Le témoignage de Sœur Marie-André du Sacré-Cœur s'inscrit parfaitement dans la dénonciation du travail forcé féminin développée par les missionnaires catholiques de Haute-Volta dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. Les missions se présentent volontiers comme les seuls lieux de protection de la population africaine contre l'exploitation abusive du travail forcé. Parfois, elles recourent à l'opinion publique métropolitaine, en dénonçant, dans la presse catholique, la mauvaise gestion ad...

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

In this paper, chaotic dynamics of a mixed Rayleigh–Liénard oscillator driven by parametric periodic damping and external excitations is investigated analytically and numerically. The equilibrium points and their stability evolutions are analytically analyzed, and the transitions of dynamical behaviors are explored in detail. Furthermore, from the Melnikov method, the analytical criterion for the appearance of the homoclinic chaos is derived. Analytical prediction is tested against numerical simulations based on the basin of attraction of initial conditions. As a result, it is (...) found that for ω = ν, the chaotic region decreases and disappears when the amplitude of the parametric periodic damping excitation increases. Moreover, increasing of F 1 and F 0 provokes an erosion of the basin of attraction and a modification of the geometrical shape of the chaotic attractors. For ω ≠ ν and η = 0.8, the fractality of the basin of attraction increases as the amplitude of the external periodic excitation and constant term increase. Bifurcation structures of our system are performed through the fourth-order Runge–Kutta ode 45 algorithm. It is found that the system displays a remarkable route to chaos. It is also found that the system exhibits monostable and bistable oscillations as well as the phenomenon of coexistence of attractors. (shrink)

The agroecological transition of agriculture not only requires changes in practices but also in ways of thinking and in their underlying values. Agroecology proposes broad scientific principles that need to be adapted to the singularities of each farm. This contextualization leads to the identification of agroecological practices that work locally and could serve as evidence-based practices to be transferred to local practitioners. This strategy was tested in a 4-year experiment conducted with dairy-sheep farmers in the South of France. The aim (...) was to collectively engage in the agroecological transition. Our work focused on the creation of a diagnostic tool that was used to analyze local farms and identify virtuous practices to be promoted locally as evidence-based practices. But this strategy came up against the complexity and singularity of the situations to be transformed: not only was no evidence found but the construction of the diagnostic tool itself led to controversy concerning the models of agriculture to be promoted. The experiment then took a pragmatic turn: on-farm workshops were organized to enable farmers to benefit from the professional judgment of peer farmers who were willing to help their colleagues accomplish their agroecological transition. The diagnostic tool, which was designed to be prescriptive, was then used to judge the social acceptability of solutions that made sense in each farmer’s own situation. Our experiment led us to conclude that managing the agro-ecological transition of farmers and their farming system is better conceived as a value-based process than as an evidence-based one. (shrink)

This article argues that many situations in social life can be analyzed by their requirement for the justification of action. It is in particular in situations of dispute that a need arises to explicate the grounds on which responsibility for errors is distributed and on which new agreement can be reached. Since a plurality of mutually incompatible modes of justification exists, disputes can be understood as disagreements either about whether the accepted rule of justification has not been violated or about (...) which mode of justification to apply at all. The article develops a grammar of such modes of justification, called orders of worth (grandeur), and argues that the human capacity for criticism becomes visible in the daily occurrence of disputes over criteria for justification. At the same time, it is underlined that not all social situations can be interpreted with the help of such a sense of justice, which resides on a notion of equivalence. Regimes of love, of violence or of familiarity are systematically distinct from regimes of justification. (shrink)

The relation of Pascal’s philosophy to language is well-known. Pascal’s rhetorical considerations, his reflections on the language of “honnêteté”, and the analysis of definition in De l’Esprit géométrique have been the focus of many commentaries. But the epistemological interest of these texts remains undetermined, in the context of a more general reflection on the nature of meaning, truth, and language. In this article, I show how Pascal’s reflection is confronted with a particular challenge regarding the meaning of words. This problem (...) can be restated with the help of the concept of rule and involves our ability to assess what it means to follow a rule. I trace Pascal’s evolution in the face of this problem, adopting successively a dogmatist position, a skeptical position and finally a position which I describe as both anthropological and pragmatist. This evolution demonstrates both the continuity and discursive progress of Pascal’s reflection on human knowledge from De l’Esprit géométrique to the Pensées. (shrink)

ArgumentThe Germans occupying Paris arrested Emile Borel and three other members of the Académie des Sciences in October 1941 and released them about five weeks later. Drawing on German and French archives and other sources, we argue that these events illustrate the complexity of the motivations and tactics of the occupiers and the occupied. While Borel and his colleagues were genuine members of the Resistance, and those who arrested them were full participants in a brutal occupation, both sides respected a (...) bargain, of no small importance to the Vichy regime, that allowed the university to pursue its work if its members avoided overt acts of opposition. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans Intermédialités : histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques / Intermediality : History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, n° 16, 2010, p. 105-128, puis sur Erudit.org. Nous remercions Laurent Guido de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Depuis une vingtaine d'années, l'idée de mondialisation s'est imposée au sein des discours et des pratiques culturelles, dans un contexte où sont apparues de nouvelles techniques d'information et de - (...) Cinéma, animation et vidéo – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper1 is to rationalise why and how philosophy can help today’s managers in their daily practices. I will first explain why today’s managers particularly should engage themselves in profound and enduring dialogue with philosophers. To this end, I will present the close links between the major managerial activities and the major philosophical domains. In the second section, I will sketch out how such a dialogue can be facilitated. To this end, I will present some of the (...) methods and conditions used to ensure the success of the practice of philosophy in organisations. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on the launch of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which was first published in 1925. We present the context of the launch and explain why it was closely connected to the period of the New Economic Policy. In the last section, we examine four articles about randomness and probability included in the first volumes of the encyclopedia in order to illustrate some debates from within the scientific scene in the USSR during the 1920s.

We give a “direction for use” of the scale relativity theory and apply it to an example of spontaneous multiscale integration including four embedded levels of organization (intracellular, cell, tissue and organism-like levels). We conclude by an update of our analysis of the arctic sea ice melting.

On s'est dès lors efforcé de contextualiser cette thèse et d'en préciser le sens, aboutissant à un double résultat : premièrement, les signifiés propositionnels ne sont ni des entités abstraites (platoniciennes), ni des complexes ...

Laurent Le Bon, directeur du Centre Pompidou-Metz, dévoile au cours d’un entretien avec Roland Huesca l’histoire, les atours et les enjeux de l’écriture de plusieurs catalogues d’expositions : à l’affiche Dada, Chefs-d’œuvre ?..

Pascal a croise le jeu a plusieurs reprises. En reflechissant sur des parties de cartes (ou de des) interrompues, le mathematicien jette les bases de ce qui deviendra ulterieurement le calcul des probabilites. L'auteur des Pensees, qui concoit ses lecteurs sous les traits de libertins et joueurs notoires, leur presente une societe entierement soumise au hasard; il en sonde les lois comme des regles de jeu. L'objet de cette etude n'est pas d'etablir une thematique du jeu dans l'oeuvre de Pascal, (...) mais de proposer cette notion de jeu comme un modele, un prisme a travers lequel un certain nombre de realites incompatibles coexistent neanmoins. Le modele du jeu rend compte ainsi de quelques-uns des paradoxes les plus stimulants sur lesquels roulent les Pensees: comment le conservatisme politique de Pascal s'accompagne d'une mise en cause radicale des lois, comment le monde en proie au jeu est un monde a la fois fondamentalement desordonne et admirablement regle. Quant au Pari, qui fascine et embarrasse depuis plusieurs siecles, une etude attentive des notions mathematiques qui le sous-tendent permet d'eclairer quelques obscurites du texte, et de poser une fois encore, mais sur de nouvelle bases, la question de sa portee et de sa validite. (shrink)

Cognitive forms vary considerably as a human being detaches herself from what is closest and most personal and moves to communicate — in the broad sense of taking part in a common matter — across increasing relational distances. The article proposes to deal with the variety of cognitive formats which cannot `commonize' cognition to an equal degree, relating them to a set of regimes of engagement with the world that are identified in terms of the dependency between the human agent (...) and her environment. The good that engagement aims to guarantee orients how reality is grasped and specifies the format of what constitutes relevant information. This analysis offers new insight into the composition of communities as well as persons who have to cope with the plurality of cognitive formats and engagements from the very familiar to the most public. (shrink)

Non, tout n'est pas politique. Il faut sans doute vivre en compagnie des autres, avec des lois et des forces de coercition pour garantir la subsistance commune. Mais cela ne constitue que les conditions du niveau de vie dont la chose publique s'occupe (souvent si mal): il nous reste alors a rendre nos existences vivables. Pour preparer l'insurrection de vivre, ne comptons guere sur la representation nationale, les lois du marche, la technologie, les comportements citoyens, ni non plus les derniers (...) mouvements d'indignation ou de rebellion. Sans abandonner la malheureuse necessite de la lutte (elle a certes son utilite), apprenons plutot a donner a la politique le conge qu'elle merite. Voici une provocation singuliere, une invitation a repenser les pretendues fins de la politique, mais independamment d'elle. (shrink)

Résumé Où va la peinture est un livre de Laurent Marissal qui se présente à la fois comme un traité sur la peinture et comme une œuvre peinte. Les actions qu’il relate sont elles-mêmes revendiquées comme des actions picturales. L’article s’interroge sur ces usages hétérodoxes de la notion de « picturalité », tout d’abord au niveau de la mise en forme narrative du livre, puis à celui des actions que cette forme a pour dessein de relater. Une dernière partie (...) étudie la relation du travail de Laurent Marissal avec le courant du narrative art. (shrink)

Is the study of living systems a useful metaphor for political science? In this book, Dr. Dobuzinskis argues for further exploration of biopolitical models to explain the complexity of political theory and social change. His discussion emphasizes the new cybernetics, which considers not only self-regulating but also self-organizing or self-producing systems. Self-organizing systems operate in an autonomous sphere comparable to the autonomy of the political community and the political actors who compose this community. The autonomy of these systems is maintained (...) through dynamic equilibration processes that entail not only the preservation of a given structure but also, at crucial times, the creative rearrangement of the existing structure and its transformation into a new pattern of relations. From this perspective, a political crisis is both a threat to the political system and the occasion of its renewal; stability may also mean decay. Emphasizing the links that have developed historically between the natural and social sciences, this book is a reflection on the merits of and difficulties involved in representing the evolutionary process at the political level as the problematic reproduction of national communities and states. (shrink)

Les écrits du dernier Husserl développent une théorie du monde de la vie qui s’expose dans la Krisis de 1936 et dans les nombreux textes inédits qui lui font cortège. Si cette théorie du monde de la vie ne se présente pas, à première vue, comme une éthique ou une théorie de l’éthique, elle demeure marquée par une préoccupation éthique qui scelle l’unité des analyses husserliennes. Dans cet article, on cherchera à préciser les contours et la portée de cette ultime (...) éthique husserlienne, en revenant en particulier sur le motif de l’auto-méditation que Hus-serl érige en principe de la responsabilité individuelle et sociale. (shrink)

Guillaume St-Laurent | : Le projet philosophique central de Charles Taylor se présente comme une critique de l’« image épistémologique » (epistemological picture) de la raison, critique qui se déploie au nom d’une compréhension de la rationalité humaine plus sensible à sa finitude transcendantale et historique. L’objectif du présent essai consiste à présenter une brève analyse comparative de cette image épistémologique (ou post-cartésienne) ainsi que de la perspective herméneutique que lui oppose notre auteur. En ce sens, nous comparerons tour (...) à tour six aspects déterminants de ces deux conceptions : le caractère « apodictique », « médiationnel », « désengagé », « désignatif », « dépassionné » et « procédural » de la première et le caractère « ad hominem », « immergé », « situé », « expressif », « passionné » et « substantiel » de la seconde. Nous éclairerons en outre les enjeux complexes de cette critique par quelques remarques introductives et conclusives. | : Charles Taylor’s main philosophical project presents itself as a critique of the “epistemological picture” of rationality. This critique is put forward in the name of a new understanding of reason, more sensitive to its transcendental and historical finitude. We herein propose a short comparative analysis of this epistemological (or post-cartesian) picture and Taylor’s hermeneutical perspective. To this effect, we will compare six essential aspects of these two conceptions : the “apodictic”, “mediational”, “disengaged”, “designative”, “dispassionate”, and “procedural” character of the former, and the “ad hominem”, “immerged”, “situated”, “expressive”, “passionate”, and “substantial” character of the latter. We will also try to shed light on these complex issues by some introductive and conclusive remarks. (shrink)

On a souvent résumé la présence importante des avocats dans la vie politique française sous la III e République à travers l’expression de « République des avocats. » De manière plus complexe, il s’agit de montrer comment les avocats sont au cœur, dans les premières décennies de la République, de la construction d’un champ politique marquée par la codification des règles électorales et une certaine démocratisation du personnel politique. Dans les décennies qui suivent, on note une diversification des formes d’investissement (...) du barreau en politique, moins marqué par l’investissement dans le champ politique proprement dit que par l’engagement à travers la défense judiciaire de causes. (shrink)

QUE FAIRE? Telle est la question de ceux qui n'ont pas renoncé́. Ultraviolence, crise économique, chaos social, trahison des élites... Face à l'effondrement qui vient, le Français lucide n'est plus qu'impuissance. Dans l'angle mort du dressage médiatique, son avis ne compte pas, son opinion n'existe plus. Nié dans sa souveraineté, criminalisé dans ses pensées, il n'a plus aucun moyen de se faire entendre. Résigné, vaincu, digéré par la matrice, il s'en remet à l'État, aux politiciens, à sa colère, à un (...) miracle... Espérant sans trop y croire que d'autres vont le tirer de cette impasse. Il existe pourtant des solutions. Concrètes, immédiates, individuelles. À la portée de chacun. Changer le monde. Ce livre est là pour ça. Changer le monde, en commençant par soi. Dix règles. Dix simples lois pour ne plus subir, ne plus servir. Cesser de renoncer. Sortir de la servilité. Dix commandements pour exister, survivre et gagner. Retrouver enfin la vue, le pouvoir et la grandeur. Tordre le probable. Incarner l'impossible. Renverser l'histoire. Voilà l'Éloge de la force. Voilà l'Évangile selon Obertone. Essayiste à succès et romancier de renom international, Laurent Obertone réserve cet ovni incandescent à ceux qui refusent d'abdiquer : le guide de développement personnel le plus féroce et puissant jamais publié. Dix lois pour reprendre le pouvoir. Deux-cent-trente pages pour saboter la servitude. Un manuel de guerre à l'efficacité diabolique. Une mobilisation générale pour sauver les derniers esprits libres. Bienvenue dans le champ de force. Bienvenue dans le camp des forts."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

A vital and underappreciated dimension of social interaction is the way individuals justify their actions to others, instinctively drawing on their experience to appeal to principles they hope will command respect. Individuals, however, often misread situations, and many disagreements can be explained by people appealing, knowingly and unknowingly, to different principles. On Justification is the first English translation of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's ambitious theoretical examination of these phenomena, a book that has already had a huge impact on (...) French sociology and is likely to have a similar influence in the English-speaking world. In this foundational work of post-Bourdieu sociology, the authors examine a wide range of situations where people justify their actions. The authors argue that justifications fall into six main logics exemplified by six authors: civic (Rousseau), market (Adam Smith), industrial (Saint-Simon), domestic (Bossuet), inspiration (Augustine), and fame (Hobbes). The authors show how these justifications conflict, as people compete to legitimize their views of a situation. On Justification is likely to spark important debates across the social sciences. (shrink)

This book addresses current practices in customary law. It includes contributions by scholars from various legal systems (the USA, France, Israel, Canada et cetera), who examine the current impacts of customary law on various aspects of private law, constitutional law, business law, international law and criminal law. In addition, the book expands the traditional concept of the rule of law, and argues that lawyers should not narrowly focus on statutory law, but should instead pay more attention to the impact of (...) practices on "real legal life." It states that the observation of practices calls for a stronger focus on usage, customs and traditions in our legal systems - the idea being not to replace statutory law, but to complement it with customary observations. (shrink)

Le long terme appelle de nouveaux développements de la prospective. De nombreuses disciplines sont déjà engagées dans ce sens. Les sciences de la communication pourraient utilement investir dans ce domaine, en particulier pour l'analyse des processus de communication dans les forums prospectifs, et pour la mobilisation des théories du récit dans l'examen des fondements théoriques des méthodes de scénarios.Long term policies require new developments in Future Studies. Many disciplines are already actively involved. Communication science could - and indeed should - (...) increasingly participate in such efforts, in analysing communication issues and processes within various Future Studies arenas, and mobilizing theories on narratives for a re-examination of the theoretical bases for scenario methodologies. (shrink)

Emmanuel Lévinas interprète une page talmudique en affirmant que la persécution ne peut être traduite dans une autre langue que celle de la victime. Si l’éthique lévinassienne laisse comprendre pourquoi la traduction de la parole douloureuse des persécutés redoublerait la dévalorisation de la parole singulière de ces victimes déjà induite par la persécution, elle semble aussi se fonder, en l’occurrence, sur une conception de la traduction qui mériterait peut-être d’être élargie à partir des réflexions de Walter Benjamin ; prise en (...) compte qui permettrait alors de penser une traduction de la persécution qui ne dévalorise pas la parole singulière des victimes et qui ne les enferme pas dans une douleur intransmissible. (shrink)

A lot of effort is currently made to provide methods to analyze and understand deep neural network impressive performances for tasks such as image or text classification. These methods are mainly based on visualizing the important input features taken into account by the network to build a decision. However these techniques, let us cite LIME, SHAP, Grad-CAM, or TDS, require extra effort to interpret the visualization with respect to expert knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to inspect (...) the hidden layers of a fitted CNN in order to extract interpretable linguistic objects from texts exploiting classification process. In particular, we detail a weighted extension of the Text Deconvolution Saliency (wTDS) measure which can be used to highlight the relevant features used by the CNN to perform the classification task. We empirically demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on corpora from two different languages: English and French. On all datasets, wTDS automatically encodes complex linguistic objects based on co-occurrences and possibly on grammatical and syntax analysis. (shrink)

Heredity has been dismissed as an insignificant object in Claude Bernard’s physiology, and the topic is usually ignored by historians. Yet, thirty years ago, Jean Gayon demonstrated that Bernard did elaborate on the subject. The present paper aims at reassessing the issue of heredity in Claude Bernard’s project of a “general physiology”. My first claim is that Bernard’s interest in heredity was linked to his ambitious goal of redefining general physiology in relation to morphology. In 1867, not only was morphology (...) included within experimental physiology, but it also theoretically grounded physiological investigations. By 1878, morphology and physiology were considered as completely independent sciences, and only the latter was perceived as suitable to experimentation. My second claim is that this reversal reflected the existence of two opposite attitudes towards heredity. In the late 1860s, Bernard was convinced that heredity would soon be accessible to experimental manipulation and that new species would be produced in the laboratory exactly like organic chemistry succeeded to do for raw bodies. Ten years later, he ascertained that this was impossible. My third claim is that Bernard was epistemologically ill-equipped to address the issue of heredity. Bernard was strongly committed to a general reasoning scheme that acknowledged only three categories: determining conditions, constant laws and phenomena. This scheme was a key factor in his successes as a physiologist who was able to capture new mechanisms in living bodies. Nonetheless, it also prevented him from understanding how time and history could be endowed with a causal action that cannot be reduced to timeless parameters. (shrink)

In the context of change to the “new modernity” described in Beck’s work, companies develop management modes and methods that focus more and more on individuals. Constitutive of the individualization process, human resources practices have become ambivalent as the process itself. This contribution examines how a managerial and organizational innovation as telework contributes to the process of individualization, and the paradoxes it addresses to management. At the interface of the social and the technical, teleworking appears as a flexible arrangement, meeting (...) employees’ and employer’s demands – which is a characteristic of the process of individualization – by simultaneously fragmenting collectivity, exposing individuals to social risk, and producing exclusion. The authors focus on two consecutive paradoxes of such individualized managerial practices: the individual–collective dilemma and the autonomy–control paradox. Finally, the paper reveals HRM as a new institution of individualization in a world where regulation functions are more and more transferred to individuals themselves. (shrink)

Nous montrons dans cet article comment les approches dynamiques en logique contemporaine ont retrouvé, quoique sous d ’ autres attendus, une configuration théorique qu ’ on peut attribuer à Aristote au moment de la rédaction des Topiques. Dans cette configuration, la logique et la rhétorique – ou au moins la dialectique – se complètent dans le cadre conceptuel homogène offert par la dialectique, entendue comme une certaine forme relativement codifiée de débat critique. L ’ idée principale est qu ’ aujourd (...) ’ hui, de même qu ’ alors, la dialectique est le cadre dans lequel il est possible de penser le rapport entre la logique et les formes générales de l ’ argumentation d ’ une part, et entre la logique et la théorie de la connaissance scientifique d ’ autre part. (shrink)