Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux n’a été publié qu’en 1967, un siècle et demi après avoir été écrit par Fourier. Fourier y analyse la société de son temps, critiquant sévèrement le mariage monogame et l’asservissement des femmes. Il élabore un autre modèle théorique et politique de société, l’Harmonie, fondée sur la disparition du mariage monogame, la multiplication systématique des relations amoureuses de toutes natures, et une égalité absolue entre les sexes. A sa publication, l’ouvrage de Fourier est reçu avec enthousiasme, comme (...) précurseur de la « libération sexuelle ». Plutôt que comme un utopiste, un prophète ou un rêveur, Fourier peut sans doute être considéré comme un des inventeurs de la science sociale, qu’il conçoit critique et radicale. (shrink)

Qu’est-ce qui est possible, autorisé et prescrit en matière de conduites sexuelles selon son âge, son sexe et celui de son partenaire? À quel âge est-on encore trop jeune ou déjà trop vieux pour être considéré comme un sujet sexuel? Et dans quelles mesures ces questions constituent-elles des enjeux politiques? Les textes rassemblés dans ce dossier interrogent diverses formes historiques d’articulation entre organisation des âges, structuration des rapports de genre et régulation de la sexu...

Ce gros livre est le fruit d’un travail collectif, réalisé à l’initiative de l’Agence nationale de recherche sur le sida et les hépatites virales (ANRS), par un collectif de treize chercheur-e-s (sociologues, démographes, épidémiologistes, psycho-sociologues, économistes). Un long questionnaire a été élaboré et soumis par téléphone par soixante et un enquêteurs de l’Institut de sondage Ipsos à plus de 12 000 personnes âgées de 18 à 69 ans entre septembre 2005 et mars 2006. Cette enquête dite...

Close le 6 janvier 2014, cette exposition a donné lieu à deux publications : un livre collectif codirigé par Denis Chevallier, Michel Bozon, Michelle Perrot, Florence Rochefort et un petit catalogue à destination des visiteurs, illustrés tous les deux par une femme « torera » en costume de toréador chaussée de talons aiguilles de couleur rouge et tenant avec le bras gauche une cocotte-minute et de la main droite une épée : il s’agit d’un autoportrait de Pilar Albarracin (...) qui veut souligner iro... (shrink)

This paper takes issue with the exemplarist strategy of fostering virtue development with the specific goal of improving its applicability in the context of education. I argue that, for what matters educationally, we have good reasons to endorse a liberal account of moral exemplarity. Specifically, I challenge two key assumptions of Linda Zagzebski’s Exemplarist Moral Theory (2017), namely that moral exemplars are exceptionally virtuous agents and that imitating their behavior is the main strategy for acquiring the virtues. I will introduce (...) and discuss the notions of enkratic exemplars and injustice illuminators and show that we have good reasons to consider them moral exemplars although they fail to satisfy (either of) the key assumptions. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that authors can make anything whatsoever true in their fictions by artistic fiat. Harry Deutsch originally called this position the Principle of Poetic License. If true, PPL sets an important constraint on accounts of fictional truth: they must be such as to allow that, for any x, one can write a story in which it is true that x. I argue that PPL is far too strong: it requires us to abandon the law of non-contradiction and (...) entails a radical revision of otherwise ordinary commitments about truth in fiction. (shrink)

Most discussions frame the Liar Paradox as a formal logical-linguistic puzzle. Attempts to resolve the paradox have focused very little so far on aspects of cognitive psychology and processing, because semantic and cognitive-psychological issues are generally assumed to be disjunct. I provide a motivation and carry out a cognitive-computational treatment of the liar paradox based on a cognitive-computational model of language and conceptual knowledge within the Predictive Processing framework. I suggest that the paradox arises as a failure of synchronization between (...) two ways of generating the liar situation in two different PP sub-models, one corresponding to language processing and the other to the processing of meaning and world-knowledge. In this way, I put forward the claim that the liar sentence is meaningless but has an air of meaningfulness. I address the possible objection that the proposal violates the Principle of Unrestricted Compositionality, which purportedly regulates the conceptual competence of thinkers. (shrink)

An interview with Michel Foucault in 1979 that was never published during his lifetime and was recently rediscovered in the archives. The interview, appearing for the first time in English and in its complete form, marks one of Foucault’s final public discussions of the contentious topic of the Iranian Revolution. In particular, Foucault clarifies what he means by “political spirituality” and addresses the respective relations between religion, revolution, and self-transformation.

Influential philosopher Michel Serres’s foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres’s arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue—creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought. Michel Serres is professor in history of science at the Sorbonne, professor of Romance languages at Stanford University, and author of several books, including _Genesis._ Lawrence R. Schehr is (...) professor of French at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. His books include _Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal _. (shrink)

This paper explores what happens when artists fail to execute their goals. I argue that taxonomies of failure in general, and of failed-art in particular, should focus on the attempts which generate the failed-entity, and that to do this they must be sensitive to an attempt’s orientation. This account of failed-attempts delivers three important new insights into artistic practice: there can be no accidental art, only deliberate and incidental art; art’s intention-dependence entails the possibility of performative failure, but not of (...) failed-art; and art’s intention-dependence is perfectly compatible with the role that luck plays in artistic creation. (shrink)

An exciting and highly original examination of the practices of truth-telling and speaking out freely (parr?sia) in ancient Greek tragedy and philosophy. Foucault discusses the difficult and changing practices of truth-telling in ancient democracies and tyrannies and offers a new perspective on the specific relationship of philosophy to politics.

The premise that every work belongs to an art-kind has recently inspired a kind-centred approach to theories of art. Kind-centred analyses posit that we should abandon the project of giving a general theory of art and focus instead on giving theories of the arts. The main difficulty, however, is to explain what makes a given kind an art-kind in the first place. Kind-centred theorists have passed this buck on to appreciative practices, but this move proves unsatisfactory. I argue that the (...) root of this dissatisfaction stems not from the act of kicking the can down the road, but from not kicking it far enough. The missing ingredient, I argue, is a notion of convention which does the work of marking the difference between art and non-art for a given physical medium. (shrink)

This chapter introduces a novel account of fake news and explains how it differs from other definitions on the market. The account locates the fakeness of an alleged news report in two main aspects related to its production, namely that its creators do not think to have sufficient evidence in favor of what they divulge and they fail to display the appropriate attitude towards the truth of the information they share. A key feature of our analysis is that it does (...) not require that fake news must be circulated with the intention to deceive one’s audience. In this way, our account overcomes a potential limitation of the current philosophical discussion about fake news, which appears to individuate the main problem with this phenomenon in the fact that fake news consumers are misled and misinformed. In contrast, the proposed analysis shows that an additional (and perhaps equally fundamental) problem uncovered by the spread of fake news is a widespread pathological relationship with information, one on which we consume information not to satisfy our interest in the truth but to strengthen our social identities and quench our hunger for social recognition. (shrink)

The debate about the nature of the representational format of concepts seems to have reached an impasse. The debate faces two fundamental problems. Firstly, amodalists (i.e., those who argue that concepts are represented by amodal symbols) and modalists (i.e., those who see concepts as involving crucially representations including sensorimotor information) claim that the same empirical evidence is compatible with their views. Secondly, there is no shared understanding of what a modal or amodal format amounts to. Both camps recognize that the (...) two formats play essential roles in higher cognition, leading to an increasing number of hybrid proposals. In this paper, I argue that the existence of those fundamental problems should make us suspicious about a modal/amodal dichotomy. Also, I suggest that hybrid approaches, as they currently stand, do not provide suitable solutions to the impasse. Instead, we should overcome the dichotomy and treat the modal/amodal distinction as a graded phenomenon. I illustrate this hypothesis with an example of a cognitive-computational model of concepts based on the Predictive Processing framework. (shrink)

This is a short piece on literary literacy, in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure story. -/- The entire piece is spread across all three volumes: Volume 1 Chapter 12, Volume 2 Chapter 5, and Volume 3 Chapter 22.

In this contribution, we look – both historically and in the present – at how children are objectified in data and how it is assumed that this objectivation is a way to dismiss ideology, or at least to separate the ideological from the scientific. We argue, however, that the separation of data from ideology is itself a highly ideological choice. As Freire points out: education never was and never can be objective. The objectivation of the child and, more generally, of (...) pedagogy means that the agenda that this serves remains veiled. A closer look at what data are put forward as the means to objectify education reveals that this agenda is deeply individualistic and fit to serve a competitive capitalist society. We argue that if this is the case, it ought to be the result of democratic debate and, therefore, we need more, not less, ideologies in pedagogy, because facts and data are always embedded in ideologies. And so they should be. (shrink)

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...) do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy, Culture contains a rich selection of interviews and other writings by the late Michel Foucault. Drawing upon his revolutionary concept of power as well as his critique of the institutions that organize social life, Foucault discusses literature, music, and the power of art while also examining concrete issues such as the Left in contemporary France, the social security system, the penal system, homosexuality, madness, and the Iranian Revolution.

The so-called paradoxes of quantum physics are easily disposed of as soon as one accepts that there are no such things as intrinsically existing particles and their intrinsic properties, but that both particles and properties are relational “observables.” Accordingly, quantum physics does not offer a “description of the outer world,” but rather a prescription about how to make probabilistic predictions within a participatory environment. The latter view looks quite radical with respect to standard Western Aristotelian ontology; but it looks natural (...) in the context of the Indian-Buddhist concept of Pratītyasamutpāda which underpins Śūnyatā. Special attention will then be devoted to the quantum feature of non-separability, which displays remarkable similarities with Pratītyasamutpāda. Finally, the meaning of such twofold parallel between quantum physics and Śūnyatā will be discussed. This parallel will be related to the similarity of epistemological situation between knowing a world from which we are not entirely separated and knowing oneself. (shrink)

In this paper, I criticize Putnam’s argument, which contends that scientific realism implies adherence to a God’s eye point of view. I also show that some sort of God’s eye point of view in a weak sense, i.e. interest-free, is indeed accessible to humans and that a moderate version of scientific realism is philosophically defensible.

Concept contextualism is the view that the information associated with a concept is dependent on the context in which it is tokened. This view is gaining support in recent years. The received and c...

Présentation de la spécificité de l'épistémologie en France, entre philosophie de la connaissance et philosophie des sciences, à travers un panorama de son histoire depuis la fin du XIXe siècle, de ses grands courants et de ses grandes figures : A. Comte, A. Cournot, C. Bernard, G. Bachelard, H. Poincaré, etc.

Schopenhauer’s invective is legendary among philosophers, and is unmatched in the historical canon. But these complaints are themselves worthy of careful consideration: they are rooted in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of language, which itself reflects the structure of his metaphysics. This short chapter argues that Schopenhauer’s vitriol rewards philosophical attention; not because it expresses his critical take on Fichte, Hegel, Herbart, Schelling, and Schleiermacher, but because it neatly illustrates his philosophy of language. Schopenhauer’s epithets are not merely spiteful slurs; instead, they reflect (...) deep-seated theoretical and methodological commitments to transparency of exposition. (shrink)

Bien que Caring for America ait fait l’objet de nombreuses recensions au moment de sa publication en 2012, ce n’est que maintenant, sept ans plus tard, que l’on peut saisir l’importance de son apport à la littérature sur le travail de care. Depuis une dizaine d’années, cette littérature s’étoffe, surtout dans les sciences sociales mais Caring for America s’en distingue par sa dimension historique. Eileen Boris et Jennifer Klein montrent que les caractéristiques associées par les chercheurs au...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a critique of the normative foundations of the 2019 Quebec Act respecting the laicity of the State. This is primarily based on the theses we developed in La nation pluraliste. Repenser la diversité religieuse au Québec (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2018), and elaborates a suitable diversity management model for Quebec using the republican liberalism described in Rawls’ later work. This discussion draws attention to certain pitfalls in the concept of (...) secularism as defended by the Coalition Avenir Québec government. Second, we present a methodological discussion on how political philosophy can contribute to the formation of law, by examining how our criticism of Act respecting the laicity of the State corresponds to an exercise in implementing Rawls’ own method of thoughtful balance. (shrink)

Tout être vivant inscrit son activité dans l'espace. Environnements proches accessibles à notre vue, environnements lointains, villes, continents... Nous explorons l'espace en le traversant, mais aussi en écoutant les descriptions qui nous en sont faites, en étudiant cartes, atlas ou supports numériques. Nous mémorisons des itinéraires, nous comparons des distances, nous retrouvons notre point de départ après un long trajet. Nos capacités de raisonnement nous permettent d'imaginer des raccourcis, de créer de nouveaux parcours, en un mot, de manifester notre adaptation (...) à l'environnement. Les technologies numériques étendent cette capacité en offrant à l'individu de nouvelles formes d'assistance au déplacement. Ces dispositifs sont particulièrement utiles pour les personnes souffrant de déficits visuels ou encore d'atteintes neurologiques spécifiques. Quelles capacités mentales l'individu doit-il mobiliser lorsqu'il est confronté à l'espace? Quelles fonctions cérébrales met-il en oeuvre? La psychologie et les neurosciences jouent un rôle primordial pour répondre à ces questions, comme en témoignent plusieurs chapitres de ce livre. Mais un ouvrage consacré à l'espace doit aussi donner leur place à d'autres disciplines concernées par la question : la géométrie, la géographie, l'urbanisme, l'architecture, la peinture, le cinéma, etc. Les sciences du langage participent elles aussi à ce concert scientifique, lorsqu'elles analysent la manière dont l'art littéraire est mis au service de la description de l'espace. Enfin, les systèmes d'aide à la navigation, la robotique, la réalité virtuelle constituent des domaines privilégiés d'application des connaissances touchant à la représentation de l'espace. L'Espace est donc au carrefour de nombreuses disciplines. Pour la première fois, un ouvrage de synthèse révèle la manière dont chacune apporte son éclairage à la compréhension des conduites de l'être humain au sein de son environnement. (shrink)