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)

The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in the collection of Michel Foucault's lectures at the College de France, one of the world's most prestigious institutions. Faculty at the college give public lectures, in which they can present works-in-progress on any subject of their choosing. Foucault's were more speculative and free-ranging than the arguments of such groundbreaking works as The History of Sexuality or Madness and Civilization . In the lectures comprising this volume, Foucault focuses upon the (...) ways the "self" and consequently "self-study" have been conceived since the days of antiquity, starting with Socrates. Definitions and conceptions of "self-study" in Greek and Roman literature, Foucault argues, remain in force today, and underlie modern interpretations of the self. Engaging, engrossing, and provocative, The Hermeneutics of the Subject reveals Foucault at the height of his powers. (shrink)

The living world features prominently in a number of disciplines. In this context of theoretical maturation and media attention, poetry, too, has a contribution to make (via words and sounds) to this debate. As a type of voyance that seeks to reconnect us to the living world by promoting its voice and visibility, poethics (as conceived by Michel Deguy and Jean-Claude Pinson) is intent on relaunching the motif of “poetic dwelling” by delineation of a sensorial and memorial process of (...) “taking place” (Emmanuel Merle). Poethic ambition relies on a type of language that might “stimulate our imaginaries” (Patrick Chamoiseau). The aim of this ethico-phenomenological approach in the wake of Gaston Bachelard and Gilbert Durand is to rehabilitate a poetic practice typically exemplified by Emmanuel Merle and Jean-Pierre Chambon (and Yves Bonnefoy as their predecessor) as an essential ally of science and philosophy; it is about cultivating attention, emotion and wonderment, and sensitizing us to our “geosolidarities” (Olivier Remaud) in order to create an affinity between vigilance and hope. It is quite something, as Michel Deguy might say…. (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)

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)

To study consciousness, scientists need to determine when participants are conscious and when they are not. They do so with consciousness detection procedures. A recurring skeptical argument against those procedures is that they cannot be calibrated: there is no way to make sure that detection outcomes are accurate. In this article, I address two main skeptical arguments purporting to show that consciousness scientists cannot calibrate detection procedures. I conclude that there is nothing wrong with calibration in consciousness science.

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...

Some proponents of the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness profess strong views on the Neural Correlates of Consciousness, namely that large swathes of the neocortex, the cerebellum, at least some sensory cortices, and the so-called limbic system are all not essential for any form of conscious experiences. We argue that this connection is not incidental. Conflation between strong and weak versions of the theory has led these researchers to adopt definitions of NCC that are inconsistent with their own previous definitions, (...) inadvertently betraying the promises of an otherwise fruitful empirical endeavour. (shrink)

In 1980, Michel Foucault began a vast project of research on the relationship between subjectivity and truth, an examination of conscience, confession, and truth-telling that would become a crucial feature of his life-long work on the relationship between knowledge, power, and the self. The lectures published here offer one of the clearest pathways into this project, contrasting Greco-Roman techniques of the self with those of early Christian monastic culture in order to uncover, in the latter, the historical origin of (...) many of the features that still characterize the modern subject. They are accompanied by a public discussion and debate as well as by an interview with Michael Bess, all of which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, where Foucault delivered an earlier and slightly different version of these lectures. Foucault analyzes the practices of self-examination and confession in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the first centuries of Christianity in order to highlight a radical transformation from the ancient Delphic principle of “know thyself” to the monastic precept of “confess all of your thoughts to your spiritual guide.” His aim in doing so is to retrace the genealogy of the modern subject, which is inextricably tied to the emergence of the “hermeneutics of the self”—the necessity to explore one’s own thoughts and feelings and to confess them to a spiritual director—in early Christianity. According to Foucault, since some features of this Christian hermeneutics of the subject still determine our contemporary “gnoseologic” self, then the genealogy of the modern subject is both an ethical and a political enterprise, aiming to show that the “self” is nothing but the historical correlate of a series of technologies built into our history. Thus, from Foucault’s perspective, our main problem today is not to discover what “the self” is, but to try to analyze and change these technologies in order to change its form. (shrink)

The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the College de France before his death in 1984. In this course, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditionsbased on courage and conviction.

Context: Varela’s neurophenomenology was conceived from the outset as a criticism and dissolution of the “hard problem” of the physical origin of consciousness. Indeed, the standard (….

According to Husserl, the epochè (or suspension of judgment) must be left incomplete. It is to be performed step by step, thus defining various layers of “reduction.” In phenomenology at least two such layers can be distinguished: the life-world reduction, and the transcendental reduction. Quantum physics was born from a particular variety of the life-world reduction: reduction to observables according to Heisenberg, and reduction to classical-like properties of experimental devices according to Bohr. But QBism has challenged this limited version of (...) the phenomenological reduction advocated by the Copenhagen interpretation. QBists claim that quantum states are “expectations about experiences of pointer readings,” rather than expectations about pointer positions. Their focus on lived experience, not just on macroscopic variables, is tantamount to performing the transcendental reduction instead of stopping at the relatively superficial layer of the life-world reduction. I will show that quantum physics indeed gives us several reasons to go the whole way down to the deepest variety of phenomenological reduction, may be even farther than the standard QBist view: not only reduction to experience, or to “pure consciousness,” but also reduction to the “living present.”. (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)

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)

Th is paper is the second part of a general study on the relationship between Nishida and Chinese philosophy. In the fi rst, I explored the extent to which Nishida’s philosophy was infl uenced, directly and indirectly, explicitly and implicitly, historically and conceptually, by materials coming from the intellectual horizon of Chinese thought. I concentrate here on Nishida’s own position toward what he understood by “Chinese philosophy.” Is this philosophy, so suggestive for Nishida, promoted to a central place in his (...) work or not, and if so, in what sense might we take this idea of “centrality” as specifi cally Chinese? In setting forth several archetypes of Chinese thought present in Nishida’s philosophy, the focus of this article falls on the methodological, logical and metaphysical contrasts we can identify between the Japanese philosopher and Chinese philosophy as his underground intellectual sources. (shrink)

Predictive Processing (PP) is an increasingly influential neurocognitive-computational framework. PP research has so far focused predominantly on lower level perceptual, motor, and various psychological phenomena. But PP seems to face a “scale-up challenge”: How can it be extended to conceptual thought, language, and other higher cognitive competencies? Compositionality, arguably a central feature of conceptual thought, cannot easily be accounted for in PP because it is not couched in terms of classical symbol processing. I argue, using the example of language, that (...) there is no strong reason to think that PP cannot be scaled up to higher cognition. I suggest that the tacitly assumed common-sense conception of language as Generative Grammar (“folk linguistics”) and its notion of composition leads to the scale-up concerns. Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) plays the role of a cognitive computational paradigm for folk linguistics. Therefore, we do not take LOTH as facing problems with higher cognition, at least with regard to compositionality. But PP can plausibly play the role of a cognitive-computational paradigm for an alternative conception of language, namely Construction Grammar. If Construction Grammar is a plausible alternative to folk linguistics, then PP is not in a worse position than LOTH. (shrink)

Few researchers of the past made sense of the collapse of representations in the quantum domain, and looked for a new process of sense-making below the level of representations: the level of the phenomenology of perception and action; the level of the elaboration of knowledge out of experience. But some recent philosophical readings of quantum physics all point in this direction. They all recognize the fact that the quantum revolution is a revolution in our conception of knowledge. In these recent (...) readings of quantum physics, quantum states are primarily generators of probabilistic valuations. Accordingly, they should not be seen as statements about what is the case, but as statements about what each agent can reasonably expect to be the case. Three features of such non-interpretational, non-committal approaches to quantum physics strongly evoke the phenomenological epistemology. These are: their deliberately first-person stance; their suspension of judgment about a presumably external domain of objects, and subsequent redirection of attention towards the activity of constituting these objects; their perception-like conception of quantum knowledge. But beyond phenomenological epistemology, these new approaches of quantum physics also make implicit use of a phenomenological ontology. Chris Fuch’s participatory realism thus formulates a non-external variety of realism for one who is deeply immersed in reality. But participatory realism strongly resembles Merleau-Ponty’s endo-ontology, which is a phenomenological ontology for one who deeply participates in Being. This remarkable analogy is supported by Merleau-Ponty himself. Indeed, 50 years before QBism, Merleau-Ponty acknowledged the strong kinship between the status of quantum mechanics and his phenomenology of embodiment. He did so in two texts that remained unpublished until after his death: Visible and invisible, and the Lectures on Nature. The final part of this article is then devoted to a study of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of quantum physics. (shrink)

Nishida Kitarô’s is generally depicted as a philosopher of nothingness. In the present paper, I would like to discuss this suggestive but ambiguous characterization, starting the enquiry with the seminal essay he wrote in order to answer to the critique of his celebrated topological logic, by Sôda Kiichirô. Firstly, I focus on the last sections of Nishida’s essay, to make clear in what sense we can still speak of “being” within the frame of such an unfathomable logic of nothingness. In (...) other words, Nishida is a philosopher of nothingness to the extent that he meditates being. Secondly, I demonstrate that the very notions of nothingness and being can be logically articulated through a topo-logy that yields new insights into the idea of “predication”, according to what I call a “second sketch of topo-logization”. Now, what is the ultimate meaning of such a topology for Nishida? Finally, I establish how a painstaking reading of his late 1944 correspondence with Mutai Risaku reveals his unsuspected project of reapprehending metaphysics under the form of “topological logic”, rather than “logic of place” or “place-logic”. -/- 摘要 西田幾多郎通常被描述為「無」的哲學家。左右田喜一郎曾經批評他 著名的拓樸學邏輯，在本文中，筆者先談西田回應左右田的批評，據此討 論「無」這種暗示性但又曖昧不明的描繪。 首先，筆者把重點放在西田這篇文章的最後幾個部分，以便釐清在 「無」這種深不可測的邏輯架構下，如何能繼續討論「存有」。換言之， 西田只在「存有」的思考方面，才稱得上是一位「無」的哲學家。其次， 筆者將具體說明，依照所謂「拓樸化的第二概略」，即可透過一種對「述 詞」的觀念提出新見解的拓樸學，在邏輯上清楚說明「無」與「存有」的 概念。對西田而言，這樣一種拓樸學的終極意義為何？最後，筆者將證 明，只要費心閱讀西田與霧臺理作在一九四四年末期的書信往來，即可理 解他如何在「拓樸學邏輯」，而非「場所邏輯」的形式下，重新理解形上 學。. (shrink)

This book is about Karl Popper's early writings before he began his career as a philosopher. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate that Popper's philosophy of science, with its emphasis on the method of trial and error, is largely based on the psychology of Otto Selz, whose theory of problem solving and scientific discovery laid the foundation for much of contemporary cognitive psychology. By arguing that Popper's famous defence of the method of falsification as well as his elaboration (...) of an evolutionary theory of knowledge are equally indebted to German psychology, Michel ter Hark challenges the received view of the development of Popper's philosophy. The book concludes with a reinterpretation of Popper's theory of the mind-body problem, emphasizing its contemporary relevance. (shrink)

本論は、反復ないし取り返し（reprise）」という概念によって、デカルト哲学を再解釈する試みである。対話や討論の際に、相手の話や考えを「反復する＝取り返す」（reprendre、この仏語には「非難す る」、「咎める」という含意もある）ことには、いつも意味を取り間違える（mé-prendre）危険性がある。そもそも、あらゆる取り方（prise）は、精神が自分自身を取る（とらえる）仕方からの派生に過ぎ ない。したがって、他のもの（言葉、着想、テーマ、テーゼ等）を取り返す前に、自ら自身を正しく取り返す方法が必要になる。時間において自己自身を取り返す働きであるコギトの実践的な意義は、ここに現れると思われ る。 ましてや、取り返す働きは、何度も自己自身を再把握することであるからこそ、思考の連続性の内にある種の非連続性をもたらす。それは 、現象学で中心となった課題、すなわち自己の時間性や歴史性という方面を際立たせる働きである。この点で、J.ヴァールのデカルト解釈を踏まえつつそれを超えなければならないことが分る。実際、取り返しという現象 -態度の射程は、デカルト哲学の理解にとどまらず、メルロ=ポンティの思想にも不可欠なものである。.