Les interrogations nouvelles des historiens modernistes sur la culture populaire, celles des anthropologues du politique concernant la politique au village ou dans les milieux ouvriers des grandes villes, nous incitent à postuler l'existence dès l'Ancien Régime d'une politique populaire dont on avait jusqu'ici remarqué surtout les manifestations extrêmes : émeutes frumentaires ou anti-fiscales, jacqueries anti-seigneuriales. Cette politique du peuple est fondée sur la survie des communautés de base qui se résignent à l'ordre des choses tant que les seuils de l'intolérable (...) ne sont pas franchis. L'insurrection a donc pour but un retour à l'ordre que le pouvoir doit assurer face aux agressions qui menacent les communautés. En France, La Révolution de 89 a remis en cause cet ordre des choses, les initiatives et exigences de la Nation ont reçu l'assentiment populaire quand elles correspondaient aux impératifs de la politique du peuple et cela jusqu'à l'écroulement du Second Empire. Il semblerait qu'il faille voir dans la politique du peuple, les racines de ce que politologues et historiens appellent le populisme.The new questions of the historians on the popular culture, those of the anthropologists of the policy concerning the policy in the village or in the working classes of the cities, encourage us to postulate the existence as far back as the "Ancien Régime" of a popular policy which one had noticed up to now especially the extreme demonstrations: anti-tax riots or massacres against the nobility. This policy of the people is founded on the survival of the basic communities {parishes, districts) which resign themselves to the established order as long as the thresholds of intolerable are not crossed. The purpose of the rebellion is thus a return to the order which the power must ensure against the aggressions which threaten the communities. In France, the Revolution of 89 doubt this order, the initiatives and requirements of the Nation received the popular approval when they corresponded to the requirements of the policy of the people and that until the collapse of the Second Empire. It would seem that it is necessary to see in the policy of the people, the roots of what political scientists and historians call the populism. (shrink)

Univocalist analyses of the modal auxiliary verbs ('ought'/'must'/'can'/'may''/'will') and the adjectives 'right'/'wrong'.

Introduction -- The mathematical roots of the concept of analogy -- Aristotle : the uses of analogy -- Aristotle : analogy and language -- Thomas Aquinas -- Immanuel Kant -- Karl Barth -- Final reflections.

A-t-on le droit de croire en l'existence de Dieu? Non, répondent ceux qui veulent des preuves. Oui, affirme ce livre, car nous avons le droit de croire même sans justification épistémologique. Cela n'a rien d'intellectuellement honteux, contrairement à ce que disent certains philosophes, en parlant d'une éthique des croyances Une nouvelle question se pose alors : a-t-on le droit de croire avoir reçu une révélation et prétendre connaître ainsi la vérité? Non, répondent ceux pour lesquels la vérité ne peut pas (...) être donnée par Dieu dans la Bible. Oui, affirme ce livre, et, qui plus est, une épistémologie peut défendre la rationalité de notre croyance à la révélation. Dès lors, peut-on faire comme si les affirmations du Credo étaient des fictions? Est-il vrai que la religion est avant tout une affaire pratique et une forme de vie? Non, répond ce livre : les arguments en faveur d'une conception non réaliste de la religion sont faibles ; en revanche, le réalisme théologique peut être défendu. Renouvelant ainsi la traditionnelle question de la relation entre foi et raison, ce livre discute aussi bien les thèses de saint Thomas, de John Locke, du cardinal Newman et de Ludwig Wittgenstein, que celles de philosophes analytiques contemporains de la religion comme Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen ou Linda Zagzebski. (shrink)

Emphasizing the continuity between his moral and aesthetic doctrines and the metaphysical basis in which they rest, the author explores Kant's relation to Leibniz and Hume, and his attempt to construct a philosophy which was neither rationalist nor empiricist, and could display the limits of human understanding; he shows that Kant was not only a master of philosophical criticism, but the greater defender of the objectivity of human knowledge, in both the scientific and the moral spheres.

_Rationality and Religion_ deals with the perennial question of how far religious faith needs reason.

This paper will examine a claim that nursing is united by its moral stance. The claim is that there are moral constraints on nurses' actions as people practising nursing and that they are in some way different from both what for now can be called standard morality and also different from the person's own moral views who also happens to be a nurse, hence the defining and unifying factor for nursing. I will begin by situating the claim within the broader (...) area about the need for a definition to state features that are essential to all and only members of its class. This will highlight the fact that there are two distinct types of definition used by authors seeking to find a unity for nursing. One type of definition has to do with goals or purposes given to nursing and the other with ends discovered as nursing. But even if there are ends waiting to be discovered a particular practical concern is how we can have knowledge of them. I will suggest that knowledge by intuition is plausible but that as things currently stand in moral epistemology it will not provide the unifying ground for nursing. Then I will argue that in the latter approach to definition a certain account of human nature has been advanced in order to provide features that are there to be discovered and so not dependent on human beings for the definition or classification. However, such an attempt to define nursing cannot do what is wanted. Rather than the account of human nature grounding morality and doing so for nursing, the account of human nature itself relies upon a prior account of morality. Because of this it loses its supposed ground of unity for the profession. Nursing is not united by its moral stance especially if this is understood in a strong sense as unique moral stance, but as things currently stand in moral epistemology this is not necessarily a bad thing for practitioners or patients. (shrink)

Discussing the history of universal human rights and Confucian values, Ames asserts that a growing dialogue between China and the United States would benefit China in terms of political and individual rights and the United States in terms of a greater sense of civic virtue.

In his own time, Lao Sze-Kwang formulated his own intra-cultural approach to the philosophy of culture that begins from the interdependence and organic nature of our cultural experience. In this essay, I address three questions: Why did Lao abandon his early reliance on the Hegelian model of philosophy of culture and formulate his own “two- structured” theory? Again, given Lao’s profound commitment and contribution to Chinese philosophy and its future directions, why is it not proper to describe him as a (...) “Chinese philosopher?” And why is the much accomplished Lao Sze- Kwang not installed in the CUHK pantheon as yet one more of the great “New Confucian” philosophers (xinruxuejia 新儒學家) to be associated with this institution? (shrink)

More than forty years of commitment to nuclear weapons may have prepared Britain to take part in Armageddon, but not to defend itself against attack. What made British governments choose this path and how have they justified it? How have they responded to the moral questions it raises? Using material from recently-released official documents, Roger Ruston presents a moral history of British defence policy, from the 'lesson' of Appeasement to the nuclear modernizations of the eighties, and answers many of (...) the questions that governments have avoided. The book will be of great interest to defence historians, moralists, politicians, and general readers who need a clear account of their country's defence predicament as a basis from which to devise workable and morally acceptable alternatives. (shrink)

Sound and complete semantics for classical propositional logic can be obtained by interpreting sentences as sets. Replacing sets with commuting dense binary relations produces an interpretation that turns out to be sound but not complete for R. Adding transitivity yields sound and complete semantics for RM, because all normal Sugihara matrices are representable as algebras of binary relations.

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects--or passions, as they were also called--formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for such theories, since it wasn't apparent that musical tones could (...) imitate anything with any dependability, beyond the rare thunderclap or birdcall. Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music, postulating that music's physical materiality as sound vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. It is a pendant to contemporary theories of affect, and one from which they have much to learn. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory's common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it gives renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects. (shrink)

Examines the aims and tools of science for creating theories and explanations of phenomena, with an eye to answering the question of whether or not science ...

Stopping rules — rules dictating when to stop accumulating data and start analyzing it for the purposes of inferring from the experiment — divide Bayesians, Likelihoodists and classical statistical approaches to inference. Although the relationship between Bayesian philosophy of science and stopping rules can be complex (cf. Steel 2003), in general, Bayesians regard stopping rules as irrelevant to what inference should be drawn from the data. This position clashes with classical statistical accounts. For orthodox statistics, stopping rules do matter to (...) what inference should be drawn from the data. "The dispute over stopping rule is far from being a marginal quibble, but is instead a striking illustration of the divergence of fundamental aims and standards separating Bayesians and advocates of orthodox statistical methods" (Steel 2004, 195) ... (shrink)

This essay presents a theory of aesthetics for landscape gardening based on Karsten Harries’s theory of the ethical function of architecture. It begins with an attempt to understand Horace Walpole’s praise of William Kent’s contribution to the development of “the modern taste in gardening,” according to which Kent was largely responsible for achieving the progressive revolution in landscape architecture that produced the picturesque style of English landscape gardening. After examining Harries’s theory, the essay discusses whether landscape architecture can produce works (...) of art and examines several historically-important garden styles to argue that it can. Finally, it discusses problems inherent in Modern and Postmodern landscape architecture. (shrink)

This article serves to extend a critique initiated by Allsup and Benedict in their 2008 PMER article, "The Problems of Band." Using the work of Michael Foucault as a theoretical and methodological basis, I consider ways in which today's large ensemble paradigm, particularly that of the wind band, has resulted in an ongoing antinomy in school music between those who view bands as a medium of music education and those who view bands as a medium for music education. I argue (...) that the emergence of the pedagogical band world in the United States and Canada altered the nature of wind band practices, and that the resultant bands-as-music-education paradigm can be understood in terms of issues of power and legitimacy. I strive to demonstrate how future directions in music education might benefit from a reflexive engagement with the discourses of our profession. (shrink)