Depuis plusieurs années, on constate que les sciences suscitent une tenace convoitise de la part de mouvements qu'on peut qualifier du terme générique de " spiritualistes ". Notre environnement culturel est en grande partie technoscientifique ; il leur faut donc investir cet espace pour diffuser encore et toujours des thèses pourtant éculées : l'existence d'un Plan cosmique ou divin, l'ordonnancement du monde par une intelligence transcendante, la fin du darwinisme, le principe anthropique fort... Ces mouvements, aux contours très divers, présentent (...) néanmoins une véritable unité de visée et de pensée, quand il s'agit pour eux de " montrer " que la science la plus en pointe rejoint les intuitions fondatrices des religions instituées ou des spiritualités moins organisées. Ainsi, foi et science deviendraient les deux faces indissociables de la " connaissance ". Beaucoup considèrent avec condescendance ces errements, ce qui leur évite de s'interroger avec force sur les symptômes d'une société qui voit se déliter les idées des Lumières, certainement améliorables mais en tout état de cause, d'une inestimable pertinence pour un projet de connaissance universelle, D'autres pensent qu'il est vraiment temps d'agir. C'est la raison d'être de cet ouvrage, issu du colloque organisé au Muséum national d'histoire naturelle par Jean Dubessy et Guillaume Lecointre, et préfacé par Jacques Bouveresse. Rassemblant une quinzaine de contributions, ce livre combat une pensée qui, sous prétexte de " ré-enchanter le monde ", n'a d'autre but que de subordonner la connaissance objective de ce monde à son projet irrationaliste, en la faisant ployer sous le fardeau de l'ineptie et de l'imposture intellectuelle. (shrink)

Montrer que le rapport de la conversion au Souverain Bien chez Pascal nous invite à ausculter philosophiquement la notion d'émotion : c'est ce que Jean-Louis Bischoff entend montrer dans la présente étude. L'enjeu de son enquête est clair : il entend affoler et subvertir l'approche commune du mot « émotion ». Pour mener à bien son projet, l'auteur mobilise les lumières de philosophes comme Marion, Levinas, Ricoeur, Greisch ou Romano.

We inhabit a time of crisis-totalitarianism, environmental collapse, and the unquestioned rule of neoliberal capitalism. Philosopher Jean Vioulac is interested in and worried by all of this, but his main concern is how these phenomena all represent a crisis within-and a threat to-thinking itself. In his first book to be translated into English, Vioulac radicalizes Heidegger's understanding of truth as disclosure through the notion of "the apocalypse of truth." This apocalypse works as an unveiling that reveals the finitude and (...) mystery of truth-a full confrontation with truth-as-absence. Engaging with Heidegger, Marx, and St. Paul, as well as contemporary figures including Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek, Vioulac's book presents a subtle, masterful exposition of his analysis before culminating in a powerful vision of what he terms "the abyss of the deity." Here, Vioulac articulates a portrait of Christianity as a religion of mourning, waiting for a god (Jesus) who has already died, a form of ever-present eschatology whose end has always already taken place. With a preface by Jean-Luc Marion, Apocalypse of Truth presents a major contemporary French thinker to English-speaking audiences for the first time. (shrink)

Qui pourrait pretendre encore aujourd'hui qu'il n'existe pas de philosophie hors de l'Occident La philosophie chinoise prend son envol aux alentours des VIe-IVe siecles avant Jesus- Christ, au moment ou l'humanite se trouve engagee dans la periode anale au cours de laquelle les anciennes conceptions du monde seront profondement bouleversees. Alors que la tradition philosophique occidentale a elabore sa metaphysique sur les bases d'une onto-theologie renvoyant autant a la revelation biblique qu'a l'ontologie positive parmenidienne, la Chine a analyse le reel (...) en termes d'interactions, de relations reciproques et de transformations continues ou les concepts sont definis sous un angle cosmologique. (shrink)

S'il était un empire de l'imagination, ce serait moins celui du réel que celui du refuge fantastique, de l'imaginaire. Dès lors, il est capital de redonner à l'imagination sa juste place dans une philosophie de l'action. L'imagination est le médiateur de la créativité. Elle est la faculté du possible pratique en nous ancrant poétiquement au monde. Les images fournissent un cadre herméneutique pour l'agir. Elles augmentent notre intelligence du réel et testent notre capacité a nous investir. En ces termes dominés (...) par la rationalité instrumentale et le contrôle, voire l'évaluation tous azimuts du vécu, reconnaître la place des puissances de l'imagination est devenu tâche urgente pour habiter autrement notre monde! (shrink)

Enracinés dans son pouvoir de désirer et de connaître, l'homme porte en lui, selon Hobbes, les germes de toutes les religions instituées : elles peuvent se décomposer et disparaître, mais leurs principes subsisteront tant qu'il y aura des hommes. Cet ouvrage examine la conception de ce " naturel religieux " à laquelle Hobbes est finalement parvenu, la place qu'il reconnaît à Dieu dans le discours qu'il considérait comme scientifique ou philosophique, le statut qu'il faut accorder à son exégèse des Ecritures (...) et, bien sûr, les relations entre religion et politique. Sont également envisagés les éléments à partir desquels d pu se former cette pensée du religieux, et notamment la relation de Hobbes à la théorie baconienne de l'histoire et les rapports qu'il entretint dans sa jeunesse avec le cercle de Paolo Sarpi. (shrink)

In conversation analysis, through Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, and others, the conceptual architecture is joined at the hip to a technical architecture of transcripts, sequence, and turn productions. That the conceptual was to be found and demonstrated in the material detail of temporal productions was central to CA’s extraordinary innovations. As with CA, an Epistemic CA has the task of giving evidence of its conceptual order in actual materials, and thus animating the materials to show them. The task and relationship are (...) emblematically reflexive: we shall find the expression ‘Oh’ indexing ‘changes of state’ or ‘inapposite inquiries’, for example, as of the account-able animations of turns and sequences of turns. Our shared attachments to sequential analysis deliver the expectation that we shall see how Epistemic order is achieved on actual occasions, through actual materials, rendered as transcript. The discussion turns to how the Epistemic Program engages and acquits this analytic expectation. (shrink)

The imaginary has been inseparable, since prehistoric times, from technical artefacs, their forms, functions and uses. Gilbert Durand’s typologies can help to understand better the different technologies, their success, their effects, etc. Can we not go further by looking in the imaginary for one of the keys to technological innovation today which would allow an anthropological renovation of theoretical tools?

This bibliography documents John Locke's works published from 1654 through 1800. It includes the publishing history of all known editions and translations, as well as material published in journals, and posthumous materials whenever published.

Theory from the south -- On personhood : a perspective from Africa -- Liberalism, policulturalism, and ideology : thoughts on citizenship and difference -- Nations with/out borders : the brave neo world and the problem of belonging -- Postcolonial politics and discourses of democracy : an anthropological take on African political modernities -- History on trial : memory, evidence, and the forensic production of the past -- Alien-nation : zombies, immigrants, and millennial capitalism -- Beyond bare life : AIDS, (bio)politics, (...) and the neo world order. (shrink)

An examination of the fundamental role cybernetics played in the birth of cognitive science and the light this sheds on current controversies. The conceptual history of cognitive science remains for the most part unwritten. In this groundbreaking book, Jean-Pierre Dupuy—one of the principal architects of cognitive science in France—provides an important chapter: the legacy of cybernetics. Contrary to popular belief, Dupuy argues, cybernetics represented not the anthropomorphization of the machine but the mechanization of the human. The founding fathers of (...) cybernetics—some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts—intended to construct a materialist and mechanistic science of mental behavior that would make it possible at last to resolve the ancient philosophical problem of mind and matter. The importance of cybernetics to cognitive science, Dupuy argues, lies not in its daring conception of the human mind in terms of the functioning of a machine but in the way the strengths and weaknesses of the cybernetics approach can illuminate controversies that rage today—between cognitivists and connectionists, eliminative materialists and Wittgensteinians, functionalists and anti-reductionists. Dupuy brings to life the intellectual excitement that attended the birth of cognitive science sixty years ago. He separates the promise of cybernetic ideas from the disappointment that followed as cybernetics was rejected and consigned to intellectual oblivion. The mechanization of the mind has reemerged today as an all-encompassing paradigm in the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. The tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions Dupuy discerns in cybernetics offer a cautionary tale for future developments in cognitive science. (shrink)

Aren't we actually sick of sex, of difference, of emancipation, of culture? With this provocative taunt, the indomitable sociologist Jean Baudrillard challenges us to face up to our deadly, technologically empowered renunciation of mortality and subjectivity as he grapples with the complex issues that define our postmillennial world. What does the advent and proliferation of cloning mean for our sense of ourselves as human beings? What does the turn of the millennium say about our relation to time and history? (...) What does the instantaneous, virtual realm of cyberspace do to reality? In _The Vital Illusion_--as always--Baudrillard leads his readers to some surprising conclusions. Baudrillard considers how human cloning--as well as the "cloning" of ideas and social identities--heralds an end to sex and death and the divagations of living by instituting a realm of the Same, beyond the struggles of individuation. In this day and age when everything can be cloned, simulated, programmed, and genetically and neurologically managed, humanity shows itself unable to brave its own diversity, preferring instead to regress to the pathological eternity of self-replicating cells. By reverting to our viral origins as sexless immortal beings, we are, ironically, fulfilling a death wish, putting an end to our own species as we know it. Next, Baudrillard explores the "nonevent" that was and is the turn of the millennium. He provocatively puts forward the thesis that the arrival of the year 2000 could never take place because we could neither resolve nor leave behind our history, nor could we stop counting down toward our future. For Baudrillard, the millennial clock reading to the millionth of a second on its way to zero is the perfect symbol of our time: history decays rather than progresses. In closing, Baudrillard examines what he calls "the murder of the real" by the virtual. In a world of copies and clones in which everything can be made present in an instant by technology, we can no longer even speak of reality. Beyond Nietzsche's symbolic murder of God, our virtual world free of referents is in the process of exterminating reality, leaving no trace: "The corps(e) of the Real--if there is any--has not been recovered, is nowhere to be found." Peppered with Baudrillard's signature counterintuitive moves, prophetic visions, and dark humor, _The Vital Illusion_ exposes the contradictions that guide our contemporary culture and rule our lives. (shrink)

In 1982-83, I was preparing my volume on the Belgian cartoonist Hergé. During the Second World War, Hergé’s comic strips appeared daily in the newspaper Le Soir. Since I wanted to analyze the influence of the rightist thought on Hergé and Tintin, I borrowed most of the copies of Le Soir available in this country through interlibrary loan. Examining the newspaper, I came across Paul de Man’s articles, which were sometimes on the same page as the comic strips. I showed (...) these articles to some colleagues related to or teaching at Harvard University. I specifically recall an afternoon with a colleague from Boston University whose specialty is the hunting of presumed French fascist intellectuals; we discussed together the possible bridges between de Man’s contemporary thought and his former intellectual engagement during the Second World War.That is to say that, as far as I know, several people at Harvard and in the Boston area were aware of de Man’s former affiliation with rightist circles. One can ask why it took five more years for the “scandal” to appear: why this “sudden” revelation after several years of silence and dissimulation? Compared to the fact that Hergé had constantly been confronted with his political past, one can wonder how strongly Paul de Man’s “secret” was kept. Jean-Marie Apostolidès is professor of French at Stanford University. He is currently writing an essay on the anthropological reading of literature. His article “Molière and the Sociology of Exchange” appeared in the Spring 1988 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Though traditional accounts of moral development focus on the development of rational and deliberate thinking, recent work in developmental affective neuroscience suggests that moral cognition is tightly related to affective and emotional processing. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies show age-related changes in response to empathy-eliciting stimuli, with a gradual shift from the monitoring of somatovisceral responses in young children mediated by the amygdala, insula and medial aspect of the orbitofrontal cortex, to the executive control and evaluation of emotion processing implemented (...) by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in older participants. These data indicate that the development of moral reasoning involves the increasing integration of empathic emotion-related somatovisceral responses with more complex social-reasoning abilities. (shrink)

This paper introduces the special issue on Logic and Religion of the journal Logica Universalis (Springer). The issue contains the following articles: Logic and Religion, by Jean-Yves Beziau and Ricardo Silvestre; Thinking Negation in Early Hinduism and Classical Indian Philosophy, by Purushottama Bilimoria; Karma Theory, Determinism, Fatalism and Freedom of Will, by Ricardo Sousa Silvestre; From Logic in Islam to Islamic Logic, by Musa Akrami; Leibniz’s Ontological Proof of the Existence of God and the Problem of Impossible Objects, by (...) Wolfgang Lenzen; A Logical Analysis of the Anselm’s Unum Argumentum (from Proslogion), by Jean-Pierre Desclés; Monotonic and Non-monotonic Embeddings of Anselm’s Proof, by Jacob Archambault; Computer-Assisted Analysis of the Anderson–Hájek Ontological Controversy, by C. Benzmüller, L. Weber and B. Woltzenlogel Paleo. (shrink)

This book revisits the theory of the sources of international law from the perspective of formalism.

Le projet de Jean Piaget ne se réduit pas à son œuvre épistémologique. Il prend sa source, dès l'adolescence, dans une volonté de réconcilier la science et la foi. C'est de cette source-là, morale et humaniste, que lui vient son intérêt pour l'éducation. Sa pensée éducative se fonde sur la ferme conviction que la morale est une logique de l'action comme la logique est une morale de la pensée. Il s'ensuit qu'éducation morale et éducation intellectuelle doivent être menées de (...) front, et donc, qu'il faut éduquer la personne entière. Mais l'éducation est ambiguë par essence, selon qu'elle enferme l'enfant dans son égocentrisme intellectuel et la morale conventionnelle ou, au contraire, qu'elle stimule, par une pédagogie appropriée, sa marche vers une plus grande rationalité et une éthique personnelle. Dans de nombreux textes, Piaget explique comment l'école peut aider l'élève, citoyen de demain, à construire sa liberté intérieure, liberté de jugement autant que liberté de conscience. Humaniser l'humanité par l'éducation grâce à l'école, tel est le sens de son engagement - pendant trois décennies - à la tête du Bureau international d'éducation et à l'Unesco. (shrink)

This edited collection explores the philosophy of Clarence Irving Lewis through two major concepts that are integral to his conceptual pragmatism: the a priori and the given. The relation between these two elements of knowledge form the core of Lewis's masterpiece Mind and the World-Order. While Lewis's conceptual pragmatism is directed against any conception of the a priori as constraining the mind and experience, it also emphasizes the inalterability and the unavoidability of the given that remains the same through any (...) interpretation of it by the mind. The essays in this volume probe Lewis's new account of the relation between the a priori and the given in dialogue with other notable figures in 20th-century philosophy, including Carnap, Friedman, Goodman, Putnam, Quine, Russell, Sellars, and Sheffer. C.I. Lewis: The A Priori and the Given represents a focused treatment of a long-neglected figure in 20th-century American philosophy. (shrink)

In one of the first attempts at autobiography, Rousseau1s Confessions not only retells the facts of the author1s life, but reveals his innermost feelings & details the strengths & weaknesses of his character.

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.

This book explores the ways deconstruction addresses the issue of futurity (what Jacques Derrida calls the "to-come," [l'à-venir]). In order to achieve this, it focuses on three French expressions, venue, survenue, and voir-venir, each taken from the work of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Catherine Malabou. The idea behind this focus is to elude the issue of the one and only "to-come," as if this was a uniform and coherent entity or structure of experience, and to put forward instead (...) the possibility of a multiplicity of structures, each with a different intonation or pitch. Overall, this book makes an original contribution to the way deconstruction addresses the issue of futurity in the act of writing and translation. (shrink)

Baudrillard's unsettling coda: previously unpublished texts written just before the visionary theorist's death in 2007. History that repeats itself turns to farce. But a farce that repeats itself ends up making a history.—from The Agony of Power In these previously unpublished manuscripts written just before his death in 2007, Jean Baudrillard takes a last crack at the bewildering situation currently facing us as we exit the system of “domination” and enter a world of generalized “hegemony” in which everyone becomes (...) both hostage and accomplice of the global market. But in the free-form market of political and sexual liberation, as the possibility of revolution dissipates, Baudrillard sees the hegemonic process as only beginning. Once expelled, negativity returns from within ourselves as an antagonistic force—most vividly in the phenomenon of terrorism, but also as irony, mockery, and the symbolic liquidation of all human values. This is the dimension of hegemony marked by an unbridled circulation—of capital, goods, information, or manufactured history—that is bringing the very concept of exchange to an end and pushing capital beyond its limits: to the point at which it destroys the conditions of its own existence. In the system of hegemony, the alienated, the oppressed, and the colonized find themselves on the side of the system that holds them hostage. In this paradoxical moment in which history has turned to farce, domination itself may appear to have been a lesser evil.This book gathers together three essays—“From Domination to Hegemony,” "The White Terror of World Order," and "Where Good Grows"—and a 2005 interview with Baudrillard by Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext launched Baudrillard into English back in the early 1980s; now, as our media and information infested “ultra-reality” finally catches up with his theory, Semiotext offers The Agony of Power, Baudrillard's unsettling coda. (shrink)

A collection of 15 fables from a founding figure of postmodernism that ask in the words of Jean-Francois Lyotard, "how to live and why?" It provides attention to issues of justice and ethics, and aesthetics and judgement - unravelling and reconfiguring idealistic notions of subjects.

This article focuses on the relationship between emotions and passions, on the one hand, and values, needs and rights, on the other. This relationship is indeed central to the social dimension of international politics. In this perspective, the article examines how emotions and passions can be at the same time effects and causes of the extent to which actors feel that their needs and rights are fulfilled or not. In the process, the article also explores the negative and positive features (...) of emotions and passions, and their impact on the nature and dynamics of change in international affairs. Beyond this general approach to emotions and passions in connection with the social dimension of international politics and the questions of values, needs, and rights of actors and change, it concludes with the idea that there is also a contextual dimension to the generic argument developed in the article. This will have to be factored in for future research on case studies. (shrink)

Ce recueil rassemble les articles et conférences que Jean Wahl a consacrés à Kierkegaard. Ils s'échelonnent des années 1930 aux années 1960. Certains sont inédits : d'autres furent à la source des Etudes kierkegaardiennes, publiées par Jean Wahl en 1938 ; d'autres encore, rédigés ou publiés après la guerre, témoignent de l'attachement continu de Wahl à Kierkegaard, et de son obstination à voir en lui le père de l'existentialisme. Ainsi restitués dans leur originalité et leur intégralité, ces textes (...) proposent une lecture unitaire et multiple de Kierkegaard, où sont abordées toutes ses catégories : l'angoisse, l'instant, le choix, le paradoxe... On ne manquera pas non plus de retrouver, dans ce face-à-face exceptionnel entre deux hommes et deux pensées, le fil discret mais ferme qui les relie à Levinas ou Deleuze. Magnifique introduction à l'œuvre de Jean Wahl dont l'importance est aujourd'hui incontestée. (shrink)

Parues pour la premiere fois en 1938, les Etudes kierkegaardiennes de Jean Wahl constitutent a tous egards une somme incontournable pour comprendre le sens de la philosophie de Kierkegaard et la place si originale qu'elle occupe dans l'histoire de la philosophie. L'auteur s'efforce d'y faire apparaitre le lien existant entre les evenements qui marquerent la vie de Kierkegaard et la formation de ses concepts fondamentaux. Par ce biais, l'auteur montre comment la theorie des trois stades de l'existence fait appel (...) a une dialectique qualitative, opposee a la dialectique hegelienne. L'auteur montre enfin que la theorie des trois stades de la croyance et de l'existence qui lui sont liees sont inseparables d'une lutte entreprise contre les pensees qui contribuerent a la genese de la pensee de Kierkegaard et qu'il s'agit a present pour lui de depasser: il n'y a pas de chemin qui conduit de la pensee, du cogito, a l'etre, au sum, car l'existence est l'etre hors de toute pensee. (shrink)

Dans l’utilitarisme benthamien, le calcul n’assure-t-il pas l’universalité que les langues paraissent compromettre en raison de leur relativisme? Quand bien même il théoriserait le langage, l’utilitarisme benthamien, parce qu’il s’exprime dans la langue vernaculaire - anglais, français, espagnol...-, est relativement dépendant de ces langues dans sa conceptualisation. Ce qu’une langue appelle bonheur, plaisir, jouissance... n’est pas ce qu’une autre appelle happiness, pleasure, enjoyment, joycence. Ces différences ne sont pas sans effets sur la pensée du droit, de l’économie, de la société. (...) Bentham les a considérées à plusieurs reprises, mais tout particulièrement dans les _Springs of Action_ et dans les _Tables_ qui les accompagnent. L’idée d’approfondissement de ces effets et de leur systématisation, ainsi que de leurs rapports aux divers secteurs de l’activité humaine, s’est esquissée, sinon pleinement développée, dans la _Nomographie_. Mais une difficulté apparaît lorsqu’on prend e... (shrink)

Jean Jacques Rousseau's thinking on the nature and dynamics of international politics represents a brilliant and disturbing contribution to our understanding of international affairs. This book attempts to make Rousseau's thinking on international relations easily accessible by collecting for the first time selections from Rousseau's important writings in which he develops his unique international perspective, and by providing a detailed interpretation of this perspective.

En interrogeant l’élaboration conceptuelle des dimensions actives du soi vivant, Jean-Sébastien Hardy met en avant la proximité insoupçonnée de M. Henry avec Husserl. La conception du « je pense » comme « je peux » inspirée de Maine de Biran supposerait la reprise de deux thèses avancées par Husserl quant au Ich kann. Ce constat permet à l’auteur d’avancer l’hypothèse d’après laquelle le « pouvoir du corps », qui retiendra le plus souvent M. Henry dans sa thématisation et ses (...) descriptions de la « potentiation » charnelle, est justement celui de se mouvoir. Puisque ce « pouvoir-se-mouvoir » ouvre la voie pour comprendre quelle conception de l’activité peut émerger d’une pensée de la passivité radicale de la vie à l’égard d’elle-même, l’enjeu fondamental de cet article est d’examiner les sens et les fonctions que reçoit la potentialité motrice entre Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps et Incarnation, et ce à la lumière notamment des affirmations henryennes. (shrink)

We applaud Boyer's attempt to ground the psychology of ownership partly in a cooperative logic. In this commentary, we propose to go further and ground the psychology of ownership solely in a cooperative logic. The predictions of bargaining theory, we argue, completely contradict the actual features of ownership intuitions. Ownership is only about the calculation of mutually beneficial, reciprocal contracts.