Les travaux de Patrice Bret occupent une place centrale en histoire des sciences et en histoire des techniques. Ce livre entend les mettre à l'honneur, qu'il s'agisse de l'histoire des savoirs académiques, du régime techno-politique du XVIIIe siècle, des interactions entre savants et praticiens à l'heure de la chimie lavoisienne, des circulations culturelles et des traductions ou encore de la place des femmes de sciences. Les contributions réunies dans ce volume illustrent, par leur diversité, l'influence de Patrice Bret (...) dans la communauté historienne. Nous proposons ainsi de mettre en perspective son oeuvre en la replaçant dans un contexte intellectuel, scientifique et épistémologique. Un constat s'impose : loin de distinguer entre les approches conceptuelles, érudites et méthodologiques, Patrice Bret joue un rôle de premier plan dans un milieu scientifique qui a choisi de conjuguer le renouvellement des questionnements avec la production d'instruments de recherche et les interrogations de repérage, de dénomination, d'identification, seules à même de contrer les récits téléologiques qui ont longtemps prévalu dans ce domaine. Si l'histoire des sciences et l'histoire des techniques sont de nos jours à l'avant-poste du renouvellement de la science historique, c'est aussi grâce au rôle de passeur de Patrice Bret. (shrink)

In this paper, I evaluate recently defended mechanistic accounts of the unity of neuroscience from a metaphysical point of view. Considering the mechanistic framework in general , I argue that explanations of this kind are essentially reductive . The reductive character of mechanistic explanations provides a sufficiency criterion, according to which the mechanism underlying a certain phenomenon is sufficient for the latter. Thus, the concept of supervenience can be used in order to describe the relation between mechanisms and phenomena . (...) Against this background, I show that the mechanistic framework is subject to the causal exclusion problem and faces the classical metaphysical options when it comes to the relations obtaining between different levels of mechanisms . Finally, an attempt to improve the metaphysics of mechanisms is made and further difficulties are pointed out. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an interpretation of the Stoic argumentum ex gradibus entium as it appears in Book II of Cicero's De Natura Deorum. In addition to displaying certain similarities to later formulations of the so-called "ontological argument," particularly Anselm's, I argue that the argument ex gradibus entium was a versatile feature of Stoic philosophical theology, capable of employment in relation to two distinct topics: the existence of god and the identification of god's essential nature with the world. I (...) claim that the instance of the argument ex gradibus entium at ND II 18-21 is a token of this latter type, and show that there are no textual reasons precluding this interpretation. In light of the fact that the argument can be analyzed more effectively in this role, I suggest that this particular instance of the argument is best thought of as an attempt on the part of the Stoics to identify the world with god rather than as a strict proof for god's bare existence. I end with some reflections on the general type of the Stoic argument qua precursor to two of Anselm's ontological proofs. Although I think it is a mistake to call the Stoic argument "ontological" in a strict sense, it may, I suggest, have shared a similar conceptual underpinning with at least one of Anselm's famous formulations. (shrink)

Les révolutions de la biologie ont profondément modifié l'homme. Des cellules souches à l'épigénome, des thérapies géniques aux transplantations du microbiote, des interfaces cerveau-machine à l'application de l'intelligence artificielle en matière de santé, Patrice Debré dresse dans ce livre une fresque fascinante des avancées et perspectives de cette transformation possible d'Homo sapiens. A travers elle, le lecteur comprendra les différentes configurations que peut épouser la condition humaine.0Les connaissances de la maîtrise du vivant doivent s'appuyer sur la science et non (...) pas sur les préjugés et les fausses rumeurs! Si la biologie va plus vite que l'homme, elle doit avancer au pas d'un nouvel humanisme."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The use of social media as a recruitment tool for research with humans is increasing, and likely to continue to grow. Despite this, to date there has been no specific regulatory guidance and there has been little in the bioethics literature to guide investigators and institutional review boards faced with navigating the ethical issues such use raises. We begin to fill this gap by first defending a nonexceptionalist methodology for assessing social media recruitment; second, examining respect for privacy and investigator (...) transparency as key norms governing social media recruitment; and, finally, analyzing three relatively novel aspects of social media recruitment: the ethical significance of compliance with website “terms of use”; the ethics of recruiting from the online networks of research participants; and the ethical implications of online communication from and between participants. Two checklists aimed at guiding investigators and IRBs through the ethical issues are included as appendices. (shrink)

On an internalist account of logical inference, we are warranted in drawing conclusions from accepted premises on the basis of our knowledge of logical laws. Lewis Carroll's regress challenges internalism by purporting to show that this kind of warrant cannot ground the move from premises to conclusion. Carroll's regress vindicates a repudiation of internalism and leads to the espousal of a standpoint that regards our inferential practice as not being grounded on our knowledge of logical laws. Such a standpoint can (...) take two forms. One can adopt either a broadly externalist model of inference or a sceptical stance. I will attempt, in what follows, to defend a version of internalism which is not affected by the regress. The main strategy will be to show that externalism and scepticism are not satisfying standpoints to adopt with regard to our inferential practice, and then to suggest an internalist alternative. (shrink)

The view that research with competent adults requires valid consent to be ethical perhaps finds its clearest expression in the Nuremberg Code, whose famous first principle asserts that “the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” In a similar vein, the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that “no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.” Yet although some formulations of the consent principle allow no exceptions, others hold (...) that informed consent is not always strictly necessary for ethical research. The U.S. federal regulations known as the “Common Rule,” which govern research with human subjects, lists several conditions for waiving consent. However, neither guidance documents on the ethics of clinical research nor the literature in bioethics contains a general justification of research without consent. The purpose of this paper is to advance a justificatory framework that will explain why research without consent is permissible in paradigmatic cases and that can be useful in analyzing cases about which there is disagreement. We argue that research without consent can be justified on two grounds: if it stands to infringe no right of the participants and obtaining consent is impracticable, or if the gravity of the rights infringement is minor and outweighed by the expected social value of the research and obtaining consent is impracticable. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for multiple clinical trials at the same institution to recruit concurrently from the same patient population. When the relevant pool of patients is limited, as it often is, trials essentially compete for participants. There is evidence that such a competition is a predictor of low study accrual, with increased competition tied to increased recruitment shortfalls. But there is no consensus on what steps, if any, institutions should take to approach this issue. In this article, we argue (...) that an institutional policy that prioritises some trials for recruitment ahead of others is ethically permissible and indeed prima facie preferable to alternative means of addressing recruitment competition. We motivate this view by appeal to the ethical importance of minimising the number of studies that begin but do not complete, thereby exposing their participants to unnecessary risks and burdens in the process. We then argue that a policy of prioritisation can be fair to relevant stakeholders, including participants, investigators and funders. Finally, by way of encouraging and helping to frame future debate, we propose some questions that would need to be addressed when identifying substantive ethical criteria for prioritising between studies. (shrink)

Institutional review boards, tasked with facilitating ethical research, are often pulled in competing directions. In what we call the protection-inclusion dilemma, we acknowledge the tensions IRBs face in aiming to both protect potential research participants from harm and include under-represented populations in research. In this manuscript, we examine the history of protectionism that has dominated research ethics oversight in the United States, as well as two responses to such protectionism: inclusion initiatives and critiques of the term vulnerability. We look at (...) what we know about IRB decision-making in relation to protecting and including “vulnerable” groups in research and examine the lack of regulatory guidance related to this dilemma, which encourages protection over inclusion within IRB practice. Finally, we offer recommendations related to how IRBs might strike a better balance between inclusion and protection in research ethics oversight. (shrink)

Ensuring that clinical trials, once launched, successfully complete and generate useful knowledge is an important and indeed ethically imperative goal, given the risks and burdens borne by research participants. Since there are insufficient willing research participants to power all the trials that are currently undertaken,1 addressing underenrolment will require prioritisation decisions that reduce the number of trials competing for participants. While there are multiple levels at which research priority-setting can and does take place, competition between trials often plays out in (...) real time at the institutional or site level, where complex decisions must be made about how to manage overlapping trials in ways that balance different considerations, including the risk of non-completion. We sought to explore what research institutions in particular might ethically do to mitigate the risk that competition between trials will contribute to recruitment shortfalls. Against this backdrop, we appreciate the thoughtful replies to our article and are especially encouraged that all three respondents acknowledge the importance and indeed necessity of setting research priorities in ways that respect the rights and interests of various parties. The key question raised by the commentaries primarily concerns not whether research prioritisation should take place but rather how it is best accomplished. In what follows, we clarify our argument in the original article, and then focus on several points raised in the commentaries regarding the role of institutions in research priority-setting. Our approach is animated by the risk that competition between clinical trials for the same population of participants can be a cause of underenrolment when there are insufficient participants to meet the statistical needs of all open studies. In such situations, one or more of the competing studies will fail to meet recruitment targets, reducing their statistical ability to answer the research question. There are strong ethical reasons to avoid …. (shrink)

An adequate analysis of experiences and situations specific to women, especially mothering, requires consideration of women's difference. A focus on women's difference, however, jeopardizes feminism's claims of women's equal individualist subjectivity, and risks recuperating the inequality and oppression of women, especially the view that all women should be mothers, want to be mothers, and are most happy being mothers. This book considers how thinkers including Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Nancy Choderow and Adrienne Rich struggle to negotiate this dilemma of (...) difference in analyzing mothering, encompassing the paradoxes concerning embodiment, gender and representation they encounter. Patrice Di Quinzio shows that mothering has been and will continue to be an intractable problem for feminist theory itself, and suggests the political usefulness of an explicitly paradoxical politics of mothering. (shrink)

On savait que c’était l’entité la plus complexe de l’univers connu. Mais le feu d’artifice de découvertes récentes dépasse l’entendement et fait exploser tous les schémas. Votre cerveau est (beaucoup) plus fabuleux que vous le croyez. Il est : totalement élastique, même âgé, handicapé, voire amputé de plusieurs lobes, le système nerveux central peut se reconstituer et repartir à l’assaut des connaissances et de l’action sur le monde ; totalement social, un cerveau n’existe jamais seul, mais toujours en résonance avec (...) d’autres. Mieux : nous sommes neuronalement constitués pour entrer en empathie avec autrui et aller à son secours. Ce livre aborde ces questions passionnantes avec cinq spécialistes. (shrink)

This paper presents an epistemological framework capable of addressing the opposition between indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge, an opposition widespread in anthropology especially in relation to the problem of sustainable development. In the first part of the paper, we provide a contextualist framework that satisfies two constraints: a priori neutrality with respect to forms, or types, of knowledge, and explicitness of the conditions with respect to the possibility of knowledge transfer. In the second part, we apply the framework to the (...) specific case of Northern Algonquian knowledge. By means of the framework, we investigate and make explicit the underlying epistemic standard at play by identifying the conditions under which particular beliefs are qualified as knowledge in the Northern Algonquian context. (shrink)

The paper argues that a functional reduction of ordinary psychology to neuropsychology is possible by means of constructing fine-grained functional, mental sub-types that are coextensive with neuropsychological types. We establish this claim by means of considering as examples the cases of the disconnection syndrome and schizophrenia. We point out that the result is a conservative reduction, vindicating the scientific quality of the mental types of ordinary psychology by systematically linking them with neuroscience. That procedure of conservative reduction by means of (...) functional sub-types is in principle repeatable down to molecular neuroscience. (shrink)

Background Ethical and scientific principles require that clinical trials address an important question and have the resources needed to complete the study. However, there are no clear standards for review that would ensure that these principles are upheld.Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews with a convenience sample of nineteen experts in clinical trial design, conduct, and/or oversight to elucidate current practice and identify areas of need with respect to ensuring the scientific value and feasibility of clinical trials prior to initiation and (...) while ongoing. We used a priori and grounded theory to analyze the data and constant comparative method to induce higher order themes.Results Interviewees perceived determination of scientific value as the responsibility of the investigator and, secondarily, other parties who review or oversee research. Interviewees reported that ongoing trials are rarely reevaluated due to emerging evidence from external sources, evaluation is complex, and there would be value in the development of standards for monitoring and evaluating evidence systematically. Investigators, IRBs, and/or data monitoring committees (DMCs) could undertake these responsibilities. Feasibility assessments are performed but are typically inadequate; potential solutions are unclear.Conclusions There are three domains where current approaches are suboptimal and in which further guidance is needed. First, who has the responsibility for conducting scientific review, whether it be the investigator, IRB, and/or DMC is often unclear. Second, the standards for scientific review (e.g., appropriate search terms, data sources, and analytic plan) should be defined. Third, guidance is needed on the evaluation of ongoing studies in light of potentially new and evolving evidence, with particular reference to evidence from outside the trial itself. (shrink)

This study investigates the large French fair trade (FT) market and the importance of FT coffee within it, in an attempt to identify some general features of FT consumers. On the basis of 7,587 transactions, the authors abo determine the impact of FT characteristics on customer behavior. The main result is somewhat surprising: FT coffee purchases seem to involve a temporary commitment as FT coffee consumers appear less loyal than traditional coffee consumers. The authors derive some business and academic implications.

“Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” juxtaposes elliptical descriptions that reveal the interiorization of commodities in the economy of high capitalism. “Allegory in the nineteenth century vacated the outer world, to colonize the inner world.”32 Each of the exposé’s six sections consists of two parts: “Fourier, or the Arcades,” “Daguerre, or the Panoramas,” “Grandville, or the World Exhibitions,” “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior,” “Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris,” “Haussmann, or the Baricades.”33The commercial arcade and not the factory is the logical (...) starting point for Benjamin. Paris, like London, the other capital of nineteenth-century capitalism, is an administrative and financial but not an industrial center. Paris is the locus classicus of bourgeois culture, which finds its most conspicuous expression in the arcade. The arcade cuts through and commercializes the residential block. It harnesses the technology of cast-iron “Pompeian” pillars, to offer in its enticing bay windows the latest, most sophisticated form of bourgeois merchandising. Fourier houses his “land of Cockaigne” in a “reactionary modification” of the arcade.34Parallel to the technical innovation of the arcades is that of the lifelike painted panoramas, which serve Jacques-Louis David’s pupils when they “draw from nature.” Politically superior, the city still dreams of the country. “The panoramas, which declare a revolution in the relation of art to technology, are at the same time an expression of a new feeling about life.”35 They drive a wedge between “plastic foreground” and “informational base.” The worker in the literary panorama is “a trimming for an idyll.” Technical innovations in photography reduce the representational significance of painting. Now photography “is given the task of making discoveries”: it explores the sewers and catacombs. It markets events. With impressionism and cubism, painting in turn transcends bourgeois conceptions of realism. 32. “Die Allegorie hat im neunzehnten Jahrhundert die Umwelt geräumt, um sich in der Innenwelt anzusiedeln” .33. Adorno objects to the use of people’s names in these titles and suggests that objects like dust or plush would bemore illuminating. Benjamin retains the names to evoke bourgeois interiorization. Louis-Philippe, however, is anomalous, since he is emblem rather than allegorist; the true allegorist of the “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior” section is the collector. Otherwise, the organization is strictly symmetrical: Benjamin discusses Charles Fourier, Louis Daguerre, and Grandville at the end of the sections in which they appear, the others at the beginning.34. Trans. Jephcott, p. 148. “Das Schlaraffenland,” “ihre reaktionäre Umbildung” . Anne Higonnet, formerly a student at the Ecole du Louvre, is a graduate student of art history at Yale University. Margaret Higonnet, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, has written on Romantic and modern literary theory. Patrice Higonnet is Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University. He has written on the French Revolution and, with Margaret Higonnet, is coauthor of a forthcoming book on suicide in eighteenth-century France. (shrink)

Patrice Bergeron « Nous avons besoin de reconnaître la ville à partir d’un regard contemplatif, c’est-à-dire un regard de foi qui découvre ce Dieu qui habite dans ses maisons, dans ses rues, sur ses places » (François, Exhortation apostolique Evangelii Gaudium, 24 novembre 2013, no 71). Il y a une bonne part d’audace dans cette interpellation, car la « présence de Dieu » en ville ne saute pas nécessairement aux yeux, plus encore lorsqu’on y cherche le Dieu Sauveur. Néanmoins, (...) que voit-on de Dieu dans ces villes aux mille visages, quand on ose le chercher? Qu’est-ce qui caractérise une telle démarche de discernement spirituel? Autrement dit, que voit-on et comment voit-on? Telles sont les questions que cet article explore théologiquement à partir d’une série de témoignages écrits par des chrétiennes et des chrétiens formés aux « Exercices spirituels ignatiens » qui, au coeur de leur ville de résidence sur différents continents, ont été invités à contempler en marchant. L’analyse de ces témoignages permet non seulement d’éclairer le croire chrétien en acte et le travail du regard interprétant au coeur de l’espace urbain, elle montre aussi comment un tel regard parvient à discerner des traces de la grâce au coeur de l’ambivalence urbaine. (shrink)

Patrice Bergeron,Fabrice Blée,Marc Dumas,Raymond Lemieux,Jean Richard,Gérard Siegwalt.

I examine different strategies involved in stating anti-theistic arguments from natural evil, and consider some theistic replies. There are, traditionally, two main types of arguments from natural evil: those that purport to deduce a contradiction between the existence of natural evil and the existence of God, and those that claim that the existence of certain types or quantities of natural evil significantly lowers the probability that theism is true. After considering peripheral replies, I state four prominent theistic rebutting strategies: skeptical (...) theism; Richard Swinburne's view that moral knowledge entails natural evil; the soul-making theodicy; and the natural law theodicy. (shrink)

Background Institutional review board (IRB) expertise is necessarily limited by maintaining a manageable board size. IRBs are therefore permitted by regulation to rely on outside experts for review. However, little is known about whether, when, why, and how IRBs use outside experts.Methods We conducted a national survey of U.S. IRBs to characterize utilization of outside experts. Our study uses a descriptive, cross-sectional design to understand how IRBs engage with such experts and to identify areas where outside expertise is most frequently (...) requested.Results The survey response rate was 18.4%, with 55.4% of respondents reporting their institution’s IRB uses outside experts. Nearly all respondents who reported using outside experts indicated they do so less than once a month, but occasionally each year (95%). The most common method of identifying an outside expert was securing a previously known subject matter expert (83.3%). Most frequently, respondents sought consultation for scientific expertise not held by current members (69.6%). Almost all respondents whose IRBs had used outside experts reported an overall positive impact on the IRB review process (91.5%).Conclusions Just over half of the IRBs in our sample report use of outside experts; among them, outside experts were described as helpful, but their use was infrequent overall. Many IRBs report not relying on outside experts at all. This raises important questions about what type of engagement with outside experts should be viewed as optimal to promote the highest quality review. For example, few respondents sought assistance from a Community Advisory Board, which could address expertise gaps in community perspectives. Further exploration is needed to understand how to optimize IRB use of outside experts, including how to recognize when expertise is lacking, what barriers IRBs face in using outside experts, and perspectives on how outside expert review impacts IRB decision-making and review quality. (shrink)

This investigation of time and space is motivated by gaps in our current understanding: by the lack of definitions, by our failure to appreciate the nature of these entities, by our inability to pin down their properties. The author's approach is based on two key ideas: The first idea is to seek the geo-historical origins of time and space concepts. A thorough investigation of a diversified archaeological corpus, allows him to draft coherent definitions; it furthermore gives clues as to whether (...) time and space were discovered or invented. The second idea is to define the units before trying to define space and time. The results presented here are unexpected: Time and space were not discovered in nature, but they were invented; time is not a phenomenon and space has no materiality; they are only concepts. This runs contrary to the opinion of most scientific and the philosophical authorities, although one would seek in vain for a theoretical validation of the conventional position. This book will provide much food for thought for philosophers and scientists, as well as interested general readers. (shrink)

This book explores the mind-body issue from both the perspectives of philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Starting from the problem of mental causation, it provides an overview of the contemporary metaphysical discussion and argues in favour of the token-identity thesis, as the only position that can account for the causal efficacy of the mental. Showing furthermore that this ontological reductionism is not dissociable from epistemological reductionism, the author applies a new strategy of inter-theoretic reduction, which is compatible with (...) the multiple realizability of mental properties. Using functionally defined sub-types, this account establishes a conservative reduction of psychology to neuroscience, which vindicates both the scientific legitimacy and the theoretical indispensability of psychology. This account is illustrated by several empirical examples borrowed from contemporary neuroscience. (shrink)

Depuis le célèbre article de Merleau-Ponty, « De Mauss à Claude Lévi-Strauss », la manière dont on évalue le rapport entre ces deux auteurs détermine ou exprime autant d’interprétations historiques du structuralisme et de choix théoriques ou philosophiques quant aux sciences sociales. Cette filiation se voulait une critique: être fidèle à la découverte de Mauss, celle du caractère central de la réciprocité dans la vie sociale, imposait de dépasser la sociologie vers une sémiologie générale. Cet article s’efforce de montrer qu’il (...) ne s’agit pas là, contrairement à l’interprétation subtile qu’en fit Merleau-Ponty, de faire de la réalité sociale un système de points de vue substituables ou de mouvements corrélés de sub-jectivation, mais de montrer que ce sont les « valeurs » qui, du fait de leur nature, de leur ontologie, doivent nécessairement circuler entre plusieurs points de vue exclusifs et complémentaires. Il revisite la célèbre critique de Lévi-Strauss à Mauss sur l’explication de l’obligation de donner par une « force des choses », et replace l’apport de l’anthropologie structurale dans la philosophie de l’esprit contemporaine, là où elle se confronte aux questions ouvertes par la physique sur l’ontologie des objets quantiques. (shrink)

Studies in Thasian epigraphy, III A third fragment of the Stele of the Agathoi and the role of the polemarchs in Thasos. The fragment J. Pouillou x, Recherches sur Thasos I, 140, belongs to the top of the Stele of the Agathoi (Fournier, Hamon, BCH 131 [ 2007], p. 309-381). It contains part of the decree’s opening : the proposal was made by the polemarchs by way of an ephodos (the same procedure occurs in several other Thasian decrees). Brief discussion (...) of this inadequately known magistracy and its important role in the institutional set-up of the city. (shrink)

The concept of ‘problem’ has been recently promoted by the official academic institutions and put at the centre of a new field of research, self-styled ‘transdisciplinary studies’, in order to provide a foundation to a resolutely transdisciplinary approach to research and thought in general. The paper notes that the same move (i.e. connecting a problem-centred approach to thought with transdisciplinary method) can be found in Deleuze’s philosophy, which provides us with what the technocratic image of thought advocated by transdisciplinary studies (...) ultimately cannot provide: a positive concept of problems where those are not negative moments but originary and active matrices of thought. It then argues that Deleuze owes this concept to the French epistemological tradition, and more specifically to Bachelard, where it is nothing other than the concept of structure. It ends by explicating what particular version of structuralism Deleuze was thus led to construct in order to account for the role of problems in a radically transdisciplinary account of thought: it is the fact that all structures are multi-structured that grounds the essentially transdisciplinary nature of thought. The fact that we could think differently is precisely what makes us think. (shrink)

Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?—Marilynne RobinsonMarilynne Robinson, Gilead (London: Virago Press, 2004), p. 280.Preamble: Going the Bloody Hard WayThe writings of Pamela Sue Anderson and Gillian Howie have been, and continue to be, important in helping to shape the development of my own philosophical vision. Yet my commitment to (a fairly (...) traditional) theism marks a point of departure between my work and theirs. Given their quite reasonable disinclination to persist with traditional theism, especially its concept of divine transcendence,Not only does an uncritical approach to the theistic conception of divine transcendence serve to sacralise hierarchical relationship between men and women, such that the latter is subordinate to the former, it also, as Anderson reminds us, sustains epistemic and practical norms that quietly yet pot. (shrink)

Dans cet ouvrage, science et musique dialoguent selon trois grandes lignes. La premiere est representee par la recherche des causes physiologiques de l'harmonie musicale, conformement au titre de la conference que donne Helmholtz en 1857 (expose synthetique des idees qu'il reprendra dans sa tres fameuse Theorie physiologique de la musique), et par la presentation populaire pour les musiciens qu'en propose Enst Mach, des 1866. Avec Helmholtz, le son acquiert une place centrale pour la musique - le son tel qu'entendu par (...) l'oreille, avec toute sa richesse harmonique - et la dissonance, qui n'est plus un simple rate de la consonance, devient des lors la cle de toute theorie musicale. Mais qu'en est-il aujourd'hui de la theorie physiologique de Helmholtz? Son examen par Patrice Bailhache, a l'aune de l'acoustique actuelle, forme la seconde ligne de force du present livre. Et la troisieme, retenue par Antonia Soulez, est celle tracee par Carl Dalhaus, qui en 1970, voit dans la demarche de Helmholtz une mise en question inaugurale de la naturalite d'un systeme de sons. C'est la musique qui, alors, questionne la science: quelle pertinence ces considerations sur la dissonance et ses causes, conservent-elles face au regne du timbre et de la dissonance depuis la musique atonale et le dodecaphonisme? (shrink)

I consider two views that combine different elements of general theistic replies to natural evil, those of Peter van Inwagen and William Hasker. I end with a Hasker-style defense – one that, unlike Hasker's, denies the existence of pointless natural evils – and some brief observations on the direction of future debate.

In The Order of Things (OT), Foucault recounts the birth and imminent death of Man as an object of study for science and philosophy. Foucault's point is that this very notion of “Man” is dependent on a particular transformation in the history of Being. The mere formulation of this hypothesis opens up a whole series of questions. First, is it true that Man has only become an object of concern in the late eighteenth century. Secondly, if Man has indeed only (...) recently become an object of theoretical interest, is Foucault's description and explanation of this process correct. Thirdly, why should we overcome the concept of “ Man”. Fourthly, in what sense was structuralism deemed to help us overcoming the limitations of this paradigm. In conclusion, if OT has to be overcome, it seems that it should be on grounds slightly different from those usually advanced. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

Ce livre est une psychanalyse essentielle et rigoureuse de la philosophie. L'histoire de la philosophie s'y annonce comme étant l'incarnation diversifiée de trois essences fondamentales de la pensée de l'être ou de trois ontologies. Ces ontologies sont aussi les trois moments de la vie renonciatrice de la pensée. La pensée aspire à l'absolu et relativise cette aspiration tout en s'accomplissant dans cette même relativisation.0Le tome 1 montre que ces trois ontologies se déploient dans chacune des trois grandes pensées que sont (...) la philosophie de Platon, celle de Descartes et celle de Kant. Le tome 2 montre que ces trois ontologies se déploient à travers trois triades philosophiques, Héraclite, Aristote et Spinoza, Plotin, Leibniz et Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger et Bergson. Ce second tome montre ainsi que tout se passe comme si un seul génie s'incarnait et ressurgissait à chaque fois à travers trois pensées philosophiques différentes.0Tel est le mystère de la vie rationnelle de la pensée. (shrink)