RésuméKarl Popper, dans La logique de la découverte scientifique, a généralisé et formalisé, sans le savoir, les grands principes méthodologiques formulés par Claude Bernard dans son Introduction àľétude de la médecine expérimentale.Cette analogie est frappante lorsqu'on rapproche du faillibilisme poppérien ľ affirmation du physiologiste selon laquelle les progrès de la méthode expérimentale consistent en ce que la somme des vérités augmente à mesure que la somme des erreurs diminue.Ľ intérêt que ľ on porte à cette analogie dépasse la simple curiositéérudite (...) car certaines difficultés du poppérianisme sont déjà sensibles dans la méthodologie bernardienne.En effet, si ľ un et ľ autre insistent sur le caractère hypothético‐déductif de la démarche scientifique, ni ľ un ni ľ autre n'aborde le difficile problème des décisions épistémiques qu'elle requiert. C'est notamment au niveau des hypothèses falsifiantes destinées àéviter les coïncidences constituent un des écueils les plus graves que rencontre la méthode expérimen‐tale qu'est sensible cette difficulté.SummaryIn his Logic of Scientific Discovery Karl Popper, nor realizing the fact, has generalized and formalized the main methodological principles formulated by Claude Bernard in his Introduction àľ Etude de la Médecine Expérimentale.This analogy is especially noticeable when one brings together Popper's “faillibilism” and the physiologist's affirmation according to which “progress in the experimental method consists in the fact that the more the total error decreases, the more the total truth increases”.The interest in this analogy goes far beyond erudite curiosity since some of Popper's difficulties are already perceptible in Bernard's methodology.As a matter of fact, if both stress the hypothetical‐deductive nature of the scientific progress, none approaches the difficult problem of the epistemic decisions required. This difficulty is particularly perceptible at the level of the falsifying hypotheses intended to avoid the “coincidences being one of the most serious pitfalls of the experimental method” .ZusammenfassungOhne es zu wissen, hat Karl Popper in der Logik der Forschung die methodischen Prinzipien, die Claude Bernard in seiner Introduction àľ Etude de la Médecine Experimental formuliert, verallgemeinert und formalisiert.Die Analogie tritt besonders deutlich hervor, wenn man Poppers Faillibilismus mit der Behauptung des Physiologen konfrontiert, wonach der Fortschritt darin bestehen soll, dass die Summe der Wahrheiten in dem Masse zunimmt, wie die Summe der Irrtümer abnimmt.Das Interesse an dieser Analogie ist insofern nicht ein rein historisches, als gewisse Schwie‐rigkeiten, denen Popper begegnet, sich schon in Bernards Ansatz bemerkbar machen.Wenn auch beide besonderes Gewicht auf den hypothetisch‐deduktiven Charakter des wis‐senschaftlichen Vorgehens legen, so gehen sie beide nicht auf das schwierige Problem der erkenntnistheoretischen Entscheide ein, diedamit verbunden sind. Dieser Mangel macht sich vor allem bei Poppers falsifizierenden Hypothesen bemerkbar, die, wie schon Bernard formuliert, dazu dienen sollen, die Hauptschwierigkeit der experimentellen Methode, namlich das zufällige Zusammentreffen von Ereignissen, zu vermeiden. (shrink)

According to familiar accounts, Rousseau held that humans are actuated by two distinct kinds of self love: amour de soi, a benign concern for one's self-preservation and well-being; and amour-propre, a malign concern to stand above other people, delighting in their despite. I argue that although amour-propre can (and often does) assume this malign form, this is not intrinsic to its character. The first and best rank among men that amour-propre directs us to claim for ourselves is that of occupying (...) 'man's estate'. This does not require, indeed it precludes, subjection of others. Amour-propre does not need suppression or circumscription if we are to live good lives; it rather requires direction to its proper end, not a delusive one. (shrink)

Bede's Ecclesiastical History is the most important single source for early medieval English history. Without it, we would be able to say very little about the conversion of the English to Christianity, or the nature of England before the Viking Age. Bede wrote for his contemporaries, not for a later audience, and it is only by an examination of the work itself that we can assess how best to approach it as a historical source. N.J. Higham shows, through a close (...) reading of the text, what light the Ecclesiastical History throws on the history of the period and especially on those characters from seventh- and early eighth-century England whom Bede either heroized, such as his own bishop, Acca, and kings Oswald and Edwin, or villainized, most obviously the British king Cædwalla but also Oswiu, Oswald's brother. In (Re-)Reading Bede, N.J. Higham offers a fresh approach to how we should engage with this great work of history. He focuses particularly on Bede's purposes in writing it, its internal structure, the political and social context in which it was composed and the cultural values it betrays, remembering always that our own approach to Bede has been influenced to a very great extent by the various ways in which he has been both used, as a source, and commemorated, as man and saint, across the last 1,300 years. (shrink)

This part of the philosophy of psychology I refer to as 'moral psychology'; and, therefore, this book is offered as a contribution to moral psychology. ...

A central concern of the cognitive science of language since its origins has been the concept of the linguistic system. Recent approaches to the system concept in language point to the exceedingly complex relations that hold between many kinds of interdependent systems, but it can be difficult to know how to proceed when “everything is connected.” This paper offers a framework for tackling that challenge by identifying *scale* as a conceptual mooring for the interdisciplinary study of language systems. The paper (...) begins by defining the scale concept—simply, the possibility for a measure to be larger or smaller in different instances of a system, such as a phonemic inventory, a word's frequency value in a corpus, or a speaker population. We review sites of scale difference in and across linguistic subsystems, drawing on findings from linguistic typology, grammatical description, morphosyntactic theory, psycholinguistics, computational corpus work, and social network demography. We consider possible explanations for scaling differences and constraints in language. We then turn to the question of *dependencies between* sites of scale difference in language, reviewing four sample domains of scale dependency: in phonological systems, across levels of grammatical structure (Menzerath's Law), in corpora (Zipf's Law and related issues), and in speaker population size. Finally, we consider the implications of the review, including the utility of a scale framework for generating new questions and inspiring methodological innovations and interdisciplinary collaborations in cognitive-scientific research on language. (shrink)

The Homeric Scholia are not the most obvious source for literary criticism in the modern sense. And yet if one takes the trouble to read through them one will find many valuable observations about poetic technique and poetic qualities. Nowadays we tend to emphasize different aspects from those which preoccupied ancient critics, but that may be a good reason for looking again at what they have to say.

In the six remarkable elegidia transmitted in the Tibullan corpus as 3.13–18 we appear to possess the writings of an educated Roman woman of aristocratic family and high literary connections: a woman, moreover, who participates as an equal in one of the most distinguished artistic salons of the age, and composes poetry in an obstinately male genre on the subject of her own erotic experience, displaying a candour and the exercise of a sexual independence startingly at odds with the ideology (...) of her class. Such a figure is either, depending on one's viewpoint, too good to be true or too embarrassing to be tolerated. The case could easily be put that Sulpicia, more perhaps even than Sappho, has found her poems condemned by accident of gender to a century and a half of condescension, disregard, and wilful misconstruction to accommodate the inelastic sexual politics of elderly male philologists. Certainly even the most sympathetic of recent comment is prone to lapse into a form of critical language outlawed in Catullan scholarship thirty years ago. Yet feminist critics have been strangely cautious in their response. A scholar who rose swiftly to the defence of Erinna when that elusive poet's identity was impugned has notoriously written of Sulpicia: ‘She was not a brilliant artist: her poems are of interest only because the author is female.’ Five years late, Sulpicia has found a place in the major sourcebook on ancient women, but with the cycle of poems violently reordered after the judgment of a nineteenth-century critic, anxious to restore his poetess's chastity against the disconcerting frankness of the texts. (shrink)

Life, but not as we know it -- Still life in nearly present time -- Driving and the city -- Movement-space -- Afterwords -- From born to made -- Spatialities of feeling -- But malice aforethought -- Turbulent passions.

There were five kinds of cyber deterrence presented at the workshop on Landscaping strategic cyber deterrence, hosted at the Oxford Internet Institute. They were the well-studied areas of deterrence by ‘punishment’ and ‘denial’, and the novel concepts of deterrence by ‘association’, ‘norms and taboos’, and finally, ‘entanglement’. In the following workshop commentary, I present these five kinds of deterrence and explain them in light of recent developments in the academy and industry. I argue for analytical congruence between all three novel (...) concepts, since they aim to alter the behaviour of actors by adding a social cost in response to breaking norms and conventions. Throughout, I argue that we are beginning to understand how cyber deterrence works, both in theory and practice, and when all concepts are taken together, they become more than the sum of their parts. Finally, I point out an omission of the workshop, where computational modelling and simulation could be added to the landscape of strategic cyber deterrence. (shrink)

Liberal critics of plato's republic criticise him for ignoring the moral autonomy of persons, their right to form and to express their own moral ideas. It is argued that this criticism is superficial. Neither plato, nor his liberal critics, wish all moral views to be held and acted on; they both wish to set limits to what is acceptable. The true source of disagreement is over the scope of reason in human affairs; plato understands that narrowly; his liberal critics in (...) a broad, permissive, way. (shrink)

Did Alcidamas invent the story of the contest of Homer and Hesiod? Martin West has argued that he did , 433 ff.). I believe that there are a number of reasons for thinking this improbable. The stories of the deaths of Homer and Hesiod were traditional before Alcidamas. Heraclitus knew the legend of the riddle of the lice and Homer's death , and the story of Hesiod's death was well known by Thucydides’ time . The first attempt to record information (...) about Homer's life is ascribed to Theagenes of Rhegium, in the late sixth century b.c. . By that time it seems likely that there was already a considerable body of legends about the early poets. The pieces of hexameter verse in the Herodotean Life of Homer, some of which show detailed knowledge of the area around Smyrna in the archaic period, probably date from before 500 b.c. In relating the stories of the poets’ deaths Alcidamas is recording the results of στορα, and this is what he implies in Michigan papyrus 2754 . West's theory requires one to assume that he has incorporated with these traditions his own fiction of the contest. This seems to me to go against what we know in general about the activity of sophists such as Alcidamas. Although they were capable of inventing myths , there is no evidence that they created such stories about earlier historical figures, rather than collecting popular legends about them, and using these for their own purposes. It is true that Critias used the evidence of Archilochus’ own poetry to draw conclusions about his life . But this is not the same as inventing a story virtually from scratch. Hesiod's own testimony about his poetic victory , the original starting-point for the legend of the contest with Homer, did not on its own provide a basis from which such inferences could be drawn. It seems more likely that the legend is the product of earlier popular embroidery, at a time when speculation about these early poets’ lives was becoming common. (shrink)