Based on hierarchical classification and logistic regression of early US and French COVID-19 clinical trials we show that despite the registration of a large number of trials, only a minority had characteristics usually associated with providing robust and relevant evidence.

The French philosopher Renaud Barbaras remarked that late in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s career, “The phenomenology of perception fulfills itself as a philosophy of expression.” In _Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology, _Véronique M. Fóti_ _addresses the guiding yet neglected theme of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. She traces Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about how individuals express creative or artistic impulses through his three essays on aesthetics, his engagement with animality and the “new biology” in the second of his lecture courses (...) on nature of 1957–58, and in his late ontology, articulated in 1964 in the fragmentary text of _Le visible et l’invisible _. With the exception of a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 essay “Cezanne’s Doubt,” Fóti engages with Merleau-Ponty’s late and final thought, with close attention to both his scientific and philosophical interlocutors, especially the continental rationalists. Expression shows itself, in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, to be primordial, and this innate and fundamental nature of expression has implications for his understanding of artistic creation, science, and philosophy. (shrink)

In this marvellous book, Raimond Gaita discusses ideas about love and hatred, good and evil, guilt and forgiveness. Moving, wise and inspiring, A Common Humanity explores personal, political and philosophical ideas about the kind of society and the sort of public conversation we might have in the twenty-first century. 'Raimond Gaita's insights are original and his prose is as eloquent as it is affecting.' Economist, Books of the Year, 2000.

The Holocaust and attempts to deny it, racism, murder, the case of Mary Bell. How can we include these and countless other examples of evil within our vision of a common humanity? These painful human incongruities are precisely what Raimond Gaita boldly harmonizes in his powerful new book, _A Common Humanity_. Hatred with forgiveness, evil with love, suffering with compassion, and the mundane with the precious. Gaita asserts that our conception of humanity cannot be based upon the empty language (...) of individual rights when it is our shared feelings of grief, hope, love, guilt, shame and remorse that offer a more potent foundation for common understanding. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Simon Weil, Primo Levi, George Orwell, Iris Murdoch and Sigmund Freud, Gaita creates a beautifully written and provocative new picture of our common humanity. (shrink)

Raimond Gaita's _Good and Evil_ is one of the most important, original and provocative books on the nature of morality to have been published in recent years. It is essential reading for anyone interested in what it means to talk about good and evil. Gaita argues that questions about morality are inseparable from the preciousness of each human being, an issue we can only address if we place the idea of remorse at the centre of moral life. Drawing on (...) an astonishing range of thinkers and writers, including Plato, Wittgenstein, George Orwell and Primo Levi, Gaita also reflects on the place of reason and truth in morality and ultimately how questions about good and evil are connected to the meaning of our lives. This revised edition of _Good and Evil_ includes a substantial new preface and afterword by the author. (shrink)

Veronique Foti delves into the full range of Heideggerian texts to elaborate the problematics of historicity, language, and the structure of disclosure or "manifestation" in connection with the Herman poets whom Heidegger invoked along his path of thinking. Foti's reading of these ports is a probing inquiry into the aesthetic, ethical, and political implications of Heidegger's thought. She knows how technicity and poetizing are opposed yet brought together in Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology, how they are both politicized and linked with ethical (...) praxis, and how technicity, poetizing, and praxis cannot be dissevered from Heidegger's essential thinking. (shrink)

In this lyrical and beautifully written book, Raimond Gaita tells inspirational, poignant, sometimes funny but never sentimental stories of the dogs, cats and cockatoos that lived and died within his own family. _The Philosopher's Dog_ is above all a book about our creatureliness and its place in the understanding of our humanity.

La philosophe étudie le concept d'amour du monde de H. Arendt. Il permet de dévoiler toute la complexité du rapport d'Arendt au christianisme, livrant un nouvel éclairage sur son oeuvre. Du souci du politique, qui s'mpose en 1933, à l'amour du monde, choisi librement en 1955, la pensée d'Arendt ne cesse de s'élargir, dans un dialogue serré avec le christianisme.

Gallagher hardly refers to the central issue of the phenomenological reduction, and he perpetuates the historical blunder of Chisholm, misinterpreting Husserlian intentionality as linguistic intensionality. This misunderstanding opens the way to a “naturalization” of phenomenology, which misses the very method of the phenomenological reduction as well as the essential dimension of subjective lived experience.

We agree with Nuñez that the Mundurucu do not master the formal propreties of number lines and logarithms, but as the term "intuition" implies, they spontaneously experience a logarithmic mapping of number to space as natural and "feeling right.".

For more than three decades the incomparable voice of Raimond Gaita has been summoning us to new conversations that deepen our understanding of what matters most to human life and awaken the sense of our common humanity. For Gaita, we are never more fully alive than when we are fully present to one another in conversation. In a time when modes of communication tend to superficiality and self-promotion, when political debates are increasingly inured to lies and even violence, and (...) the moral demands of dialogue give way to a torrent of competing monologues, Gaita's invitation to rediscover what genuine conversation requires of us could not be more timely. These collected writings at once invite us into that conversation and enact its severe demands. Gaita asks us to confront the distinctive evil of genocide, to examine the true cost of the 'War on Terror', to interrogate what justice requires in response to Australia's dispossession of its First Peoples, to understand our need for truth in politics, especially during war, to see what is at stake in the decline of the universities, to grasp what was lost during the Black Summer bushfires, and to reckon with the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic-when we learned, he writes, 'how much we needed to touch and hold other people'. Gaita's astonishing range of concerns is held together by the consistency and unrelenting tenderness of his moral vision. To see the world through Gaita's eyes is to discover, once again, what it means to love the world and to remain faithful to it. He tells us that an unconditional love of the world is the deepest form of hope and the truest source of our energies to honour the demands of justice. This is how we learn to be human"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Humans possess two nonverbal systems capable of representing numbers, both limited in their representational power: the first one represents numbers in an approximate fashion, and the second one conveys information about small numbers only. Conception of exact large numbers has therefore been thought to arise from the manipulation of exact numerical symbols. Here, we focus on two fundamental properties of the exact numbers as prerequisites to the concept of EXACT NUMBERS : the fact that all numbers can be generated by (...) a successor function and the fact that equality between numbers can be defined in an exact fashion. We discuss some recent findings assessing how speakers of Munduruc (an Amazonian language), and young Western children (3-4 years old) understand these fundamental properties of numbers. (shrink)

Examines the German poet Hölderlin’s philosophical insights into tragedy.

Geometry defines entities that can be physically realized in space, and our knowledge of abstract geometry may therefore stem from our representations of the physical world. Here, we focus on Euclidean geometry, the geometry historically regarded as “natural”. We examine whether humans possess representations describing visual forms in the same way as Euclidean geometry – i.e., in terms of their shape and size. One hundred and twelve participants from the U.S. (age 3–34 years), and 25 participants from the Amazon (age (...) 5–67 years) were asked to locate geometric deviants in panels of 6 forms of variable orientation. Participants of all ages and from both cultures detected deviant forms defined in terms of shape or size, while only U.S. adults drew distinctions between mirror images (i.e. forms differing in “sense”). Moreover, irrelevant variations of sense did not disrupt the detection of a shape or size deviant, while irrelevant variations of shape or size did. At all ages and in both cultures, participants thus retained the same properties as Euclidean geometry in their analysis of visual forms, even in the absence of formal instruction in geometry. These findings show that representations of planar visual forms provide core intuitions on which humans’ knowledge in Euclidean geometry could possibly be grounded. (shrink)

Examines the construction of vision in the works of Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Nancy, and Derrida.

Although torture is prohibited in international law, a consequentialist justification of it has occasionally been professed on the belief that torture is indispensable andeven morally obligatory as an information-gathering device in so-called 'ticking bomb' situations. The author adheres to the conviction that torture is an evil that could never justifiably be done. Objecting to the moral stand of consequentialism, he emphasizesthe distinctive terribleness of torture, drawing attention to the victim's infinite preciousness or 'sacredness', which even the concept of autonomy, or (...) the concepts of democracy and civilization never can reach. Of course, some might call this a question of the heart, and not of the head, and affirm — with Kant, for one — that cognitive content should be separated from resonant form if thought is to survive distortion. To this there is no argument apart from the vital testimony of goodness and pure love, where understanding involves head and heart inseparably combined. This is not just an appeal to the supererogatory, which belongs to a different perspective, as a feat of moral character. Saintly love not only affirms human dignity, it actively reveals and makes visible adignity that is inalienable from the victims humanity. Torture therefore never can fullfil the requirement that it be administered without degrading the intrinsic preciousness of each human being. (shrink)

Lors de la publication de sa thèse sur les collections complètes des Discours de Grégoire de Nazianze, en 1997, l'A. signalait que l'inventaire des colletions fourni était incomplet. Il publie donc, pour les autres témoins, une description correspondant à la classification utilisée dans sa thèse. Seuls les manuscrits conservés en Russie n'ont pu être accessibles.

L'on ne saurait trop souligner combien l'âge "classique" est un âge critique. Moment de crise aiguë, totale, puisque c'est la destitution du monde ancien qui s'amorce et une situation inédite qui se dessine : l'homme se découvrant comme jamais instance de liberté face à un monde dont il est désormais séparé, ce qui devient pensable, c'est la réformation générale du monde et de soi. La question est de savoir comment réinventer la liberté dans les conditions de la modernité. Cette entreprise (...) s'énonce électivement en terme d'usage et sa fortune témoigne de la variété des voies empruntées. Or parmi les figures de "la liberté par l'usage", il en est une qui, méconnue, se recommande de trois sources anciennes : le stoïcisme, la théologie paulinienne et le legs augustinien. Révéler son originalité consiste à déployer ce qui est ramassé dans l'étrange formule de Paul : "user du monde comme n'en usant pas". Attester son actualité à l'âge classique, c'est montrer comment Fénelon, Pascal, Malebranche ou Mme de Lambert jouent de sa plasticité pour se l'approprier diversement et en faire une figure de la liberté disponible pour la modernité - y compris la nôtre. (shrink)

Cet article a déjà paru dans la revue brésilienne Psicanàlise & Barroco em revista en juillet 2020. Nous remercions Véronique Verdier de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Résumé : Cet article esquisse l'itinéraire de reconquête des rythmes de l'existence. Partant d'un constat, l'existence est en fait rythmée mais ces rythmes sont le plus souvent passivement subis et ne sont pas ceux choisis par le sujet, nous nous demandons comment retrouver une maîtrise de ces rythmes car cette maîtrise (...) est - Philosophie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Although the three sections contain essays written from a wide spectrum of viewpoints, they emphasize, respectively, the important connections of Merleau-Ponty's thought to that of Derrida and Levinas, the Husserlian heritage and complex implications of his philosophy of material existence, and the relation of his philosophy of painting to contemporary abstract art. A distinguishing feature of this collection is its emphasis on contemporaneity.

Human adults are thought to possess two dissociable systems to represent numbers: an approximate quantity system akin to a mental number line, and a verbal system capable of representing numbers exactly. Here, we study the interface between these two systems using an estimation task. Observers were asked to estimate the approximate numerosity of dot arrays. We show that, in the absence of calibration, estimates are largely inaccurate: responses increase monotonically with numerosity, but underestimate the actual numerosity. However, insertion of a (...) few inducer trials, in which participants are explicitly (and sometimes misleadingly) told that a given display contains 30 dots, is sufficient to calibrate their estimates on the whole range of stimuli. Based on these empirical results, we develop a model of the mapping between the numerical symbols and the representations of numerosity on the number line. (shrink)