We explore and critically reflect on the process of science and engineering research assistant skill development both within laboratory-based research teams and, when no team is present, within the faculty supervisor-research assistant interactions. Using a performance-based measure of research skill development, we identify research assistants who, over the course of an academic year of service as a researcher, markedly developed, modestly developed, or failed to develop their research skills. Interviews with these research assistants and their faculty supervisors, seen through the (...) lens of cognitive apprenticeship, provide insight into this variation. We found that within the contours of supervisory relationships and research teams, research skill development is indelibly shaped, for better or worse, by supervisor influence and abundant trial-and-error. (shrink)

This paper introduces an innovative curricular approach—the Health Humanities Portrait Approach —and its pedagogical tool—the Health Humanities Portrait. Both enable health professions learners to examine pressing social issues that shape, and are shaped by, experiences of health and illness. The Portrait Approach is grounded in a set of “critical portraiture” principles that foster humanities-driven analytical skills. The HHP’s architecture is distinctively framed around a pressing social theme and utilizes a first-person narrative and scholarship to explore how the dimensions of the (...) personal and the structural are mutually constituted. We argue that when creator-educators adopt the Portrait Approach and its critical portraiture principles to design and teach the HHP, they enable learners to become proficient in synthesizing and analyzing—with both depth and breadth—the human and social dimensions of patients’ lives. This inventive curricular intervention provides a needed contribution to health professions education in that it utilizes health humanities methodologies to elucidate the multiple aspects of health, illness, disability, and healthcare. (shrink)

This piece offers a response to Michel Serres’s Relire le relié (Citation2019) by way of a series of interruptions, which release unexpected meanings from the trinitarianism of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It considers the problematics of translating the title into English as Religion: Rereading What is Bound Together (2021), and connects the discussion back to themes from two earlier texts, The Parasite (Citation1980) and the conversations with Bruno Latour, Éclaircissements (Citation1992), as well as to a modalization of interference (...) in Serres’s Hermès II (Citation1972). This series of interruptions and interferences consider the hybrid, pagan, and Christian nature of Serres’s religious inheritance and legacy. Understated, and awaiting discovery, is a connection between Hestia and Aphrodite, and between the woman caught in adultery, whom a crowd of learned men seek to stone, with whom the text opens, and Mary, the mother of God. (shrink)

A new form of ethics suggested by the Francophone philosopher M. Onfray concerns, first of all, the resignation from faith in a transcendent God, which is substituted with an undefined sacrum in immanence. This new form of ethics is, today, becoming a popular alternative to religious ethics. However, traditional, and new ethics should not be treated as separate sets, as they do not necessarily compete with each other. Systems of spiritual development related to specific denominations will always provide inspiration even (...) for atheists’ ethics. The latter can indicate that, apart from religion, there is also a spirituality that can develop in a person. Nihilism is not the only alternative to religion, as sometimes the defenders of the old religious order try to show. (shrink)

FADYL JK and NICHOLLS DA. Nursing Inquiry 2013; 20: 23–29 Foucault, the subject and the research interview: a critique of methodsResearch interviews are a widely used method in qualitative health research and have been adapted to suit a range of methodologies. Just as it is valuable that new approaches are explored, it is also important to continue to examine their appropriate use. In this article, we question the suitability of research interviews for ‘history of the present’ studies informed by the (...) work of Michel Foucault – a form of qualitative research that is being increasingly employed in the analysis of healthcare systems and processes. We argue that several aspects of research interviewing produce philosophical and methodological complications that can interfere with achieving the aims of the analysis in this type of study. The article comprises an introduction to these tensions and examination of them in relation to key aspects of a Foucauldian philosophical position, and discussion of where this might position researchers when it comes to designing a study. (shrink)

In order to show how what Michel Foucault described as Chicago School neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics devalues human life while masking that devaluation, I examine the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, and the following civil unrest. Through an exploration of the concept of human capital, I argue that this concept, while seeming to answer a question regarding labor in economics, exacerbates the devaluation of human life in the U.S. generally and in the case of (...) Freddie Gray more specifically. Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics lectures illustrates why the devaluation of life has gone largely unrecognized. As the concept of human capital, along with other ‘market values,’ proliferated beyond the realm of economics into daily life, human beings have come to be characterized as ‘enterprise units.’ I will argue that the prosecution of the War on Drugs provides a paradigmatic case of characterizing human beings as enterprise units, some useful and others surplus, looking to Baltimore to provide concrete examples. (shrink)

Adorno develops critiques in parallel of the phenomenologies of G. W. F. Hegel and of Edmund Husserl. While respecting their differences, he rehearses conjoined objections to their accounts of philosophy, and of progress, of history, and of nature. Critical of Hegel’s idealist dialectics, and of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, Adorno also in his readings of their texts reveals a textual materiality of their philosophical enquiries, which provides material evidence in support of his critique. This essay seeks to reveal the dynamic of (...) this process, and show certain parallels with results supplied in the phenomenological enquiries of Michel Henry, and in the deconstructions of Jacques Derrida. If an epoch may still be captured in the concept, then the negative dialectical conceptuality developed by Adorno must capture a condition common to that epoch, and, in part, shared by other such thinkers. (shrink)

Building on the cultural transfer theory of Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, the paper examines the history of Marian Zdziechowski’s interactions with Leo Tolstoy. Its starting point is their correspondence of the 1890s, and the endpoint – Zdziechowski’s magnum opus Pessimism, Romanticism and the Bases of Christianity (1915). The main emphasis lies on two microhistories of cultural transfer with opposing vectors, represented in the relations between these two figures. The first, revolving around the publication of Zdziechowski’s essay Religious and (...) Political Ideals of Polish Society, is dedicated to the attempts of Zdziechowski, a young Polish intellectual, to secure a place in the field of Russian intellectual culture with the help of Tolstoy, one of its leading figures. The second concentrates on Tolstoy’s letter to Zdziechowski, which the latter used as a preface to a separate publication of his essay. Aiming to communicate the idea that Tolstoy was no enemy for the Poles to the Polish audience, Zdziechowski thus responded to the critical reaction to Tolstoy in the Polish press of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the end, the figure of Zdziechowski as a mediator between cultural fields proves to be of high value for further studies of processes and mechanisms of cultural transfer. (shrink)

This essay responds to the Nancean account of presentation, evoked in the opening citation, in order to trace out in Nancy's enquiries a disruption of Husserlian presentation, and a re-thinking of materiality on the edge of classical phenomenology. It stages a non-encounter between the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and of Jacques Derrida in relation to a third term, the Lacanian conception of the ‘real’. Thereby it can be shown how these writings touch on each other, in response to phenomenology and (...) to psychoanalytical theory, but do not engage. All the same, the claim to be made is that the writings of Nancy and Derrida converge in forming a third option, alongside the secularised phenomenologies of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and the Christian phenomenologies of Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry, by marking up the event of Lacan's reformulation of Freud's psychoanalytical theorising. (shrink)

“What characterizes the act of justice is not resort to a court and to judges; it is not the intervention of magistrates. What characterizes the juridical act, the process or the procedure in the broad sense, is the regulated development of a dispute. And the intervention of judges, their opinion or decision, is only ever an episode in this development. What defines the juridical order is the way in which one confronts one another, the way in which one struggles. The (...) rule and the struggle, the rule in the struggle, this is the juridical.” - Michel Foucault Penal Theories and Institutions is the title Michel Foucault gave to the lectures he delivered at the Collège de France from November 1971 to March 1972. In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first time his approach to the question of power that will be the focus of his research up to the writing of Discipline and Punish and beyond. His analysis starts with a detailed account of Richelieu’s repression of the Nu-pieds revolt and then goes on to show how the apparatus of power developed by the monarchy on this occasion breaks with the system of juridical and judicial institutions of the Middle Ages and opens out onto a “judicial State apparatus”, a “repressive system”, whose function is focused on the confinement of those who challenge its order. Michel Foucault systemizes the approach of a history of truth on the basis of the study of “juridico-political matrices” that he had begun in the previous year’s lectures and which is at the heart of the notion of “knowledge-power”. In these lectures Foucault develops his theory of justice and penal law. The appearance of this volume marks the end of the publication of the series Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION THE SEEMING CONTINGENCY OF THE QUESTION CONCERNING THE BODY AND THE NECESSITY FOR AN ONTOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE BODY When we disclose and..

It is commonly thought that authors can make anything whatsoever true in their fictions by artistic fiat. Harry Deutsch originally called this position the Principle of Poetic License. If true, PPL sets an important constraint on accounts of fictional truth: they must be such as to allow that, for any x, one can write a story in which it is true that x. I argue that PPL is far too strong: it requires us to abandon the law of non-contradiction and (...) entails a radical revision of otherwise ordinary commitments about truth in fiction. (shrink)

There is a striking difference between the methodology of the young Einstein and that of the old. I argue that Einstein’s switch in the late 1910s from a moderate empiricism to an extreme rationalism should at least in part be understood against the background of his crushing personal and political experiences during the war years in Berlin. As a result of these experiences, Einstein started to put into practice what, drawing on Schopenhauer, he had preached for years, namely to use (...) science as his means of escaping from “the merely personal.” Whatever the exact sources of Einstein’s about-face, the older man has left us with a highly misleading picture of how the younger man achieved the successes that we still celebrate today. This has had a harmful influence on theoretical physics. If the young Einstein’s successes are any guide as to how successful theoretical physics is done, close adherence to general features of the empirical data is much more and mathematical elegance is much less important than the old Einstein wanted us to believe. (shrink)

Readers of this volume will notice that it contains only a few papers on general relativity. This is because most papers documenting the genesis and early development of general relativity were not published in Annalen der Physik . After Einstein took up his new prestigious position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1914, the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin academy almost by default became the main outlet for his scientific production. Two of the more important papers on (...) general relativity, however, did find their way into the pages of the Annalen [35,41]. Although I shall discuss both papers in this essay, the main focus will be on [35], the first systematic exposition of general relativity, submitted in March 1916 and published in May of that year. (shrink)

This book’s basic argument is that the Freudian unconscious, far from constituting a radical break with the philosophy of consciousness, is merely the latest exemplar in a heritage of philosophical misunderstanding of the Cartesian cogito that interprets “I think, therefore I am” as “I represent myself, therefore I am” (in the classic interpretation of Heidegger, one of the targets of the book).

Most discussions frame the Liar Paradox as a formal logical-linguistic puzzle. Attempts to resolve the paradox have focused very little so far on aspects of cognitive psychology and processing, because semantic and cognitive-psychological issues are generally assumed to be disjunct. I provide a motivation and carry out a cognitive-computational treatment of the liar paradox based on a cognitive-computational model of language and conceptual knowledge within the Predictive Processing framework. I suggest that the paradox arises as a failure of synchronization between (...) two ways of generating the liar situation in two different PP sub-models, one corresponding to language processing and the other to the processing of meaning and world-knowledge. In this way, I put forward the claim that the liar sentence is meaningless but has an air of meaningfulness. I address the possible objection that the proposal violates the Principle of Unrestricted Compositionality, which purportedly regulates the conceptual competence of thinkers. (shrink)

Contemporary or postmodern thought is based on the lack of foundation. The impossibility of having a principle for philosophy has become a position of principle. As a result, rhetoric has taken over. Content has given way to the priority of form. Michel Meyer's book aims at showing that philosophy as foundational is possible and necessary, and that rhetoric can flourish alongside, but the conception of reason must be changed. Questioning rather than answering must be considered as the guiding principle. (...) What the author calls "problematology" is not only the study of questioning but also the analysis of the reasons why it has been repressed throughout the history of philosophy. Since Socrates, philosophers and scientists have reasoned by asking questions and by trying to solve them. Questioning has been the unthematized foundation of philosophy and thought at large. Philosophers, however, have preferred another norm, granting privilege to the answers and thereby repressing the questions into the realm of the preliminary and unessential. They have not considered their discursive practice as being based upon some question-answer complex, but exclusively on the results they call propositions. Meyer argues that propositions ensue from corresponding questions, and not the other way around. Anthropology, ontology, reasoning, and language thus receive a new interpretation in the problematological conception of philosophy, a conception in which questions and problems are thematized afresh. The theory of language in everyday use, in argumentation, or in literary analysis receives a full and decisive treatment here, making Meyer's question-view one of the leading theories in contemporary thought, alongside his rhetoric for which he is already well known. (shrink)

La véritable esthétique de la Mort n'est pas d'en répartir le domaine en catégories, mais d'examiner le fait de l'Art tut entier sous l'hypothèse de sa présence prépondérante au sein même des démarches créatrices (...). Une esthétique de la Mort. Dans une nouvelle dialectique, Mort ne recouvre pas une idée vague, mais si le mot Vie me sollicite à la reconnaissance de tous les éléments fondamentaux d'une présence intérieure à moi-même, devenant Moi par la pensée que je lui accorde, Mort (...) implique une prise de conscience analogue et antagoniste (...). L'art dit s'examiner préférentiellement dans ses liens avec la Mort, et non dans l'arbitraire liaison avec la vie, dont toute prépondérance dans l'œuvre est la véritable perturbation affectant les rapports pré-établis, valorisants, de l'œuvre et de la Mort. Michel Guiomar. (shrink)

More or less explicitly inspired by the Aristotelian classification of arguments, a wide tradition makes a sharp distinction between argument and proof. Ch. Perelman and R. Johnson, among others, share this view based on the principle that the conclusion of an argument is uncertain while the conclusion of a proof is certain. Producing proof is certainly a major part of mathematical activity. Yet, in practice, mathematicians, expert or beginner, argue about mathematical proofs. This happens during the search for a proof, (...) then when the proof is presented and discussed by experts, and finally when it is taught or used in didactical contexts. (shrink)

Should governments accept the principle of devoting a proportion of their resources to funding basic research? From the standpoint of economics, science should be considered as a public good and for that reason it should be protected from market forces. This article tries to show that this result can only be maintained at the price of abandoning arguments traditionally deployed by economists themselves. It entails a complete reversal of our habitual ways of thinking about public goods. In order to bring (...) this reversal about, this article draws on the central results obtained by the anthropology and sociology of science and technology over the past several years. Science is a public good, not because of its intrinsic properties but because it is a source of diversity and flexibility. (shrink)

Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy was widely regarded as the pre-eminent art theorist of his day and exerted tremendous influence over the development of the arts in nineteenth-century France, publishing over twenty books over his career. Translated into English for the first time by Michel-Antoine Xhignesse, this 1837 treatise on imitation in the arts represents one of his major theoretical works. Quatremère de Quincy argues, against the prevailing opinion of the day, that artistic imitation aims at communicating the essence of (...) the thing represented (ideal imitation), rather than merely faithfully reproducing its life appearance (real imitation). In order to communicate the essence, he argues, the artist must prioritize the contributions of her imagination over the choice and appearance of her model. This represented a significant departure from other accounts of ideal imitation, such as Batteux’s or Winckelmann’s, which instead advocated combining the best features of several different models. (shrink)

La visée de cette étude se résume en peu de mots : abandonné à lui-même, le système économico-politico-social actuel est condamné et son trépas sera douloureux, à moins qu’une réforme profonde ne survienne. Les pistes de réflexion qu’il rassemble dans cette étude trouvent leur origine dans deux systèmes de pensée complémentaires : la philosophie organique du dernier Whitehead et le matérialisme dialectique de Marx. Poliment mis entre parenthèses comme une double aberration historique, leurs travaux ont pourtant déterminé les balises conceptuelles (...) de tous les problèmes contemporains : les racines et les enjeux de la technoscience, du matérialisme, du capitalisme et de l’existence démocratique dans une biosphère en faillite, au propre comme au figuré... De plus, ce balisage s’alimente d’une pensée processuelle et pragmatique qui est tout à fait à l’ordre du jour. Ainsi, à la lumière des travaux de ces deux penseurs, Michel Weber aborde la thèse simple suivante : la civilisation occidentale mondialisée a atteint un point de rupture qui ne tardera plus à se manifester sous une forme insurrectionnelle, à moins que des réformes radicales soient promptement mises en oeuvre. Il en propose principalement trois : déprofessionnaliser la politique, recentrer la société sur les communautés et restaurer le droit régalien de battre monnaie. En somme, il s’agit ici de dessiner une réponse politique à une crise globale systémique qui est radicalement politique. (shrink)

These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delivered at the Collège de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society. Praise for Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France Series “Ideas spark off nearly every page...The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s], but (...) they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday.”—Bookforum “Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are...[He] is carrying out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture.”—The Nation “[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual coded and ask new questions...[He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture.”—The New York Review of Books. (shrink)

English summary: This commentary of Plato's Euthydemus demonstrates its place as the clearest text for understanding the relationship between Platonism and Sophism. French description: De tous les dialogues de Platon, l'Euthydeme est peut-etre le plus exclusivement consacre a l'elucidation de la relation du platonisme avec la sophistique. Ce qu'on a pris pour indigence de son contenu, c'est l'acuite avec laquelle la forme y est consideree. Formalisme moral de Socrate, formalisme eristique des sophistes: dans la lecon d'eristique donnee a Socrate apparait, (...) plus clairement peut-etre que dans aucun texte antique, la logique propre au discours sophistique, celle-la meme a laquelle a affaire dans sa totalite le texte platonicien. La sophistique, et Platon avec elle, relevent d'un regime de discours pre-aristotelicien, et c'est dans la pratique de ce discours que demande a etre reinscrite la tant galvaudee ironie socratique. (shrink)

With this profound final work, completed in the days leading up to his death, Michel Serres presents a vivid picture of his thinking about religion—a constant preoccupation since childhood—thereby completing Le Grand Récit, the comprehensive explanation of the world and of humanity to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life. Themes from Serres's earlier writings—energy and information, the role of the media in modern society, the anthropological function of sacrifice, the role of scientific knowledge, the problem (...) of evil—are reinterpreted here in the light of the Old Testament accounts of Isaac and Jonah and a variety of Gospel episodes, including the Three Wise Men of the Epiphany, the Transfiguration, Peter's denying Christ, the Crucifixion, Emmaus, and the Pentecost. Monotheistic religion, Serres argues, resembles mathematical abstraction in its dazzling power to bring together the real and the virtual, the natural and the transcendent; but only in its Christian embodiment is it capable of binding together human beings in such a way that partisan attachments are dissolved and a new era of history, free for once of the lethal repetition of collective violence, can be entered into. (shrink)

Comme la musique, la psychanalyse est un art d'interprétation. Mais on ne trouvera pas ici de déchiffrement de l'inconscient des œuvres musicales ou d'analyse de leurs auteurs. Il s'agit plutôt de l'autre sens du mot interpréter : jouer un morceau, en donner sa version, le dire dans sa propre langue en espérant qu'elle sera entendue par d'autres. Ce livre s'adresse à ceux pour qui la musique n'est pas une question de savoir, de culture ou de distinction, mais qui entrent en (...) elle comme dans la nuit. Ceux qui entretiennent avec toutes choses des relations musicales inconscientes. Ceux qui cherchent en elle non l'avoir, mais l'être. Ceux pour qui, disait Nietzsche, " la vie sans la musique serait une erreur ". (shrink)

Toute science, admet-on, commence par détacher un objet en le rendant indépendant des sujets et des situations. Mais cette conception étroite de la connaissance scientifique laisse subsister des zones d'ombre. La conscience n'est pas un objet. Elle est ce sans quoi rien ne pourrait être pris pour objet. La conscience n'est pas détachable des sujets, car elle s'identifie à ce qui est vécu par un sujet. De façon analogue, en physique quantique, un phénomène n'est pas dissociable de son contexte expérimental, (...) car il s'identifie à ce qui se manifeste à grande échelle au laboratoire. Que faire pour ne pas laisser ces cas extrêmes de côté? Généraliser la méthode scientifique. Ne plus la borner à définir et à caractériser des objets, mais l'étendre à la coordination directe des expériences. Telle est la révolution de pensée qu'il faut accomplir pour résoudre, ou plutôt dissoudre, deux questions-limites de la science : le problème de l'origine de la conscience et le paradoxe du "chat de Schrödinger" en physique quantique. (shrink)