancient world believe that Bernal has vastly overstated the degree of Egyptian influence on Greece and misinterpreted such evidence as there is, especially in the case of his proposed new etymologies. Some of the contributors seem sincerely puzzled by the relative lack of attention accorded to Black Athena. Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence (New Brunswick, N.J. 2006). For example, Patrice Rankine in his chapter “Black Apollo?” is impressed by the “patience and meticulous attention to sources” displayed in Bernal’s claim (based on the epithet λυκηγενής) “that European scholars dislodged Apollo from his Egyptian connection” to Sun worship. Rankine believes that it is mainly because of “the context of North American intellectual life” that such proposals failed to persuade classicists and Indo-Europeanists. He does not appear to have supposed that there might be other, far more compelling reasons why linguists have thought that Apollo’s origins might more credibly be traced to Lycia or Anatolia.Rankine and other contributors to the volume call attention to the nationalism and other types of Zeitgeist that have caused European scholars to ignore or downplay the contributions of Egypt and other African cultures. Toby Green observes, “In the long run, the most deep-rooted impact of Black... (shrink)