La théorie lockienne de la perception a été lue tantôt comme une forme de représentationnalisme, tantôt comme relevant d'un réalisme direct n'impliquant pas d'entité intermédiaire entre l'esprit et les choses. Cet article entreprend de clarifier cette question à partir des analyses de l'Essai sur la distinction et la confusion des idées. Celles-ci interrogent à la fois la nature de l'idée comme image et le fait qu'elle n'est déterminée que lorsque l'esprit lui donne un nom. Pour faire comprendre ce dernier point, (...) Locke utilise la métaphore de l'anamorphose en peinture, et plus particulièrement de l'anamorphose cylindrique. En reliant cette métaphore aux théories de la perspective du XVIIe siècle, à la camera obscura de l'esprit, et enfin à l'optique du XVIIe siècle, l'article parvient à plusieurs conclusions. Faire de l'idée une image ne conduit jamais Locke à voir en elle un objet qui s'interpose entre l'esprit et les choses. Une idée comme celle de sense data est étrangère à sa pensée. Si Locke ne met jamais en doute la réalité du monde extérieur, c'est que pour lui l'idée nous donne d'emblée accès à une extériorité, qu'il s'agit de déterminer. Enfin, la perception lockienne ne relève pas d'un modèle sémantique dont l'origine serait à trouver dans Descartes et qui préparerait celui de l'empirisme du XVIIIe siècle, faisant de l'idée un signe. Elle se rapprocherait plutôt, paradoxalement, de l'idée austinienne du silence des sens. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wisdom's Flowering Cherry:William Johnston's Charismatic ZenLucien Miller Click for larger view View full resolutionIn 1976, when I was about to leave Taiwan after a sabbatical in Taiwan, I happened upon a tattered poster on a telephone pole: [End Page 133]CHRISTIAN-ZEN RETREAT DIRECTOR: WILLIAM JOHNSTON, S.J. ST. BENEDICT'S CONVENT, TAMSUI, TAIWANSunday-FridayI knew that Father Johnston was the well-known Irish Jesuit theologian at Sophia University in Tokyo, widely honored for his (...) studies of mysticism and his major contributions to the development of Buddhist-Christian encounter. I was totally intrigued. Instantly, I decided to attend the retreat.1day oneI was late when I arrived at Saint Benedict's chapel, where the retreat was underway, announcing my presence with a mighty thud of its door to a full gathering of retreatants sitting silently in the pews. Suddenly, here I was, the sole layman among a group of Catholic priests and sisters, most of them American-born, who were serving as missionaries in Taiwan. I looked and felt like a misfit, especially since Father Johnston had to wait to begin the retreat because of me. The chapel setting was Far Eastern in its simplicity and decor. Square in shape, it had a low altar in its center, about a foot and a half high. A plain, muted oil lamp hung to one side, softly gleaming in the semidarkness of late afternoon. Tatami mats and cushions were placed on the spacious floor around the front and two sides of the altar, so that after today's introduction, participants could sit on cushions according to zazen form and face the altar.As I dashed into a pew and looked up, I experienced a Catholic's shock. To my utter surprise, Father Johnston appeared in black Japanese yukata robes, instead of a priest's black suit. He bowed deeply before the altar, where he placed the Eucharist in a ciborium in plain view instead of in the tabernacle where it belonged. Turning to face us, he sat zazen style with his legs crossed on a Zen cushion with the ciborium behind his back. There was no "In the Name of the Father" or "let us pray." We simply maintained a long silence. In imitation of Japanese monks, many of the religious women and men retreatants were wearing robes, while the priests among them had on cassocks. Everyone but me had dressed appropriately for a Zen sesshin. I guessed many were fellow neophytes like me, as we all awkwardly sat zazen with legs crossed as best we could. We would quickly discover together that, for the uninitiated Westerner, zazen would initially prove a painful affair.Father Johnston was partly bald with longish hair at the temples, bushy white eyebrows, and wore a gray-brown beard and radiant smile. While born in Ireland and definitely Irish, you could tell by his clothing, carriage, and bearing that he had been profoundly touched by Japanese culture and language through his long years in Japan. Nonetheless, you readily knew by his sparkling blue eyes amidst his ruddy complexion that the Irish remained in the Japanese.I had brought my Zen sitting cushion all the way from my home in Pelham, MA, to Taiwan, and had practiced daily morning zazen in our Japanese-styled residence while teaching and researching at Tunghai University near Taichung. But feeling late and a bit shy about being up front with esteemed Father Johnston and among the clergy and [End Page 134] religious, I placed my cushion at the back of the chapel, sat down, and crossed my legs. Father Johnston noticed that I was off by myself, and came over. "Good," he laughed, complimenting my sitting posture. "But pretty hard to sit on a marble floor!"He explained to the participants that the schedule he set would be followed beginning the next morning, and that it was entirely voluntary. You could practice crosslegged zazen on your cushion and mat on the chapel floor or sit in the pews. The general atmosphere would be both disciplined, Zen-style, and relaxed. "Please keep silence at all times," he requested. Morning zazen was very early—from... (shrink)

L’alpinisme, pour Pierre-Henri Frangne, est d’abord une expérience. Spécialiste de philosophie de l’art, professeur à l’université de Rennes, auteur d’ouvrages sur la photographie et le cinéma, Monteverdi et Mallarmé, il pratique cette activité tous les étés depuis près d’une vingtaine d’années. Ses domaines de recherche l’ont déjà amené à écrire sur la montagne comme objet esthétique et sur la photographie de montagne. Mais ce nouvel ouvrage est cette fois d’abord une interrogation, à la pre...

This article offers a novel account of a key concept in Hannah Arendt’s political thought: amor mundi. In political theory’s ethical turn, theorists have increasingly turned to amor mundi as a source of ethical guidance and inspiration for politics. However, in doing so, they have elided Arendt’s distinct understanding of care. This article recovers Arendt’s understanding of amor mundi as care for the world by reconstructing the central concerns of her dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and tracing them to the (...) “Crisis” essays of Between Past and Future. It shows that amor mundi emerges in the dissertation as part of a question: if love is our fundamental orientation toward the world, how can we love the world without instrumentalizing it? The two “Crisis” essays provide the following answer: if love is to avoid—and perhaps militate against—the instrumentalization of the world, it must take the form of care. Following this analysis, this article contends that the contribution of amor mundi to the ethical turn is best understood, not as the ethos needed to guide action in the political realm, but as a key pre- or nonpolitical ethos needed to conserve the world where politics takes place—and thus the very possibility of politics. (shrink)

Praised as a panacea for resolving all societal issues, and self-evidently presupposed as technological innovation, the concept of innovation has become the emblem of our age. This is especially reflected in the context of the European Union, where it is considered to play a central role in both strengthening the economy and confronting the current environmental crisis. The pressing question is how technological innovation can be steered into the right direction. To this end, recent frameworks of Responsible Innovation (RI) focus (...) on how to enable outcomes of innovation processes to become societally desirable and ethically acceptable. However, questions with regard to the technological nature of these innovation processes are rarely raised. For this reason, this paper raises the following research question: To what extent is RI possible in the current age, where the concept of innovation is predominantly presupposed as technological innovation? On the one hand, we depart from a post-phenomenological perspective to evaluate the possibility of RI in relation to the particular technological innovations discussed in the RI literature. On the other hand, we emphasize the central role innovation plays in the current age, and suggest that the presupposed concept of innovation projects a techno-economic paradigm. In doing so, we ultimately argue that in the attempt to steer innovation, frameworks of RI are in fact steered by the techno-economic paradigm inherent in the presupposed concept of innovation. Finally, we account for what implications this has for the societal purpose of RI. (shrink)

Recent research on thick terms like “rude” and “friendly” has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like “friendly” and “courageous” can be more easily canceled than the evaluative content of negative terms like “rude” and “selfish”. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick (...) terms but also for thin terms such as “good” or “bad” (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect indicates a pervasive asymmetry between positive and negative evaluative terms. (shrink)

" Au gre des rangements a perte de vue de ma bibliotheque, j'ai fini par mettre ensemble Heraclite, Zhuangzi, Goethe, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Bachelard et Rimbaud. Leur point commun, c'est la comprehension (" prendre avec ") de la nature, qui leur donne l'image la plus sensee de l'existence : pour mesurer notre place dans l'univers, il faut d'abord entendre la place de l'univers en nous. Or cette imbrication semble oubliee voire gommee par la plupart des systemes philosophiques. Faut-il voir la quelque (...) rapport avec la destruction acceleree de la planete ou, parallelement, avec le manque d'enthousiasme general qui nous gagne? La nature, il en reste encore assez pour s'en meler. Alors, decouvrons le secret des vieilles cosmogonies et sollicitons nos auteurs un par un, les litterateurs et les visionnaires, la poignee de philosophes interesses, puis les erudits de l'ecologie si pleins de verdeur - afin de moissonner les recettes d'une attitude plus confortable. Elles risquent de surprendre. Car, a force de cerner l'intelligence du monde, on va voir que c'est un mystere a double tranchant. ". (shrink)

Ce dictionnaire encyclopédique embrasse, avec ses treize chapitres, la quasi-totalité du domaine, allant des problématiques à la communication politique en passant par les concepts transversaux, l'intelligence artificielle, les sciences cognitives, les mass media et le droit de la communication. Ordre alphabétique à l'intérieur des chapitres. [SDM].

Dans quelle mesure les techniques des instruments modernes d'observation et d'imagerie optique ou numérique développées en physique, biologie et médecine transforment-elles les conceptions philosophiques de l'observation, et le rapport entre cette dernière et la théorie? La philosophie des sciences a conduit ces dernières décennies une réflexion sur le rôle des instruments dans l'observation en s'appuyant essentiellement sur des appareils traditionnels comme les microscopes et télescopes. Le...

In this landmark work of economic sociology, Lucien Karpik introduces the theory and practical tools needed to analyze markets for singularities. Singularities are goods and services that cannot be studied by standard methods because they are multidimensional, incommensurable, and of uncertain quality. Examples include movies, novels, music, artwork, fine wine, lawyers, and doctors. Valuing the Unique provides a theoretical framework to explain this important class of products and markets that for so long have eluded neoclassical economics. With this innovative (...) theory--called the economics of singularities--Karpik shows that, because of the uncertainty and the highly subjective valuation of singularities, these markets are necessarily equipped with what he calls "judgment devices"--such as labels, brands, guides, critics, and rankings--which provide consumers with the credible knowledge needed to make reasonable choices. He explains why these markets are characterized by the primacy of competition by qualities over competition by prices, and he identifies the conditions under which singularities are constructed or are in danger of losing their uniqueness. After demonstrating how combinations of the numerous and multiform judgment devices can be used to identify different market models, Karpik applies his analytical tools to the functioning of a large number of actual markets, including fine wines, movies, luxury goods, pop music, and legal services. (shrink)

Both Plato and Confucius were deeply concerned with moral cultivation and political leadership, topics that were inherently gendered in ancient patriarchal societies. I show that both thinkers focused their discussions on concepts that were associated with male aristocratic ideals of gentlemanliness. Yet while Confucian texts emphasize moral behavior and ritual to beautify the male body (shen 身), Plato focuses on the cultivation of a non-physical soul, which women also possess. Various theories have been proposed to explain this difference in their (...) understandings of the self, but when we bear the gendered nature of their inquiry in mind, an important difference takes center stage: for Socrates, the male body is an object of sexual desire. This paper highlights the influence of homoerotic desire in Plato’s unique approach to gentlemanliness, offering a new perspective for comparing these philosophers' views on gender, cultivation, and leadership. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of two corpus studies investigating the discourse surrounding conspiracy theories and genuine theories. The results of these studies show that conspiracy theories lack the epistemic and scientific standing characteristic of theories more generally. Instead, our findings indicate that conspiracy theories are spread in a manner that resembles the dissemination of rumors and falsehoods. Based on these empirical results, we argue that it is time for both re-engineering conspiracy theory and for relabeling "conspiracy theory". We propose (...) relabelling conspiracy theories as either "conspiracy stories" or "conspiracy narratives" to more accurately convey their true nature. (shrink)

In this reissue, originally published in English in 1973, French philosopher Lucien Goldmann turns his attention to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the great age of liberalism and individualism and analyses the ‘mental structures’ of the outlook of the _philosophes, _who showed that the _ancien regime _and the privileges of the Church were irrational anachronisms. In assessing the strengths and limitations of individualism, Goldmann considers the achievements and limitations of the Enlightenment. He discusses the views of Hegel and (...) Marx and examines the relation between liberal scepticism and traditional Christianity to point the way to the possible reconciliation of the two seemingly incompatible ‘world visions’ of East and West today. (shrink)

De quoi peut-il s'agir lorsqu'on entreprend de penser les représentations? Pourquoi leur accorder un intérêt épistémologique aussi important qu'il faille s'y mettre à plusieurs dans le cadre d'un ouvrage collectif? A quoi peut bien se destiner cette synergie? C'est pour pouvoir résoudre le problème de pertinence et de sens que pose la réflexion sur les représentations que des univeristaires camerounais ont accepté de collaborer à cet ouvrage.

Ce dictionnaire propose de réunir des portraits de brutes et de mégères dans le but de s'interroger sur les causes et les raisons de cette perception négative. Pourquoi certaines figures évoquent-elles la méchanceté? Que peut nous dire cette méchanceté dénoncée de nous-mêmes et de l'époque qui l'a engendrée? Il s'agira de retracer les portraits de ceux et celles ayant marqué l'Histoire et la fiction par leur cruauté, leur perfidie, leur machiavélisme, leur art de la dissimulation ou de la manipulation. S'attarder (...) sur la méchanceté et ses possibles, décliner les façons de la penser et de la vivre, de la subir ou de l'exercer, c'est s'intéresser à une facette peu valorisée de la sensibilité d'autant plus importante que chaque individu, de près ou de loin, est amené, un jour, à se montrer méchant. La méchanceté et ses manifestations, qu'elles soient conceptuelles ou biographiques, nous invitent donc à une introspection globale, à une immersion dans les affres de la noirceur des âmes dont la bouche n'est autre que celle de la méchanceté Le champ de cette entreprise est vaste et recouvre notamment : La Malice, le Machiavélisme, Orangina Rouge, Barbe Bleue, le cinéma d'Alfred Hitchcock, Marie-Antoinette, la Mauvaise conscience, Gilles de Rais, Harry Powell (La nuit du chasseur) Salomé-Hérodiade, Dracula, Tatie Danielle, Marie Tudor, la Perversité, la Mégère Grecque, Dark Vador, Mildred Ratched (Vol au-dessus d'un nid de coucou)... (shrink)