Sandra Harding here develops further the themes first addressed in her widely influential book, The Science Question in Feminism, and conducts a compelling analysis of feminist theories on the philosophical problem of how we know what we ...

La Jaiminiyasamhita, en partie inédite, est une œuvre puranique de nature "encyclopédique". Dans une section de six chapitres intitulée "La question de Janaka" ('Janakaprasna'), le roi Kartaviryarjuna rend visite à Dattatreya, afin de recevoir un enseignement sur l''advaita', la "non-dualité". Ce dernier lui rapporte l'enseignement que le sage Asita transmit autrefois au roi mythique Janaka. Cette "question de Janaka", à l'instar des Upanisad, se présente sous la forme d'un dialogue entre un maître et un disciple. La thématique au cœur de (...) ce dialogue concerne la nature du 'brahman' et son rapport au corps. Elle permet à l'auteur de faire montre de l'étendue de son savoir dans des domaines aussi riches que variés: le développement embryonnaire et les théories physiologiques, les conceptions cosmogoniques, les paradoxes de la non-dualité et les disciplines de salut, en particulier le yoga, influencé par des conceptions tantriques. (shrink)

In their examination of survey findings, Pierson et al. (2024) illuminate critical insights into the current composition and philosophical perspectives of the bioethics field. Their study addresses...

Offers a pragmatically oriented reconstruction of the central issues of time.

ABSTRACTBesides physiological, behavioural, and affective effects, romantic love also has cognitive effects. In this study, we tested whether individual differences in infatuation and/or attachment level predict impaired interference control even in the absence of a love booster procedure, and whether individual differences in attachment level predict reduced adaptive cognitive control as measured by conflict adaptation and post-error slowing. Eighty-three young adults who had recently fallen in love completed a Stroop-like task, which yielded reliable indices of interference control and adaptive cognitive (...) control. We did not observe the predicted negative association between infatuation or attachment level and interference control. It might be that reduced interference control with love only happens when people are actively thinking about their beloved. In addition, we observed only weak evidence for the prediction t... (shrink)

Before developing a pragmatically based account of this interrelationship, the ensuing discussion will very briefly explore the positions of John Rawls, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Richard Rorty to elicit certain relevant features. As a sketchy caricature, and with all the dangers sketchy caricatures involve, it can be said that Rawls' position exemplifies the individual as the source of important community arrangements, MacIntyre's the individual as the product of community arrangements, and Rorty's the freeing of the issue from ontological entanglements and presumptions.

Collins, John Francis; Carroll, Sandra The publication of the 'Norms for the Formation of Permanent Deacons and Guidelines for the Ministry and Life of Permanent Deacons' by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, in August 2016, has renewed focus on the role of permanent deacon. This article uses a heuristic structure to discuss the role of the permanent deacon in the Catholic Church in Australia. It then provides a historical perspective and background on the worker priest movement from the mid-twentieth (...) century to explore the possibility of its application to the contemporary role of permanent deacon. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ontological and Other AssumptionsLloyd A. Wells (bio) and Sandra J. Rackley (bio)Fahrenberg and Cheetham have conducted an immensely thought-provoking study of the assumptions about human nature made by 800 students and pose a question about the future impact of these assumptions on individuals’ practice in professions including medicine and psychotherapy.This work represents a branch of “philosophical anthropology,” which considers assumptions people make about human nature. The authors used (...) a questionnaire, much of which was newly designed, to assess the assumptions made by university students studying psychology, philosophy, sciences, and other disciplines. Most of the respondents were studying at Freiburg, but some were sampled at several other universities in both the former East and West Germanies. Questions involved consciousness and the brain, evolution, free will, belief in God, the meaning of life, and theodicy.Given the importance of these beliefs and assumptions in so many peoples’ lives, it is quite surprising that there are so few modern data available, and this study ventures an important first step in assessing these assumptions. However, there are many problems inherent in this study (and any like it).The first, for us, is the validity of the questionnaire itself, an issue that was not specifically addressed in the paper. Face validity is a problem even in the few questions quoted directly in the paper. For example, some statements contain two clauses, and one could well agree with one without agreeing with another: “I do not know whether a God exists and I do not believe it is possible to know.” This is the most relevant answer for a true agnostic, but the assumption that “I do not know whether a God exists” does not necessarily link at all with “I do not believe it is possible to know.” Similarly, a theist might have trouble with the two clauses, “I know God really exists” and “I do not doubt this.” (Technically, knowledge does imply a lack of doubt, but belief certainly does not.) Particularly in the trilemmas, where various patterns of response were analyzed, these multiple-clause statements may have led students to respond in a manner inconsistent with their true beliefs and assumptions. Furthermore, many of the questions contain terms that may have been unfamiliar to first-year university students. The authors explain their rationale in not defining terms, but the lack of clarity about definitions may have led some of the students to not fully understand the questions asked and to perhaps influence the answers they chose.Misunderstanding of the questions may account for some of the disparities reported in the results. Other apparent inconsistencies, however, do not seem to be a result of unclear questions. For example, sixty percent of the students agreed with the statement that “I believe in … existence after death,” whereas forty-seven percent agreed with the statement that “when my brain is dead my consciousness and my person cease to be.” These [End Page 203] findings do not add up, and this study has several similar sets of data. People contradict themselves in long and complex questionnaires, and this may be a simple explanation for these findings, but is this the only explanation? How seriously did the students take the questionnaire, often given as part of their class? How honest were their responses?How generalizable are the findings of this study? It is very difficult even to speculate about this. The statistics are incomprehensible in light of the data given, and one must essentially take them on faith, wherever one falls on the God/theodicy questions. The design has many flaws, but we do learn how a subsample of German university students rate important factors about the meaning of life. Statements are made in the paper that the students’ results correlate with similar results for the general population, but this assertion seems to be based on a very few questions. One would like much more delineation of this apparent correlation, because we wonder about the juxtaposition of developmental factors with the answers the students gave to this questionnaire. First-year university students are at a critical developmental point, and it would be fascinating to follow this large cohort of students over time to see whether... (shrink)

La dénonciation du populisme est analysée ici comme une manière de structurer le champ politique selon une certaine distribution des capacités et des incapacités, qui dissout a priori l’objet qu’elle prétend mettre en lumière. À cette attitude s’opposent les usages communs du terme « populaire », en particulier dans les textes de Stanley Cavell sur le cinéma hollywoodien, qui se poursuivent aujourd’hui dans certaines études sur les séries télévisées : dans les deux cas, un parti pris de perfectionnisme démocratique fait (...) apparaître l’ordinaire comme un terreau d’intelligence davantage que comme la banalité du vulgaire. (shrink)

Résumé L’auteure souhaite ici réhabiliter une forme d’individualisme, qui serait définie par la capacité de prendre la parole, par la possession d’une voix subjective, et par la confiance en soi au sens du philosophe américain R.W. Emerson ( Self-Reliance ). Dans cette approche, on peut définir la démocratie radicale en termes linguistiques, ceux de l’expression et de l’action individuelle, rendus possibles par mon consentement : mais aussi par la possibilité du dissentiment, de la désobéissance à la règle donnée. C’est alors (...) la difficulté de l’expression et l’obscurité à soi et aux autres, non l’évidence et la clarté, qui permettront de redéfinir l’individu. (shrink)

Retour du moralisme? Une telle question pourrait laisser entendre que l’époque revient à une situation antérieure, celle de l’ordre moral. Ce n’est cependant pas là notre objet. Le retour dont nous allons parler n’est pas une réaction de l’ensemble de la société, mais un retour dans la théorie. Tandis que la société, à l’heure du PACS, poursuit son...

Mais qui donc voudrait introduire un principe nouveau de toute moralité et être pour ainsi dire le premier à la découvrir, comme si tout le monde avant lui avait été dans l’ignorance de ce qu’était le devoir ou s’était trouvé dans une erreur générale ?Il est dur d’avoir un contremaître sudiste ; c’est pis d’en avoir un nordiste ; mais le pire de tout, c’est..

À la différence du cinéma, les séries TV, genre mineure, regardé dans l’univers domestique, ont mis souvent en avant les femmes. À partir de la série Buffy, leurs héroïnes échappent aux stéréotypes de genre et allient violence, souci des autres et affirmation d’un pouvoir collectif. Au tournant du siècle certaines séries deviennent féministes et accompagnent la transformation de la vision des femmes, de leur âge, de leur orientation sexuelle, de leurs appartenances sociale et raciale. Il y a même des vieilles (...) et des méchantes. L’article détaille ces transformations dans l’évocation concrète des séries de référence. (shrink)

This book is comprised of twenty essays by Richard Martin. Almost half of them were written in response to invitations to present papers, and the author's desire to keep these in chronological order accounts in part for the arrangement of the book. Each of the essays is self-contained and can be read as an independent unit, yet the total set of essays presents an integrated thread of development in a way which provides a greatly increased value to the book as (...) a whole. The essays center around three main topics: the primordial God, the nature of science, and the search for value. They are all brought together by being discussed, in various alternative ways, by means of a common methodology incorporating modern logic and systematic semiotics, including syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Further, the author presents them as intimately interwoven in his analyses of "the real internal constitution" of the nature of God. (shrink)

L'une des doctrines traditionnelles qui a le plus stimulé les deux premières générations de philosophes analytiques est l'idée kantienne d'une distinction entre jugements analytiques et synthétiques. À cet égard, l'ardeur philosophique fut d'ailleurs si grande que dès le début des années cinquante on était parvenu au constat qu'elle ne survivrait pas au XXe siècle. Ce fut d'abord la notion de jugement synthétique a priori qui tomba sous la critique que lui adressaient les membres du Cercle de Vienne. Quelques années plus (...) tard, Quine s'attaquait à la dichotomie entre jugements analytiques et synthétiques avec le résultat que la distinction elle-même se vit chassée du champ de la sémantique et de l'épistémologie. Or, contre toute apparence, la question ne semble pas être définitivement réglée. L'objectif premier de Jocelyn Benoist dans son livre L'a priori conceptuel consiste à explorer la possibilité de réhabiliter une certaine notion de synthèse a priori. Cette notion proviendrait d'une lecture bolzanienne de la conception husserlienne de l'a priori matériel, c'est-à-dire d'une lecture faite à la lumière de la théorie des «propositions conceptuelles pures» que présente Bernard Bolzano dans sa Théorie de la science. (shrink)