Dans ses Variations, Gérard Rabinovitch retrouve le cheminement des pensées qui se sont posées sur le rire, depuis l'Antiquité. Il explore la spécificité qui fonde l'humour pour mieux tracer la frontière qui le sépare des autres formes de rires. En suggérant de reprendre la discussion sur la liberté du rire là où l'avait lancée en son temps Pierre Desproges, qui à la question "Peut-on rire de tout?" répondait en homme averti "Oui! Mais pas avec n'importe qui!", Gérard Rabinovitch (...) propose en filigrane une nuance corrective : "Oui! Mais pas n'importe comment". Il accompagne son propos itinérant d'un florilège d'histoires d'auteurs venus d'horizons variés qui scrutent la condition humaine avec humour et lucidité. (shrink)

Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre's biographer and author, was one of the keynote speakers at last year's UK Sartre Society Conference at La Maison française in Oxford. The title of her talk echoed that of a key article she published in Le Monde on 12/13 March 2023, ‘Qui a encore peur de Sartre?’, which brilliantly characterises Sartre's position in France and in the world. The article is translated in full below.

Après l'enterrement de Sartre, en avril 1980, on eut l'impression que la France venait d'enterrer Victor Hugo pour la deuxième fois. Puis son oeuvre s'embarqua dans une étrange aventure, faite de bonheurs et de malheurs, selon les pays et selon les époques. Dans cet essai, Annie Cohen-Solal porte sur cette pensée en mouvement un regard nouveau, nourri de ses voyages à travers le monde et des lectures auxquelles il lui a été donné d'assister. Car, pendant qu'en France on s'amusait (...) à chercher des poux dans la tête de Socrate, les hommages en provenance d'Europe, d'Afrique, d'Asie, d'Océanie, des deux Amériques s'accordaient sur un point : le message de Sartre restait, aux yeux de leurs intellectuels, un outil de référence pour déchiffrer leur époque. (shrink)

Sébastien Le Clerc (1637–1714) was the most renowned engraver of Louis XIV's France. For the history of scientific publishing, however, Le Clerc represents a telling paradox. Even though he followed a traditional route based on classic artisanal training, he also published extensively on scientific topics such as cosmology and mathematics. While contemporary scholarship usually stresses the importance of artisanal writing as a direct expression of artisanal experience and know-how, Le Clerc's publications, and specifically the work on cosmology in hisSystème du (...) monde(1706–1708), go far beyond this. By reconstructing the debate between Le Clerc and the professor Mallemant de Messange on the authorship of this ‘system of the world’, this article argues that Le Clerc's involvement in publishing ventures shaped his identity both as an artisan and as a scientific author. Whereas the Scientific Revolution supposedly heralded a change from the world of ‘more or less’ to the ‘world of precision’, this article shows how an artisan could be more ‘precise’ than the learned scholar whose claims he disputed, and points to the importance of the literary field as a useful lens for observing the careers of early modern scientific practitioners. (shrink)

From its beginnings religious philosophy confronted the challenge to reconcile Divine or natural determinism with man's moral freedom. In ancient Jewish thought, this gave rise to statistical ideas. In some Rabbinic texts, necessity is seen as inhering in collectives rather than in individuals. This is a statistical conception. Some miracles too were understood as highly improbable events, and remarkable phenomena were distinguished from usual ones. Medieval thinkers amplified and developed these ideas. Providential as well as natural determinism were explained as (...) operating in large numbers of individual acts of free will, an idea later taken up by Kant. (shrink)

In this study, we propose a new direction of research on the axiomatic analysis of approval voting, which is a common democratic decision method. Its novelty is to examine an infinite population setting, which includes an application to intergenerational problems. In particular, we assume that the set of the population is countably infinite. We provide several extensions of the method of approval voting for this setting. As our main result, axiomatic characterizations of the extensions are offered by revealing a direct (...) link between approval voting and the Borda rule. The characterized methods are natural extensions of the standard approval voting method for the finite-population case and are regarded as minimum requirements for other possible infinite-population extensions, which are reasonably democratic. (shrink)

L’objet de cet article est d’éclairer les rapports qu’entretiennent le droit naturel et l’économie dans la pensée de F. Bastiat. On montre que le statut de la raison humaine occupe une place centrale dans cette articulation. On met également en évidence les tensions entre le mécanisme de répartition des droits de propriété soumis à une procédure de concurrence et le respect de la loi naturelle. A cet égard, F. Bastiat définit la liberté comme la capacité à utiliser la raison.The aim (...) of this paper is to throw a new light on the close relations between natural rights and economics in F. Bastiat’s thought. We show that the human reason status holds a central place in this articulation. We also underscore the problematic compatibility between the natural rights allocation mechanism based on a competition process and the natural law. We explain how F. Bastiat comes to grips with this tension. He proposes to define the notion of liberty as the faculty of using human reason. (shrink)

A new class of values combining marginalistic and egalitarian principles is introduced for cooperative TU-games. It includes some modes of solidarity among the players by taking the collective contribution of some coalitions to the grand coalition into account. Relationships with other class of values such as the Egalitarian Shapley values and the Procedural values are discussed. We propose a strategic implementation of our class of values in subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. Two axiomatic characterizations are provided: one of the whole class (...) of values, and one of each of its extreme points. (shrink)

We introduce three natural collective variants of the well-known axiom of desirability, which require that if the contributions of a first coalition are at least as large as the contributions of a second coalition, then the payoff in the first coalition should be as large as the payoff in the second coalition. These axioms are called coalitional desirability and average coalitional desirability. The third variant, called uniform coalitional desirability, applies only to coalitions with the same size. We show that coalitional (...) desirability is very strong: no value satisfies simultaneously this axiom and efficiency. To the contrary, the combination of either average coalitional desirability or uniform coalitional desirability with efficiency and additivity characterizes the equal division value. (shrink)

New and recent axioms for cooperative games with transferable utilities are introduced. The non-negative player axiom requires to assign a non-negative payoff to a player that belongs to coalitions with non-negative worth only. The axiom of addition invariance on bi-partitions requires that the payoff vector recommended by a value should not be affected by an identical change in worth of both a coalition and the complementary coalition. The nullified solidarity axiom requires that if a player who becomes null weakly loses (...) from such a change, then every other player should weakly lose too. We study the consequence of imposing some of these axioms in addition to some classical axioms. It turns out that the resulting values or set of values have all in common to split efficiently the worth achieved by the grand coalition according to an exogenously given weight vector. As a result, we also obtain new characterizations of the equal division value. (shrink)

We introduce a new allocation rule, called the sequential equal surplus division for rooted forest TU-games. We provide two axiomatic characterizations for this allocation rule. The first one uses the classical property of component efficiency plus an edge deletion property. The second characterization uses standardness, an edge deletion property applied to specific rooted trees, a consistency property, and an amalgamation property. We also provide an extension of the sequential equal surplus division applied to the problem of sharing a river with (...) bifurcations. (shrink)

No Moonlight in My Cup: Sinitic Poetry from the Japanese Court, Eighth to the Twelfth Centuries. Edited and translated by Judith N. Rabinovitch and Timothy R. BradstocK. East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 10. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xxvi + 474. $232.

It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominent European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism,” a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about to make it accessible (...) to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes. Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind. This book presents a new English translation of Sartre’s 1945 lecture and his analysis of Camus’s _The Stranger_, along with a discussion of these works by acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal. This edition is a translation of the 1996 French edition, which includes Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre’s introduction and a Q&A with Sartre about his lecture. (shrink)

It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominent European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture (“Existentialism Is a Humanism”) was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism,” a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about (...) to make it accessible to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes (“existence precedes essence”). Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind. This book presents a new English translation of Sartre’s 1945 lecture and his analysis of Camus’s _The Stranger_, along with a discussion of these works by acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal. This edition is a translation of the 1996 French edition, which includes Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre’s introduction and a Q&A with Sartre about his lecture. (shrink)

It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominent European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism,” a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about to make it accessible (...) to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes. Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind. This book presents a new English translation of Sartre’s 1945 lecture and his analysis of Camus’s _The Stranger_, along with a discussion of these works by acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal. This edition is a translation of the 1996 French edition, which includes Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre’s introduction and a Q&A with Sartre about his lecture. (shrink)

Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936), ki je kasneje postal angleški pesnik in eden največjih filologov svojega časa, je svoj zafrkantski »fragment« objavil pri triindvajsetih, leta 1883, v reviji Bromsgrovian. Revijo je izdajala Bromsgrove School, kjer se je šolal kot najstnik (1870–77); na šolo, ki je prva prepoznala njegov jezikovni in pesniški talent, se je za kratek čas (1881–82) vrnil kot pomožni učitelj po ne­pričakovanem študijskem porazu na Oxfordu. Kot ugotavlja Ralph Marcellino, ni naključje, da besedilo paro­dira predvsem Ajshila, ki je bil (...) Housmanov najljubši pesnik. V njem odzvanja Oresteja, zlasti drami Agamemnon in Prinašalke pitnih darov, verjetno zato, ker so ju dijaki na šoli, kjer je poučeval, pri pouku največ brali. Prav ta ciljna publika je znala ceniti norčevanje iz retoričnih figur ter sintaktičnih konstrukcij, ki jim jih je njihov pomožni učitelj vbijal v glavo. (shrink)

Among the shooting stars that have crossed the contemporary French cultural scene for fifteen years, aided by media sensationalism, we have yet to see a comet of some magnitude. The conspicuous absence of an influence like Sartre's raises many questions. Sartre and his times would seem a natural subject matter but, apart from Annie Cohen Solal's best-selling biography, Gallimard's constant stream of posthumous works has failed to turn Sartre into a media event. And yet, it now seems likely that (...) Roland Barthes was right when, back in the seventies, he proposed that Sartre would be suddenly “rediscovered” and that it would happen “soon, in a completely natural way.”. (shrink)

At the beginning of 1945, Sartre made his first visit to the United States. It proved an important moment for him. According to Annie Cohen-Solal, it marked the beginning of his concern with political struggle: “It is far from home, far from his daily reality and his socio-historical connivances, that his first endorsement of a purely social cause takes place.” The cause was that of African-Americans. On his return to France, Sartre described for Le Figaro how shocked he was (...) by the indifference shown to Black people by White Americans, both in the South and the North. Racism permeated America. It was to be found not only in segregation or in the way Blacks were consigned to the most menial jobs. It was also in the most commonplace experience of how Whites passed Blacks on the streets. (shrink)