A collection of essays on the development of science and the history of ideas.

As a rule, there is nothing in the words themselves to mark off metaphors from literal language. If a boundary could somehow be drawn, it would be in constant need of re‐adjustment as metaphors become entrenched, idiomatic, and finally literal, and literal phrases are put to figurative or hyperbolic, and then metaphorical uses. Further, there is no algorithmic recovery of the intended meaning of a metaphor from the meanings of its components, no function that takes literal meanings as its arguments (...) and has metaphorical meaning as its output. That is, metaphors are syntactically invisible, pragmatically unstable, and semantically under‐determined. Their creation, use, and interpretation are almost impenetrable mysteries. As if to spite semantic theorists, they are also linguistic commonplaces, present in every kind of discourse. The discourse of philosophy is no exception to this rule, availing itself of the various stylistic, heuristic, and explanatory roles metaphors can play. Philosophy also produces metaphors of another sort, metaphors that differ in important ways from the metaphors of art and literature, as well as the metaphors of the natural and social sciences. These “grand“ metaphors are lasting monuments to the triumphs of philosophical discourse, even as they are also testimony to the failures of philosophical theorizing. This is because philosophy’s grand metaphors were never intended that way. They are better read as structural hypotheses that have become metaphors only after failing as literal truths. Ironically, it is precisely as metaphors that these images are integrated into our ways of thinking. In the end, thought itself is re‐structured, and these failures as descriptive truths succeed in becoming “constitutive truths” of a new reality. (shrink)

In these writings by one of our most creative legal philosophers, Meir Dan-Cohen explores the nature of the self and its response to legal commands and mounts a challenge to some prevailing tenets of legal theory and the neighboring moral, political, and economic thought. The result is an insider's critique of liberalism that extends contemporary liberalism's Kantian strand, combining it with postmodernist ideas about the contingent and socially constructed self to build a thoroughly original perspective on some of the (...) most vital concerns of legal and moral theory.Dan-Cohen looks first at the ubiquity of legal coercion and considers its decisive impact on the nature of legal discourse and communication, on law's normative aspirations and claim to obedience, and on the ideal of the rule of law. He moves on to discuss basic values, stressing the preeminence of individual identity and human dignity over the more traditional liberal preoccupations with preference-based choice and experiential harm. Dan-Cohen then focuses more directly on the normative ramifications of the socially constructed self. Fundamental concepts such as responsibility and ownership are reinterpreted to take account of the constitutive role that social practices--particularly law and morality--play in the formation of the self.Throughout, Dan-Cohen draws on a uniquely productive mix of philosophical traditions and subjects, blending the methods of analytic philosophy with the concerns of Continental philosophers to reconceive the self and its relation to ethics and the law. (shrink)

L'actualité d'un livre aussi significatif dans le parcours philosophique d'un auteur que Le bruit du sensible est souvent prétexte à interroger la place qu'occupe une pensée dans la vie intellectuelle contemporaine. À ce titre, l'œuvre de Jocelyn Benoist est particulièrement éloquente d'un questionnement qui, venu de la phénoménologie, s'est peu à peu ouvert à des enjeux qui excèdent le registre phénoménologique, voire qui le désertent avec fidélité, c'est-à-dire avec un esprit critique, vigoureux, et d'une extraordinaire fécondité. Jocelyn Benoist nous mène (...) sur la voie d'un chemin sans retour en direction du sensible. Le sensible découvert comme dimension à part entière de la réalité elle-même (et non de notre rapport à la réalité), autrement dit de notre appartenance de plain-pied à la réalité, dont une certaine philosophie a pu croire que nous en étions séparés et qu'il nous fallait, par le biais de la perception, y accéder. Tel est le bruit du sensible, celui d'un être à part entière, et non plus d'un apparaître distinct de l'être servant de sas d'accès intentionnel ou conceptuel à celui-ci. Les contributions réunies dans le présent volume se veulent apporter un contrepoint à cette résonance équivoque et tentent de cerner au plus près ce que Jocelyn Benoist entend substituer au sens perceptuel de la phénoménologie, à savoir la notion de bruit. (shrink)

Collection of essays examining the ways in which humanity is enmeshed in its surroundings.

RésuméA ľaide de quelques exemptes empruntés à la théorie quamique, à la physique des interactions fondamentales et à la cosmologie, on montre la pertinence et la modernité du concept gon‐séthien ?horizon de réalité.SummaryBy means of examples from quantum theory, from the physics of basic interactions and from cosmology, Gonseth's concept of the horizon of reality is shown to be relevant and modern.

In this book, 11 leading scholars contribute to the understanding of the scientific and philosophical works of Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), the most luminous Jewish intellectual since Talmudic times. Deeply learned in mathematics, astronomy, astrology (which he strongly rejected), logic, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and jurisprudence, and himself a practising physician, Maimonides flourished within the high Arabic culture of the 12th century, where he had momentous influence upon subsequent Jewish beliefs and behavior, upon ethical demands, and upon ritual traditions. For him, mastery (...) of the sciences was indispensable in the process of religious fulfilment. (shrink)

Tandis qu'une main de femme en moi écrivait des textes positifs, argumentés, d'ordre métaphysique, historique ou poétique, l'attente des jours se déroulait dans une aridité, une pauvreté qui se répétait elle-même.

Tranquillity and Insight. An Introduction to the Oldest Form of Buddhist Meditation. Amadeo Solé-Leris. Century Hutchinson, London, and Shambhala, Boston 1986. 176 pp. £6.95 / $7.95.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid legal decision making has become prominent. This paper investigates the use of AI in a critical issue in employment law, the determination of a worker’s status—employee vs. independent contractor—in two common law countries (the U.S. and Canada). This legal question has been a contentious labor issue insofar as independent contractors are not eligible for the same benefits as employees. It has become an important societal issue due to the ubiquity of the gig (...) economy and the recent disruptions in employment arrangements. To address this problem, we collected, annotated, and structured the data for all Canadian and Californian court cases related to this legal question between 2002 and 2021, resulting in 538 Canadian cases and 217 U.S. cases. In contrast to legal literature focusing on complex and correlated characteristics of the employment relationship, our statistical analyses of the data show very strong correlations between the worker’s status and a small subset of quantifiable characteristics of the employment relationship. In fact, despite the variety of situations in the case law, we show that simple, off-the-shelf AI models classify the cases with an out-of-sample accuracy of more than 90%. Interestingly, the analysis of misclassified cases reveals consistent misclassification patterns by most algorithms. Legal analyses of these cases led us to identify how equity is ensured by judges in ambiguous situations. Finally, our findings have practical implications for access to legal advice and justice. We deployed our AI model via the open-access platform, https://MyOpenCourt.org/, to help users answer employment legal questions. This platform has already assisted many Canadian users, and we hope it will help democratize access to legal advice to large crowds. (shrink)

The most recent restatements of stakeholder theory formulate that approach in terms of the distribution of value: “A stakeholder approach to business is about creating as much value as possible for stakeholders, without resorting to tradeoffs” (Freeman et al. 2010: 28). This formulation marks a shift from earlier work, which included a procedural dimension—a requirement that stakeholders participate in organization decision making. The present paper pushes back against this shift: it argues that orienting the stakeholder approach around the participation requirement (...) provides for a different moral logic, one not available to (now) conventional stakeholder theorizing (without that requirement), and one that may be more compelling to many. This argument requires critical re-examination of the moral arguments offered in the most recent restatements of the stakeholder approach. (shrink)

We live in a market system and witness much economic inequality. Although such inequality may not be an essential characteristic of market systems, it seems historically inevitable. How we should evaluate this inequality, on the other hand, is contentious. I propose that bleeding heart libertarians provide the best diagnosis and prescription.

Early in the history of liberalism, its most important proponents were concerned with freedom of religion. As polities and individuals now accept a dizzying array of religions, this has receded to the background for most theorists. It nonetheless remains a concern. Freedom of speech is a similar concern and very much in the foreground for theorists looking at the current state of academia. In this essay, I argue that inappropriate limits to freedom of religion and inappropriate limits to freedom of (...) speech—especially in the form of de-platforming on college campuses—both have, as one of their effects, what I call harms of silence. This means we ought not have those limits, so should seek to change them where they exist. (shrink)

There is a strong intuition that we can listen to works of music, yet musical ontologies on which works of music are abstract objects, perhaps most notably, type theories of music, seem to imply that this is impossible. This problem has received relatively little attention in the literature. I here explore and develop a solution suggested by Julian Dodd and argue that it has at least two problematic consequences, namely (i) that some works of music cannot be listened to unless (...) one has already studied the relevant score or through a similar process learned roughly what the work requires of its performances and (ii) that it is possible for two people to listen to different musical works while listening to the same performance. (shrink)

This paper addresses epistemic aspects of the phenomenon of obstetric violence—which has been described as a kind of gender violence—mainly from the perspective of recent theories on epistemic injustice. I argue that what is behind the dismissal of women’s voices in labor is mainly how the birthing subject, in general, is conceived. Thus, I develop a link between the phenomenon of testimonial injustice in labor and the marked irrationality that is seen as a core characteristic of birthing subjects: an irrationality (...) that appears to be always at odds with the kind of knowledge that is, wrongly, privileged within medicalized childbirth. I use Miranda Fricker’s analysis to argue that a central part of obstetric violence involves laboring women being “wrongfully undermined specifically in their capacity as knowers” : they are disbelieved in the labor room because of a double prejudice, one deriving simply from their condition as women, the second involving the kind of knowledge that many women find useful in the process of birthing. Women in labor thus suffer from both systematic and incidental kinds of testimonial injustice. (shrink)