L'acüon educative repose sur un double fondement: d'une part, la nature et la vocation de l'etre humain, et d'autre part, la societe humaine ä bätir. L'homme a des traits specifiques qui exigent et en meme temps permettent son education: il est imparfait, inacheve (il ne sait pas tout, il ne se comporte pas for cement bien), il faut done l'amener ä s'ameliorer; il est perfectible e'est-a-dire qu'il peut devenir meilleur; il a la volonte de se depasser, de tendre vers l'ideal, (...) ideal qu'il n'atteint, bien sür, jamais; il est capable materiellement, intellectuellement (grace ä sa formation, ä son experience) d'agir sur autrui, de le mener vers cet ideal; enfln, il est conscient de devoir le faire, car l'homme ne peut et ne doit etre eduque que par l'homme. Et, second justificatif de Taction educative: la societe des hommes et les rapports devant exister entre eux. L'homme, par essence, Vit et est fait pour vivre en collectivite. Celle-ci doit etre harmonieuse, bien organisee, de preference sous forme d'Etat, pour le bonheur de tous les membres, lesquels doivent etre ä meme de concourir ä l'edification d'une societe egalitaire, toutes choses qui necessitent Taction educative. (shrink)

In polite contexts, people find it difficult to perceive whether they can derive scalar inferences from what others say . Because this uncertainty can lead to costly misunderstandings, it is important to identify the cues people can rely on to solve their interpretative problem. In this article, we consider two such cues: Making a long Pause before the statement, and prefacing the statement with Well. Data from eight experiments show that Pauses are more effective than Wells as cues to scalar (...) inferences in polite contexts—because they appear to give a specific signal to switch expectations in the direction of bad news, whereas Well appears to give a generic signal to make extra processing effort. We consider the applied value of these findings for human–human and human–machine interaction, as well as their implications for the study of reasoning and discourse. (shrink)

English summary: Am I free? Is this not the most fundamental question for all humans? For Spinoza, for us to be free, we must first free ourselves from the illusion of freedom; between determinism and free will is true freedom. Through Spinozas philosophy of desire and reason, the idea of living with our desires without being a slave to them allows us to come closer to answering the question of whether or not we are free. French description: Suis-je libre? N'est-ce (...) pas la question la plus fondamentale que se pose l'etre humain? Car de la reponse que chacun se donne depend la maniere de vivre et de penser. Or, il y a pour Spinoza un risque majeur: tomber dans l'illusion de la liberte. C'est le pire prejuge, la plus dangereuse erreur; se croire libre alors qu'on ne l'est pas. Pour etre veritablement libre, nous dit Spinoza, il faut avant tout se liberer de l'illusion de la liberte! Il n'y a pas ici de paradoxe mais une exigence de la pensee: entre le determinisme et le libre arbitre, il y a la vraie liberte. Ainsi la liberte est un combat contre le pessimisme du je n'y peux rien et l'optimisme du je fais ce que je veux. Si la liberte est une realite fondamentale de la nature humaine, elle est aussi une exigence permanente. Suis-je libre? C'est la question qu'il faut se poser tout au long de sa vie. Pour cette tache difficile mais passionnante, Spinoza est a mon sens indispensable. Des ma decouverte de la philosophie, j'ai voulu comprendre de quelle maniere Spinoza, le philosophe du desir et de la raison, nous parlait de liberte. La liberte individuelle d'abord: comment vivre avec ses desirs sans en etre esclave mais sans y renoncer? La connaissance nous aide et la necessite ne s'oppose plus a la liberte. La liberte politique ensuite: comment vivre en societe avec sa personnalite mais en harmonie avec les autres? La raison nous aide et la paix ne s'oppose plus a la liberte. Dans les deux cas la liberte est possible sans aucune aide, sans aucun ideal, sans aucune reference transcendante, a partir de la seule Terre et de la vie reelle de l'homme. Dans ma vie personnelle comme dans mon engagement collectif, les idees de Spinoza m'ont toujours guide, eclaire, libere. Elles me conduisent encore. Je dois d'ailleurs remercier Andre Comte-Sponville et Marcel Conche qui m'ont grandement aide a m'orienter sur ce chemin, des ma jeunesse. La liberte est une lutte infinie, nous dit Spinoza, la plus belle des luttes. J.F. Robredo. (shrink)

Depuis la Grèce, en dépit des rêves d'une langue bien faite, les philosophes s'expriment dans des langues qui sont le partage de peuples différents. Or, peut-on inscrire le discours de l'universel dans le champ limité d'une langue particulière? Le français fait sa joie des analyses sèches, comme l'on parle d'une pointe sèche qui grave le cuivre nu. Celui qui saurait le conduire vers la synthèse, pourtant, aurait reconnu, selon le mot de von Humboldt, " l'énigme de cette langue ". Le (...) colloque de Nice, " Philosopher en français ", a tenté d'approcher une telle énigme. Trente-deux chercheurs internationaux ont croisé leurs exposés selon quatre thèmes : la philosophie française au XXe siècle ; la philosophie française et les courants internationaux ; l'histoire française de la philosophie ; le philosophe français et le style. Tous mettent l'accent sur l'approche " à la française ", comme disait Montaigne, des grandes questions théoriques et cherchent à définir ce qu'il en est du style français en philosophie. J.-F. M. (shrink)

The notion of affordance remains elusive, notwithstanding its importance for the representation of agency, cognition, and behaviors. This paper lays down a foundation for an ontology of affordances by elaborating the idea of “core affordance” which would serve as a common ground for explaining existing diverse conceptions of affordances and their interrelationships. For this purpose, it analyzes M. T. Turvey’s dispositional theory of affordances in light of a formal ontology of dispositions. Consequently, two kinds of so-called “core affordances” are proposed: (...) specific and general ones. Inspired directly by Turvey’s original account, a specific core affordance is intimately connected to a specific agent, as it is reciprocal with a counterpart effectivity (which is a disposition) of this agent within the agent-environment system. On the opposite, a general core affordance does not depend on individual agents; rather, its realization involves an action by an instance of a determinate class of agents. The utility of such core affordances is illustrated by examining how they can be leveraged to formalize other major accounts of affordances. Additionally, it is briefly outlined how core affordances can be employed to analyze three notions that are closely allied with affordances: the environment, image schemas, and intentions. (shrink)

Dans un ouvrage récent, Not for Profit, Martha C. Nussbaum a pris fait et cause pour la philosophie pour enfants . En fait, ce renvoi n’est pas isolé car de nombreux échanges entre Nussbaum et Matthew Lipman ont existé. Dans cet article, je ne m’intéresse pas aux citations de l’un à l’autre mais pars de l’œuvre de Nussbaum pour esquisser ce qu’il en est de l’éducation à la démocratie. Pour commencer, je rappelle la théorie des « capabilités », ou capacités (...) réelles ; je montre en outre l’importance des émotions dans une démocratie. Ensuite, je traite de la culture des émotions en démocratie. L’éducation concerne certes les adultes, mais elle touche bien davantage les enfants. L’exemple du dégoût sert à montrer l’importance d’une prise en charge des émotions dès l’enfance, particulièrement à l’école. Enfin, je regarde la manière dont on peut, dans une pratique de classe, promouvoir l’esprit critique en suivant les préceptes donnés par Nussbaum. Comment, dans une communauté de recherche, prêter davantage attention à autrui ? Comment exploiter en philosophie pour enfants la thèse selon laquelle les émotions sont des jugements de valeur ? Pour conclure, j’essaie d’approfondir le lien entre Nussbaum et Gareth B. Matthews : sans doute l’insistance de la première sur la valeur formatrice des récits aurait-elle dû l’amener à se pencher davantage sur la pratique philosophique avec les enfants du second. In a recent work, Not for Profit, Martha C. Nussbaum stood for the Philosophy for Children movement. In fact, this mention is not isolated, for many exchanges took place between Nussbaum and Matthew Lipman. I don’t focus on quotations from the one by the other but instead, starting from Nussbaum’s work, sketch her conception of training for democracy. First of all, I remember her theory of capabilities and show furthermore the importance of emotions in a democracy. I treat then the culture of emotions in a democracy. Of course, education refers to adults too. Still, it concerns children more heavily. The instance of disgust helps in showing the importance of dealing with emotions since childhood, particularly at schools. Finally, I get a look on how, in a classroom, critical thinking may be improved using Nussbaum’s precepts. How can be paid more attention to the other in a community of inquiry? How is in P4C the thesis that emotions are judgments of value to be exploited? In conclusion, I try to deepen the link between Nussbaum and Gareth B. Matthews: the stress laid by the latter on the formative value of narratives might have driven her to bend herself more on the philosophical practice of the former. (shrink)

Crises and disability: Issues, debates, experiences For the past few months, warnings and crises have been linked together in a crescendo. Public policies hardly produce any “answers,” but on the contrary create even more concern. In France since the end of 2018, a diversity of intersecting and sometimes allied social forces have risen, notably the yellow vests; the staffs of hospital and of sheltered social housing structures for elderly dependent people (Ehpad) who have been on strike for m...

The proceedings of the first major international conference on the philosophy of Spinoza to be held in the United States are published here. Contained are papers on all aspects of Spinoza's thought by 31 distinguished scholars from the United States, Europe, Israel and Australia including Jonathan Bennett, Alan Donagan, Margaret Wilson, Amélie Rorty, Richard Popkin, Jean-Marie Beyssade, Alexandre Matheron, Étienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, Emilia Giancotti, Hubertus Hubbeling, and Yirmiyahu Yovel.Topics discussed are Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, Psychology, Moral, (...) Political and Social Philosophy, and Spinoza's influence. (shrink)

Luca M. Possati, Jean Grondin, Paul Ricoeur ; Aurore Dumont, François Dosse et Catherine Goldenstein, Paul Ricoeur: penser la mémoire ; Paul-Gabriel Sandu, Gert-Jan van der Heiden, The Truth of Language. Heidegger, Ricoeur and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement ; Paul Marinescu, Marc-Antoine Vallée, Gadamer et Ricoeur. La conception herméneutiquedu langage ; Witold Płotka, Saulius Geniusas, Th e Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology ; Delia Popa, Annabelle Dufourcq, La dimension imaginaire du réel dans la philosophie de (...) Husserl ; Maria GyemantDenis Seron, Ce que voir veut dire. Essai sur la perception ; Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Hans Friesen, Christian Lotz, Jakob Meier, Markus Wolf, Ding und Verdinglichung. Technik- und Sozialphilosophie nach Heidegger und der Kritischen Th eorie ; Bogdan MincăLarisa Cercel, John Stanley, Unterwegs zu einer hermeneutischen Übersetzungswissenschaft. Radegundis Stolze zu ihrem 60. Geburtstag ; Denisa Butnaru Johann Michel, Sociologie du soi. Essai d’herméneutique appliquée ; Ovidiu Stanciu, Jan Patočka, Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs. Trad. fr. Erika Abrams ; Mădălina Diaconu, Emmanuel Alloa, Das durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen, Phänomenologie. (shrink)

Diderot est davantage connu comme écrivain et penseur matérialiste que comme philosophe des sciences. Mais, quoiqu’il ne fût pas un savant, son intérêt pour les sciences et leur importance dans son travail encyclopédique et philosophique justifient cette idée. Il s’agit d’abord d’esquisser les traits principaux du « Diderot homme de sciences », pour reprendre les mots de Jean Mayer. En m’appuyant sur les études plus ou moins récentes sur le sujet, je voudrais proposer un bilan personnel axé sur la (...) manière dont Diderot pratique les sciences et la réflexion philosophique à leur égard. Loin d’en faire un usage doctrinal exploitant des résultats scientifiques pour justifier des thèses métaphysiques élaborées par ailleurs, Diderot pense avec les sciences, médite sur leur esprit, se soucie des gestes des savants et des conditions concrètes du développement du savoir. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:François H. Lapointe PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC SURVEY ThL· survey is limited to articles written in English that have appeared in journals published between 1 January 1974 and 31 December 1976. Abbott, Don. "Marxist Influences on the Rhetorical Theory of Kenneth Burke." Philosophy and Rhetoric 7 (1974): 217-33. Abel, Lionel. "Jacques Derrida: His 'Difference' With Metaphysics." Salmagundi no. 25 (1974): 3-21. Adamowski, T. H. "Character and Consciousness: (...) D. H. Lawrence, Wilhelm Reich, and Jean-Paul Sartre." University of Toronto Quarterly 43 (1974): 31 1-34. Adams, D. J. "Style and Social Ideas in Jacques le fataliste." Studies in Voltaire & the Eighteenth Century 124 (1974): 231-48. Adams, Hazard. "Contemporary Ideas of Literature: Terrible Beauty or Rough Beast?" Contemporary Literature 17 (1976): 349-77. Adorno, Theodor W. "Lyric Poetry and Society." Telos no. 20 (1974): 56-71. Ages, Arnold. "Bonald and the Jews." Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa 44 (1974): 32-43. Allen, Diogenes. "The Experience of Existence: Jean-Paul Sartre and Iris Murdoch." International Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1974): 181-87. Allen, Marcus. "Character Development in the Oreste of Voltaire and Les Mouches of Jean-Paul Sartre." CLA Journal 18 (1974): 1-21. Alter, Jean. "A (Terrorist) System of the Novel." Diacritics 6 (1976): 10-15. Altieri, Charles. "Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: A Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory." MLN 91 (1976): 1397-1423. Altieri,Charles. "Wordsworth's 'Preface' as Literary Theory." Criticism 18 (1976): 122-146. [On Wordworth and Wittgenstein.] Ames, Van Meter. "Art for Art's Sake Again?" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1975): 303-307. Appleman, Philip. "The Dread Factor: Eliot, Tennyson, and the Shaping of Science." Columbia Forum, N. S. 3 (1974): 32-38. Armstrong, Paul B. " E. M. Forster's Howard's End: The Existential Crisis of the Liberal Imagination." Mosaic 8 (1974): 183-99. Arnold, A. James. "La Condition humaine as Nietzschean Tragedy." Mélanges Malraux Miscellany 6 (1974): 15-24. 366 François H. Lapointe367 Aronson, Ronald. "L'Idiot de la famille: The Ultimate Sartre?" Telos no. 20 (1974): 90-107. Arthos, John. "Du Bartas, Petrarch and the Poetry of Deism." Rice University Studies 60 (1974): 1-17. Artz, Johannes. "Newman as Philosopher." International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1976): 263-88. Ausmus, Harry J. "Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Language." The Midwest Quarterly 18 (1977): 169-86. Ayala, Francisco. "Ortega y Gasset, Literary Critic." Critical Inquiry 1 (1974): 395-414. Bakalar, H. Nicholas. "The Cartesian Legacy to the Eighteenth-century Grammarians." MLN 91 (1976): 698-721. Barnes, Hazel. "Apotheosis and Deification in Plato, Nietzsche and Huxley." Philosophy and Literature 1 (1976): 3-24. Baron, Dennis E. "Role Structure and the Language of Literature." Journal of Literary Semantics 4 (1975): 43-52. Barooskian, Vahan D. "The Aesthetics of the Russian Revolutionary Theatre 1917-1921." British Journal of Aesthetics 15 (1975): 99-117. Bart, B. F. "Hypercreativity in Stendhal and Balzac." Nineteenth Century French Studies 3 (1974-75): 18-39. Barthes, Roland. "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." New Literary History 6 (1975): 237-72. Bashford, Bruce. "The Rhetorical Method in Literary Criticism." Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (1976): 133-46. Bass, Alan. "Time and the Witch: Femininity, Metapsychology and the Temporality of the Unconscious." MLN 91 (1976): 871-912. Bassett, Sharon. "Towards a Critique of Romanticism: Wordsworth, Pater and the 'Anima Mundi'." Criticism 17 (1975): 262-75. Batchelor, R. "Literature, Society and the Concept of Revolt." European Studies Review 5 (1975): 395-427. Battin, M. Pabst. "Aristotle's Definition of Tragedy in the Poetics, Part 1." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1974): 155-70, and Part II in Ibid. 33 (1975): 293-302. Bauer, George. "Sartre and the 'Sugars' of History." L'Esprit Créateur 15 (1975): 377-86. Baumgarten, Murray. "The Historical Novel: Some Postulates." Clio 4 (1975): 173-82. Beauchamp, Gorman. "Gulliver's Return to the Cave: Plato's Republic and Book IV of Gulliver's Travels." The Michigan Academician 7 (1974): 201-10. Bennett, Jonathan. "The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn." Philosophy 48 (1974): 123-34. Benzon, William. "Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics." MLN 91 (1976): 952-82. Bergonzi, Bernard. "A Grid of Codes: Views of Structuralism." Encounter 45 (1975): 52-58. Berry, Wanda Warren. "The... (shrink)

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the most important French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. His impact has been felt across many disciplines: sociology; cultural studies; art theory and politics. This volume presents a diverse selection of interviews, conversations and debates which relate to the five decades of his working life, both as a political militant, experimental philosopher and teacher. Including hard-to-find interviews and previously untranslated material, this is the first time that interviews with Lyotard have been presented (...) as a collection. Key concepts from Lyotard's thought – the differend, the postmodern, the immaterial – are debated and discussed across different time periods, prompted by specific contexts and provocations. In addition there are debates with other thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, which may be less familiar to an Anglophone audience. These debates and interviews help to contextualise Lyotard, highlighting the importance of Marx, Freud, Kant and Wittgenstein, in addition to the Jewish thought which accompanies the questions of silence, justice and presence that pervades Lyotard's thinking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scrutinizing Studio Art and Its StudyHistorical Relations and Contemporary ConditionsElizabeth M. Grierson (bio)Yet art is nevertheless an inquiry, precise and rigorous.—Maurice BlanchotIntroductionThe modern disciplines of art and art history have been going through significant revisions since the 1980s, when the objective domain of knowledge was placed in a contested position by the multiplicity of narratives characterizing postmodern social spaces. Whether there was or was not any disciplinary "crisis" at (...) that time is not at issue here.1 What is of concern is to identify the ways the academy—and specifically the art academy—sought to respond by rethinking disciplinary knowledge and thereby problematizing traditional methodologies of scholarly inquiry. Through the academic privileging of aesthetics and scientific discourses, modern knowledge brought with it a metanarrative appeal to the transcendence of the human spirit through art and religiosity, coupled with the identification of the rational human subject as agent of progress. This discussion is concerned with asking how these metanarratives were intervened or interrogated through art and its study and how those moments of displacement could be identified and analyzed. Ultimately, we may address the question of how discourses of power operate to normalize social practices and silence difference in institutional practices of art and art education. [End Page 111]Crisis in the DisciplinesIn 1982 an issue of Art Journal was dedicated to the theme of the crisis in the disciplines. However, as Donald Preziosi2 points out, if the disciplines of art and art history were deemed by Art Journal to be in crisis, there was only one article (by Oleg Grabar) in that journal issue that addressed this crisis and problematized "the history of the discipline and its methodological prospects for the future."3 In other words, if there was a crisis, and art educators or art historians were feeling it, what constituted the crisis was not yet being addressed. What is of interest is that this was a time when the object of study was under reconsideration and art and its history were part of a revisionist climate of scrutiny and reconsideration. This being so, there was significant expansion to the way fine arts and art history were being approached in the 1980s and 1990s in response to revisionist scholarship. This trend continued to be reinvigorated with the transformations of digital technologies in the 2000s.Art academies of the early 1990s in New Zealand and Australia were starting to grapple with methodological regimes of art history as a discipline in the context of intellectual challenges of postmodernity. Directing these issues to artists and their scholarly needs, educators were opening the discrete academic disciplines to wider intellectual, social, and cultural possibilities of inquiry. Standing before a "great" work of art and proclaiming its greatness had lost its meaning. Jean-François Lyotard had written it thus: "The time is past when we can plant ourselves in front of a Vernet and sigh along with Diderot, 'How beautiful, grand, varied, noble, wise, harmonious, rigorously coloured this is!'"4Threading throughout this discussion is the way one particular art academy was facing this challenge in those postmodernist years of the 1990s. The account tells of processes and principles of pedagogical change, but the implications of this case are not limited to one academy in one location. It was the early 1990s, and the writers of the first degree nominated as "visual arts" in New Zealand were addressing some of the issues of disciplinarity in fine arts and art history. This was the first degree situating what might be called a postmodernist pedagogical approach to fine arts studio and its study. This was at a time when changes in the New Zealand Education Act (1989, 1990) enabled degrees in art to be formally accredited and resourced in tertiary institutions beyond the long-established universities of Auckland (North Island) and Canterbury (South Island). This political move gave opportunity for educational innovation in the pedagogies of fine arts and art history. It was in this context that one independent art school in Auckland, ASA School of Art, seized the moment to work toward a more interdisciplinary notion of practice and theory. Given the opportunity to introduce a more... (shrink)

Restless Ideas is a lively new textbook of contemporary social theory that speaks directly to the anxious age in which we live today. In addition to providing a highly readable guided tour of major social theories from the mid-20th to the early 21st century, this book is full of dynamic examples that show how these theories may be used to deepen our understanding of current events and of our own life experiences. The emergence of demagogic political leaders like Donald Trump (...) in the USA, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey; the rise of religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and political populism; the digital echo-chamber of social media; and the underlying causes of Brexit are only some of the many current social issues that can be framed through contemporary social theories. Similarly, the politics of sexual, racial and ethnic minorities can be analyzed through the prism of theoretical perspectives such as queer theory, standpoint and intersectional theory, postcolonial theory and critical race theory, while the ongoing struggles for gender equality and gender justice can usefully be examined through the generational perspectives of feminist theories. This book sets the stage with a critical discussion of the loaded history of the social theory canon and makes the argument that there has never been a better time than the present to broaden our understanding of our shared global heritage of social theory, to include some of the formerly excluded classics of past social thinkers, and to open the doors to current social thinkers theorizing from the margins. The book traces the modern roots of contemporary social theory back to the works of the early structural functionalists, systems theorists, conflict theorists, symbolic interactionists, ethnomethodologists and sociobiologists, building on and at times inverting the canon with the critical advancements to social theory. Later chapters focus on the current influence of structuration theory, third wave critical theory, postmodernism and poststructuralism, critical race theory, postcolonialism, liquid and late modernity theories, and globalization theories. These perspectives include the works of contemporary social theorists such as Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Juliet Mitchell, Dorothy Smith, Judith Butler, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Zygmunt Bauman, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Manuel Castells and Ulrich Beck. The underlying premise - and the promise - of this book is that social theory has the power to provide us with the skills for more informed observation, analysis, and empathic understanding of social behavior and social interaction. In a word: the value of social theory may be seen in how it can enhance social literacy - by deepening our understanding of the world around us, and by empowering us to become practical theorists in our own lives. (shrink)

The ambition and proposal for data modeling of myths presented in this paper is to link contemporary technical affordances to some canonical projects developed in structural anthropology. To articulate the theoretical promise and innovation of this proposal, we present a discrete-event system specification modeling and simulation approach in order to perform a generative analysis and a dynamic visualization of selected narratives, aimed at validating and revitalizing the transformational and morphodynamic theory and methodology proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his structural analysis (...) of myth. After an analysis of Lévi-Strauss’s transformational methodology, we describe in detail how discrete-event system specification models are implemented and developed in the framework of a DEVSimPy software environment. The validation of the method involves a discrete-event system specification simulation based on the extension of discrete-event system specification models dedicated to provide a dynamic Google Earth visualization of the selected myth. Future work around the discrete-event system specification formalism in anthropology is described as well as future applications regarding the impact of computational models to new contemporary anthropological domains. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Air of Liberty:A Transatlantic PerspectiveKieran M. Murphy (bio)"En somme le rôle du critique serait sans cesse de faire de l'air dans le plein du monde mais non pas forcement de faire du vide."—Roland Barthes"Dèyè mòn, gen mòn" ["Behind mountains, there are mountains"]—Haitian proverbThe phrase "I can't breathe" has become a worldwide rallying cry against injustice. Ben Okri deems "I can't breathe" the "mantra of oppression" that should "spark (...) the real change our world so desperately needs." He attributes the phrase's remarkable impact to how it taps into our primal fear of suffocation, encouraging empathy for "seemingly insignificant people." He also brings attention to how, as a slogan, "I can't breathe" subverts institutional racism through poetic means: "Not even William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin or Toni Morrison at their most eloquent came out with anything as simple in the genius of its truth as: 'I can't breathe.'" This truth is airborne: "'I can't breathe' suddenly equates racism with the deprivation of air, which is what it always was." The chokehold of racism emerged with the transatlantic slave trade and, Okri concludes, has been ever since the prohibition of breathing "freedom."The powerful convergence of poetics and politics in the slogan "I can't breathe" comes from its essential truth: the aerial nature of freedom. More than just a concept or metaphor, freedom is also something you breathe. Freedom is a kind of concept-image that depends on our intimate, life-sustaining relationship with the atmosphere. "I can't breathe" brings attention to this relationship to help redress the failure of our institutions to bestow freedom equally.The aerial nature of freedom is even more apparent in the related slogan "the air of liberty." References to "the air of liberty" occurred frequently during the French Revolution to convey the origin of the "human rights" that have become the bedrock of our democratic institutions. Today, these human rights continue to exert their legal weight for the defense of equality. Yet, when confronted with the evasive mechanism of institutional racism, they keep falling short. This predicament is partly due to [End Page 200] their supposed airtight foundation. "The air of liberty" offers a window to the turbulent time when human rights sprang conspicuously from the atmosphere, that we can reopen to shift the focus from the legal to the aerial origin of freedom. This strategy unleashes historical winds that swept across the Atlantic world, including a critical undercurrent from the Haitian Revolution that prefigured the "I can't breathe" movement and its critique of the white chokehold on freedom. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Detail of Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier, Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, circa 1789 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)The best-known depiction of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Fig. 1) portrays the origin of liberty in a scene unfolding in the sky. Spreading its light and dissipating the clouds of error, the Enlightenment's eye of reason levitates like an aerostat. Its liberating power illuminates the law symbolized by a winged figure pointing to the tablets below containing the articles proclaiming that "men" are born free and equal. Despite the prominence given to the eye of reason, it is in the atmosphere in which it elevates that we must look for the elemental spring of liberty.References to the aerial nature of liberty most intriguingly surfaced in contemporary debates concerning the universality of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The revolutionary and abolitionist Jacques Pierre [End Page 201] Brissot characterized the 1791 slave rebellion that ravaged the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) as a fight for a purer, healthier air. In a speech delivered the same year at the National Assembly, he argued that, following the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the "atmosphere" of inequality hovering over the plantations of Saint-Domingue had become noxious not only for the enslaved but also for the troops that France might dispatch to restore order in the colony... (shrink)

Nouvelle édition critique et traduction française annotée de la _Lettre à Marcella_ de Porphyre. Le philosophe néoplatonicien Porphyre (234-305) y adresse à sa femme un témoignage unique sur la manière dont une vie philosophique peut être conduite et se préserver. This book presents a new annotated and translated edition of neoplatonist 3rd-century Greek philosopher Porphyrius’ _Letter to Marcella_. This letter, adressed to his wife, gives a unique account on the ways and principles along which a philosophical life should be led (...) so as to perpetuate itself. (shrink)

Schelling est le moins connu des " grands " philosophes : c'est que, sans doute, dans l'œuvre qu'il nous propose, il n'y a rien justement à connaître, aucun sens ultime et autonome qui puisse désormais se représenter, se résumer pour lui-même, se diffuser dans une quelconque postérité - rien d'autre que l'œuvre elle-même et le travail toujours recommencé de son impossible perfection. Pendant soixante années, de 1794 à 1854, qui sont les plus riches peut-être (parce que les dernières) de l'histoire (...) de la philosophie, une pensée a cherché à se clore, à se comprendre, à s'arrêter, sans cesser de se voir rouverte par l'effondrement (le retournement) des structures où elle avait cru s'équilibrer. Il a semblé à l'auteur de cette étude que ces ruines successives finissaient par présenter un tracé signifiant, comme si le véritable " système " de Schelling s'écrivait peu à peu, hors de la vue du philosophe, dans un autre espace qui est celui de l'histoire même de son œuvre, jusqu'au moment où, dans sa " dernière philosophie ", tout le passé contradictoire se récapitule et redevient contemporain au sein d'une construction qui se présente elle-même comme dédoublée et interminable. On trouvera ici l'histoire de cette formation, de ce destin que Schelling a patiemment enduré sans jamais chercher à l'interrompre de manière prématurée, et qui fait de lui une figure proprement exemplaire. Grâce à cette œuvre en effet, où la pensée apparaît perpétuellement replongée dans la profondeur parfois désespérante de son travail, il devient possible d'approcher d'un peu plus près " l'acte et le lieu " de la philosophie, partout ailleurs masqués par la perfection superficielle de son résultat ; par là même, au-delà de l'individu Schelling, c'est une question plus vaste qui se trouve posée - la question : Qu'est-ce qu'une œuvre philosophique? (shrink)

The objective of this study is to analyze the measurability and interfirm comparability of sustainability performance through the qualitative content analysis of 12 sustainability reports of mining firms using the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines. The systematic comparison of information disclosed in 92 GRI indicators sheds light on the reasons underlying the impossibility of rigorously measuring and comparing the sustainability performance of firms from the same sector, which are supposed to be strictly following the same reporting guideline. These reasons include qualitative (...) aspects of sustainability, lack of compliance with GRI protocols, indicator contingency, ambiguous or incomplete information, data heterogeneity, and report opacity. The study makes it possible to return to the very notion of sustainability, its meaning, and flexible application by organizations. The results are discussed from three different theoretical perspectives, each of which proposes possible and complementary explanations of the main findings. (shrink)

Les philosophes anciens ont ecrit sur le rapport de la cite et du monde et c'est a eux que l'on doit les premieres theses cosmopolitiques. L'objet de l'essai de Jean-Francois Pradeau est d'exposer ces theses, en les rendant accessibles a des lecteurs qui ne les connaissent pas. Ainsi l'essai presente-t-il ce que des auteurs comme Diogene le cynique, Platon, les stoiciens ou encore le Pere de l'Eglise Saint Augustin ont pu dire de la citoyennete mondiale et du reve d'une (...) cite mondiale unique qui reunirait enfin tous les peuples. Les questions qu'agite cette histoire ancienne du cosmopolitisme sont pour beaucoup celles de notre epoque, qui a fait l'eloge pendant quelques decennies d'une forme d'emancipation cosmopolitique, qui a invente une Europe supranationale, mais qui parait aujourd'hui figee autour de ses frontieres. Les grecs anciens qui ont invente la formule citoyen du monde ont quelque chose a nous dire de la mondialisation. Ils nous rappellent avec une certaine simplicite que la vie humaine, qui est une vie politique, c'est-a-dire une vie qui n'est possible que dans les limites instituees d'une communaute civique, ne peut atteindre la tranquillite ou le bonheur sans apprecier a sa juste mesure la place qui lui convient dans le monde. Il est nefaste et finalement impossible de vivre sans se faire une certaine idee de ce monde et de son ordre, sans se representer, ne serait-ce que de maniere vraisemblable, ce qu'est l'univers et la place qui nous revient en son sein. (shrink)