This article explores a training need common to every stage of a teacher’s career : the need to be accompanied. It takes an integrative perspective on the process of the situated learning of teaching, throughout the career, from the pre-service practicums to the period of entrance in the profession then to the in-service training. Providing a reflexive accompaniment of the teachers’ practical experiences is here presented as a central factor for linking the training and the work environments. The first part (...) of the article exposes our conception of a reflexive accompaniment and justifies its importance for the evolution of the teaching practices. Then, we describe how we were convinced of that importance through our role as directors of two teacher training devices, one in Switzerland, one in Quebec. Finally, the third part of the article is devoted to the training of the persons that practice such an accompaniment. (shrink)

John Dewey talks about child as an «agency of doing» which, by its action, strives to create meaning. From this view, Dewey offers new teaching principles focusing on learning in a context of free activity rather than in a context of restrictive discipline. The child is no longer just invited to represent the phenomenon to understand, it is somehow invited to meet it, to experience it, experience being defined as a transaction between the human being and physical and social environment. (...) Dewey also said that the lack of continuity in the experience marks the beginning of the learning process, he called inquiry, no longer described as essentially individualistic, which bases his epistemic perception of democracy. After briefly describing our meeting with Dewey’s educational thought, we will try to establish, from his conception of action, inquiry and democracy, how his thought can be considered as a foundation for a major innovation educational innovation symbolizing education reform in Quebec of the 2000s: the project approach. (shrink)

La guerre du Vietnam a été le plus grand traumatisme vécu par les Américains au XXe siècle, une « tache » dans « leur siècle » que la société a progressivement estompée pour faire entrer le récit de cette guerre dans la logique de la « Destinée manifeste ». L'analyse des fictions cinématographiques et télé­visées produites aux États-Unis permet de suivre l'évolution de ce travail de mémoire : violence du traumatisme dans les années 1960 et surtout 1970, « révision » (...) dans les années 1980 pour en faire une « noble cause », devenue quasi folklorique dans les années 1990 et remise au goût du jour dans les années 2000 face au nouveau bourbier américain, l'Irak.The Vietnam War was a momentous trauma for 20th century Americans, a "stain}} on "the American century" that was gradually glossed over by society to bring events into line with the "Manifest Destiny". This analysis of film and TV fiction produced in the United States tracks the workings of memory from the violent trauma of the 1960s and especially the 1970s, through to the "revision" of the 1980s that turned the war into a "noble cause}}, then into !ittle more than anecdotal folklore in the 1990s, and finally, after 2000, back to centre stage as America once more sank into a quagmire, this time in Iraq. (shrink)

We present a novel semantic and conversational framework for a class of gradable-like constructions. These include metalinguistic comparatives, like "Ann is more a linguist than a philosopher", as well as metalinguistic equatives, degree modifications, and conditionals. To the extent previous literature discusses such metalinguistic gradability, the focus has been on comparatives. We extend our account of metalinguistic comparatives (Rudolph & Kocurek 2020) to cover a broader range of metalinguistic gradable constructions. On our semantic expressivist view, these all serve in (...) various ways to express speakers' relative commitments to different linguistic interpretations. (shrink)

This section discusses mostly some unsolved problems. . . .I hope that some mathematicians who are interested in a classification of sets of real numbers, in particular sets with Lebesgue measure zero, will read it and try to find solutions for the problems here outlined.

Poverty has continued to be an enormous challenge for Africa. Immoral political decisions and tactics have led to the continued suffering of the landless poor in the city of Harare. With no consideration for the dignity of people, the government of Zimbabwe through Operation Murambatsvina demolished shelters belonging to the poor in the city a decade and half ago. To this day, most of the victims of this destruction still lack adequate accommodation. The majority urban poor have been excluded from (...) the community and inhabit shanty towns around Harare. Deprived of justice, the poor are alienated from their right to land, nourishment and dignified life. This complete disregard for life and African community values ought to be challenged. Ubuntu moral theory presents necessary guiding principles for human progress that achieves genuine harmony and equality among all people. In light of the experiences of deadly but preventable poverty in Harare, the will-to-live for all requires confirmation. Every human being is endowed with irrevocable intrinsic worth. The elimination of poverty requires practical philosophical resolutions that are driven by sincere respect for human life. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering involves revising our concepts. It can be pursued as a specific philosophical methodology, but is also common in ordinary, non-philosophical, contexts. How does our capacity for conceptual engineering fit into human cognitive life more broadly? I hold that conceptual engineering is best understood alongside practices of conceptual exploration, examples of which include conceptual supposition (i.e. suppositional reasoning about alternative concepts), and conceptual comparison (i.e. comparisons between possible concept choices). Whereas in conceptual engineering we aim to change the concepts (...) we use, in conceptual exploration, we reason about conceptual possibilities. I approach conceptual exploration via the linguistic tools we use to communicate about concepts, using metalinguistic negotiation, convention-shifting conditionals, and metalinguistic comparatives as my key examples. I present a linguistic framework incorporating conventions that can account for this communication in a unified way. Furthermore, I argue that conceptual exploration helps undermine skepticism about conceptual engineering itself. (shrink)

Cette étude se propose de confronter deux conceptions du passé qui se font jour en alternance dans la pensée de Paul Ricœur. La première, que l’on rencontre dans Temps et récit et ailleurs, appréhende le passé comme un espace d’expérience riche de possibilités dont la saisie au présent permet d’orienter les attentes dirigées vers l’avenir; la seconde, reprise de la psychanalyse freudienne, le pose comme une charge qui hante le présent sur le mode de la compulsion de répétition. Les enjeux (...) de cette confrontation entre un passé qui ouvre sur l’avenir et un qui en barre l’accès sont doubles: d’un côté il s’agit de montrer quelles incidences les lectures de Freud faites par Ricœur ont eu sur sa propre philosophie du temps; de l’autre, d’exposer, à la lumière du problème posé par la hantise du passé, toute la portée pratique de l’idée ricœurienne d’un passé indéterminé. (shrink)

Some assertions give rise to the acquaintance inference: the inference that the speaker is acquainted with some individual. Discussion of the acquaintance inference has previously focused on assertions about aesthetic matters and personal tastes (e.g. 'The cake is tasty'), but it also arises with reports about how things seem (e.g. 'Tom seems like he's cooking'). 'Seem'-reports give rise to puzzling acquaintance behavior, with no analogue in the previously-discussed domains. In particular, these reports call for a distinction between the specific acquaintance (...) inference (that the speaker is acquainted with a specific individual) and the general acquaintance inference (that the speaker is acquainted with something or other of relevance). We frame a novel empirical generalization -- the specific with stage-level generalization -- that systematizes the observed behavior, in terms of the semantics of the embedded 'like'-clause. We present supporting experimental work, and explain why the generalization makes sense given the evidential role of 'seem'-reports. Finally, we discuss the relevance of this result for extant proposals about the semantics of 'seem'-reports. More modestly, it fills a gap in previous theories by identifying which reports get which of two possible interpretations; more radically, it suggests a revision of the kind of explanation that should be given for the acquaintance behavior in question. (shrink)

This paper describes subjectivity as the manifestation of the primordial awareness field.

This study arises from a question concerning the phenomenological approach to memory in Memory, History, Forgetting, namely, why does Ricœur, who is otherwise known a great thinker of narrativity, neglects to consider the narrative aspect of memory? After explaining this surprising omission, we try to piece together, from hints and suggestions scattered throughout Ricœur’s work, a hermeneutical phenomenology more compatible with the narrative aspect of personal memory.