Polémiste, philosophe, économiste, Proudhon a tenté de réfuter Malthus sur la base de critiques relevant de la démographie, de la théorie économique, de la critique sociale et de la philosophie morale. Trois thèmes articulent économie et population, tant au niveau théorique que pratique : le droit au travail, l’émigration et la colonisation, l’industrialisation et le libre-échange. Sur le double registre de la critique sociale et de la philosophie morale, Proudhon relie la question de la population à des thèmes tels que (...) la division du travail, le machinisme, la concurrence. Sur tous ces points, l’hostilité à Malthus est constante, cependant le modèle sociodémographique qu’il élabore est finalement très proche de la doctrine malthusienne. Si Proudhon ne parvient pas à proposer une théorie et une doctrine de population cohérentes avec son idéologie, c’est donc bien en raison de son incapacité à dépasser ses propres contradictions internes, du fait d’une dialectique mal maîtrisée. L’article se termine par un bref parallèle avec Marx, qui, au contraire de Proudhon, a su échapper au piège malthusien.Proudhon, as a polemist, a philosopher and an economist, attempted to refute Malthus, using demographic, economic, social and moral philosophical arguments. Economy is related to population through three themes, namely the right to work, emigration and colonization, industrialization and free trade. At the level of social criticism and moral philosophy, Proudhon also relates the population question to machines, the division of labour and to free competition. Although his hostility to Malthus is constant, his sociodemographic model is finally very close to the Malthusian doctrine. Thus, if Proudhon fails to put forward a theory and a doctrine of population coherent with his own ideology, it is because of his own contradictions, themselves caused by the shortcomings of his dialectics. The paper concludes on a brief comparison with Marx who, contrary to Proudhon, succeeds to avoid the Malthusian trap. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a macro level analysis of the visibility of philosophy of science in the sciences over the last four decades. Our quantitative analysis of publications and citations of philosophy of science papers, published in 17 main journals representing the discipline, contributes to the longstanding debate on the influence of philosophy of science on the sciences. It reveals the global structure of relationships that philosophy of science maintains with science, technology, engineering and mathematics and social sciences and (...) humanities fields. Explored at the level of disciplines, journals and authors, this analysis of the relations between philosophy of science and a large and diversified array of disciplines allows us to answer several questions: what is the degree of openness of various disciplines to the specialized knowledge produced in philosophy of science? Which STEM and SSH fields and journals have privileged ties with philosophy of science? What are the characteristics, in terms of citation and publication patterns, of authors who get their philosophy of science papers cited outside their field? Complementing existing qualitative inquiries on the influence of specific authors, concepts or topics of philosophy of science, the bibliometric approach proposed in this paper offers a comprehensive portrait of the multiple relationships that links philosophy of science to the sciences. (shrink)

Infants' own activities create and actively select their learning experiences. Here we review recent models of embodied information seeking and curiosity-driven learning and show that these mechanisms have deep implications for development and evolution. We discuss how these mechanisms yield self-organized epigenesis with emergent ordered behavioral and cognitive developmental stages. We describe a robotic experiment that explored the hypothesis that progress in learning, in and for itself, generates intrinsic rewards: The robot learners probabilistically selected experiences according to their potential for (...) reducing uncertainty. In these experiments, curiosity-driven learning led the robot learner to successively discover object affordances and vocal interaction with its peers. We explain how a learning curriculum adapted to the current constraints of the learning system automatically formed, constraining learning and shaping the developmental trajectory. The observed trajectories in the robot experiment share many properties with those in infant development, including a mixture of regularities and diversities in the developmental patterns. Finally, we argue that such emergent developmental structures can guide and constrain evolution, in particular with regard to the origins of language. (shrink)

Un mot d'usage quotidien, "danger", est devenu concept chez Heidegger. L'usage heideggerien de "danger" n'est pourtant pas celui de ce livre, qui refuse de s'engager de front dans la "question de l'être" au profit des manières ou modes d'être, dont il explore un échantillon sans prétention exhaustive mais utilisé comme trame heuristique. Mode d'être de l'oeuvre d'art, mode d'être de la "chose" ou du sacrement, mode d'être comme "existence" et comme "vie", un danger est toujours présent : l'existence, telle que (...) décrite chez Heidegger, est déconstituée par des phénomènes auxquels elle ne peut rendre justice ; la vie abrite l'existence mais court le risque perpétuel de n'être que dans les frontières de l'existence, etc. Et si l'étant nous est toujours donné dans un comment - comment de son apparaître, donc comment de son être -, rien ne garantit la pérennité de cette donation : presque tout étant, et d'abord l'étant que nous sommes, est en danger d'apparaître autre qu'il ne nous apparaît maintenant. Aussi convenait-il, après avoir ajointé le concept de vie à celui d'esprit, après avoir dit que la vie est "spirituelle", de justifier le titre du livre en liant "être" et "danger" ; et il restait au final le temps de proposer, dans l'élément du possible, l'hypothèse d'une eschatologie de l'être, avant tout de notre être, sur laquelle le danger n'aurait plus de prise. (shrink)

This paper discusses the development of the Logic and Religion project and the various events organized within this framework, particularly the 3rd and 4th editions, with this volume including papers presented at both.

We first start by clarifying what axiomatizing everything can mean. We then study a famous case of axiomatization, the axiomatization of natural numbers, where two different aspects of axiomatization show up, the model-theoretical one and the proof-theoretical one. After that we discuss a case of axiomatization in a sense opposed to the one of arithmetic, the axiomatization of the notion of order, where the idea is not to catch a specific structure, but a notion. A third mathematical case is then (...) examined, the one of identity, a simple and obvious notion, but that cannot be axiomatized in first-order logic. We then move on to more general notions: the axiomatization of causality and the universe. To end with we deal with an even more tricky question: the axiomatization of reasoning itself. In conclusion we discuss in the light of our investigations the relation between axiomatization and understanding. (shrink)

This paper aims to challenge the idea claimed by Putnam in his Dewey Lectures that internal realism presupposed sense data theory so that it would have been unable to account for the fundamental intuition of common sense realism that perception gives us cognitive access to reality. Rather, I argue that Putnam’s writings from the period of internal realism indicate that it (internal realism) already presupposed a form of direct realism of the kind he puts forth in the Dewey lectures. I (...) support my thesis with a demonstration of the implication of direct realism in the refutation of the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis that occurs in the first chapter of Reason, Truth and History, as well as with various passages from the philosopher’s writings of the time when he defended internal realism. I also argue, contrary to what the philosopher seems to assert in his Dewey Lectures, that his model-theoretic argument against metaphysical realism does not involve sense data theory. After noting the very strong resemblance between the theses of his common sense realism of the 1990s and those of his internal realism of the 1980s, I hypothesize that Putnam pretended to renounce internal realism in order to allow himself to rephrase his original position so as to avoid being misinterpreted as a form of idealism or fact constructivism, as was the case with his initial statement. (shrink)

L'expérience de la connaissance nous enseigne qu'il n'y a pas de Réalité Dernière, que tout train en cache un autre. Une évidence qu'il n'est pas facile d'accepter, d'où l'idée de ce train ultime, celui qui ne cacherait plus rien. La transparentisme postule l'existence, au-delà de la perception immédiate, d'un monde, d'un niveau de lecture, complètement intelligible, i.e, explicite et immédiat. D'où cette croyance en de prétendus "rayons X du savoir" qui nous dévoileraient l'envers de l'Univers.

It is tempting to consider Girard Desagues’ mathematical work, more precisely his Brouillon project on conics, as a work of mathematics applied to perspective. We would like to show in this text that it is probably more pertinent to consider that Desargues does mathematics as a practitionner of the art of perspective. We shall analyse a few extracts of Desargues’ work with this point of view in mind so as to shed light on his innovative ideas that could be hard (...) to understand in his sometimes obscure style. We shall show how this way of doing geometry can be also be found in the works Philippe de la Hire and Jacques-Francois le Poîvre, leading them to consider a transformation of the plane into itself as an explicited mathematical object. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau est l'auteur de l'entrée "économie politique" dans l'Encyclopédie en 1755. A ce titre, il aurait pu être l'un des fondateurs de cette discipline. Pourtant, la définition qu'il en donne est à l'encontre de la pensée libérale des physiocrates, puis des classiques, et constitue une véritable "anti-économique". En hypertrophiant le rôle de l'Etat et en niant l'intérêt personnel, Rousseau est au contraire l'un des pères du socialsme. En niant la liberté humaine, il nie aussi l'existence de choix éthiques.

By helping us recognize our historical moment as one of « over-exposure » - understood both in the sense of the vain images that blind us with their excess brilliance, and in the sense of bodies exposed without protection to the risk of hostile radiation - Frédéric Neyrat invites us to « bear the world’s emptiness » and to look to « letting-be » for a rampart against overflowing production. It’s time to invent an « ontopolitics of atopic subjects ».

Chaque époque se caractériserait par des dispositifs rituels de rassemblement des publics qui reflètent une certaine configuration socio-politique : du rassemblement collectif de la tradition théâtrale au modèle individualisé de l’exposition dans le contexte moderne. Comment rassembler des publics face aux défis de notre siècle?

Im Folgenden stellen wir drei aktuelle Forschungsbereiche zur formalen Logik bei Kant allgemeinverständlich dar und greifen dabei auf die trans zendentale Logik nur dann zurück, wenn sie ein besseres Verständnis der formalen Logik ermöglicht: Zunächst wird Kants Beitrag zur Rezeption und Weiterentwicklung von Euler-artigen Diagrammen dargestellt. Diese Diagramme wurden in den 1990er Jahren wiederentdeckt, als formales System interpretiert und werden heute insbes. in der Didaktik, in den Kognitionswissenschaften, in der Linguistik, in KI-Bereichen wie der (Logik-basierten) Wissensrepräsentation eingesetzt, und auch in (...) der Philosophie verwendet (Kapitel 2). Mehrere Studien haben in den letzten Jahren gezeigt, dass Kant in weiten Teilen seines Systems Oppositionsverhältnisse verwendet, die der Struktur des logischen Quadrats entsprechen. Das logische Quadrat ist heute Gegenstand intensiver Forschung, da es neben der klassischen, auch die paravollständige und parakonsistente Negation abbildet (Kap. 3). Jüngst wurde zudem die Implementierbarkeit der kantischen Logik in ein formalisiertes deduktives System bewiesen. Die Bedeutung dieses Ergebnisses wird insbesondere im Hinblick auf die formalisierte Umsetzung der Sätze vom Widerspruch, vom zureichenden Grund und der Ausschließung des Mittleren erläutert (Kap. 4). Abschließend möchten wir ein paar Perspektiven für die Forschung zur formalen Logik bei Kant nennen (Kap. 5). -- -/- Note: No financial support acknowledged by the second autor (S. Kovač). (shrink)

The academic debates around the rise of so-called populist movements rarely refer to the origins of the tensions structuring representative democracies today. The “democratic deficit” or the “democratic crisis” are expressions that imply the unstructured nature of this moment. We argue here that it points out a structural shift, resulting from the progressive disarticulation between the representative principle and the democratic principle. As both principles defined representative democracy since the 19th century, their disarticulation raises interrogations and produces reactions within the (...) political field: the return of the nation, the possible Constituent Assemblies, as well as the defence of a representative regime deprived of its democratic features are the many political possibilities born out of this disarticulation. The present article develops this thesis and aims at contributing to the theoretical discussions around the current situation of representative democracies, as well as around the so-called populist moment. (shrink)

Les philosophies de l'histoire se nourrissaient de miettes tombées de la table du théologien. L'effondrement de leurs projets onto-théologiques permettrait-il de penser enfin l'histoire en fidélité au logos de la philosophie? Mettre toute métaphysique de l'histoire entre parenthèses ne consacre pas l'éternel retour du même, ou plutôt du pareil, mais libère le champ d'une temporalité plénière. Et parce que la temporalité - le temps tel que je le vis et que nous le vivons - se déploie comme ce que l'on (...) peut nommer une histoire, celle que je suis et celle que nous sommes, alors la question philosophique de l'histoire peut être logée sans reste dans une quaestio de tempore formulée après Husserl et Heidegger, et certains autres : sans préjuger d'une eschatologie que seule la théologie peut organiser, mais en s'autorisant à en précomprendre les raisons. L'existence est le mode d'être de l'étant que nous sommes, et l'existence est être en/comme histoire, historialité. L'historialité est une dimension de la temporalité. Qui le sait saura éviter les ornières de la philosophie de l'histoire. Non pas pour décrire une existence sans histoire, mais pour rendre raison du phénomène de l'histoire. En première instance seulement, certes, mais en rigueur, parce que sans prétention apocalyptique indue. L'histoire dont nous parlons est une réalité avant-dernière."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The study investigated the extent to which defensive functioning and defense mechanisms predict clinically meaningful symptomatic improvement within brief psychodynamic psychotherapy for recurrent and chronic depression in an inpatient setting. Treatment response was defined as a reduction in symptom severity of 46% or higher from the baseline score on the Montgomery–Asberg Depression Rating Scale. A subsample of 41 patients from an RCT was included. For each case, two sessions of brief inpatient psychodynamic psychotherapy were transcribed and then coded using the (...) Defense Mechanism Rating Scales and the Psychotic Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, an additional scale developed to study psychotic defenses. Results showed that defensive functioning and mature and immature defense changed during psychotherapy and predicted treatment response. Patient’s defenses observed throughout therapy also predicted treatment response at 12-month follow-up. The addition of psychotic defenses allows a better prediction of the treatment response. Overall, these results are in line with previous research and provide further validation of defensive functioning as a predictor of outcomes and a mechanism of change in psychotherapy. (shrink)

For many years, M. Jean d'Ormesson has been doing me the honor of asking me to write for Diogenes. More recently, he suggested that I should coordinate an issue of this review that would be devoted to my extended discipline, History, but history in the way in which I understand it. It was certainly not for lack of interest that I did not reply to the first request but, no doubt, because of the sense of a chronic lack of time (...) - almost a pleonasm - from which I, like everyone else, suffer. It was not because I was cured that I accepted the second invitation but probably because I allowed myself, with full knowledge of the facts, to entertain the idea that editing an issue would take up less time than simply contributing. … In fact, as everyone knows, the opposite is true, especially when the occasional editor also volunteers to be one of the contributors. This issue is now completed and I sincerely thank M. Jean d'Ormesson for having wished to entrust me with this task that I have enjoyed very much. (shrink)

We are again going through a period of expansion in biographical literature. There is an ever greater number of publications, demonstrating the libido biographica of the reading public and also showing the interest of authors for a genre that is often treated with a great deal of care and rigor. This is not the first time in the history of letters, and each of us can find in his library a quantity of ancient, classic or modern works proving the constancy (...) of this production. However, the contemporary phenomenon takes on a different meaning. The appetite for the biographical seems to be directly linked to its value as testimony. We are living in an era of distrust with regard to rules and codes. Every individual is called on to organize his conduct and invent his existence, from which comes, it seems, this need for an example that also expresses a taste for history and a need for more truth than entertainment from the author of biographies. (shrink)

Constitué d'analyses et de réflexions sur les méthodes pratiquées aujourd'hui dans l'écriture de l'histoire de la philosophie, cet ouvrage vise à rendre compte de la différence des pratiques existant selon les traditions et à interroger l'existence d'une démarche historique spécifique au domaine de la philosophie. L'enjeu fondamental est donc de savoir s'il existe une historiographie propre à la philosophie. Les interrogations portent en particulier sur les questions des critères d'exactitude, de vérification, de crédibilité qui permettraient de distinguer et de décider (...) entre les interprétations. Si le travail de l'interprétation est infini, toujours à refaire, reprendre et corriger, cela n'implique nullement l'abandon des exigences qui fondent la pertinence historique. Une introduction indispensable à toute pratique de l'histoire de la philosophie. L'ouvrage comporte notamment des textes de : P. Aubenque (Paris IV), J. Biard (Tours), B. Bourgeois (Paris I), C. Coutel (Artois), Th. De Koninck (Laval, Québec), D. Deleule (Paris X), D. Garber (Chicago), P. Magnard (Paris IV), J.-M. Narbonne (Laval, Québec), E. Nuzzo (Salerne), John Rogers (Keele), J. B. Schneewind (Johns-Hopkins, Baltimore), Tom Sorell (Essex), J.-L. Vieillard-Baron (Poitiers), Y. C. Zarka (CNRS, Paris), mais aussi de F. P. Adorno (Salerne, CNRS), P. Caye (CNRS), P. Destrée (CNRS, Belgique), T. Gontier (CNRS), J.-B. Gourinat (CNRS), E. Picavet (Paris I), I. Radrizzani (Munich), C. Viano (CNRS), A. Vasiliu (CNRS). (shrink)

Le divertissement a deux significations : 1 / se divertir par des amusements et des réjouissances dans des activités principalement ludiques ; 2 / se détourner de ce qui fait le sérieux de l’existence individuelle ou sociale pour se livrer à des activités légères ou frivoles.Au premier sens, le divertissement est une façon de se retrouver, de revenir sur soi-même, de s’éprouver...