Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Thierry Patrice, 57 ans, médecin, nommé professeur à 32 ans, Lauréat de la Faculté, est internationalement connu pour ses travaux concernant l'action de la lumière sur les tissus vivant en cancérologie. Il a reçu plusieurs Prix pour l'étude du rôle de l'oxygène dans différentes maladies, dont le diabète, mais aussi lors du vieillissement.

De manière évidente l’architecture « est ». Par sa matérialité et sa présence, elle s’impose dans l’espace de nos vies. Mais son authenticité n’est pas technique, historique ou matérielle. Elle est symbolique et culturelle. Car au delà de son « apparence », l’architecture n’existe que par ses usages, par ses incessantes modifications ou même par son souvenir. Il n’existe aucun moment de l’histoire d’une architecture qui serait plus « authentique » qu’un autre. L’authenticité relève d’une vision doctrinaire de l’architecture qui (...) considérerait l’excellence d’un moment unique, face à l’infini d’une histoire toujours renouvelée. Or, dans un monde qui se caractérise par la quête perpétuelle du singulier, l’architecture qui, par essence, est in-définie et plurielle, risque de se transformer en signe, « authentique » mais dépourvu de sens. (shrink)

In the wake of recent attempts at alternate history (Bowler 2013), this paper suggests several avenues for a pluralistic approach to Charles Darwin and his role in the history of evolutionary theory. We examine in what sense Darwin could be described as a major driver of theoretical change in the history of biology. First, this paper examines how Darwin influenced the future of biological science: not merely by stating the fact of evolution or by bringing evidence for it; but by (...) discovering natural selection, and giving it pre-eminence over any other mechanism for evolution; and also by proposing a masterful and quite unique synthesis of many scientific fields. Contrasting Darwin’s views with those of A.R. Wallace, I conclude that “natural selection” is clearly an original contribution, that it had no forerunners or co-discoverers, and could barely have appeared after Darwin conceived of it. This specificity of Darwin’s contribution is an invitation to be strongly presentist (Loison 2016) and to adopt only weak counter-factuals. In contrast, there are possible ways to use strong counter-factuals as attempts to “pluralize” the history of biological theory: i.e. imagine new possible avenues for the development of evolutionary biology. The idea that evolution was a theory “in the air” suggests that evolutionary theory could have developed in a world without Darwin, especially if we accept to delete not only “Darwin” but “England”. France and Germany are examined as possible countries where evolutionary ideas would have thrived even with no contribution from the English scientists. Finally, the paper suggests another counter-factual hypothesis: deleting not Darwin and his Origin but the Darwin Industry itself. This may allow us to read the Origin of Species with fresh eyes and to discover Darwin’s life-long interest in variation and its laws, as many of his early readers did. (shrink)

Kritische beschouwing over godsdienst en geloof.

A mentally-ill Belgian woman sought euthanasia to escape her problems. The doctors told her, sure, why not?

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Panorama de la vision du lieu et de l'urbain de 20 philosophes importants du 20e siècle de Simmel, James ou Heidegger à Maldiney, Nancy en passant par Derrida, Foucault ou Deleuze.--[Memento].

L’article envisage d’abord les conditions et conséquences d’une ressaisie proprement philosophique du concept sociologique d’artification. Trois propositions en découlent. 1˚) Contrairement à l’approche sociologique de l’artification, cette ressaisie relève d’une problématique de la légitimation (mais on parle alors de légitimation spécifiquement théorique et non pas idéologique). 2˚) La question de l’artification suppose une définition spéculative de l’art, laquelle possède nécessairement une vertu normative. 3˚) Seules des pratiques peuvent subir un processus d’artification, et non des objets (à moins de les considérer (...) en tant que fonctions d’une pratique). On passe ensuite à la question de la « transposabilité » historique et culturelle du concept d’artification. Dans une optique sociologique, ce sont les pratiques contemporaines voire actuelles qui, pour l’essentiel, retiennent l’attention. Mais la présence même d’objets anciens et non-occidentaux dans nos musées d’art invite à réfléchir à la manière dont ils sont ou peuvent être qualifiés d’artistiques (ou requalifiés comme tels) ; il s’agit aussi de se pencher sur les processus apparentés à l’artification dans les cultures étrangères à la modernité occidentale. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage a pour enjeu de débattre du schéma théorique forgé par Alfred Schütz, promoteur de l'idée de sociologie phénoménologique (puisant son cadre analytique dans une lecture de la sociologie compréhensive weberienne, de la philosophie de la durée bergsonienne, et de la phénoménologie husserlienne). Les catégories princeps de la recherche sont dès lors celles de conscience, de temporalité et de signification. La structure phénoménologique de l'expérience sociale, l'essence de la compréhension intersubjective, les perspectives offertes par les tenants d'une sociologie formiste (...) en matière d'entendement de l'interaction, sont les thèmes majeurs de ce débat. Dans le cadre de cette lecture, Thierry Blin tente d'établir les principes d'une sociologie phénoménologique formiste ou structurale, permettant ainsi de fonder à nouveaux frais une sociologie de l'action. (shrink)

Comment Descartes a-t-il pu nier l'évidence de sa dette à l'égard du cogito d'Augustin, et Jacques Hadamard s'accuser, à l'inverse, de ne pas avoir découvert la relativité avant Einstein? Qu'est-ce qui pouvait bien justifier Lacan, lorsqu'il osait affirmer que l'inconscient n'est pas de Freud, mais de lui... De même, côté art : on se demande pourquoi Borges a voulu faire de Ménard l'auteur du Quichotte ou Duchamp devenir celui d'un urinoir. Thierry Marchaisse prouve ici que l'on peut devenir le (...) véritable auteur de l'idée d'un autre, et que ce paradoxe, avancé par Pascal voilà plus de trois siècles, est à la fois le verrou et la clé de la logique de la créativité. (shrink)

Presenting a series of historical portraits of Bantu, Thierry Secretan recounts his investigation into the compounds that housed the black labor of the gold mines of the Rand, around Johannesburg. The use of a « pass » to control the black miners prefigured the apartheid system. From 1904 to 1939,Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, an Irish guard at one of the compounds, began to photograph the different kind of people doing the hard labor in the mines. The results were some 7200 (...) exposures and working prints, on 13 /18 cm negatives. Hundreds of enlargements were exhibited from 1925 onward in a gallery in his own home in Kimberley. These photographs were rediscovered in 1998 by Thierry Secretan, who is still attempting to save them front slow destruction: they constitute an extraordinary catalogue of the Bantu cultures. (shrink)

L'oeuvre et la pensée de Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) semblent devoir éternellement se résumer à ses cieux textes les plus célèbres, Walden ou la vie dans les bois et La Désobéissance civile, occultant un parcours riche et complexe. Chantre de la liberté individuelle, engagé activement dans la lutte contre l'esclavage, il ne fut pas cet ermite vivant clans sa cabane retirée au bord d'un lac, dans la forêt, bien qu'il entretînt une relation panthéiste avec la Nature. Inlassable arpenteur de sa (...) région, autour de Concord, en Nouvelle-Angleterre, il vécut de son métier de géomètre qui lui permit de s'adonner à l'observation de la faune et de la flore. Nourri de littérature classique et de philosophie orientale, éternel célibataire aux nombreuses amitiés masculines et féminines, brillant conférencier, il concentre en lui cette indépendance intemporelle et cet appel du Wild qui constituent l'âme de la nation américaine. Au risque d'écorner l'image d'Epinal que s'est faite de lui la postérité, cette biographie se propose de révéler les aspects les moins connus de la vie du grand écrivain, qui tint son Journal pendant un quart de siècle. Loin d'en souffrir, l'image de Thoreau se trouve au contraire rehaussée par cet éclairage nouveau. (shrink)

Fifty years after his death, the thought of the French scientist and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) continues to inspire new ways of understanding humanity’s future. Trained as a paleontologist and philosopher, Teilhard was an innovative synthesizer of science and religion, developing an idea of evolution as an unfolding of material and mental worlds into an integrated, holistic universe at what he called the Omega Point. His books, such as the bestselling The Phenomenon of Man, have influenced generations of (...) ecologists, environmentalists, planners, and others concerned with the fate of the earth.This book brings together original essays by leading experts who reflect on Teilhard’s legacy for today’s globalized world. They explore such topics as: the idea of God and the person; quantum reality and Teilhard’s vision; spiritual resources for the future; politics and economics; and a charter for co-evolution. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans T. Paquot, Le quotidien urbain, Paris, La Découverte, 2001, p. 180-188. Nous remercions Thierry Paquot de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Les intertitres sont les nôtres. Établir une bibliographie sur les temps dans le contexte urbain se révélerait vite une impossible, et prétentieuse, ambition. Qui aurait l'outrecuidance de pouvoir la réaliser? Il est moins vain et plus modeste, et certainement commode pour les lecteurs, de rassembler les ouvrages marquants sur la - (...) Urbanisme – Nouvel article. (shrink)

"Based on the reading of the only twelfth-century manuscript of the Enigma extant, Charleville MS. 114, and an examination of the fifteenth-century manuscript Uppsala C. 79." Revision of the editor's thesis, Catholic University of America, 1971, presented under title: The enigma fidei of William of Saint Thierry, a translation and commentary. Bibliography: p. 119-120.

This paper argues that some words are so highly charged with meaning by a community that they may prevent a discussion during which each participant is on an equal footing. These words are indeed either unanimously accepted or rejected. The presence of these adjectival groups pushes the antagonist to find rhetorical strategies to circumvent them. The main idea we want to develop is that some propositions are not easily debatable in context because of some specific value-bearing words, and one of (...) the goals of this paper is to build a methodological tool for finding and classifying these VBWs. Our study echoes the importance of “cultural keywords” in argument, but is rather based on a German approach developed by,, and about “Miranda” and “Anti-Miranda” words that is expanded and refined here. In particular, our study tries to understand why some statements, fueled by appreciative or evaluative adjectives, have such rhetorical effects on a pragmatic level in the particular context of a vote on the Swiss popular initiative called “for more affordable housing”. This context is fruitful since two parties offer reasons for two opposing policy claims: namely, to accept or to reject an initiative. When one party uses arguments containing such universally unassailable adjectival groups to defend a “yes” vote, the opposing party cannot use a symmetrical antonym while pleading for the “no” vote. The methodological tool that is proposed here could shed light on the use of certain rhetorical and referential strategies in conflicting policy proposition contexts. (shrink)

Valorising the biocultural heritage of common goods could enable peasant farmers to achieve socially and economically inclusive sustainability. Increasingly appreciated by consumers, peasant heritage products offer small farmers promising opportunities for economic, social and territorial development. Identifying the obstacles and levers of this complex, multi-scale and multi-stakeholder objective requires an integrative framework. We applied the panarchy conceptual framework to two cases of participatory research with small quinoa producers: a local fair in Chile and quinoa export production in Bolivia. In both (...) cases, the “commoning” process was crucial both to bring stakeholders together inside their communities and to gain outside recognition for their production and thus achieve social and economic inclusion. Despite the differences in scale, the local fair and the export market shared a similar marketing strategy based on short value chains promoting quality products with high identity value. In these dynamics of biocultural heritage valorisation, the panarchical approach revealed the central place as well as the vulnerability of the community territory. As a place of both anchoring and opening, the community territory is the privileged space where autonomous and consensual control over the governance of common biocultural resources can be exercised. (shrink)

Why is ordinary language vague? We argue that in contexts in which a cooperative speaker is not perfectly informed about the world, the use of vague expressions can offer an optimal tradeoff between truthfulness (Gricean Quality) and informativeness (Gricean Quantity). Focusing on expressions of approximation such as “around”, which are semantically vague, we show that they allow the speaker to convey indirect probabilistic information, in a way that can give the listener a more accurate representation of the information available to (...) the speaker than any more precise expression would (intervals of the form “between”). That is, vague sentences can be _more informative_ than their precise counterparts. We give a probabilistic treatment of the interpretation of “around”, and offer a model for the interpretation and use of “around”-statements within the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In our account the shape of the speaker’s distribution matters in ways not predicted by the Lexical Uncertainty model standardly used in the RSA framework for vague predicates. We use our approach to draw further lessons concerning the semantic flexibility of vague expressions and their irreducibility to more precise meanings. (shrink)

Portretten van twintig belangrijke conservatieve denkers uit de twintigste eeuw.

The aim of this paper is to study the monotonicity properties with respect to the probability distribution of the state processes, of optimal decisions in bandit decision problems. Orderings of dynamic discrete projects are provided by extending the notion of stochastic dominance to stochastic processes.

This article compares four ways of thinking corporate responsibility. When corporate responsibility is defined by its function, firm’s moral obligations are limited to obligations imposed on it by its function, whatever its capacity (strict functionalism), or as far as it is compatible with its effective capacity (compatibilist functionalism). When corporate responsibility is defined by its capacity, firms’ moral obligations are limited to obligations which its power imposes on it, whatever its function (strict capacitarism), or insofar as it is compatible with (...) the respect of its specific function (compatibilist capacitarism). Due to the impossibility of perfectly aligning moral tasks with social tasks and of reducing all general obligations to specific obligations, capacitarism seems more convincing than functionalism. Because of the indispensability of a division of (moral) labor, compatibilist capacitarism seems more robust than strict capacitarism. (shrink)

L’œuvre de Copernic est à la fois tournée vers l’avenir par le système héliocentrique du monde qu’elle inaugure, et vers le passé par sa fidélité au principe du mouvement réel circulaire et uniforme des astres, hérité de Ptolémée, et à la conception du monde fini ayant pour limite la sphère des fixes et hiérarchisé ayant pour centre le Soleil, héritée des Pythagoriciens. Dès lors, est-elle à bon droit nommée « révolution copernicienne » selon l’expression consacrée ou bien doit-elle être rigoureusement (...) pensée comme réforme de l’astronomie ptoléméenne? La question engage la remise en chantier du concept de révolution scientifique. Celle-ci est-elle, selon son concept kuhnien, un changement de paradigme pour un groupe scientifique dans un domaine de recherche – auquel cas l’œuvre de Copernic serait une révolution scientifique en substituant au paradigme géocentrique de l’astronomie son paradigme héliocentrique? Ou bien est-elle, selon Kant qui a élaboré le premier son concept, une transformation dans la façon de penser, qui instaure une science – auquel cas cette œuvre serait bien plutôt une réforme scientifique, l’astronomie étant une science déjà instaurée dans l’Antiquité? (shrink)

This article explores urban dwellers’ perceptions of climate change and their propensity to act ecologically. It argues that a better understanding of people's moral and psychological functioning toward ecology could guide the creation of more suitable environmental management strategies. The study is based on semi-structured interviews investigating the environmental values of urban inhabitants; the interviews were conducted in 2018, in a coastal French area affected by recurring floods. Our results showed no significant relationships among the three studied factors of experiencing (...) natural hazards, becoming aware of sustainable issues and developing intentions to ‘act green’. In fact, these last two aspects depended mainly on informal education and socio-economic conditions. Using a ‘heuristic of fear’ (Jonas 1984) to develop sustainability practices is therefore inefficient, at best. Instead, practical efforts should be centred on upbringing, education, self-efficacy and socio-economic and political regulations, especially in a country like France where people are historically used to welcoming collective regulations by the Welfare State. (shrink)