John Locke proposed a straightforward relationship between qualitative and quantitative doxastic notions: belief corresponds to a sufficiently high degree of confidence. Richard Foley has further developed this Lockean thesis and applied it to an analysis of the preface and lottery paradoxes. Following Foley's lead, we exploit various versions of these paradoxes to chart a precise relationship between belief and probabilistic degrees of confidence. The resolutions of these paradoxes emphasize distinct but complementary features of coherent belief. These features suggest principles that (...) tie together qualitative and quantitative doxastic notions. We show how these principles may be employed to construct a quantitative model - in terms of degrees of confidence - of an agent's qualitative doxastic state. This analysis fleshes out the Lockean thesis and provides the foundation for a logic of belief that is responsive to the logic of degrees of confidence. (shrink)

The possible and revelation -- The saturated phenomenon -- Metaphysics and phenomenology: a relief for theology -- "Christian philosophy": hermeneutic or heuristic? -- Sketch of a phenomenological concept of the gift -- What cannot be said: Apophasis and the discourse of love -- The banality of saturation -- Faith and reason.

Traditional health sciences (including nursing) paradigms, conceptual models, and theories have relied heavily upon notions of the ‘person’ or ‘patient’ that are deeply rooted in humanistic principles. Our intention here, as a collective academic assemblage, is to question taken‐for‐granted definitions and assumptions of the ‘person’ from a critical posthumanist perspective. To do so, the cinematic works of filmmaker David Cronenberg offer a radical perspective to revisit our understanding of the ‘person’ in nursing and beyond. Cronenberg's work explores bodily transformation and (...) mutation, with the body as a fragile and malleable vessel. Cronenberg's work allows us to interrogate the body in all its complexity, contingency, and hybridity and provides avenues of rupture within current understandings of ‘the person’. Reinventing the definition of what it means to be human, critical posthumanism offers opportunities to both critique humanist theories and build affirmative futurities. Also drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, specifically, their concept of becoming, we propose a critical posthumanist alternative to the conceptualization of the person in the health sciences, that of the becoming‐mutant, so frequently explored in Cronenberg's films. Such a conceptualization permits the inclusion of various technological interventions of the contemporary subject: The postperson. This position offers the health science disciplines a radical reconceptualization of the conceptual and theoretical approaches, extending beyond those trapped within the quagmire of humanistic principles. (shrink)

In a recently published paper, we argued that theories of cultural evolution can gain explanatory power by being more pluralistic. In his reply to it, Dennett agreed that more pluralism is needed. Our paper’s main point was to urge cultural evolutionists to get their hands dirty by describing the fine details of cultural products and by striving to offer detailed and, when explanatory, varied algorithms or mechanisms to account for them. While Dennett’s latest work on cultural evolution does marvelously well (...) on the first point, it has only whet our appetite on the second. Accordingly, the present paper aims to show what an evolutionary explanation of culture that takes the variety of cultural evolution mechanisms seriously would look like. We will focus on the cultural evolution of social epistemic mechanisms and we will propose that Darwinian algorithms should be complemented with a cultural analogue of the error reduction mechanism proposed to account for human cognition, with a particular emphasis on the necessity to build independencies between different sub-systems in charge of tracking states of the world. To illustrate our point, we will present how the evolution of the legal system as epistemic systems can be understood as a process of building increasingly better independencies and how various criticisms of the actual legal system calls for building even more of them. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy discusses his life's work with Pierre-Philippe Jandin. As Nancy looks back on his philosophical texts, he thinks anew about democracy, community, jouissance, love, Christianity, and the arts.

A l'occasion du cinquantenaire de la mort de René Guénon, l'auteur retrace la vie de ce philosophe qu'un commentateur qualifia d'invisible, tant il fut discret et effacé. De son enfance en milieu catholique à son adhésion à l'islam, en passant par son intérêt pour l'ésotérisme, l'occultisme, l'hindouisme et son initiation maçonnique, Guénon surprend en se montrant un infatigable chercheur d'absolu et un précurseur du dialogue interreligieux. Cet ouvrage très complet propose une vivante évocation de la tradition symbolique, que René Guénon (...) a eu le mérite d'épurer. Sa pensée, tout en interrogeant les apports de l'Orient à l'Occident, les mythes et les symboles, dénonce les pseudo-religions, les sectes, le théosophisme ou l'erreur spirite, et évite le piège du syncrétisme. René Guénon estimait que tout homme doit tendre à la réalisation spirituelle et il fut un juge impitoyable de notre civilisation occidentale matérialiste. Jean-Luc Maxence éclaire l'itinéraire exceptionnel de cet auteur qui, en une vingtaine de livres, marqua plusieurs figures de son époque, de René Daumal à Louis Pauwels ou Raymond Abellio, et dont l'œuvre était considérée comme " l'une des plus singulières de ce temps " par le cardinal Daniélou, même si celui-ci ne partageait pas ses idées. Rebelle, inclassable, la pensée du " philosophe invisible " appartient au patrimoine de la philosophie. (shrink)

For over a century reconstructions of Alexandria have all, without exception, been based on the plan drawn by Mahmoud al-Falaki in around 1866. We are not concerned to give an exegesis of the many amendments and additions made to this plan since its publication, but to appraise in the light of new evidence the validity of the road network which he proposed. The recent discovery of several cartographie documents contemporary with Falaki's work makes possible a new interpretation of the indications (...) recorded in his report and to single out, in its reconstruction, the parts deriving from the excavations from the parts based on assumption. (shrink)

Comment une formation politique répond-elle, au XXIème siècle, à son électorat? Comment faire face aux défis futurs autrement que par le biais d'un débat politique bipolarisé? Cela passe nécessairement par la mise en avant d'un discours résolument démocrate... et toujours écologiste! A chaque instant, la recherche du positionnement juste doit être notre fil conducteur. Sur l'équité, la solidarité et l'engagement en faveur d'une transformation réelle de notre société, nous avons tous notre mot à dire afin de préparer l'avenir! Tel est (...) l'enjeu! Aux niveaux européen, national, régional et local, nous sommes invités à réagir. Parfois pour saluer certaines avancées courageuses, souvent pour rappeler l'existence de certaines lignes rouges déjà allègrement franchies et dénoncer les égarements des responsables politiques en place. Doucement mais sûrement, une autre voie se dessine! Cet ouvrage se propose de mettre en lumière les thèmes sur lesquels les démocrates français et européens doivent désormais avancer de manière significative. Sans avoir la prétention d'apporter toutes les réponses, Jean-Luc Bennahmias contribue au débat à travers des textes, réflexions et entretiens récents faisant sens dans son parcours politique. Il rappelle un certain nombre de ses prises de position historiques sur des questions essentielles, telles que l'action à mener envers les jeunes, les libertés, les minorités ou bien encore l'Union européenne. Et il réaffirme la vigueur de son combat pour une écologie omniprésente dans nos politiques publiques. (shrink)

Le syndrome de Kierkegaard est un essai libre de Jean- Luc Berlet, consacré à l'un de ses penseurs de prédilection, le Danois Seren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Ce syndrome dont il est question, tel que défini par l'auteur, pourrait être conçu comme la tension qui résulte de l'impossible choix entre l'amour de la femme et l'amour de Dieu. Kierkegaard renonça en effet à l'amour charnel de la femme au profit d'une vie ascétique consacrée à I écriture et à la réflexion sur l'Amour. (...) A plus grande échelle ce syndrome pourrait être compris comme l'abandon du temporel au profit d'un idéal spirituel Et les regrets qui en découlent. En effet, comme nombre de contemporains opérant ce type de choix, Kierkegaard connut bien des tourments. Ces affres permirent néanmoins à Kierkegaard de développer une conception de l'Amour et du Divin d'une grande originalité qu'il est bon de redécouvrir dans notre époque marquée par le consumérisme sentimental. Tout au long des quatorze chapitres qui jalonnent cet ouvrage, Jean-Luc Berlet retrace le parcours littéraire de ce philosophe danois considéré par beaucoup comme le père de l'existentialisme, brossant ici un tableau complet de son énigmatique personnalité. En outre, chaque chapitre est accompagné d'un code QR, donnant chacun actes à une vidéo en ligne où Jean - Luc Berlet approfondit son développement et fournit des clefs de lecture pour une meilleure compréhension de l'oeuvre de Kierkegaard. (shrink)

According to a popular version of the current evolutionary attitude in cognitive science, the mind is a massive aggregate of autonomous innate computational devices, each addressing specific adaptive problems. Our aim in this paper is to show that although this version of the attitude, which we call GOFEP , does not suffer from fatal flaws that would make it incoherent or otherwise conceptually inadequate, it will nevertheless prove unacceptable to most cognitive scientists today. To show this, we raise a common (...) objection to the concept of innateness, not to mount an attack on GOFEP but to study how its proponents have attempted to meet that challenge. The aim of this move is to show that GOFEP cannot face the challenge without, as it were, losing its soul. There is, or so we will argue, something deep at the heart of GOFEP that prevents its proponents from meeting the challenge. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThat beauty [beauté] pertains to phenomenality, this may have long seemed self-evident. For however conveyed and crafted in sensible experience, beauty is to be seen, heard, touched; in short it makes itself manifest. Not only does beauty make itself manifest by taking shape, but it makes itself manifests par excellence, to a greater extent than what appears in the course of everyday life. The beautiful [beau] should therefore be seen as a phenomenon. Today, however, we can no longer take this (...) rule for granted; nor can we consider to be irrefutable the fact that beauty phenomenalizes itself as such, and that we can experience [éprouver] directly and as such a “phenomenon of the beautiful.”. (shrink)

Among the many difficulties, or even paradoxes, that phenomenology has imposed upon us by positing itself as a doctrine, or at least as a radical foundation for philosophy, one must first and foremost consider the operation typically referred to as the reduction. The reasons for detecting difficulties therein are many, but they take on even greater significance since Husserl proclaimed the reduction to be fundamental to any philosophy that wished to establish itself as a phenomenology. The history of phenomenology, then, (...) would appear not only as the history of all the difficulties encountered in the reduction, but principally as the history of Husserl’s own self-elucidation of his entire project. This brings us to the point of reformulating Ricoeur’s claim—that phenomenology is the sum of misinterpretations of Husserl’s doctrine—with this new contention: that phenomenology consists in the sum of discussions and disagreements about the doctrine and practice of the reduction. (shrink)

The Abidjan School is a school of thought that developed in the 1980s and 1990s in the Côte d'Ivoire inspired by the work of Louis-Joseph Lebret and Amartya Sen. It follows the empirical approach i...

Créativité et mathématiques ne font pas bon ménage dans l'inconscient collectif. Pourtant à l'heure d'Internet, il existe bien une manière de revisiter la géométrie, l'algèbre ou même la logique. Il suffit de prendre un peu de distance par rapport aux calculs, de se donner quelques libertés par rapport à l'histoire, de changer de point de vue... En vagabondant à travers l'histoire et l'application des mathématiques, les auteurs se livrent ici à un jeu de vulgarisation d'une saveur et d'une subtilité inédites. (...) [4e de couv.]. (shrink)

The position of the Belgian prime minister is hardly mentioned in the Belgian Constitution. lt was only after almost 140 years, in 1970 he was mentioned for the first time. lts power is rather a matter of common law. Since 1831 through the years, the position and power of the PM changed strongly. This often happened together with changes concerning the power of the King: the weaker the King, the stronger the PM.The existence of coalition governments puts forward bis role (...) as coordinator and even as arbitrator, whereas the federalisation process since the seventies places him as a conciliator between Regions and Communities. The growing importance of the European Council of Head of States have made him the most important decision-maker among the national politicians in the European integration process. The PM's skills concerning timing and agendasetting are very important because it is one of his most important power instruments. Other key skills are bis profound knowledge in certain issues but mostly as a generalist, his insisting on good minister nominations by the party leaders, the way he can motivate his cabinet members, a good team spirit among the government members and the existence of a clear government contract. In order to avoid a strongdependency on or tutelage from the political parties of the majority it is important to have their top politicians in the government. (shrink)

Now in paperback, Jean-Luc Marion's groundbreaking philosophy of human uncertainty. In Negative Certainties, renowned philosopher Jean-Luc Marion challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions we have developed about knowledge: that it is categorical, predicative, and positive. Following Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger, he looks toward our finitude and the limits of our reason. He asks an astonishingly simple—but profoundly provocative—question in order to open up an entirely new way of thinking about knowledge: Isn’t our uncertainty, our finitude, and rational limitations, one (...) of the few things we can be certain about? Marion shows how the assumption of knowledge as positive demands a reductive epistemology that disregards immeasurable or disorderly phenomena. He shows that we have experiences every day that have no identifiable causes or predictable reasons and that these constitute a very real knowledge—a knowledge of the limits of what can be known. Establishing this “negative certainty,” Marion applies it to four aporias, or issues of certain uncertainty: the definition of man; the nature of God; the unconditionality of the gift; and the unpredictability of events. Translated for the first time into English, Negative Certainties is an invigorating work of epistemological inquiry that will take a central place in Marion’s oeuvre. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyse the meaning and the implications of the comparative interpretation of Sartre’s and Ryle’s theses on imagination that Ricœur undertook in the still unpublished text of his Lectures on Imagination. These lectures were delivered at the University of Chicago in 1975. First, the article shows how Ricœur brings out a strong convergence , both in the method and in the presuppositions , of the Sartrean and Rylean conceptions of imagination : the choice of (...) a descriptive method leads the two philosophers to a common critique of the mental image . Secondly, the article analyses the properly critical side of the Ricœurian interpretation by showing how it eventually brings to light the common theoretical limitation of Sartre’s and Ryle’s theses on imagination. According to Ricœur, those theses lead to a conception of image as picture and fail to consider the image as fiction , and so they remain locked in a theory of reproductive imagination and of the primacy of perception. Résumé Cet article se propose d’analyser le sens et les enjeux de la lecture croisée des thèses de Sartre et Ryle sur l’imagination à laquelle se livre Ricœur dans le texte encore inédit des Lectures on imagination professées en 1975 à l’Université de Chicago. Dans un premier temps, il montre comment Ricœur met en relief une convergence forte , de méthode et de présupposés entre les conceptions sartrienne et rylienne de l’imagination : le choix d’une méthode descriptive conduisant les deux philosophes à une commune critique de l’image mentale . Puis, dans un second temps, il analyse le versant proprement critique de la lecture ricœurienne en montrant comment elle en vient à dénoncer une commune limitation théorique des thèses de Sartre et Ryle sur l’imagination. Selon Ricœur, ces thèses débouchent sur une conception de l’image comme tableau qui échoue à penser l’image comme fiction et elles restent de ce fait enfermées dans une théorie de l ’ imagination reproductrice et du primat de la perception. (shrink)

Presentation of the Excellence Award at the Fonds Ricœur’s Summer Workshop 2019.

Standard equilibrium economic models focus on interdependencies. This text develops a theory which is based on disequilibria. The model proposed is a heuristic tool that makes it possible to explore these disequilibria in relation to Western economies.

« Qui veut s’entremettre entre deux penseurs résolus est marqué de médiocrité : il n’a pas l’œil pour discerner ce qui ne se produit qu’une fois : le fait de ne voir que ressemblances et de tout égaliser est caractéristique d’une faible vue », écrivait Nietzsche dans le Gai savoir, à l’aphorisme 228. C’est cette gageure qu’il nous faut tenter d’affronter. Faire le point sur l’improbable relation de Proust à Schelling oblige d’abord à ne jamais perdre de vue « ce (...) qui ne se produit qu’une fois... (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy'sOn the Commerce of Thinkingconcerns the particular communication of thoughts that takes place by means of the business of writing, producing, and selling books. His reflection is born out of his relation to the bookstore, in the first place his neighborhood one, but beyond that any such "perfumery, rotisserie, patisserie," as he calls them, dispensaries "of scents and flavors through which something like a fragrance or bouquet of the book is divined, presumed, sensed."On the Commerce of Thinking is thus (...) not only something of a semiology of the specific cultural practice that begins with the unique character of the writer's voice and culminates in a customer crossing the bookstore threshold, package under arm, on the way home to a comfortable chair, but also an understated yet persuasive plea in favor of an endangered species. In evoking the peddler who, in times past, plied the streets with books and pamphlets literally hanging off him, Nancy emphasizes the sensuality of this commerce and reminds us that this form of consumerism is like no other, one that ends in an experience-reading-that is the beginning of a limitless dispersion, metamorphosis, and dissemination of ideas. Making, selling, and buying books has all the elements of the exchange economy that Marx analyzedfrom commodification to fetishismyet each book retains throughout an absolute and unique value, that of its subject. With reading, it gets repeatedly reprinted and rebound. For Nancy, the book thus functions only if it remains at the same time open and shut, like some Moebius strip. Closed, it represents the Idea and takes its place in a canon by means of its monumental form and the title and author's name displayed on its spine. But it also opens itself to us, indeed consents to being shaken to its core, in being read each time anew. (shrink)

Dans cet entretien, Jean-Luc Marion remet en cause la pertinence à la fois du concept de pouvoir et de la question même de l’« au-delà » du pouvoir dans la mesure où tous deux demeurent prisonniers du régime de la métaphysique. De son point de vue, certains phénomènes identifiés par la philosophie contemporaine – tel celui de l’appel – rendent inopérants ce régime et les concepts (pouvoir, puissance, force, faiblesse) qu’il peut configurer. Délivrés du pouvoir aussi bien que du non-pouvoir, (...) ces phénomènes procèdent de ce que Marion propose d’appeler l’impouvoir. (shrink)

IntroductionAlthough the motor signs of Parkinson’s disease are well defined, nonmotor symptoms, including higher-level language deficits, have also been shown to be frequent in patients with PD. In the present study, we used a lexical decision task to find out whether access to the mental lexicon is impaired in patients with PD, and whether task performance is affected by bradykinesia.Materials and MethodsParticipants were 34 nondemented patients with PD, either without medication or under optimum medication. A total of 19 age-matched control (...) volunteers were also recruited. We recorded reaction times to the LDT and a simple RT task. In each task, stimuli were either visual or auditory. Statistical analyses consisted of repeated-measures analyses of variance and Tukey’s HSD post hoc tests.ResultsIn the LDT, participants with PD both off and on medication exhibited intact access to the mental lexicon in both modalities. In the visual modality, patients off medication were just as fast as controls when identifying real words, but slower when identifying pseudowords. In the visual modality of the control task, RTs for pseudowords were significantly longer for PD patients off medication than for controls, revealing an unexpected but significant lexicality effect in patients that was not observed in the auditory modality. Performances of patients on medication did not differ from those of age-matched controls.DiscussionMotor execution was not slowed in patients with PD either off or on medication, in comparison with controls. Regarding lexical access, patients off medication seemed to have difficulty inhibiting a cognitive-linguistic process when it was not required, and exhibit a specific pseudoword processing deficit in the LDT, which may have been related to impaired lateral word inhibition within the mental lexicon. These deficits seemed to be compensated by medication. (shrink)

This interview given by Luc Foisneau to Florent Guénard is the most complete about the editorial project of the Dictionnaire des philosophes français du XVIIe siècle, published in 2015, Classiques Garnier, Paris.

Probabilistic models have much to offer to philosophy. We continually receive information from a variety of sources: from our senses, from witnesses, from scientific instruments. When considering whether we should believe this information, we assess whether the sources are independent, how reliable they are, and how plausible and coherent the information is. Bovens and Hartmann provide a systematic Bayesian account of these features of reasoning. Simple Bayesian Networks allow us to model alternative assumptions about the nature of the information sources. (...) Measurement of the coherence of information is a controversial matter: arguably, the more coherent a set of information is, the more confident we may be that its content is true, other things being equal. The authors offer a new treatment of coherence which respects this claim and shows its relevance to scientific theory choice. Bovens and Hartmann apply this methodology to a wide range of much discussed issues regarding evidence, testimony, scientific theories, and voting. Bayesian Epistemology is an essential tool for anyone working on probabilistic methods in philosophy, and has broad implications for many other disciplines. (shrink)

This volume is the direct result of a conference in which a number of leading researchers from the fields of artificial intelligence and biology gathered to ...

This article proposes a number of models to examine through which mechanisms a population of autonomous agents could arrive at a repertoire of perceptually grounded categories that is sufficiently shared to allow successful communication. The models are inspired by the main approaches to human categorisation being discussed in the literature: nativism, empiricism, and culturalism. Colour is taken as a case study. Although we take no stance on which position is to be accepted as final truth with respect to human categorisation (...) and naming, we do point to theoretical constraints that make each position more or less likely and we make clear suggestions on what the best engineering solution would be. Specifically, we argue that the collective choice of a shared repertoire must integrate multiple constraints, including constraints coming from communication. Key Words: autonomous agents; colour categorisation; colour naming; connectionism; cultural evolution; genetic evolution; memes; origins of language; self-organisation; semiotic dynamics; symbol grounding. (shrink)

As the need for more diversity in business ethics is becoming more pressing in our global world, we provide an historical study of a Fair Trade (FT) movement, born in rural Mexico. We first focus on the basic assumptions of its founders, which include a worker–priest, Frans van der Hoff, a group of native Indians and local farmers who formed a cooperative, and an NGO, Max Havelaar. We then review both the originalities and challenges of the FT movement and its (...) potential contributions to the current theories and practices in business ethics. (shrink)

The article investigates the relations between Hausdorff and non-Hausdorff manifolds as objects of general relativity. We show that every non-Hausdorff manifold can be seen as a result of gluing together some Hausdorff manifolds. In the light of this result, we investigate a modal interpretation of a non-Hausdorff differential manifold, according to which it represents a bundle of alternative space-times, all of which are compatible with a given initial data set.

The problem of Common Knowledge will be considered in two classes of models: a class K.* of Kripke models and a class S of Scott models. Two modal logic systems will be defined. Those systems, KC and MC, include an axiomatisation of Common Knowledge. We prove determination of each system by the corresponding class of models. MSC: 03B45, 68T25.

Considerations regarding predication in ordinary language as well as the ontology of relations suggest a refinement of the Ontological Square, a conceptual scheme used in many foundational ontologies and which consists of particular substrates as well as their types on the one hand and particular attributes as well as their types on the other hand. First, the distinction between particulars and universals turns out to be one of degree, since particulars are merely the least elements in the subsumption hierarchy. Second, (...) relations may be analysed in terms of roles as ways of participating in events. In consequence, the Logic of the Ontological Square proposed in (Schneider 2009) has to be revised accordingly. (shrink)