When do children become aware of themselves as differentiated and unique entity in the world? When and how do they become self-aware? Based on some recent empirical evidence, 5 levels of self-awareness are presented and discussed as they chronologically unfold from the moment of birth to approximately 4-5 years of age. A natural history of children's developing self-awareness is proposed as well as a model of adult self-awareness that is informed by the dynamic of early development. Adult self-awareness is viewed (...) as the dynamic flux between basic levels of consciousness that develop chronologically early in life. (shrink)

Recent semantic research has made increasing use of a principle, Maximize Presupposition, which requires that under certain circumstances the strongest possible presupposition be marked. This principle is generally taken to be irreducible to standard Gricean reasoning because the forms that are in competition have the same assertive content. We suggest, however, that Maximize Presupposition might be reducible to the theory of scalar implicatures. (i)First, we consider a special case: the speaker utters a sentence with a presupposition p which is not (...) initially taken for granted by the addressee, but the latter takes the speaker to be an authority on the matter. Signaling the presupposition provides new information to the addressee; but it also follows from the logic of presupposition qua common belief that the presupposition is thereby satisfied (Stalnaker, Ling Philos 25(5–6):701–721, 2002). (ii) Second, we generalize this solution to other cases. We assume that even when p is common belief, there is a very small chance that the addressee might forget it (‘Fallibility’); in such cases, marking a presupposition will turn out to generate new information by re-establishing part of the original context. We also adopt from Raj Singh (Nat Lang Semantics 19(2):149–168, 2011) the hypothesis that presupposition maximization is computed relative to local contexts—and we assume that these too are subject to Fallibility; this accounts for cases in which the information that justifies the presupposition is linguistically provided. (iii) Finally, we suggest that our assumptions have benefits in the domain of implicatures: they make it possible to reinterpret Magri’s ‘blind’ (i.e. context-insensitive) implicatures as context-sensitive implicatures which just happen to be misleading. (shrink)

Conceptualist accounts of the representational content of perceptual experiences have it that a subject _S_ can experience no object, property, relation, etc., unless _S_ "i# possesses and "ii# exercises concepts for such object, property, or relation. Perceptual experiences, on such a view, represent the world in a way that is conceptual.

This paper argues that in some explanations mathematics are playing an explanatory rather than a representational role, and that this feature unifies many types of non-causal or non-mechanistic explanations that some philosophers of science have been recently exploring under various names. After showing how mathematics can play either a representational or an explanatory role by considering two alternative explanations of a same biological pattern—“Bergmann’s rule”—I offer an example of an explanation where the bulk of the explanatory job is done by (...) a mathematical theorem, and where mechanisms involved in the target systems are not explanatorily relevant. Then I account for the way mathematical properties may function in an explanatory way within an explanation by arguing that some mathematical propositions involving variables non directly referring to the target system features constitute constraints to which a whole class of systems should comply, provided they are describable by a mathematical object concerned by those propositions. According to such “constraint account”, those mathematical facts are directly entailing the explanandum, as a consequence of such constraints. I call those explanations “structural”, because here properties of mathematical structures are accounting for the explanandum; various kinds of mathematical structures thereby define various types of structural explanations. (shrink)

Latour’s actor-network ‘theory’ (ANT), and more generally Latour’s constructivist and relativistic work, has since long been debunked. (1) It does not make any sense, mixing all conceptual categories together (humans and non-humans, facts and moral prescriptions, science and politics); (2) nevertheless, it pretends to explain important issues such as our current environmental crisis and what to do to overcome it; (3) consequently, it can have extremely damaging political consequences. Latour’s ANT may perhaps be considered as a work of art but (...) certainly not as a work of science. Unfortunately, I find that Anders Blok and Casper Bruun Jensen’s attempt to salvage it is unconvincing and inherits the same problems. (shrink)

In topological spaces, the relation of extended contact is a ternary relation that holds between regular closed subsets A, B and D if the intersection of A and B is included in D. The algebraic counterpart of this mereotopological relation is the notion of extended contact algebra which is a Boolean algebra extended with a ternary relation. In this paper, we are interested in the relational representation theory for extended contact algebras. In this respect, we study the correspondences between point-free (...) and point-based models of space in terms of extended contact. More precisely, we prove new representation theorems for extended contact algebras. (shrink)

The West African Ebola epidemic has set in motion a collective endeavour to conduct accelerated clinical trials, testing unproven but potentially lifesaving interventions in the course of a major public health crisis. This unprecedented effort was supported by the recommendations of an ad hoc ethics panel convened in August 2014 by the WHO. By considering why and on what conditions the exceptional circumstances of the Ebola epidemic justified the use of unproven interventions, the panel's recommendations have challenged conventional thinking about (...) therapeutic development and clinical research ethics. At the same time, unanswered ethical questions have emerged, in particular: the specification of exceptional circumstances, the specification of unproven interventions, the goals of interventional research in terms of individual versus collective interests, the place of adaptive trial designs and the exact meaning of compassionate use with unapproved interventions. Examination of these questions, in parallel with empirical data from research sites, will help build pragmatic foundations for disaster research ethics. Furthermore, the Ebola clinical trials signal an evolution in the current paradigms of therapeutic research, beyond the case of epidemic emergencies. (shrink)

This article examines what might constitute the first manifestation of consciousness in the life of an individual, focusing on the subjective starting state of newborns. It presents evidence showing that we are born with some minimal self-awareness, a kind of awareness that might even be present in foetuses depending on the criteria used. It investigates the mechanisms that might account for how self-awareness quickly evolves from being minimal and phenomenal in the context of sensation, perception, and action and discusses the (...) innate propensity of newborns to detect sameness in the experience of things that surround them. It identifies two putative mechanisms that would support an innate propensity to detect sameness: synesthesia and the vicariousness of experience. (shrink)

The paper develops an objection to the extensional model of time consciousness—the view that temporally extended events or processes, and their temporal properties, can be directly perceived as such. Importantly, following James, advocates of the extensional model typically insist that whole experiences of temporal relations between non-simultaneous events are distinct from mere successions of their temporal parts. This means, presumably, that there ought to be some feature(s) differentiating the former from the latter. I try to show why the extensional models (...) offers no credible ground for positing such a difference. (shrink)

Here we will go beyond the variety of violence to show its unity, common points and continuities. For although there are multiple forms of violence, they are interrelated: they define a continuum from trivial to extreme violence. Violence against oneself, things, living things such as plants and animals, other nations, the other, one’s fellow human beings, therefore the violence of society against its members, which returns to self-violence. Another continuum is its spiral development, with violence generating violence and pushing it (...) to grow. Violence can also be learned, we progress ever further in violence: in gangs, in armies, in society... Everyone is capable of violence, sometimes to a good advantage as in self-defence. Here it resides in necessity, that of survival, but in general it is impunity that allows and encourages it. In closed, totalitarian, universes: family, work, hospital, army, state... The proximity and distance between the perpetrator and the victim defines yet another continuity. We will discuss the various elements that contribute to its development. And paradoxically, to see that violence also serves to avoid violence. In this way, evacuating it, refusing it, is in fact feeding it, which makes today’s violence, which is an evolution of previous violence and which prepares and defines tomorrow’s violence. (shrink)

Kant’s analysis of the concept of natural purpose in the Critique of judgment captured several features of organisms that he argued warranted making them the objects of a special field of study, in need of a special regulative teleological principle. By showing that organisms have to be conceived as self-organizing wholes, epigenetically built according to the idea of a whole that we must presuppose, Kant accounted for three features of organisms conflated in the biological sciences of the period: adaptation, functionality (...) and conservation of forms..Kant’s unitary concept of natural purpose was subsequently split in two directions: first by Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, that would draw on the idea of adaptative functions as a regulative principle for understanding in reconstituting and classifying organisms; and then by Goethe’s and Geoffroy’s morphology, a science of the general transformations of living forms. However, such general transformations in nature, objects of an alleged ‘archaeology of nature’, were thought impossible by Kant in the §80 of the Critique of judgment. Goethe made this ‘adventure of reason’ possible by changing the sense of ‘explanation’: scientific explanation was shifted from the investigation of the mechanical processes of generation of individual organisms to the unveiling of some ideal transformations of types instantiated by those organisms. (shrink)

We propose two alternatives to Xu’s axiomatization of Chellas’s STIT. The first one simplifies its presentation, and also provides an alternative axiomatization of the deliberative STIT. The second one starts from the idea that the historic necessity operator can be defined as an abbreviation of operators of agency, and can thus be eliminated from the logic of Chellas’s STIT. The second axiomatization also allows us to establish that the problem of deciding the satisfiability of a STIT formula without temporal operators (...) is NP-complete in the single-agent case, and is NEXPTIME-complete in the multiagent case, both for the deliberative and Chellas’s STIT. (shrink)

Beyond the predominant paradigm of an essentially rational human cognition, based on the classical binary logic, we want to propose some reflections that are organized around the intuition that the representations we have of the world are weighted with appreciations, for example affective ones. resulting from our integration into a social environment. We see these connotations as essentially ternary in nature, depending on the concepts underlying neutrosophy: either positive, negative or neutral. This form of representation would then influence the very (...) nature of the cognitive process, which in complex real-world situations, has to deal with problems of a combinatorial nature leading to a number of cases too large for our abilities. Forced to proceed by shortcuts on the basis of heuristics, cognition would use these assessments of the representations it manipulates to decide whether partial solutions are attractive for solving the problem or on the contrary are judged negative and are then quickly rejected. There is still the case of a neutral weighting that allows processing to continue. Thus a neutrosophical conception of our representations of the world explains how our cognition functions in its treatment of combinatorial problems in the form of producing processing accelerating heuristics, both in terms of partial solutions selection and processing optimization. (shrink)

The problem of generation has been, for Kant scholars, a kind of test of Kant's successive concepts of finality. Although he deplores the absence of a naturalistic account of purposiveness (and hence of reproduction) in his pre-critical writings, in the First Critique he nevertheless presents a "reductionist" view of finality in the Transcendental Dialectic's Appendices. This finality can be used only as a language, extended to the whole of nature, but which must be filled with mechanistic explanations. Therefore, in 1781, (...) mechanism and teleology are synonymous languages. Despite the differences between its two authors, the Wolffian embryology, exposed in the Theorie der Generation (1764), and debated by Blumenbach's dissertation on Bildungstrieb, enabled Kant to resolve the philosophical problem of natural generation, and subsequently to determine what is proper to the explanation of living processes. Thus, in the Third Critique he could give another account of purposiveness, restricted to the organism, and more realistic than his former one; this philosophical reappraisal of purposiveness in embryology required the new concept of "simply reflexive judgement", and the correlated notion of "regulative principle". Thus framed, this naturalized teleology provided some answers to the Kantian problem of order and contingency after the end of classical (Leibnizian) metaphysics. (shrink)

We define and study the notion of an indexed frame. This is a bi-dimensional structure consisting of a Cartesian product equipped with relations which only relate pairs if they coincide in one of their components. We show that these structures are quite ubiquitous in modal logic, showing up in the literature as products of Kripke frames, subset spaces, or temporal frames for STIT logics. We show that indexed frames are completely characterised by their ‘orthogonal’ relations, and we provide their sound (...) and complete logic. Using these ‘orthogonality’ results, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for an arbitrary Kripke frame to be isomorphic to certain well-known bi-dimensional structures. (shrink)

Ce texte présente une analyse de la construction intellectuelle, politique et nationaliste de la notion de « langues » comme unités fondamentales, closes et distinctes les unes des autres, qui constituent le monde sociolinguistique. Il propose une théorie du « triple enfermement » logico-mathématique, sociopolitique et ethno-nationaliste des pratiques linguistiques en Occident, qui a exclu toute prise en considération des continuités pensées comme des « mélanges » et autres « intermédiaires » entre de supposées « vraies » langues. Il examine (...) ensuite l’émergence d’une autre conception de l’espace linguistique où l’« entre-les-langues » est non seulement remis en valeur, mais aussi et surtout pensé comme constituant le composant primordial du monde sociolinguistique. Il montre comment une analyse interculturelle du passage « entre-les-langues » et comment l’analyse de l’inventivité « hors-des-langues » des locuteurs ont permis de revisiter la conception des pratiques linguistiques sur une base fondamentalement renouvelée. This text presents an analysis of the intellectual, political and nationalist construction of the notion of “languages” as fundamental closed and distinct units constituting the sociolinguistic world. It suggests a “triple enlocking” theory of linguistic practices in the Western world. These logico-mathematical, sociopolitical and ethno-nationalist enlockings have excluded any consideration for continua, presented as “mixings” and other “intermediates” between supposed “true” languages. Then comes the examination of another conception of the linguistic space where the “between-the-languages” is not only restored in value but also considered as the primary component of the sociolinguistic world. It shows how an intercultural analysis of both the passing “between-the-languages” and the speakers inventivity “out-of-the-languages” has allowed revisiting the conception of linguistic practices on a fundamentally new basis. (shrink)

Quelques années avant sa mort, Sartre soutient que, même s’il lui est arrivé d’écrire sur de tels sujets, il ignore aussi bien l’angoisse que le désespoir. Avec la sincérité – semble-t-il – d’un homme délivré du qu’en-dira-t-on, l’auteur de L’Être et le néant déclare : « j’ai parlé de désespoir, mais c’est de la blague, j’en ai parlé parce qu’on en parlait, parce que c’était la mode : on lisait Kierkegaard », et il ajoute à propos de l’angoisse : « (...) je n’ai jamais eu d’angoisse. Ce sont des no... (shrink)

O presente artigo pretende sustentar que o diagnóstico adorniano sobre perda da experiência qualitativa do tempo no expressionismo de Schoenberg pode ser desdobrado a partir da mobilização de dois conceitos da musicologia: o trabalho temático e a harmonia tonal. Ambos os conceitos estão associados a procedimentos compositivos em virtude dos quais logrou-se, na música anterior ao expressionismo, uma continuidade temporal que obedecia a uma necessidade, isto é, não contingente, ou fortuita. A dissolução da continuidade temporal na obra expressionista de Schoenberg (...) é, portanto, resultado do abandono destes mesmos procedimentos. (shrink)

In the ordinary modal language, KD is the modal logic determined by the class of all serial frames. In this paper, we demonstrate that KD is nullary.

Since its origin in the early 20th century, the modern synthesis theory of evolution has grown to represent the orthodox view on the process of organic evolution. It is a powerful and successful theory. Its defining features include the prominence it accords to genes in the explanation of development and inheritance, and the role of natural selection as the cause of adaptation. Since the advent of the 21st century, however, the modern synthesis has been subject to repeated and sustained challenges. (...) In the last two decades, evolutionary biology has witnessed unprecedented growth in the understanding of those processes that underwrite the development of organisms and the inheritance of characters. The empirical advances usher in challenges to the conceptual foundations of evolutionary theory. Many current commentators charge that the new biology of the 21st century calls for a revision, extension, or wholesale rejection of the modern synthesis theory of evolution. Defenders of the modern synthesis maintain that the theory can accommodate the exciting new advances in biology, without forfeiting its central precepts. The original essays collected in this volume—by evolutionary biologists, philosophers of science, and historians of biology—survey and assess the various challenges to the modern synthesis arising from the new biology of the 21st century. Taken together, the essays cover a spectrum of views, from those that contend that the modern synthesis can rise to the challenges of the new biology, with little or no revision required, to those that call for the abandonment of the modern synthesis. (shrink)

The problem of unification in a normal modal logic $L$ can be defined as follows: given a formula $\varphi$, determine whether there exists a substitution $\sigma$ such that $\sigma $ is in $L$. In this paper, we prove that for several non-symmetric non-transitive modal logics, there exists unifiable formulas that possess no minimal complete set of unifiers.

This article addresses the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on the implications of state secularism for the public use of reason. Recent commentators have traced this debate either to Habermas’s and Taylor’s divergent views about the status of Western modernity or to their disagreement about the relation between the good and the right. I argue that these readings rest on misinterpretations of Habermas’s theory of social evolution and understanding of impartial justification. I show that the debate rests on (...) diverging interpretations of what it means for citizens to embed the principles of liberal democracy in their respective conceptions of the good. This difference in turn leads Habermas and Taylor to espouse different criteria of democratic legitimacy. I conclude by suggesting that we have prima facie reasons to prefer Habermas’s conception of legitimacy to Taylor’s, and to that extent, to favor his model of the public use of reason. (shrink)

Musical performance requires the ability to master a complex integration of highly specialized motor, cognitive and perceptual skills developed over years of practice. It often means also being able to deal with a large amount of pressure within dynamic environments. Consequently, many musicians suffer from health-related problems and have a large number of physical and psychological complaints. Research has shown that making music can present challenges for musicians’ wellbeing. Therefore, our research aims to evaluate and analyze the wellbeing of two (...) distinct groups of respondents, college music students compared with amateur musicians in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, this second group serving as our comparison group. This article presents the results of a sample of 126 musicians (mean age ± SD = 22.4 ± 4.5 years, 71 male). The wellbeing was assessed through the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF questionnaire evaluating two general measures, Quality of Life and General health, and four specific dimensions, Physical health, Psychological health, Social relationships and Environment. The respondents’ Quality of Life was high on each measure: median scores were higher than 4 for the first two measures and higher than 70 for the four specific dimensions. Among the dimensions, respondents had the highest mean score for Social relationships and Physical health (74.0 and 73.8, respectively) and, finally, on Psychological health (70.3). Our overview of musicians’ wellbeing in Western Switzerland underlines the importance of helping musicians to be aware of their health in order to take care of themselves. This research offers an important insight into musicians’ health and point out the importance of involving different actors (teachers, administrators or support staff) to promote their wellbeing and empower musicians. (shrink)

When engaging with classical Chinese ethics, we might end up wondering what kind of moral theorizing we ultimately are confronted with. The accounts and answers to specific practical problems are dispersed throughout the texts and expressed via various codes of composition, ranging from sayings to theoretical reflections to poems. However, what exactly the aim of these theories consists in is not explicitly addressed by systematic second-order reflections. In this article I try to shed some light on the understanding of moral (...) theorizing that underlies the transmitted texts. For this, I adopt an issue-centered approach that attempts to indirectly address the understanding of moral theorizing via the question about the source of normativity. That approach will be tested by drawing on the accounts of Mengzi 孟子 and Cheng Yi 程頤. First conclusions will show that moral theorizing can be understood as the simultaneous business of a moral anatomist and a moral painter. (shrink)

‘Statisticalists’ argue that the individual interactions of organisms taken together constitute natural selection. On this view, natural selection is an aggregated effect of interactions rather than some added cause acting on populations. The statisticalists’ view entails that natural selection and drift are indistinguishable aggregated effects of interactions, so that it becomes impossible to make a difference between them. The present paper attempts to make sense of the difference between selection and drift, given the main insights of statisticalism; basically, it will (...) disentangle the various kinds of indistinguishability between selection and drift that happen within biology, by examining the epistemological and metaphysical nature of the distinction between selection and drift. It will be based on a ‘difference-making account’ of selection. The first section will explicate the inscrutability of selection and drift, its various types in the statisticalist writings, and its implications. The second section specifies concepts of natural selection and drift in the difference making account of selection I am using, and shows that one can derive from this the statistical signatures of selection and drift. On this basis I focus on one sort of indistinguishability issue about selection and drift, which I call epistemic opacity, and explain why it mostly affects small populations. The last section explains why epistemic opacity does not raise an genuine epistemic problem for evolutionary biology. (shrink)

I investigate the relationship between adaptation, as defined in evolutionary theory through natural selection, and the concept of emergence. I argue that there is an essential correlation between the former, and “emergence” defined in the field of algorithmic simulations. I first show that the computational concept of emergence (in terms of incompressible simulation) can be correlated with a causal criterion of emergence (in terms of the specificity of the explanation of global patterns). On this ground, I argue that emergence in (...) general involves some sort of selective processes. Finally, I show that a second criterion, concerning novel explanatory regularities following the emergence of a pattern, captures the robustness of emergence displayed by some cases of emergence (according to the first criterion). Emergent processes fulfilling both criteria are therefore exemplified in evolutionary biology by some so-called “innovations”, and mostly by the new units of fitness or new kinds of adaptations (like sexual reproduction, multicellular organisms, cells, societies) sometimes called “major transitions in evolution”, that recent research programs (Maynard-Smith and Szathmary 1995 ; Michod 1999 ) aims at explaining. (shrink)

Ecology in principle is tied to evolution, since communities and ecosystems result from evolution and ecological conditions determine fitness values. Yet the two disciplines of evolution and ecology were not unified in the twentieth-century. The architects of the Modern Synthesis, and especially Julian Huxley, constantly pushed for such integration, but the major ideas of the Synthesis—namely, the privileged role of selection and the key role of gene frequencies in evolution—did not directly or immediately translate into ecological science. In this paper (...) I consider five stages through which the Synthesis was integrated into ecology and distinguish between various ways in which a possible integration was gained. I start with Elton’s animal ecology, then consider successively Ford’s ecological genetics in the 1940s, the major textbook Principles of animal ecology edited by Allee et al., and the debates over the role of competition in population regulation in the 1950s, ending with Hutchinson’s niche concept and McArthur and Wilson’s Principles of Island Biogeography viewed as a formal transposition of Modern Synthesis explanatory schemes. I will emphasize the key role of founders of the Synthesis at each stage of this very nonlinear history. (shrink)

Natural selection is often envisaged as the ultimate cause of the apparent rationality exhibited by organisms in their specific habitat. Given the equivalence between selection and rationality as maximizing processes, one would indeed expect organisms to implement rational decision-makers. Yet, many violations of the clauses of rationality have been witnessed in various species such as starlings, hummingbirds, amoebas and honeybees. This paper attempts to interpret such discrepancies between economic rationality and biological rationality. After having distinguished two kinds of rationality we (...) introduce irrationality as a negation of economic rationality by biologically rational decision-makers. Focusing mainly on those instances of irrationalities that can be understood as exhibiting inconsistency in making choices, i.e. as non-conformity of a given behaviour to axioms such as transitivity or independence of irrelevant alternatives, we propose two possible families of Darwinian explanations that may account for these apparent irrationalities. First, we consider cases where natural selection may have been an indirect cause of irrationality. Second, we consider putative cases where violations of rationality axioms may have been directly favored by natural selection. Though the latter cases seem to clearly contradict our intuitive representation of natural selection as a process that maximizes fitness, we argue that they are actually unproblematic; for often, they can be redescribed as cases where no rationality axiom is violated, or as situations where no adaptive solution exists in the first place. (shrink)

What are the roots of human normativity and when do children begin to behave according to standards and norms? Empirical observations demonstrate that we are born with built-in orientation toward what is predictable and of the same - henceforth what deviates from it -, what is the norm or the standard in the generic sense of the word. However, what develop in humans is self-consciousness, transforming norms from “should” to “ought” and making human normativity profoundly different from any other forms (...) expressed in infancy, other animals, or any smart machines. Self-consciousness is the ability to objectify oneself through the evaluative eyes of others. It sets us apart as a species and is at the roots of human normativity. A developmental blueprint capturing the progressive co-emergence of self-consciousness and normativity in the human child is proposed. (shrink)

This paper interprets the two pages devoted in the Critique of Pure Reason to a critique of Leibniz’s view of organisms as infinitely organized machines. It argues that this issue of organisms represents a crucial test-case for Kant in regard to the conflicting notions of space, continuity and divisibility held by classical metaphysics and by criticism. I first present Leibniz’s doctrine and its justification. In a second step, I explain the general reasoning by which Kant defines the problem of the (...) Antinomies, and then I specify the case of the Second Antinomy. Then, I ask why the organism raises specific issues for Kant’s solution of the Second Antinomy, and why it sheds light on the nature of Leibniz’s metaphysical assumptions about organisms. The last section considers this critique of Leibniz from the perspective of Kant’s future theory of organisms in the third Critique, specifying its role in the development of a Kantian view of organisms with regard to the changes occurring at the same time in the life sciences. (shrink)

We argue that Anselm’s ontological argument (or at least one reconstruction of it) is based on an empirical version of Berry’s paradox. It is invalid, but it takes some understanding of trivalence to see why this is so. Under our analysis, Anselm’s use of the notion of existence is not the heart of the matter; rather, trivalence is.

The comprehension of living organisms in all their complexity poses a major challenge to the biological sciences. Recently, systems biology has been proposed as a new candidate in the development of such a comprehension. The main objective of this paper is to address what systems biology is and how it is practised. To this end, the basic tools of a systems biological approach are explored and illustrated. In addition, it is questioned whether systems biology ‘revolutionizes’ molecular biology and ‘transcends’ its (...) assumed reductionism. The strength of this claim appears to depend on how molecular and systems biology are characterised and on how reductionism is interpreted. Doing credit to molecular biology and to methodological reductionism, it is argued that the distinction between molecular and systems biology is gradual rather than sharp. As such, the classical challenge in biology to manage, interpret and integrate biological data into functional wholes is further intensified by systems biology’s use of modelling and bioinformatics, and by its scale enlargement. (shrink)

This article has three main aims. First, it argues that the question of the inclusion of “non‐Western” thought in philosophy cannot be resolved by appealing to definitions of philosophy, as such definitions are an integral part of the epistemically hegemonic practices responsible for the exclusion of non‐Western thought in the first place. Second, it argues that philosophy is structurally Eurocentric. It makes this argument first by looking at metaphilosophy. It argues that metaphilosophy is primarily performative and that its performativity is (...) a form of boundary work that is engaged in hegemonic practices of the epistemic type. It then argues that philosophy as a whole is inescapably engaged in boundary work and hegemonic practices, some of which partake in structural Eurocentrism. Finally, it promotes sociometaphilosophy, an approach that draws from the new sociology of knowledge to identify illegitimate mechanisms of exclusion inscribed in the rules that codify philosophical practice. (shrink)

The Powers of the Sacred is an opportunity for Hans Joas to return to the dynamogenic character of religion highlighted by William James and Émile Durkheim, in order to propose a reflection on the process of sacralisation of values. The present contribution enters into a pragmatist dialogue with Joas’s proposals, based on investigations carried out in an evangelical context. The aim is to show how certain spiritual practices encouraged on the horizon of collective celebrations participate in the creation of values (...) configured by religious entrepreneurs anxious to capture the religious energy of the faithful for the benefit of conservative political mobilizations. These empirical cases shed new light on the notion of the sacred proposed by Joas, and allow us to identify certain methodological knots, notably in the relationship between Joasian concepts and the notions through which social actors confer meaning on their individual or collective experiences. (shrink)

This new contribution to urban morphology studies outlines the investigations carried out in the Ghlastropi region, over a vast urbanized zone that covers the area between the House of Masks and the western coastline beyond the Dioskourion. Several observations can be made. The urban forms that can be reconstructed from surface remains vary according to topography and natural conditions. To the south of the House of Masks and the Guest house, the urban fabric is less dense than that of the (...) Theatre Quarter, and it is organized around a number of water reservoirs resulting from open‑cast quarries. The Ghlastropi hill features the remains of a unique marble edifice on its summit, while its western slope was covered with a high‑density district; there, the houses followed the slope down to Street 5 and to the port’s commercial buildings. Finally, further south, we find a more spread‑out habitat pattern, established on a very narrow coastal space, comparable to the building pattern found on the coastal cliffs of the Patiniotis peninsula. These observations lead us to believe that the city of the late 1st and early 2nd centuries did not extend beyond these few houses facing the sea. Further south, the remains we come across apparently belong to terraces or isolated buildings linked to the agricultural activities of the Delian countryside. (shrink)