Introductory.--Bergson and Pascal.--Bergson and Molière.--Balzac.--Meredith and the cosmic spirit.--The new criticism: Albert Thibaudet.--Marcel Proust.

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, (...) which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)

Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated manner to refer to actions in the zone of moral indifference, (...) whereas negative terms cannot be so interpreted. (shrink)

Imagine you and your friend Pierre agreed on meeting each other at a café, but he does not show up. What is the difference between a friend’s not showing up meeting? and any other person not coming? In some sense, all people who did not come show the same kind of behaviour, but most people would be willing to say that the absence of a friend who you expected to see is different in kind. In this paper, I will spell (...) out this difference by investigating laypeople’s conceptualisation of absences of actions in four experiments. In languages such as German, French, Italian, or Polish, people consider a friend’s not coming an omission. Any other person’s not coming, in contrast, is not considered an omission at all, but just a mere nothing. This use of the term omission differs from the usage in English, where ‘omission’ refers to all kinds of absences. In addition, ‘omission’ is not even an everyday term, but invented by philosophers for the sake of philosophical investigation. In other languages, ‘omission’ is part of an everyday vocabulary. Finally, I will discuss how this folk concept of omission could be made fruitful for philosophical questions. (shrink)

In “The Immorality of Horror Films,” philosopher and film scholar Gianluca Di Muzio proposes an analytic argument that aims to prove horror narratives, particularly slashers, unethical. His Argument from Reactive Attitudes contests slashers encourage pleasurable responses towards depictions of torture and death, which is possible only by suspending compassionate reactions. Doing so degrades sympathy and empathy, causing desensitization. This article will argue Di Muzio’s ARA, while valuable to discussion of art horror and morbidity, fails to meet its intended aim. The (...) ARA contains structural flaws in its logic, compounded by reliance on insufficient evidence. Additionally, Di Muzio does not adequately consider or rebut prominent aesthetic concerns, including ontological and moral distance of representations. Lastly, the argument utilizes a flawed classificatory schema that undermines its primary goal. Even narrowly confined to slashers, the ARA cannot explain alternative reasons for engaging with horror, nor does it account for those nuanced slasher works designed to foster compassion. The project concludes by offering a modified ARA with greater potential to accurately analyze the interrelation between art horror and morality. (shrink)

La Fédération démocratique internationale des femmes (FDIF), créée en 1945 à Paris, a été l’une des plus importantes organisations féminines internationales durant la guerre froide. Tombée dans l’oubli, ignorée par l’histoire des femmes à l’Ouest comme à l’Est, elle fait l’objet de nouvelles recherches depuis une quinzaine d’années, en lien avec le dynamisme des travaux sur l’engagement « féministe » des États communistes. Les raisons idéologiques et intellectuelles de cet oubli ont été analy...

Résumé – Nous nous intéressons à l’enseignement et l’apprentissage de l’infini en classe de mathématiques en considérant les différences et les relations entre infini potentiel et infini actuel. Nous présentons les principaux éléments de notre étude philosophique, épistémologique et didactique, ainsi que trois situations visant à conduire un travail explicite avec les élèves sur ces questions en début de lycée. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- Abstract – We are interested in the teaching and learning of infinite in mathematics class, taking into account the relations (...) between potential infinite and actual infinite. We report the main elements of our current philosophical, epistemological and didactical study; we also present three mathematical situations that we consider relevant for this purpose and to be explored with 10 and 11 grade students. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the effect of sound on visual motion perception. One model involves the illusion created when two identical objects moving towards each other on a two-dimensional visual display can be seen to either bounce off or stream through each other. Previous studies show that the large bias normally seen toward the streaming percept can be modulated by the presentation of an auditory event at the moment of coincidence. However, no reports to date provide sufficient evidence to (...) indicate whether the sound bounce-inducing effect is due to a perceptual binding process or merely to an explicit inference resulting from the transient auditory stimulus resembling a physical collision of two objects. In the present study, we used a novel experimental design in which a subliminal sound was presented either 150 ms before, at, or 150 ms after the moment of coincidence of two disks moving towards each other. The results showed that there was an increased perception of bouncing when the subliminal sound was presented at or 150 ms after the moment of coincidence compared to when no sound was presented. These findings provide the first empirical demonstration that activation of the human auditory system without reaching consciousness affects the perception of an ambiguous visual motion display. (shrink)

L’ouvrage de David Niget est tiré d’une thèse soutenue à Angers, bel aboutissement d’un travail de cotutelle et d’un projet d’histoire croisée entre la France et le Québec. Devenu au fil des ans le principal spécialiste français de l’histoire de la justice des mineurs pour le premier xxe siècle, David Niget a, plus récemment, étendu ses études à la Belgique et, sans abandonner son champ de recherche, s’est plus directement investi dans des recherches sur « Jeunesses et violences ». Il (...) s’intér... (shrink)

Sobrement intitulé « Colonisations » ce numéro est le produit d’une envie et d’une actualité historiographique. L’envie de voir et penser large, d’ouvrir davantage la revue à des espaces non occidentaux, de rendre possible une réflexion sur la circulation des modèles et les connexions entre les différents espaces colonisés. Cette envie participe du renouveau de l’histoire coloniale et impériale outre-Atlantique, de son développement en France, et de la faible visibilité des femmes et du genre...

This article focuses on Nicomachean Ethics III, 13 and its quotations in the work of Thomas Aquinas. The aristotelian examples of predators pursuing their prey inserted in this extract aroused Thomas’ interest from the Sentences commentary until the IIa-IIae. They offered him an alternative model to the famous avicennian paradigm of the sheep fleeing the wolf, that enabled him to account for the motivation of animal movement, instinct and animal pleasure. Unlike modern commentators, Thomas takes seriously this small but significant (...) piece of zoology inserted in the chapter on temperance of the ethica vetus. (shrink)

In this essay, written for the public presentation of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Scritti filosofici, edited by Giovanni Moretto and Fulvio Tessitore , the author underlines the controversial relationship between Humboldt’s historical-anthropological thought and Kantian criticism, which represents nevertheless a premise both essential and encumbering of Humbolt’s reflection.

This analysis shows the common critique of representation suggested by the fluid metaphor in feminist theory and literature. The poetics of theory and the poetics of literature thus flow together into a metaphorical poetics of the fluid as a utopian form and space that subverts patriarchal language and textually undermines artificial divisions among the very genres of theory and literature that describe it.Ingeborg Bachmann’s fragmentary novel Der Fall Franza reconstructs the crisis and death of its eponymous young Austrian female protagonist, (...) who has been psychologically destroyed by her psychologist husband and who convinces her geologist brother to take her on a research trip to Egypt. One of the first events.. (shrink)

L’inégalité est une thématique sociale, abordée de façon récurrente dans les médias. Appliquant une approche de « sémantique discursive », nous examinerons l’usage d’inégalité(s) dans le discours de presse en circonscrivant les principales dimensions sémantiques du nom à travers ses fonctionnements préférentiels en cotexte, étroit ou élargi. Après quelques questionnements sémantico-référentiels autour du mot, l’étude du corpus – constitué d’articles issus des journaux Le Monde, Libération et Le Figaro – montrera qu’inégalité(s) fonctionne, à la fois, comme un lieu d’observation, d’évaluation (...) et de revendication. L’analyse conduit également à penser que l’usage partagé et consensuel du segment lutte contre les inégalités dans le corpus fait apparaître une forme de « langue de bois ». (shrink)

Cet article compare deux interprétations de l’amour chez Antigone, celle de Martha Nussbaum, d’un côté, et celle de Simone Weil, de l’autre. Nussbaum considère qu’Antigone est froide, fermée et excessive, tandis que Weil observe chez Antigone une très rare et exigeante forme d’amour. Alors que Nussbaum défend une vision émotive et presque romantique de l’amour, Weil évoque un amour « impersonnel », dont l’ancrage n’est pas émotif. Ce type d’amour décentre de soi-même et a un effet extatique : il sort (...) l’individu de lui-même. À l’instar d’Antigone qui résiste au pouvoir, cet amour ouvre à de nouvelles configurations éthiques et politiques. (shrink)

This book explores the contributions to the philosophy of mind made by the Tibetan Buddhist thinker Phya pa Chos kyi seng ge (1109–1169) in his seminal text, the “Dispeller of the Mind’s Darkness.” This study, which includes a critical edition and English translation of those portions of the “Dispeller” devoted to explicating the nature of mental episodes and their objects, contributes to a deeper understanding of Tibetan intellectual history, while also facilitating a wider appreciation of both Phya pa’s theory of (...) mind and its significance within the global history of philosophy. (shrink)

Recent research on thick terms like “rude” and “friendly” has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like “friendly” and “courageous” can be more easily canceled than the evaluative content of negative terms like “rude” and “selfish”. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick (...) terms but also for thin terms such as “good” or “bad” (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect indicates a pervasive asymmetry between positive and negative evaluative terms. (shrink)

Les arrêts de la Cour de cassation sont traditionnellement marqués par leur concision. Souvent justifiée par la fonction de cassation, cette rédaction pourrait être moins pertinente au regard du pouvoir créateur du juge. Ce pouvoir s’appuyant sur la mission d’interprétation uniforme de la Cour de cassation, la rédaction de la décision est ici envisagée à cette aune. L’interprétation de la règle générale pour son adaptation au cas est inéluctable et cette nécessité fonde largement le pouvoir créateur du juge. L’exercice de (...) ce pouvoir devrait apparaître dans l’arrêt par la délimitation du besoin d’interprétation suscité par les circonstances de la cause et de la méthode d’interprétation retenue pour y répondre. Par ailleurs, pour parvenir à l’uniformité, l’arrêt doit favoriser l’adhésion raisonnée à l’interprétation retenue. Le jeu de cette autorité de fait implique que le sens et la portée exacte de la proposition de droit soient pleinement saisis. La connaissance de nombreux éléments généralement absents des arrêts pourrait éclairer ce sens et cette portée et il est possible de se demander pour chacun de ces éléments s’il y a plus d’avantages que d’inconvénients à les faire figurer dans le texte de la décision, à les révéler dans son contexte ou à les maintenir dans le secret du délibéré. Ces différentes propositions sont variables selon les arrêts : les canons de rédaction ne sauraient être identiques pour les arrêts porteurs de doctrine et pour les autres décisions, pour les interprétations aux fins d’application de la règle au cas et pour les interprétations aux fins de contrôle de la conformité de la règle à une autre règle. (shrink)

The standard view in philosophy is that responsibility entails causation. Most philosophers treat this entailment claim as an evident insight into the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Further, it is taken to be equally obvious that the reversal of this claim does not hold: causation does not entail responsibility. In contrast, Sytsma and Livengood have put forward an account of the use of ordinary causal attributions (statements like “X caused Y”) that contends that they are typically used interchangeably with (...) responsibility attributions (statements like “X is responsible for Y”). Put in terms of the concepts at play in these attributions, this account suggests that the reversal of the entailment claim may also hold, and, a fortiori, there would be mutual entailment between the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Using the cancellability test, we report the results of three pre-registered studies providing empirical evidence that causation and responsibility are mutually entailed by each other. (shrink)

Deceptive implicatures are a subtle communicative device for leading someone into a false belief. However, it is widely accepted that deceiving by means of deceptive implicature does not amount to lying. In this paper, we put this claim to the empirical test and present evidence that the traditional definition of lying might be too narrow to capture the folk concept of lying. Four hundred participants were presented with fourteen vignettes containing utterances that communicate conversational implicatures which the speaker believes to (...) be false. We further collected several potential proxy measures of lying, to get a better understanding of when a deceptive implicature is considered a case of lying. The results indicate that most implicatures (ten out of fourteen) were evaluated as lies and that lie ratings were closely tracked by the degree to which speakers were considered to have committed themselves to the truth of the content conveyed by their deceptive implicatures. (shrink)

Organizational purpose has flourished in the professional management literature, yet despite increased scholarly interest, academic knowledge and empirical research on the topic remain scarce. Moreover, studies that have been conducted contain important oversights including the lack of a clear conceptualization and misinterpretations that hinder the further development and understanding of organizational purpose. In view of these shortcomings, our interview study aimed to contribute to academic and societal conversations on the contemporary meaning and function of organizational purpose considering the voices and (...) perspectives of 44 global experts. Employing template analysis, we defined organizational purpose as “an organization’s reason for being characterized by significance, aspiration, direction, unification, and motivation.” Moreover, we proposed an explanatory conceptual model, including drivers and outcomes of purpose, important boundary conditions, and explanatory mechanisms. Drawing on self-determination theory, person–organization fit theory, job characteristics theory, and conservation of resources theory, we were able to explain how and under what conditions these concepts are related to organizational purpose. In doing so, our research contributes to advancing the knowledge and understanding of organizational purpose and its effects on human lives within and outside organizations. Our study thereby enhances the understanding of the role of organizations in society and helps in evaluating whether organizations take responsibility by living their purpose in the society they are part of. As such, our study provides important insights for theory development, scale development, and further empirical research on organizational purpose and its effects in different streams such as OB, HRM, marketing, leadership, and strategy. (shrink)

The effects of aging on the cognitive and affective dimensions of theory of mind , and on the latter’s links with other cognitive processes, such as information processing speed, executive functions and episodic memory, are still unclear. We therefore investigated these effects in young , middle-aged and older adults , using separate subjective and objective assessment tasks. Furthermore, a novel composite task probed participants’ abilities to infer both cognitive and affective mental states in an interpersonal context. Although age affected the (...) objective ToM tests, results revealed a direct aging effect on the second-order ToM, but an indirect one on the first-order cognitive ToM, mediated mainly by age-related declines in executive functions. This study supports the notion of an age-related distinction between subjective and objective assessments of ToM, and confirms that ToM is a complex mental ability with several characteristics reliant to some extent on executive processes. (shrink)