Après les traités 38, 50 et 25, les Éditions du Cerf récidivent avec un nouveau titre, le traité 20 Sur la dialectique. Il faut toutefois aborder ce livre d’une manière toute spéciale, car il se distingue radicalement des autres parutions de cette collection. L’auteur, Vladimir Jankélévitch, s’est en effet éteint à Paris en 1985, à l’âge de quatre-vingt-deux ans. Le travail qu’on offre au public prend donc la forme d’un hommage posthume à ce philosophe français dont les publications s’étendent sur (...) cinquante ans, de 1924 à 1974. C’est précisément sa toute première composition d’importance, celle de 1924 lors de son diplôme d’études supérieures, qui s’ajoute désormais à l’ensemble de ses écrits et permettra de voir à quel état d’élévation se trouvait alors sa pensée du haut de ses vingt ans. L’édition moderne qu’on en propose respecte autant que possible l’original manuscrit. Par exemple, toutes les annotations que fit Émile Bréhier en marge du travail de son étudiant apparaissent au bas des pages. Même les quelques erreurs de langage subsistent dans leur intégralité. Nos attentes doivent alors s’ajuster au type de travail qu’on s’apprête à lire. En tant que relique et témoignage d’une intelligence en plein développement, il prend une tout autre tangente que les ouvrages plus matures qu’a écrits P. Hadot sur les traités 38 et 50. La division de la recherche en introduction, traduction et commentaire, si constante d’un livre à l’autre, s’évanouit dans le traité Sur la dialectique. On n’y trouve aucune traduction et seulement un commentaire plus ou moins suivi sur la seconde moitié du traité. Le lecteur fera bien de se munir au préalable de son édition de Plotin chez Les Belles Lettres, afin de se rafraîchir au besoin la mémoire sur le traité I, 3. (shrink)

Donald Davidson infamously claims that belief is in its nature veridical, and that skepticism is for this reason fundamentally incoherent. To those who take the issue of external world skepticism seriously, Davidson's arguments may seem to involve a conjuring trick. In particular, his invocation of an ‘omniscient interpreter’, whose intelligibility supposedly ensures that our beliefs must be largely true, has the air of incense and lantern-rubbing about it. Davidson's claim has received considerable critical response in the literature, almost all of (...) it negative. In my view, some commentators have indeed lit on a critical and controversial lemma in Davidson's argument, but this basic result has been obscured by being presented amidst an array of other criticisms that simply make no sense from a Davidsonian point of view. The aim of this paper is to clear away some of the confusion that stands in the way of a more productive evaluation of Davidson's important claim. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Rationalism and the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction A priori Principles I: Davidson on Causation and the Mental Constitutive Principles and Classical Rationalism Classical Rationalism or Kantian Transcendentalism? The Refutation of (Transcendental) Idealism Rationalism Full‐Blown.

It is widely assumed that selection history accounts of function can support a fully reductive naturalization of functional properties. I argue that this assumption is false. A problem with the alternative causal role account of function in this context is that it invokes the teleological notion of a goal in analysing real function. The selection history account, if it is to have reductive status, must not do the same. But attention to certain cases of selection history in biology, specifically those (...) involving meiotic drive, shows that selection historical explanations are available in the case of items without any plausible function. Making contributions to goals, here fitness, must be introduced as an additional constraint in the analysis, either explicitly, or implicitly by appeal to individual functions or the selection-of/selection-for distinction. (shrink)

In this book, Della Rocca traces out the conceptual links between key concepts and principles of Spinoza's system bearing on representation and the mind-body problem. In the course of doing so, he presents and defends a number of new, interesting theses about Spinoza's thought on these matters. The arguments are presented with impressive clarity and in great detail. All in all, the book is a significant contribution to the literature on Spinoza's metaphysics and epistemology, and should be read by anyone (...) with a serious interest in its historical subject or in the two perennial philosophical problems on which it focuses. (shrink)

For years there was no focus within the U.S. federal government for alternatives to animal toxicity testing. Questions coming to regulatory agencies fell upon individuals to address in the best way they could. Given this void, the ad hoc Interagency Regulatory Alternatives Group was founded by staff in a number of federal agencies in the late 1980s to coalesce efforts in the field. The group sponsored two international workshops on eye irritation, the first making proposals for change in the current (...) test method in rabbits, the second reviewing available data on in vitro alternatives. The result has been that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is considering revision of the in vivo eye irritation test guideline to incorporate a number of the workshop deliberations. However, movement of the in vitro eye irritation alternatives has been disappointing; attempts to determine their practical testing significance have thus far been unrewarding. (shrink)

This book deals with the formation of Christian conscience in modern Africa....It can be divided into three parts. The first part is a sociological review on urbanization in Africa. The second part presents a theological reflection on conscience. The third part presents a general survey of the pastoral problems facing the Church in Africa, and in particular the urban centers. The dichotomy between the formation of conscience and the actual life experienced by a considerable number of Christians in Africa today (...) is a crucial moral and pastoral challenge. The author makes the recommendation that African realities should determine the priorities in inculturation and should provide the context for a move towards African Christian conscience. (back cover). (shrink)

From the neurophysiological perspective, thinking in dreaming and the quality of dream thought have been considered hallucinatory, bizarre, illogical, improbable, or even impossible. This empirical phenomenological research concentrates on testing whether dream thought can be defined as rational in the sense of an intervening mental process between sensory perception and the creation of meaning, leading to a conclusion or to taking action. From 10 individual dream journals of male participants aged 22–59 years and female participants aged 25–49 years, we delimited (...) four dreams per journal and randomly selected five thought units from each dream for scoring. The units provided a base for testing a hypothesis that the thought processes of dream construction are rational. The results support the hypothesis and demonstrate that eight fundamental rational thought processes can be applied to the dreaming process. (shrink)

There is evidence that many peptide growth factors and hormones act in the intracellular space after either internalization or retention in their cells of synthesis. These factors, commonly called intracrines, are structurally diverse while sharing some common functional features. Reports of intracellular peptide hormone binding and action are reviewed here. Also, this laboratory has made proposals regarding the origin and actions of intracrines and these areas are further explored. Intracrine interactions and the relationship of intracrines to transcription factors are discussed. (...) The intracellular/intracrine renin–angiotensin system (iRAS) is reviewed to illustrate the intracrine analogue of a well‐established physiological system. The role of intracrine action in metazoan development is also considered. BioEssays 25:401–409, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The topic of the present essay is the proper understanding of Donald Davidson’s version of the publicity requirement for the determinants of linguistic meaning. On the understanding I promote, the requirement is very strict indeed. My narrow aim is to show how such a strict conception of the publicity requirement can be maintained despite the evident need for interpreters to go beyond what is public on that conception in the process of constructing Davidsonian theories of meaning. Towards that aim, I (...) engage dialectically with treatments of Davidson’s principle of charity owing to Lepore and Ludwig and to Bar-On and Risjord, each of which, in different ways, recommend a more permissive approach to the publicity requirement than the one I recommended here. A broader aim is to shed some light on what would be required to take seriously the larger ambitions of Davidson’s semantic program. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the multifaceted character of computer outliners and to describe some of their more distinctive features. The author explicates the way outlining processors might be productively employed in teaching philosophy and concludes the paper with a brief discussion on extant outlining software.