In this short note I shall address a problem of word order in a passage of Petronius’Cena Trimalchionisby pointing out an attractive variant in the keycodex Traguriensis, which has been neglected thus far.

A masterful series of interviews with Levinas, conducted by French philosopher Philippe Nemo, which provides a succinct presentation of Levinas's philosophy.

Qu'est-ce que la musique? A-t-elle un sens, exprime-t-elle des sentiments, des pensées, ou n'est-elle qu'un jeu formel sur les notes? A ces questions, philosophes et esthéticiens n'ont apporté jusqu'à présent que des réponses imprécises et contradictoires. Le présent ouvrage propose donc un détour méthodologique : narrer une vie musicale entière afin qu'on puisse comprendre quels liens concrets la musique entretient avec l'environnement humain, social, physique d'un sujet, et quelle est la relation entre la maturation spirituelle de ce sujet et les (...) différents types de musique qu'il découvre et savoure à chaque étape de son " chemin ". Ce qui permet d'esquisser, dans une seconde partie, une philosophie de la musique où sont analysées les régions de l'être auxquelles la musique nous donne accès : vie, monde, psychologie, grandes questions métaphysiques. La conclusion est que la musique est un logos à part entière ayant vocation à " montrer " ce que, selon Wittgenstein, le langage verbal doit " taire ". La musique est partie intégrante de la pensée humaine. (shrink)

Après avoir rappelé le contexte scientifique de ma rencontre avec Gilles Fauconnier, le but de l’article est de situer la notion de blending sémantique entre espaces et domaines d’expérience telle qu’elle est définie dans son travail par rapport à celle de mobilisation «radiale» d’un scénario morphémique dans des domaines disjoints. Dans un premier temps, elle l’est à partir de la façon dont cette question est traitée chez Gréa (1992) en termes de distinction entre blendings générés par des métaphores filées et (...) catachrèses sans blendings, en montrant que ces dernières relèvent d’emplois radiaux de présupposés morphémiques. Dans un second temps, il est montré que s’agissant du lexique, et non de discours, les blendings de Lakoff (e.g. «conversation is war») ne relèvent pas quant à eux de métaphores filées et peuvent être des artefacts théoriques, et que les métaphores non filées peuvent bien elles être un retour au scénario morphémique. Il est enfin montré que la polymorphie des morp... (shrink)

This is the introduction to the symposium on Maxime Lepoutre, Democratic Speech in Divided Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). The symposium contains articles by Paul Billingham, Rachel Fraser, and Michael Hannon, and a response by the author.

Under the Roman Empire, in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Jews asked for and sometimes obtained privileges of immunity for their civic and imperial charges. They also asked for privileges to practice their laws (Shabbat, circumcision...). According to some historians, these requests for privileges set them apart from the civic community. This article suggests that privileges played no role in the political marginalisation of the Jews, as im-munitas was not necessarily the negative of com-munitas.

In an ideal democracy, people from all walks of life would come together to talk meaningfully and respectfully about politics. But we do not live in an ideal democracy. In contemporary democracies, which are marked by deep social divisions, different groups for the most part avoid talking to each other. And when they do talk to each other, their speech often seems to be little more than a vehicle for rage, hatred, and deception. -/- Democratic Speech in Divided Times argues (...) that we should nevertheless not give up on the ideal of democratic public speech. Drawing on the resources of political theory, epistemology, and philosophy of language, this book develops a sustained account of the norms that should govern public discourse in deeply divided circumstances. Should we try to find common ground when we talk to our political opponents, even though they seem unreasonable? Should we refrain from expressing anger, if we want to get things done? How can we use our speech to fight hate speech and disinformation? And is it even possible to speak to 'the other side,' in settings where different groups dislike one another, live apart from one another, and don't know much about one another? By tackling these questions, Lepoutre demonstrates that, when governed by the right set of norms, public speech can be a powerful force for good even amidst profound social divisions. (shrink)

According to an influential objection, which Martha Nussbaum has powerfully restated, expressing anger in democratic public discourse is counterproductive from the standpoint of justice. To resist this challenge, this article articulates a crucial yet underappreciated sense in which angry discourse is epistemically productive. Drawing on recent developments in the philosophy of emotion, which emphasize the distinctive phenomenology of emotion, I argue that conveying anger to one’s listeners is epistemically valuable in two respects: first, it can direct listeners’ attention to elusive (...) morally relevant features of the situation; second, it enables them to register injustices that their existing evaluative categories are not yet suited to capturing. Thus, when employed skillfully, angry speech promotes a greater understanding of existing injustices. This epistemic role is indispensable in highly divided societies, where the injustices endured by some groups are often invisible to, or misunderstood by, other... (shrink)

Faced with hate speech, oppressed groups can use their own speech to respond to their verbal oppressors. This “counterspeech,” however, sometimes itself takes on a hateful form. This paper explores the moral standing of such “hateful counterspeech.” Is there a fundamental moral asymmetry between hateful counterspeech, and the hateful utterances of dominant or oppressive groups? Or are claims that such an asymmetry exists indefensible? I argue for an intermediate position. There _is_ a key moral asymmetry between these two forms of (...) speech. But, this asymmetry notwithstanding, hateful counterspeech is capable of enacting serious harms—and so, contrary to what many legal theorists have argued, it is in principle an appropriate object of legal regulation. I begin by considering the central argument for thinking that hateful counterspeech is not seriously troubling. This argument holds that oppressed groups lack authority—and, by extension, “speaker power.” Yet this argument, I suggest, sits in tension with the fact that low-status members of dominant groups can, through their utterances, seriously harm members of oppressed groups. Philosophers of language have developed sophisticated arguments to explain this last phenomenon: they have argued that speaker power is relativised to particular jurisdictions; that it can be acquired dynamically in local settings; and that it is socially dispersed. I argue that, in light of these arguments, it appears that hateful counterspeech, too, can generate serious harms. Nevertheless, I show that this conclusion is compatible with recognising a crucial moral asymmetry between hateful counterspeech and the hate speech of oppressors. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 40-78, Winter 2020.

The notions of perceptual normativity and optimality have generated much discussion in the last decade or so in the literature on Merleau-Ponty. Husserl’s position on the topic has been far less extensively investigated. Surprisingly, however, Husserl wrote a great deal about the question of perceptual optimality. Not only are there a considerable number of important passages scattered throughout the manuscripts, the archive also contains a few important full texts on precisely this issue. Given the role of fulfillment for Husserl’s concept (...) of intentionality, this should not really come as a surprise, since the teleological nature of the fulfillment structure terminates in an experience of the optimum. Hence, however marginal this topic might seem at first glance, reflecting on it rapidly leads us to the heart of Husserl’s project and sheds further light on his conception of intentional experience. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature, it is customary to think of perception as being assessable with respect to epistemic norms. E.g., the whole discussion around disjunctivism, which is now often considered to be the dominant, if not the default position in philosophy of perception, is, by and large, framed and motivated by epistemological concerns about truth and falsity. This book argues that perception is normative in another, more fundamental sense. Perception is governed by norms that Doyon calls perceptual, that is, immanent (...) to its own structure. This does not mean that perceptual norms are cut-off from external facts; it rather means that they are constitutive moments of our experience of these facts. Perceptual norms are, in that sense, constitutive or enabling norms in that they establish what perception is. To articulate this view, he draws in the repertoire of the phenomenological tradition, in the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular. Like Kant, both phenomenologists were concerned with the question of the unity of experience and sought to identify the conditions of possibility for having a perception, which they conceive not as a mere sensible experience of the outer world, but as a continuous and meaningful experience of reality. Unlike Kant, however, neither phenomenologist immediately identified these conditions with cognition or epistemic criteria. For both phenomenologists, perception has its own standards, its own conditions of possibility. Perception obtains when it unfolds concordantly or coherently; and when the perceptual progression corresponds to or is in harmony with one's goal or interest, perception can also be said to be optimal. From the phenomenological point of view, concordance (Einstimmigkeit) and optimality (Optimalität) are the two basic perceptual norms governing over perceptual experience, and much of the book is devoted to clarifying their meaning and to address the philosophical consequences that follow from this insight. (shrink)

Public opinion research has shown that voters accept many falsehoods about politics. This observation is widely considered troubling for democracy—and especially participatory ideals of democracy. I argue that this influential narrative is nevertheless flawed, because it misunderstands the nature of political understanding. Drawing on philosophical examinations of scientific modelling, I demonstrate that accepting falsehoods within one’s model of political reality is compatible with—and indeed can positively enhance—one’s understanding of that reality. Thus, the observation that voters accept many political falsehoods does (...) not necessarily establish that they lack political understanding. I then address three worries: that voters cannot generally engage in such political modelling; that political modelling obscures facts that are crucial to political understanding; and that successful political modelling would require knowing that one’s model contains falsehoods. My responses reveal how, going forward, we should measure political ignorance; and they highlight the standing importance of participatory democracy. (shrink)

On trouvera dans cet ouvrage les principaux jalons du parcours philosophique étonnant de Maxime Chastaing (1913-1997) qui culmine dans une psycholinguistique, et même une psychophonétique, une étude des interactions sociales, enfin une théorisation du pacte romanesque liant l'écrivain à ses lecteurs.

It will be argued that the virtual agent (VA) can be characterized using phenomenological descriptive tools and other conceptual means within related paradigms of the analysis of subjectivity. From such a point of view, the main features of VA are: •VA is constituted by its communicative valencies; •VA is intentionally active in perception, and it is the case also at the intersubjective level; •VA establishes and supports the truth of its statements, which come out as a creative boundary, an "unquestionable (...) point of contact" between virtual "I" and virtual reality; •communicative intersubjectivity in cyberspace is better describedthrough recursive ontologies. Peirce's conception of the Subject as a species of semiosis can be helpful to clarify these points. Unlike the traditional concept of subject where communication stands at a level resting on an underlying level of being, for Peirce communication is inherent in mind itself. Along these lines, I argue for the open multivalence of the signified as overdetermined by communicative acts. (shrink)

According to the influential “expressive” argument for hate speech laws, legal restrictions on hate speech are justified, in significant part, because they powerfully express opposition to hate speech. Yet the expressive argument faces a challenge: why couldn't we communicate opposition to hate speech via counterspeech, rather than bans? I argue that the expressive argument cannot address this challenge satisfactorily. Specifically, I examine three considerations that purport to explain bans’ expressive distinctiveness: considerations of strength; considerations of directness; and considerations of complicity. (...) These considerations either fail to establish that bans are expressively superior to counterspeech, or presuppose that bans successfully deter hate speech. This result severely undercuts the expressive argument's appeal. First, contrary to what its proponents suggest, this argument fails to circumvent the protracted empirical controversies surrounding bans’ effectiveness as deterrents. Second, the expressive argument appears redundant, because bans are expressively distinctive only insofar as hate speech is already suppressed. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 106-146, Spring 2024.

Maxime F. Giguère Cet article propose une nouvelle stratégie pour écarter la conclusion sceptique, mise de l’avant par Thomas Szasz, selon laquelle la psychiatrie est illégitime. La conclusion sceptique repose sur une démarcation radicale entre troubles mentaux et somatiques. Afin de minimiser cette démarcation, Jerome Wakefield emploie une analyse conceptuelle stipulant que les troubles mentaux et somatiques sont tous les deux des dysfonctions préjudiciables. De récentes critiques ont toutefois montré que son analyse bute sur la difficulté pratique de distinguer (...) les fonctions normales des dysfonctions. En raison de ce problème, l’analyse de Wakefield ne permet pas d’écarter la conclusion sceptique. Une nouvelle stratégie ne nécessitant pas de résoudre le problème reconnu par ces critiques s’annonce alors préférable pour écarter la conclusion sceptique. (shrink)

Human activity is permeated by norms of all sorts: moral norms provide the 'code' for what we ought to do, norms of logic regulate how we ought to reason, scientific norms set the standards for what counts as knowledge, legal norms determine what is lawfully permitted and what isn't, aesthetic norms establish canons of beauty and shape artistic trends and practices, and socio-cultural norms provide criteria for what counts as tolerable, just, praiseworthy, or unacceptable in a community or milieu. Given (...) the diversity of norm-governed phenomena prevailing in our everyday experience, it is not surprising that the question of normativity has recently generated important debates in philosophy. However, the more specific question concerning the nature and function of 'norms in perceptual experience' has received comparatively little attention. This volume brings together scholars from philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, and phenomenology to explore this question. (shrink)

This present book explores recent advances in modeling discourse processes, in particular, new approaches aimed at understanding pathological language behavior specific to schizophrenia. The contributors examine the modeling paradigm of formal semantics, which falls within the scope of both linguistics and logic while providing overlapping links with other fields such as philosophy of language and cognitive psychology. This book is based on results presented during the series of workshops on Coherence and Discourse organized by SLAM, a project developed to systemize (...) the study of pathological language processing by taking an overarching interdisciplinary approach combining psychology, linguistics, computer science and philosophy. The principle focus is on conversations produced by people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. The contributions come from young and experienced researchers, and invited speakers. The book appeals to likeminded students and researchers. (shrink)

Les questions de la pauvreté volontaire, de la mendicité, ou encore de la falsification de la monnaie ayant déjà donné lieu à plusieurs études directes, nous nous proposons de les aborder par le biais, jusqu’à présent négligé, des gestes effectués par les Cyniques à l’égard des biens matériels : prendre et jeter. S’élabore, ainsi, une gestualité économique du Cynisme, qui exprime à la fois une critique éthique de l’économie et un mode de vie philosophique incarné. Classification JEL : B11.

During the nineteenth century, German philosophy developed from a type of general knowledge to an academic discipline at the university. Changes across disciplines to the philosophy of science and psychological surveys created new challenges for the place and purpose of philosophy in the educational system. The content of logic courses for secondary schools (Gymnasiums) was centred on the dissociation of nature and the scale of logic. In this paper, I will examine a number of projects for teaching philosophy at the (...) secondary school level from new humanism to reduce philosophical to philological concerns about different projects offered by Niethammer, Hegel and Herbart. Then, I will focus on the most successful – Adolf Trendelenburg’s Elements of Aristotle’s Logic (1st edition of 1836). This work is a compilation of the logical texts of Aristotle, and for as long as sixty years, it was an official textbook in Prussian secondary schools. The aim of the paper is to show how the rethinking of Aristotle’s heritage affected the theoretical and ideological expectations of propaedeutic courses and transformed the image of logic as a philosophical discipline. (shrink)

The main theme of Steve Crowell’s excellent Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger is ‘the connection between normativity and meaning’ (p. 1), a central issue in both Husserl’s and...

Les zombies sont partout, au cinéma, à la télévision, dans nos rues, chez notre libraire. Grotesques et terrifiants, ils pourraient n’être qu’une tendance kitsch, un divertissement à la mode. Derrière sa démarche traînante et ridicule se cache pourtant une figure symptomatique de notre époque. Peur de l’épidémie ou fantasme de la catastrophe, aliénation moderne ou fascination pour la violence : le zombie et le monde apocalyptique qu’il crée nous parlent d’abord, intimement, de nous-mêmes. Par l’obscène exhibition de la mort, l’ultime (...) tabou de la société occidentale, il brise les limites de la condition humaine : celles de la conscience, de la vie, de la civilisation. Mais surtout, il trahit un fantasme émergeant dans notre culture, celui d’en finir. (shrink)

Cognitive test batteries are widely used in diverse research fields, such as cognitive training, cognitive disorder assessment, or brain mechanism understanding. Although they need flexibility according to their usage objectives, most test batteries are not available as open-source software and are not be tuned by researchers in detail. The present study introduces an open-source cognitive test battery to assess attention and memory, using a javascript library, p5.js. Because of the ubiquitous nature of dynamic attention in our daily lives, it is (...) crucial to have tools for its assessment or training. For that purpose, our test battery includes seven cognitive tasks, common in cognitive science literature. By using the test battery, we conducted an online experiment to collect the benchmark data. Results conducted on 2 separate days showed the high cross-day reliability. Specifically, the task performance did not largely change with the different days. Besides, our test battery captures diverse individual differences and can evaluate them based on the cognitive factors extracted from latent factor analysis. Since we share our source code as open-source software, users can expand and manipulate experimental conditions flexibly. Our test battery is also flexible in terms of the experimental environment, i.e., it is possible to experiment either online or in a laboratory environment. (shrink)

Que pourrait être, désormais, un discours théologique sur la ou " les religion ", sur l'"interreligieux "? A partir de quel lieu le penser? Comment pourrait-il advenir? La réponse offerte ici passe par un déplacement de la discussion vers l'éthique. Exode donc hors du lieu habituel pour aborder la question. Exode hors de la dogmatique ou de la théologie fondamentale car, là, il y va de connaissance, d'appartenance fidèle, de théologalité. Mais comment déthéologaliser la religion sans la déthéologiser? Comment la (...) penser autrement que comme une expérience humaine du divin, de l'Absolu ou de l'Ultime réel? Le déplacement proposé table moins sur les registres cognitifs ou affectifs investis par les recherches sur le phénomène religieux ou l'option herméneutique du pluralisme religieux que sur un registre de l'agir ou d'une posture éthique marquée d'actes et de paroles. Comment faire travailler la notion de religion en théologie autrement qu'à partir de l'identité, de la mémoire et plus à partir de l'estime de soi? Au moyen d'une lecture du traitement de la vertu de religio et des vices s'y opposant dans la Summa theologice de Thomas d'Aquin. A partir de ce travail de lecture, une structure formelle heuristique de la religion est reconstituée dans la différence et les rapports entre religio, superstitio et irreligiositas. Une catégorie lentement élaborée, " instance éthique advenant en posture subjective ", sous-tend cette diffraction heuristique : sur une " scène de la béatitude ", l'advenir de l'instance éthique se joue dans l'inscription désirée, choisie, réitérée et énoncée pour elle-même d'un mouvement en-vers Dieu. Pour produire ce chemin de réflexion, il aura fallu opérer et proposer une inscription contemporaine d'un discours thomasien dans le champ des discussions théologiques actuelles. (shrink)

Despite the rapid strides made in observational and theoretical astronomy, particularly in our century, there are two fundamental questions respecting the universe that defy solution. One pertains to the age of the universe, that is, did the universe have a beginning and therefore have a finite time-scale or has the universe existed without beginning. The other question deals with the dimensions of the universe, that is, is the universe infinite or not. For the time being no satisfactory proof or disproof (...) has been offered either on purely logical grounds or through empirical evidence revealing whether the universe is boundless and eternal or not. It is for this reason that cosmologists must resort to a variety of unverifiable philosophic postulates in the hope of constructing a cosmological model that correlates the known laws of the physical world with the observed facts of nature and simultaneously presents a consistent picture of the universe as it changes in time. (shrink)

Le structuralisme a été le grand espoir de modernisation des sciences humaines. Sous la houlette, principalement, de Claude Lévi-Strauss en ethnologie, de Jacques Lacan en psychanalyse, de Roland Barthes en sémiologie, de Louis Althusser en sociologie et de Michel Foucault en histoire et en philosophie, ce mouvement intellectuel prend, dans la France des années 1950-1960, une ampleur telle qu'il bouleverse le paysage intellectuel et remanie en profondeur l'Université française. Puis, à partir des années 1970, l'ambitieux programme s'effondre, plus rapidement encore (...) qu'il ne s'était imposé, et nourrit au passage une position hypercritique à l'égard de la modernité. Un demi-siècle après, il est temps de revenir sur cette aventure intellectuelle pour en comprendre l'engouement ainsi que les raisons de l'échec ; mais également pour expliquer sous et angle la singularité française et ses conséquences, puisqu'elles trouvent des prolongements jusqu'à aujourd'hui. (shrink)

Intensity profiles of emotional experience over time have been found to differ primarily in explosiveness and accumulation. However, the determinants of these temporal features remain poorly understood. In two studies, we examined whether emotion regulation strategies are predictive of the degree of explosiveness and accumulation of negative emotional episodes. Participants were asked to draw profiles reflecting changes in the intensity of emotions elicited either by negative social feedback in the lab or by negative events in daily life. In addition, trait, (...) and state usage of a set of emotion regulation strategies was assessed. Multilevel analyses revealed that trait rumination was positively associated with emotion accumulation. State rumination was also positively associated with emotion accumulation and, to a lesser extent, with emotion explosiveness. These results provide support for emotion regulation theories, which hypothesise that rumination is a central mechanism underlying the maintenance of negative emotions. (shrink)