D’un versant à l’autre des Alpes, les règles universitaires et éditoriales diffèrent beaucoup, et c’est une aubaine pour les chercheurs et les érudits. Voici Théon de Smyrne, élégamment propulsé sur le devant de la scène par un jeune chercheur de 27 ans, dans une traduction italienne actualisée, commentée au fil du texte à la mode antique, avec une volonté non dissimulée d’exhaustivité dans les références, les parallèles, les contrastes et les variantes, les interprétations divergentes. Les n...

Ce volume est la réédition, entièrement revue et complétée, d’une publication de 1987 qui réunissait en douze chapitres les contributions de dix savants chercheurs, chargés chacun d’une des multiples facettes du grand auteur grec chrétien du VIe siècle apr. J.‑C., Jean Philopon. L’influence que cet auteur a exercée sur la philosophie et la science modernes n’est plus à démontrer : il est notre source la plus ancienne pour la transmission de manières d’interpréter les idées d’Aristote ; et Gal...

L’éthique de Philodème de Gadara est aujourd’hui accessible, en langue anglaise, dans une présentation thématique qui met en perspective toutes les œuvres actuellement publiées de l’épicurien d’Herculanum, protégé du beau-père de César, Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, et ami de Virgile et d’Horace. Les trois cent cinquante pages du livre de Voula Tsouna, The Ethics of Philodemus, offrent en effet enfin au public la réorganisation et le commentaire, en un seul volume, de larges et très nombreux ex...

Does metacognition--the capacity to self-evaluate one's cognitive performance--derive from a mindreading capacity, or does it rely on informational processes? Joëlle Proust draws on psychology and neuroscience to defend the second claim. She argues that metacognition need not involve metarepresentations, and is essentially related to mental agency.

Granting that various mental events might form the antecedents of an action, what is the mental event that is the proximate cause of action? The present article reconsiders the methodology for addressing this question: Intention and its varieties cannot be properly analyzed if one ignores the evolutionary constraints that have shaped action itself, such as the trade-off between efficient timing and resources available, for a given stake. On the present proposal, three types of action, impulsive, routine and strategic, are designed (...) to satisfy the trade-off above when achieving goals of each type. While actions of the first two types depend on non-conceptual appraisals of a given intensity and valence, strategic intentions have a propositional format and guide action within longer-term executive frameworks involving prospective memory. (shrink)

Perceiving an armchair prepares us to sit. Reading the first line in a text prepares us to read it. This article proposes that the affordance construct used to explain reactive potentiation of behavior similarly applies to reactive potentiation of cognitive actions. It defends furthermore that, in both cases, affordance-sensings do not only apply to selective (dis)engagement, but also to the revision and the termination of actions. In the first section, characteristics of environmental affordance-sensings such as directness, stability, action potentiation, valence, (...) and phenomenology are reexamined in light of contemporary cognitive science. In the second section, it is proposed that cognitive affordance-sensings can also be characterized along these dimensions. Called “metacognitive feelings” in the metacognitive literature, their function is to select, engage, revise and post-evaluate cognitive actions. A third section discusses alternative views, and responds to objections. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that the following Rule should be part of any characterization of science: Claims concerning specific disputed facts should be endorsed only if they are sufficiently supported by the application of validated methods of research or discovery, and moreover that acceptance of this Rule should lead one to reject religious belief. This paper argues, first, that the Rule, as stated, should not be accepted as it suffers from a number of problems. And second, that even if (...) the Rule were to be acceptable, it should not lead one to reject religious belief. (shrink)

Comparisons between related species often allow the detailed genetic analysis of evolutionary processes. Here we advocate the use of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (and several other rhabditid species) as model systems for microevolutionary studies. Compared to Drosophila species, which have been a mainstay of such studies, C. elegans has a self‐fertilizing mode of reproduction, a shorter life cycle and a convenient cell‐level analysis of phenotypic variation. Data concerning its population genetics and ecology are still scarce, however. We review molecular, behavioral (...) and developmental intraspecific polymorphisms for populations of C. elegans, Oscheius sp. 1 and Pristionchus pacificus. Focusing on vulval development, which has been well characterized in several species, we discuss relationships between patterns of variations: (1) for a given genotype (developmental variants), (2) after mutagenesis (mutability), (3) in different populations of the same species (polymorphisms) and (4) between closely related species. These studies have revealed that evolutionary variations between sister species affect those characters that show phenotypic developmental variants, that are mutable and that are polymorphic within species. BioEssays 23:807–819, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The robustness of biological processes to perturbations has so far been mainly explored in unicellular organisms; multicellular organisms have been studied for developmental processes or in the special case of redundancy between gene duplicates. Here we explore the robustness of cell biological mechanisms of multicellular organisms in an evolutionary context. We propose that the reuse of similar cell biological mechanisms in different cell types of the same organism has evolutionary implications: (1) the maintenance of apparently redundant mechanisms over evolutionary time (...) may in part be explained by their differential requirement in various cell types; (2) the relative requirement for two alternative mechanisms may evolve among homologous cells in different organisms. We present examples of cell biological processes, such as centrosome separation in prophase, spindle formation or cleavage furrow positioning, that support the first proposition. We propose experimental tests of these hypotheses. (shrink)

Dans le cadre des négociations commerciales internationales, les politiques en faveur de la diversité culturelle désignent un objectif qui consiste à limiter l'uniformisation censée résulter du fonctionnement du marché et du libre-échange. Depuis quelques années, le véritable débat ne porte plus sur l'objectif lui-même qui semble faire l'objet d'un consensus, mais sur les moyens d'y parvenir. Notre propos dans cet article est justement de revenir sur cet objectif en montrant sa complexité et son caractère multidimensionnel. Au-delà du discours incantatoire à (...) portée très générale sur ses bienfaits supposés, les décideurs publics doivent donc effectuer des arbitrages, classiquement en termes de coûts/bénéfices, de manière plus complexe entre les différentes dimensions de la diversité. Mener une politique en faveur de la diversité culturelle suppose donc de faire des choix parmi ces multiples aspects et d'assumer les coûts induits. (shrink)

This is a tricentennial riff on the Edwardsean idea that beauty is both the first principle of being and the distinguishing perfection of God. What is really distinctive about Edwards's view of beauty is that it is an ontological reality and consists in joyfully bestowing being and beauty more than in being beautiful, in creative and beautifying activity more than in being beautiful. Edwards was also a pioneer in the way he envisaged a lively universe created by God, not out (...) of nothing or out of something, but out of the very fullness of God's own life overflowing into a world as a self-enlargement of the divine life. Edwards dares to offer a vision of God as the animating soul of the universe who governs the universe by the attractive and creative power of God's own beautifying life. What might it mean for religious ethics to take this as a description of the context for its work? The answer, in part and in brief, is that a life of true virtue, grounded in the heartfelt piety of holy affections, is a beautifying life. My aim in spinning out some Edwardsean themes is to encourage the reader to think about religious ethics outside the box within which beauty and beautifying activity play no part in defining the agenda of religious ethics. Inspired by themes unique and central to Edwards in his time, we may learn things of importance to religious ethics in our time that Edwards neither knew nor believed. (shrink)

Corporate crises call for effective communication to shelter or restore a company's reputation. The use of corporate social responsibility claims may provide an effective tool to counter the negative impact of a crisis, but knowledge about its effectiveness is scarce and lacking in studies that consider CSR communication during crises. To help fill this gap, this study investigates whether the length of company's involvement in CSR matters when it uses CSR claims in its crisis communication as a means to counter (...) negative publicity. The use of CSR claims in crisis communication is more effective for companies with a long CSR history than for those with a short CSR history, and consumer skepticism about claims lies at the heart of this phenomenon. (shrink)

What is a person, and how can a person come to know that she is a person identical to herself over time ? The article defends the view that the sense of being oneself in this sense consists in the ability to consciously affect oneself : in the memory of having affected oneself, joint to the consciousness of being able to affect oneself again. In other words, being a self requires a capacity for metacognition (control and monitoring of one's own (...) internal states). This view is compatible with the hypothesis that the self is a dynamic representation emerging out of a higher level control system, - valuation control - whose articulation with control of plans and perceptual/motor control is discussed in the context of normal and pertrubed agency. (shrink)

Hence, this book's provocative claim: today's so-called logical empiricism owes much more to Kant's notion of science than to Hume's.

A prominent but poorly understood domain of human agency is mental action, i.e., thecapacity for reaching specific desirable mental statesthrough an appropriate monitoring of one's own mentalprocesses. The present paper aims to define mentalacts, and to defend their explanatory role againsttwo objections. One is Gilbert Ryle's contention thatpostulating mental acts leads to an infinite regress.The other is a different although related difficulty,here called the access puzzle: How can the mindalready know how to act in order to reach somepredefined result? A (...) crucial element in the solutionof these puzzles consists in making explicit thecontingency between mental acts and mentaloperations, parallel to the contingency betweenphysical acts and bodily movements. The paper finallydiscusses the kind of reflexivity at stake in mentalacts; it is shown that the capacity to refer tooneself is not a necessary condition of the successfulexecution of mental acts. (shrink)

As part of their corporate social responsibility, many organizations practice cause-related marketing, in which organizations donate to a chosen cause with every consumer purchase. The extant literature has identified the importance of the fit between the organization and the nature of the cause in influencing corporate image, as well as the influence of a connection between the cause and consumer preferences on brand attitudes and brand choice. However, prior research has not addressed which cause composition most appeals to consumers or (...) the impact of cause choice on corporate image. A between-subjects field experiment in the Netherlands examines the influence of three core cause attributes—cause type, cause scope, and cause acuteness—on consumers’ perceptions of corporate image. Furthermore, this experiment examines the extent to which consumer identification with the cause mediates the influence of the cause attributes on corporate image. The findings indicate that identification with the cause leads to more positive evaluations of marketing campaigns for cause type and cause scope. Also, however, our results uncover a negative direct relationship between cause scope and corporate image. Cause acuteness is only marginally influential in corporate image perceptions. By proposing and testing a comprehensive model of the influence of cause attributes on corporate image in cause-related marketing, this article provides important implications and suggests avenues for further research. (shrink)

Le volume Chemin faisant réunit vingt-et-un articles rassemblés en hommage à l’historien de la Grèce classique Pierre Brulé et aux activités qu’il a développées au sein du CRESCAM-LAHM (UMR 6566). Il peut ainsi servir de pendant à La Grèce d’à côté, un recueil d’articles de P. Brulé publié en 2007 : les compagnonnages de l’historien, illustrés par la participation de P. Briant, de M.-M. Mactoux, de L. Bruit-Zaidman, de R. Parker, de S. Georgoudi, de M. Jost, de V. Dasen ou (...) d’A. Powell, pour n... (shrink)

Cet article se penche sur les rapports entre les politiques de réparation et la perception du temps après un crime de masse. Il cherche à démontrer que les mesures réparatrices prises parfois dans le but de rétablir la justice et le dialogue entre les groupes agissent sur la perception du temps. Elles sont dotées d’un pouvoir de reformulation qui vient modifier la mise en récit du passé, et donc sa perception. Elles contribuent notamment à faire le récit des responsabilités et (...) celui de la souffrance des victimes.Pour le montrer, l’article s’appuie sur un cas, celui des réparations ouest-allemandes destinées à Israël et à la Claims Conference entre 1945 et 1980. Cette période relativement longue permet d’observer un changement dans les modes de réparation : la RFA eut d’abord recours au droit civil, puis au droit pénal, et enfin aux symboles. Chacun de ces modes reformula à sa manière l’histoire des crimes et changea par conséquent la perception du passé qui ne cessa d’évoluer au fil du temps, en intégrant au fur et à mesure davantage le point de vue de la victime. (shrink)

Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States, killing approximately 480,000 people each year. This crushing health burden falls disproportionately, and recent CDC data shows that large disparities in adult cigarette smoking remain. One factor in these disparities is the use of flavors. Menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco products are used at higher rates by vulnerable populations including youth and young adults, African Americans, women, Hispanics and Asian Americans. This is no accident; the (...) tobacco industry has long targeted these same groups. Given FDA's failure to act to ban flavored tobacco products, states and municipalities are considering taking matters into their own hands to protect their communities from these dangerous products. The authors will explore state and local authority to restrict the sales of these products and review the evidence base indicating that removing flavored tobacco products – and menthol combustible products in particular - from the market would significantly reduce the toll of illness and death caused by these products. (shrink)

A propos de 'Evolution et Rationalité' de Ronald de Sousa (2004).

Building on a model of the biological, socio-psychological, and structural drivers of luxury consumption, this article explores when and why luxury consumers consider ethics in their luxury consumption practices, to identify differences in their ethical and ethical luxury consumption. The variables proposed to explain these differences derive from biological, socio-psychological, and structural drivers, namely, consumers’ (1) age, (2) ethicality, (3) human values, (4) motivations, and (5) assumptive world. A cluster analysis of a sample of 706 U.S. adult luxury consumers reveals (...) five segments of luxury consumers, each reflecting a specific persona, that engage in both ethical and ethical luxury consumption to varying extents. The five segments differ in the extent to which they exhibit features related to four discriminant functions (immorality, ego-orientation, and strain; altruistic-orientation; conservation, in control, and positivity; and youth and luxury savvy), which vary across the biological, socio-psychological, and structural drivers. The findings thus indicate which segments of luxury consumers are most relevant for luxury firms pursuing a long-term sustainability agenda and suggest practical actions to reach those goals. (shrink)

Controlling one's mental agency encompasses two forms of metacognitive operations, self-probing and post-evaluating. Metacognition so defined might seem to fuel an internalist view of epistemic norms, where rational feelings are available to instruct a thinker of what she can do, and allow her to be responsible for her mental agency. Such a view, however, ignores the dynamics of the mind–world interactions that calibrate the epistemic sentiments as reliable indicators of epistemic norms. A 'brain in the lab' thought experiment suggests that (...) an internalist view of epistemic feelings is unable to account for the contrast between norm-tracking, educated sentiments, and illusory feelings. (shrink)

Against the prior view that primate communication is based only on signal decoding, comparative evidence suggests that primates are able, no less than humans, to intentionally perform or understand impulsive or habitual communicational actions with a structured evaluative nonconceptual content. These signals convey an affordance-sensing that immediately motivates conspecifics to act. Although humans have access to a strategic form of propositional communication adapted to teaching and persuasion, they share with nonhuman primates the capacity to communicate in impulsive or habitual ways. (...) They are also similarly able to monitor fluency, informativeness and relevance of messages or signals through nonconceptual cues. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Mental Agency as Sensitivity to Reasons Mental Agency as Voluntary Control Mental Agency, ‘Evaluative Control,’ and Metacognition References Further reading.

This book chapter aims at exploring how intentional a piece of behavior should be to count as an action, and how a minimal view on action, not requiring a richly intentional causation, may still qualify such a behavior as voluntary.

Peter Carruthers correctly claims that metacognition in humans may involve self-directed interpretations (i.e., may use the conceptual interpretative resources of mindreading). He fails to show, however, that metacognition cannot rely exclusively on subjective experience. Focusing on self-directed mindreading can only bypass evolutionary considerations and obscure important functional differences.

Pour celles et ceux qui prisent le grand large, la lecture de l’ouvrage de F. Thébaud, Une traversée du siècle. Marguerite Thibert, femme engagée et fonctionnaire internationale, s’impose. Dans cet ouvrage au long cours (près de 700 pages), l’auteure, spécialiste de l’histoire des femmes et du genre, nous convie en effet à partager un impressionnant périple temporel : celui d’une inconnue illustre, Marguerite Thibert (1886‑1982). Inconnue du grand public, Marguerite Thibert était déjà une per...

The project of understanding rationality in non-human animals faces a number of conceptual and methodological difficulties. The present chapter defends the view that it is counterproductive to rely on the human folk psychological idiom in animal cognition studies. Instead, it approaches the subject on the basis of dynamic- evolutionary considerations. Concepts from control theory can be used to frame the problem in the most general terms. The specific selective pressures exerted on agents endowed with information-processing capacities are analysed. It is (...) hypothesized that metacognition offers an evolutionary stable response to the various demands of the internal and external flows of information in a competitive environment. Metacognition provides a form of process-reflexivity that can, but does not have to be redeployed through metarepresentations. Finally the claim that rationality so conceived involves normativity is discussed. (shrink)

We investigated the association between cognitive control and individual differences in cortisol response to stress in participants with generalised anxiety disorder and in never-disordered c...

Given disagreement about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self‐knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and the scope of metacognition – the control of one’s cognition – is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self‐ascriptive view, has been that metacognition necessarily requires representing one’s own mental states as mental states, and, therefore, necessarily involves an ability to read one’s mind. The main claims of this view are articulated, and (...) the difficulties that they raise are discussed. An alternative view of metacognition, the ‘self‐evaluative view’, is then examined. It is argued that this view provides an account of metacognition that is both empirically and conceptually more adequate than the self‐ascriptive model. Particular attention is given to the problem of transferring self‐evaluative judgments to the case of others. (shrink)

This chapter examines whether, and in what sense, one can speak of agentive mental events. An adequate characterization of mental acts should respond to three main worries. First, mental acts cannot have pre-specified goal contents. For example, one cannot prespecify the content of a judgment or of a deliberation. Second, mental acts seem to depend crucially on receptive attitudes. Third, it does not seem that intentions play any role in mental actions. Given these three constraints, mental and bodily actions appear (...) to have a significantly different structure. A careful analysis of the role of normative requirements, distinguishing them from instrumental reasons, allows the distinction between mental and bodily forms of action to be clarified. Two kinds of motives must be present for a mental act to develop. The first kind is instrumental: a mental act is performed because of some basic informational need, such as the need to "remember the name of that play". The second kind is normative: given the specific type of mental action performed, there is a specific epistemic norm relevant to that act. These two motives actually correspond to different phases of a single mental act. The first motivates the mental act, i.e. makes salient the corresponding goal. The second offers an evaluation of the feasibility of the act, on the basis of its constitutive normative requirement. Conceived in this way, a characterization of mental acts avoids the three difficulties mentioned above. The possibility of pre-specifying the outcome of epistemic mental acts is blocked by the fact that such acts are constituted by strict normative requirements. That mental acts include receptive features is shown to be a necessary architectural constraint for mental agents to be sensitive to epistemic requirements. Finally, the phenomenology of intending is shown to be absent in most mental acts; the motivational structure of mental acts is, rather, associated with error- signals and self-directed doubtings. Mental acts need to be recognized as a natural kind of action meant to normatively control and enhance cognitive efficiency according to current processing needs. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that knowledge about one's own intentions can be gained in part through perception, although not through introspection. The various kinds of misperception of one's intentions are discussed. The latter distinction is applied to the analysis of schizophrenic patients' delusion of control.