Il y eut la fabuleuse croissance économique et industrielle des décennies d'après-guerre. Il y eut l'utopie communiste puis celle, libertaire, des années soixante-dix. Comme tout ce qui pouvait susciter une espérance, tout cela est mort. Il n'est plus question que de pollution gigantesque, de dérèglement climatique, d'invasion par les pauvres, de postures belliqueuses. Tout ce qui peut paraître désespérant est présenté comme inéluctable ; tout ce qui pourrait nourrir une espérance serait illusoire. En conséquence, la politique, cet art du possible, (...) ne suscite plus que scepticisme, dégoût ou indifférence. À défaut d'espoir, les électeurs se tournent en masse vers des populistes. D'autres se réfugient dans un ultracisme religieux. Bref, le temps est aux discours apocalyptiques. Pourtant, il n'est pas impossible de retrouver l'espérance. D'abord, le pire n'est pas inéluctable. À ceux qui proclament que le 'réalisme' impose ceci ou cela, il faut montrer que d'autres voies sont possibles, pourvu que l'on y croie, qu'on veuille réaliser ce que l'on souhaite, qu'on s'en donne les moyens. Et puis, la perte de l'espérance est la voie la plus sûre vers la catastrophe que l'on dit redouter. Croire celle-ci inéluctable, c'est en préparer la venue. Voilà pourquoi l'espérance est un devoir."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article considers two sociological postures in relation to Paul Ricoeur’s anthropology of capable man. The first sociological approach scrutinizes the concept of human capacity from the perspective of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. The second approach elaborated here aims to study the fundamental phenomena of the practical sphere exposed in Philosophie de la volonté. The question of capacities is raised to the upper level, where primitive sensitive experiences are carried out and human beings are still considered to be dependent on vital functions. (...) A reflection will be carried out on the inner certainty of being able to be capable and consubstantial foundation of a practical space integrated by familiarity with the body schema. This study will allow for a critical illumination of social policies currently focused on the activation of individual capacities. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ Le principal objectif de ce texte est d'apporter certaines clarifications par rapport à des problèmes et difficultés entourant l'usage actuel des notions de culture, d'appartenance et de dialogue. L'auteur montre que l'idée selon laquelle on pourrait être prisonnier de sa propre culture découle d'une transformation récente de la signification du concept de culture. Cette idée est critiquée comme étant un mythe, le mythe de la monade culturelle, reposant sur une mécompréhension des rapports entre culture, appartenance et dialogue. L'auteur s'efforce (...) de proposer une meilleure compréhension de ces trois concepts, de façon à éviter toute forme de relativisme radical. ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to shed light on some difficulties and problems related to the current use of the concepts of culture, belonging and dialogue. The author shows that the idea that we could be prisoners of our own culture stems from a recent transformation of the meaning of the concept of culture. This idea is criticized as a myth, the myth of the cultural monad, based on a misunderstanding of the relationship among culture, belonging and dialogue. The author tries to offer a better understanding of these three concepts, in order to avoid any form of radical relativism. (shrink)

We are currently observing a shift in the relevance of ethical concerns regarding security screening systems. Due to technological progress, so my hypothesis goes, more direct consequences that such systems may have on the screening subjects' health and bodily privacy become increasingly unimportant compared to more indirect ones resulting from unrestrained information processing and excessive proliferation. However, a specific technical design of a screening system may help to prevent ethically unacceptable applications.

As a collective action problem, climate change is best tackled by coordination. Most moral philosophers therefore agree on our individual responsibility as political citizens to help establish such coordination. There is disagreement, however, on our individual responsibilities as consumers to reduce emissions before such coordination is established. In this article I argue that from a Kantian deontological perspective we have a perfect duty to refrain from activities that we would not perform if appropriate coordination were established. Moral autonomy means that (...) we do not need to wait for an external lawmaker to tell us what we ought to do. In practice, this means basing our decisions on a shadow price for carbon: if we would not go out for a drive on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle if gas prices were twice as high, we should not do it now. Moreover, we have imperfect duties to reduce emissions by more than our perfect duties require. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and competitiveness. We start with the commonly held view that firm competitiveness is defined by the market. That is, the question of what are the critical competitiveness factors is answered by looking at how companies and financial analysts describe and evaluate a firm. To analyze this, we review the current state of the art on the relationship between CSR and competitiveness. Second, CSR criteria used by financial analysts (...) is identified and compared with company valuation methods. Third, the results of a multi-stakeholder dialogue on CSR and competitiveness of the European financial sector are presented. As a conclusion, we argue that CSR and competitiveness relate through a learning and innovation cycle, where corporate values, policies and practices are permanently defined and re-defined. Thus, we propose that learning takes place as CSR is embedded in business processes, and that once it has been integrated, in turn, it generates innovative practices, and finally, competitiveness. At the end of the paper, we propose that CSR in practice consists of managing inherent paradoxes generated by the tension between CSR and business policies. (shrink)

If the end of exoticism is one of the characteristics of our time, and if classical anthropology based its study of alterity on this exotic distance from the other, is anthropology still possible, and if so, to what end? The author uses these questions as a point of departure for a probing interrogation of ethnological practice, starting with Le;vi-Strauss. The author advocates an anthropology of 'proximity' in place of the usual anthropology of distance. He has studied such emblematic places of (...) Western modernity as the Parisian Metro, or such emblematic 'non-places' as airports, treating as valid anthropological objects phenomena that others might judge less 'pure' or 'significant' than systems of filiation or matrimonial alliance. He outlines an approach to anthropology that focuses on negotiating the social meanings we and others use in making sense of the world, and on the processes of identification that create the difference between same and other. (shrink)

Continues Augé's critical exploration of contemporary modernity with an examination of the role of dreams, myth and fiction in the age of satellite TV and the Internet.

Depuis quelques années, les réseaux sociaux et les usages qu'ils nourrissent ont pris une place significative au sein de la galaxie Internet. Parmi ces réseaux, ceux qui pratiquent la gratuité pour les utilisateurs finals n'ont pas encore stabilisé leur modèle économique et ce, malgré les audiences dont ils bénéficient (Facebook, par exemple). Pour ces réseaux, le défi est désormais de convertir leur succès d'estime en espèces sonnantes et trébuchantes ; en d'autres termes, de mettre leurs capacités de ciblage et de (...) filtrage des internautes, et des communautés que ces derniers forment, au service d'annonceurs solvables. Comme le montre l'exemple de aka'aki, réseau social géolocalisé sur l'Internet mobile, la voie est étroite et le succès non encore garanti. La défiance croissante des internautes à l'endroit de la ' marchandisation ' des données privées constitue la limite principale du ' business model ' en gestation. (shrink)

Cognitive ethology is the comparative, evolutionary, and ecological study of nonhuman animal (hereafter animal) minds, including thought processes, beliefs, rationality, information processing, and consciousness. It is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of science that is attracting much attention from researchers in numerous, diverse disciplines, including those interested in animal welfare. Cognitive ethology can trace its beginnings to the writings of Charles Darwin, an anecdotal cognitivist, and some of his contemporaries and disciples. Their approach incorporated appeals to evolutionary theory, interests in (...) mental continuity, concerns with individual and intraspecific variation, interests in the worlds of the animals themselves, close associations with natural history, and attempts to learn more about the behavior of animals in conditions that are as close as possible to the natural environment where selection has occurred. They also relied on anecdote and anthropomorphism to inform and motivate more rigorous study. In addition, cognitive ethologists are frequently concerned with the diversity of solutions that living organisms have found for common problems. They also emphasize broad taxonomic comparisons and do not focus on a few select representatives of limited taxa. Many people inform their views of cognitive ethology by appealing to the same studies over and over again (usually those done on nonhuman primates) and ignore the fact that there are many other animals who also show interesting patterns of behavior that lend themselves to cognitive studies. (shrink)

Giorgio Colli ha sido uno de los autores contemporáneos que más han contribuido a revisar la figura de Apolo, entendiéndola como una potencia expresiva vinculada tanto a los designios asociados a su arco como a los coligados a su lira. Una ambigüedad expresiva que examinamos en este artículo y que, veremos, articulará simbólicamente la reforma histórica que Colli detectará en el paso de la sabiduría oral a la filosofía griega escrita, pero también la que se producirá entre una ontología-política arcaica (...) de ámbito contingente y una politeia, ya clásica, ligada a la necesidad, y de carácter retórico, estetizado y comunicativo. (shrink)

This article explores a training need common to every stage of a teacher’s career : the need to be accompanied. It takes an integrative perspective on the process of the situated learning of teaching, throughout the career, from the pre-service practicums to the period of entrance in the profession then to the in-service training. Providing a reflexive accompaniment of the teachers’ practical experiences is here presented as a central factor for linking the training and the work environments. The first part (...) of the article exposes our conception of a reflexive accompaniment and justifies its importance for the evolution of the teaching practices. Then, we describe how we were convinced of that importance through our role as directors of two teacher training devices, one in Switzerland, one in Quebec. Finally, the third part of the article is devoted to the training of the persons that practice such an accompaniment. (shrink)

Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. Many of these services are provided outside the borders of the land where they are produced. This article investigates who is entitled to these non-excludable ecosystem services from a libertarian perspective. Taking a right-libertarian perspective, it is concluded that the beneficiaries generally hold the right to use non-excludable ecosystem services and the right to landowners not converting ecosystems. Landowners are only at liberty to convert ecosystems if they appropriated their land before (...) any beneficiary used the services and converted the ecosystems before or shortly after the beneficiaries started using the services. This means that the beneficiaries generally hold the right to compensation payments by the landowners in the event of service losses, instead of the landowners holding the right to payments for ecosystem services by the beneficiaries. Taking a left-libertarian perspective, it is concluded that landowners ought to pay for the non-excludable ecosystem services lost as a result of their activities as well as beneficiaries paying for the non-excludable ecosystem services they use. These payments are not made mutually, however, but to a central authority that distributes the returns to the community on an equal per capita basis. (shrink)

In this article, the relationship between philosophy and history of education is delved into. First, it is noted that both disciplines have diverged from each other over the last few decades to become relatively autonomous subsectors within the pedagogical sciences, each with its own discourses, its own expositional characteristics, its own channels of communication, and its own networks. From the perspective of the history of education, it seems as though more affiliation has been sought with the science of history. The (...) history of education, in any event, has in the past few years become more historicizing and less ‘educationalizing’. According to the author, (who is not a philosopher of education) there are signs that indicate that such an analogous line of reasoning, mutatis mutandis, also applies for the philosophy of education. Does this mean that there are no longer any bridges from the one area to the other or that none are possible? Probably not. In the second portion, it is shown that the modern or even postmodern ‘new cultural history of education’, with its often ironical and demythologizing traits uses or can use a considerable amount of ‘grand theory’ (à la Foucault). Indeed, the development of an adequate conceptual apparatus that also has to cope with the problem of ‘presentism’ assumes a constant dialogue with the past and for this a philosophical‐interpretative (casu quo, hermeneutic) approach is still the best situated. Inversely, the Foucauldian perspective shows that philosophy in general and philosophy of education in particular equally hardly do without history. Within the reflection on pedagogical praxis, the historical and the philosophical thus probably will continue to rely on each other—if only as allies against the dominance of short‐winded empirical‐quantitative research. Still, it would be naive to think that, from this possible alliance, the fragmentation of historically developed knowledge systems with their own sociological and institutional foundation of scientific activities can be rectified in a trice. (shrink)

This essay critiques Professor Martha Nussbaum's book, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality . Nussbaum's thesis is that the entire tradition of religious liberty in America can be both best understood and justified by recourse to the overarching principle of equal respect —that “[a]ll citizens have equal rights and deserve equal respect from the government under which they live.” Nussbaum insists that equal respect pervades the tradition and that all other values of religious liberty are (...) subordinate to it. She examines various free-exercise and establishment issues in light of this principle, concluding that the tradition of religious equality is under threat and calling for renewed vigilance in its defense. This essay criticizes Nussbaum's elevation of the principle of equal respect to supreme normative status. It claims that Nussbaum's single-minded focus on equal respect distorts and misunderstands the conflicts actually at issue in many religious liberty disputes. The essay focuses specifically on the inadequacies of her assessment of two prominent religious liberty cases, one in the free exercise and the other in the established context. This essay concludes that there are reasons for deep skepticism about Nussbaum's approach as a comprehensive theory of the religion clauses. (shrink)

The diversity of contemporary "capitalisms" underscores the need to supplant the amorphous concept of structure with more precise concepts, particularly institutions and networks. All institutions entail both embodied and relational aspects. Institutions are relational insofar as they map obligatory patterns of "getting by and getting along"—institutional orders—that steer stable social fields over time. Institutions are simultaneously embodied as institutional paradigms, part of a larger bodily agency Pierre Bourdieu called habitus. Institutions are in turn tightly coupled to networks between various people (...) based on, but not reducible to, strategic interests. Yet social interaction sometimes exceeds institutional boundaries, giving rise to disjunctive fields and underscoring the prominence of institutional failures in the unfolding of antagonistic relations such as warfare. Such disjunctive fields can be tracked in relation to some transnational networks at the global level without assuming developmental convergence. This last point underscores the meaning of neoclassical sociology, which eschews assumptions of developmental convergence at the global level. (shrink)