The professional situation is considered a major interface of practicum training, here conceived as a School of conjunction, a school where one learns to make links, a foundation for the engineering of professionalization. The notion of situation is here developed based on the study of a data corpus elaborated during an experience with a practicum training model centred on writing and the construction of the professional situation by a subject-actor-author of the situation, in interaction with others, (...) in the context of nurse training. The analysis and interpretation of data brings to light a complex and unique unit, constructed in the space-time of a professional practice, a process during which several states succeed one another. The critical moment in action characterizes this unit; it is central to the process, mobilizing reflection in action, internal deliberation, and action-related decision. La situation professionnelle est identifiée comme interface majeure de la formation en alternance conçue ici comme une Ecole de la conjonction, une école où l’on apprend à relier, fondement d’une ingénierie de professionnalisation. La notion de situation est approfondie à partir de l’étude d’un corpus de données constitué au fil de l’expérimentation d’un modèle de formation en alternance centrée sur l’écriture et la construction de la situation professionnelle par un sujet-acteur-auteur de la situation, en interaction avec autrui, dans le contexte de la formation en soins infirmiers. L’analyse et l’interprétation des données permettent de mettre en évidence une unité singulière complexe, construite dans l’espace-temps d’une pratique professionnelle, un processus au cours duquel plusieurs états se succèdent. Le moment critique dans l’action la caractérise ; il occupe la place centrale du processus, mobilisant réflexion dans l’action, délibération intérieure et décision d’action. (shrink)

This text examines the socio-professional guidance of Comorian migrants residing on La Réunion Island. It mainly questions the process whereby guidance is constructed as a professional situation. To apprehend the complexity of the process, we have drawn on an ethnographical procedure (Woods, 1990) based on a dual source of data—that of the guide and that of the guided—as well as a micro-sociological approach (Thomas, 1923 ; Goffman, 1993 ; Lapassade, 1997) allowing us to link the concepts of situation (...) definition and conflict in situation definition. Finally, the article mobilizes an intercultural approach (Abdallah-Pretceille, 2003 ; Clanet, 1990 ; Camilleri, 1993) which, in reference to a threefold subjectivist, interactionist and situational perspective, aims to shed light on the dimensions of guidance that are otherness and heterogeneity. Ce texte traite de l’accompagnement socioprofessionnel des migrants comoriens résidant dans l’île de La Réunion. Il questionne principalement le processus de construction de l’accompagnement en tant que situation professionnelle. Pour appréhender la complexité de ce processus, nous avons convoqué une démarche ethnographique (Woods, 1990) privilégiant une double entrée : celle de l’accompagnateur et celle de l’accompagné, une approche microsociologique (Thomas, 1923 ; Goffman, 1993 ; Lapassade, 1997) permettant d’articuler les concepts de définition de la situation et de conflit de définition de la situation et enfin une approche interculturelle (Abdallah-Pretceille, 2003 ; Clanet, 1990 ; Camilleri, 1993) visant à élucider, en référence à une triple perspective : subjectiviste, interactionniste et situationnelle, les dimensions altéritaire et hétérogène de l’accompagnement. (shrink)

Based on the presentation of a research framework (the shared work of teachers), this text uses an empirical approach to examine the hypothesis of a co-elaboration of the professional situation. To do so, the empirical investigation, based on the Goffman framework, analyzes the process of reconstructing a teaching session (reference situation) over the course of a pedagogical counselling session (support situation) characterized by interaction between a beginning teacher and a trainer. The invalidation of the hypothesis leads to (...) a suggested conceptualization of the professional situation combining definitional approaches (emphasizing the duality between its singularity and its genericity) and methodological approaches. (shrink)

Electrophysiology deals with apparatus applied in a stimulus response situation. This technique is partly concerned with physical problems, partly with biological ones. The failure to appreciate differences in these problems leads to assumptions which require critical examination. Assumptions stating the constancy of objective stimuli, the meaning of inter and intra-individual variation, and the stability of the so-called “resting level” are examined.Some experiments are cited which reveal complications by the apperception of the patient and which have a significant influence on (...) electrophysiological data. The evocation of stress reactions by routine laboratory procedures is discussed and a suggestion is made of the way in which the validity of electro-physiological measurements may be improved.Dans la science de l'électro-physiologie on se sert des instruments pour mesurer des processus de réaction d'une objet stimulée.La méthodique dans cette science est dérivée partiellement de la science biologique et partiellement de la science physicale.Une des difficultées est d'apprécier justement des differences dans les problèmes de mesure dans les deux terraines scientifiques, ce que mène à des assumptions douteuses, qui a besoin d'une examination scrupuleuze.Des assumptions concernant la constance de stimulations objectives, la significance des variations inter- et intra-individuelles et la stabilité du niveau, dit „resting level”, sont examinés.Quelques experiments, révelant des complexités dans l'apperception des patients ayant une influence importante sur les données électro-physiologiques, sont cités.L'évocation des réactions de tension, par des procedures routinières en laboratoire sont discutés et une suggestion afin d'améliorer la validité des données de mesure électrophysiologique est donnée.In der Elektrophysiologie ist man beschäftigt mit Instrumentarium, waraus die Zusammenhang zwischen Reiz und Reaktion untersucht wird. In diesen Untersuchungen werden Methoden angewandt, welche teils aus der biologischen, teils aus der physikalischen Wissenschaft stammen. Es kommt vor, dass Unterschiede in Messungsprobleme innerhalb jedem Fachgebiet nicht richtig gewertet werden, was zu Annahmen führt, welche eine kritische Analyse bedürfen.Annahmen was betrifft, die Konstanz von objective Reize, die Bedeutung von inter- und intra-individuellen Variationen und die Konstanz des sogenannten „resting level”, wurden einer Analyse unterzogen.Einige Experimenten sind zitiert, die eine erhebliche Komplexität in der Wahrnehmungsempfindung des Patienten nachweisen und die eine bedeutungsvolle Einfluss haben auf den elektro-physiologischen Angaben. Das Hervorrufen Spannungsreaktionen durch Routine-vorgänge im Laboratorium wurde diskutiert und eine Weise um mit möglicherweise zuverlassigem Erfolg elektro-physiologischen Messungen aus zu führen wurde vorgeschlagen. (shrink)

Dans le contexte de la pandémie de COVID-19, les pratiques décisionnelles liées à la répartition des ressources médicales et au traitement des personnes âgées nous renseignent sur les éthiques présentes en milieu de soin et au niveau sociétal. La comparaison entre la prise de décision dans le contexte quotidien et les particularités d’une éthique de pandémie met en lumière les tenants du passage entre une éthique hors pandémie et une « pandéthique ». L’approche éthique de santé publique, notamment (...) utilitariste, a été mise de l’avant d’une manière prépondérante dans les débats et dilemmes éthiques entourant l’allocation des ressources et la priorisation. En soulevant les oppositions et enjeux associés aux discours et aux choix du rationnement en fonction de l’âge émerge la question du traitement des personnes âgées en contexte de COVID-19, et de l’âgisme vécu dans ce contexte. En parallèle, les décisions et choix éthiques difficiles s’entremêlent au duty to care du soignant, et par conséquent à la possibilité de blessure morale. Un conflit émerge entre les pratiques éthiques décisionnelles et les valeurs personnelles ou professionnelles du soignant, alors que l’équilibre entre ses divers devoirs est bouleversé. Des approches et éthiques alternatives sont ainsi mises de l’avant à la lumière des situations vécues, notamment en contexte de soin de longue durée. La thèse développée vise à soutenir la valeur ajoutée de l’anthropologie aux processus décisionnels et son intégration plus formelle aux approches bien connues en bioéthique. À partir du regard anthropologique, nous ouvrons en conclusion sur des pistes de réflexion associées aux éthiques de la discussion, de la vulnérabilité, féministes, ou encore du care comme d’autres manières d’aborder la prise de décision en contexte de pandémie, à un moment où la réflexion éthique et sociale s’impose comme capitale. (shrink)

Développé dans le cadre d’une recherche-action, s’appliquant à appréhender l’évolution des relations entre une famille en situation de handicap et des professionnels, le « foyer bientraitant » est un schéma susceptible de mieux concevoir de quelle manière l’on peut poser, en tant qu’intervenant, un regard utile à soutenir un processus de bientraitance. Au travers d’une situation clinique, est évoqué l’intérêt de recourir à une méthodologie qui soutient une réflexion sur le quotidien, tout en reconnaissant les avantages et (...) limites de ces modèles qui s’ancrent dans la singularité d’une pratique. (shrink)

Dans les situations où les enfants d’une famille doivent être placés, la loi française actuelle recommande le placement en fratrie. Si le lien fraternel constitue une ressource pour la majorité des enfants placés, il peut parfois les fragiliser au contraire. L’objet du présent article est d’explorer les enjeux du fraternel en placement conjoint, en commençant par caractériser les relations fraternelles dans ce contexte. Puis un détour par la psychanalyse conduit à explorer les processus psychiques de la construction du (...) lien fraternel, ce qui permet d’aborder ensuite la manière dont peuvent se déployer, dans certaines circonstances, les violences intrafraternelles. Il s’agit alors de repérer les signes d’alerte conduisant les professionnels de la protection de l’enfance à privilégier dans certains cas une séparation des enfants au quotidien, tout en aménageant les conditions nécessaires au maintien du lien. (shrink)

Les situations de violence armée, comprises comme des expériences sortant de l’ordinaire, créent un rapport au temps différent de celui de la vie quotidienne et des périodes de paix. Dans cet article, nous abordons la question du temps dans les conflits armés à partir de l’étude des négociations de paix entre la guérilla colombienne des FARC et le gouvernement d’Andres Pastrana. Après un court rappel historique sur le processus de paix de façon à situer précisément l’événement, nous examinons (...) comment se construisent et se manifestent différentes temporalités au travers de l’étude de trois dichotomies : la première entre temps sociaux ; la deuxième entre temps stratégiques ; et la troisième entre rapports discursifs de chaque acteur armé. Nous constatons que ces temporalités, vécues ou construites par les acteurs à partir de leur expérience d’un temps objectivé et d’une perception subjective du rapport temporel, ont un effet sur le comportement des belligérants, ce qui rend difficile le rapprochement et l’interaction entre les parties à un moment précis du conflit armé. (shrink)

Our study has two concerns. The first falls under the methodological aspect of collaborative research : how researchers and teachers introduce each other to the world of the other and at their respective referents? What are the characteristics of their interactions, how do they facilitate mutual understanding? The second falls within the terms of the partnership : how to negotiate the subject of mutual concern, that is to say what will become both object of research and object of training? This (...) study shows that professional development actors rooted in a negotiation - conversion process, through the involvement of bifacial objects. In this sense, collaboration takes shape around the same object, each actor takes care of one side of the bifacial object and needs the experience of the other to develop this side. We can then speak of reciprocal acculturation. This research shows that collaboration is established once it has acquired the characteristics of a work situation in which and by which the activity of each category of actors produces development. (shrink)

La théorie démocratique contemporaine entretient une relation ambivalente avec les élections. Alors que les points de vue agrégatifs et minimalistes les considèrent comme une institution centrale de la démocratie représentative , les conceptions plus riches de la démocratie n’ont pas nécessairement de penchant pour elles. Les théories délibératives ont tendance à négliger les élections pour se concentrer sur la délibération publique, c’est-à-dire sur le processus continu de formation de l’opinion et d’échange de raisons qui se produit entre les élections . (...) Les théories participatives ont également tendance à les écarter en faveur d’une vision moins agonistique et plus coopérative de l’action politique . Par conséquent, peu d’attention normative a été accordée dans la littérature récente à ce moment très distinctif de la vie démocratique, à quelques notables exceptions près . Une conséquence naturelle est que la plupart des théoriciens font appel à des expériences délibératives telles que les jurys de citoyens et les mini-publics comme réponse efficace aux préoccupations démocratiques actuelles . Le tirage au sort peut ainsi être présenté comme une alternative préférable à l’élection, car il garantit une représentation descriptive, évite la capture de l’État par des élites puissantes et promet des résultats substantiellement meilleurs. Alors que de nombreux théoriciens s’intéressent aux moyens de compléter les institutions électorales par des organes délibératifs non électoraux , certains chercheurs se débarrasseraient volontiers des élections . Le moment est-il venu de les abandonner ? Cet article se concentre sur une affirmation spécifique que beaucoup de partisans du tirage au sort ont avancée, à savoir que celui-ci serait plus égalitaire que les élections, et vise à la rejeter. D’autres chercheurs ont déjà critiqué le tirage au sort pour diverses raisons. Landa et Pevnick , ainsi qu’Umbers objectent qu’il ne permet pas d’obtenir les améliorations instrumentales du gouvernement promises par ses promoteurs ; Ceva et Ottonelli , ainsi que Lafont nient que les critiques lotocratiques des élections reflètent une compréhension adéquate de l’autorité démocratique en tant que forme d’autonomie collective ; et Umbers soutient également que la lotocratie est en contradiction avec les principes de justice distributive et d’égalité sociale . En complément à ces critiques récentes, nous soutenons que la vision de l’égalité politique qui sous-tend le tirage au sort est problématique et peu convaincante. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:130. LA NOTION DE CIRCONSTANCE DANS LAS PHILOSOPHIE DE HUME Hume fait un usage irrégulier, mais presque toujours remarquable de la notion de circonstance. Certes, la notion n'est pas nouvelle. Mais, d'une part, notre auteur la transpose de l'ordre de la loi morale ou civile qui, normative, a toujours à connaître les circonstances réelles au moment de son application, à l'ordre de la causalité naturelle qui règle (...) les opérations du monde et les actions des hommes. D'autre part, Hume étend de façon considérable l'emploi du mot, tirant avantage du caractère irréductiblement vague de sa signification. La circonstance qui, selon le sens commun, est ce qui s'ajoute de façon contingente à la loi, désignera, par extensions successives, l'articulation des plans de causalité, la détermination par laquelle la cause opère, la mesure de la nécessité rapportée à l'expérience passée, enfin les liaisons de l'esprit. Et, quoiqu'elle ne soit jamais elle-même l'objet d'une réflexion propre, la notion eh vient à exprimer la double exigence méthodique de la spécification et de la généralisation, la nature critique du jugement scientifique, la conséquence sceptiques de la science de la nature humaine. C'est cette triple valeur méthodique, critique et sceptique, que nous nous proposons de ressaisir, à la lumière d'une étude qui prend pour base l'analyse des occurences expresses du terme. Sans prétendre avoir procédé à un recueil strictement exhaustif, nous voudrions faire la preuve qce la notion de circonstance apparaît à tous les moments décisifs de l'analyse humienne de la connaissance. I. Le sens dont il faut partir est le sens le plus commun. La circonstance est tout élément, trait ou détail qui, de façon contingente, entoure ou 131. s'ajoute à un événement, à un caractère ou à la production d'un effet (T447; E90; 95,- 128...). Opposée à la nécessité (T476), elle est liée à une situation (T409; 537), à une occurence (E55). Tantôt, elle reste à préciser (T287: in certain circumstances; T539: in some circustances opposé à in all circumstances); tantôt, elle est distinguée par son caractère extraordinatire (T21). Ici, on marque l'identité des circonstances (E85); là, on insiste sur leur diversité (T563). Hume rend parfaitement ce premier sens, qui appartient à l'usage, lorsqu'il s'attache à définir le rôle de l'histoire. L'histoire a pour fonction de montrer au philosophe combien la nature humaine est constante. Its chief use is only to discover the contant and universal principle of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations... (E83). Les circonstances font la trame menue et adventice de l'histoire, sur laquelle s'impriment les lois de la nature humaine. En dépit de leur variété et de leur écoulement irréductible, elles témoignent de la constance des principes et vérifient les effets du système causal que la science de l'homme se propose de dégager. Si, par elles-mêmes, elles peuvent retenir l'intérêt de l'annaliste, qui écrit l'histoire selon l'ordre de la succession et qui prend plaisir au détail des événements, elles sont négligées par le philosophe qui forme des raisonnements de causalité. Cependant, il convient d'observer que la circonstance ne se confond pas avec l'accident. Ce dernier, absorbé par sa contingence, est voué à l'oubli. Au contraire, la circonstance mérite d'être remarquée, car elle se rapporte toujours à une loi dont elle accompagne l'application. Bien plus, loin d'être une matière passive sur le fond de laquelle les principes de causalité viendraient inscrire leurs 132. effets, elle engendre elle-même un effet propre (T143; 151); elle est elle-même la source, d'une causalité qui porte sur l'opération des lois auxquelles elle s'ajoute. Elle est le principe· d' une effectivité qui, pour être seconde, n'en est pas moins déterminante. Cette influence peut prendre des formes diverses. Dans un cas... (shrink)

Il s’agit dans cet article d’éclairer la méthode et la philosophie de Simone de Beauvoir pour comprendre l’aliénation et l’action des femmes. Dans un premier temps, l’article met au jour sa méthode généalogique pour comprendre comment « la femme » a pu être considérée comme « l’Autre » de l’homme. Puis, il s’agit de montrer comment Beauvoir déplace la thèse sartrienne de la liberté en situation pour critiquer l’aliénation et la domination subies par les femmes. Enfin, (...) cet article étudie les solutions qu’elle propose pour la libération des femmes. (shrink)

This text presents a few preliminary results of research currently being conducted at the Université de Sherbrooke’s Research Institute on Educational Practices. The study seeks to understand how situations presented in teacher education can support the functioning and success of trainee teachers’ professional learning. The article’s aim is to identify the points of convergence between situations of professional activity, situations of professional learning, and training situations. The text will attempt to analyze the role that can be played by certain training (...) structures that seek to support a professionalization process that we define in terms of a general aim: the construction of professional knowledge. The originality of this research lies in that it draws on the work of Gaston Bachelard to develop a theoretical frame enabling a reading and interpretation of the results. Ce texte présente quelques résultats préliminaires d’une recherche menée présentement à l’Institut de recherche sur les pratiques éducatives de l’Université de Sherbrooke. Cette recherche vise à comprendre comment les situations présentes dans la formation à l’enseignement peuvent soutenir le fonctionnement et la réussite de l’apprentissage professionnel des enseignants en formation. Nous cherchons à identifier les points de rencontre entre les situations d’activité professionnelle, les situations d’apprentissage professionnel et les situations de formation. Nous tenterons d’analyser le rôle que peuvent jouer certains dispositifs visant à soutenir un processus de professionnalisation que nous définissons au regard d’une finalité : la construction de savoirs professionnels. L’originalité de cette recherche est la convocation des travaux de Gaston Bachelard pour élaborer le cadre théorique permettant la lecture et l’interprétation des résultats. (shrink)

La sociologie de l’action publique s’est régulièrement intéressée aux temporalités. L’action publique est perçue comme pesant très fortement sur les temporalités sociales tandis que celles-ci représentent une contrainte dont doit tenir compte toute action publique. Les analyses des chercheurs ont mis en évidence que la perception d’un temps linéaire et séquentiel ne rendait que très imparfaitement compte des processus en jeu, et que l’action publique correspondait davantage à des alternances irrégulières et peu prévisibles entre un temps long (...) de la stabilité et un temps plus bref et ramassé de la rupture. L’émergence du nouveau management public a cependant transformé radicalement cette question, en imposant une autre logique de rationalisation des temporalités dont le droit lui-même porte désormais la marque. Si la littérature rend compte des processus d’accélération de l’action publique et de la multiplication des ruptures, notre article réinterroge l’alternance et l’hétérogénéité des temps ainsi que les tensions qui en résultent. Cette hétérogénéité se trouve tout d’abord confortée par la sectorisation de l’action publique. Ensuite, il reste des domaines dans lesquels le temps long résiste, contribuant ainsi à une lecture différenciée de l’action publique contemporaine. (shrink)

La pédagogie est constitutive d’une relation de formation portée par une intention de développement de la personne mobilisant une configuration de savoirs afin d’inscrire cette personne dans un parcours de développement. La mise en oeuvre de cette relation dans une situation organisée et instrumentée produit la matière du développement, en réalité ce qui fait la valeur de la formation. L’alternance est une manière particulière d’organiser ce processus de valorisation. Dans cette contribution est analysé un dispositif faisant (...) cohabiter deux populations en alternance : des jeunes apprentis et des adultes en activité professionnelle. Une double enquête auprès de trois promotions de cette formation permet de comprendre la négociation des savoirs qui s’opère dans le cours de cette action et la résonnance que produit la pédagogie mise en oeuvre. On perçoit alors la construction de leur parcours par les alternants et les évolutions de leur rapport à l’activité. (shrink)

À partir d’une recherche-action en hôpital de jour, l’article présente la mise en place d’un groupe de parole pour les parents et assistantes familiales s’occupant d’enfants avec autisme. Cette expérience a pour objet de travailler sur les apports possibles de l’approche groupale qui peuvent servir de levier pour mobiliser les ressources parentales et celles de l’enfant. En appui sur des références groupales psychanalytiques, les auteurs questionnent l’importance d’un travail clinique sur les difficultés à remplir le rôle de parent face à (...) des enfants et/ou un environnement quand les processus d’intersubjectivité et de subjectivité sont mis en défaut. Ils montrent à partir d’une illustration clinique les qualités du groupe dans ses modalités de contenance. Il s’agit de questionner les positions subjectives dans l’après-coup du moment traumatique inaugural du diagnostic et dans ses principes d’élaboration. (shrink)

Cet article propose d’étudier les tuteurs de résilience des enfants confiés en famille d’accueil à partir de la théorie de l’attachement dans une perspective psychodynamique. Il met en évidence la complexité de la relation entre l’enfant et l’assistant familial en tant que figure d’attachement alternative, tuteur de résilience possible. Cette réflexion s’appuie sur une pratique de psychologue clinicien travaillant au sein de l’Aide sociale à l’enfance. L’articulation théorico-clinique issue de cette expérience discute des effets résilients potentiels qu’ont les assistants (...) familiaux sur le vécu des enfants confiés en famille d’accueil en termes de processus de consolidation de la base de sécurité de l’enfant par la qualité du caregiving du professionnel. Il pose ainsi la question de la complexité de cette dynamique relationnelle interactive et du danger dans le risque d’utilisation excessive de cette notion de tuteur. (shrink)

Jean-Philippe Pierron | : Dans leur réflexion sur le raisonnement moral, critique d’une approche rationaliste stricte, les théories du care et les philosophies travaillant à une compréhension enrichie de la raison pratique se sont attachées à mettre en valeur l’importance éthique qu’il y a à envisager la perspective de l’autre. Elles se sont concentrées à cette fin sur le travail de l’imagination. On montre ici que l’éthique du care de Gilligan, l’éthique de la narration de Nussbaum et l’éthique (...) de la sollicitude ricoeurienne, quoique différentes, se renforcent mutuellement à partir d’une compréhension renouvelée du rôle de l’imagination dans la morale. Si l’enquête psychologique de Gilligan, la philosophie de la littérature chez Nussbaum et l’herméneutique du texte chez Ricoeur diffèrent, ces trois auteur.es ont en commun de ne pas se satisfaire des méfaits d’une rationalité instrumentale qui bride la créativité pratique des actrices morales et acteurs moraux. Il appartiendrait à l’imagination éthique de prendre la mesure de la complexité des situations morales et d’en suivre les variations subtiles, afin de prendre soin de formes de vies rendues invisibles ou d’existences vulnérables. | : Critical of a strictly rationalist approach, theories of care and philosophies working toward a deeper understanding of practical reason have valorized the ethical importance of envisioning the perspective of the other in their reflection on moral reasoning. To this end, they have focussed on the task of the imagination. Here it is shown that, however different, Gilligan’s ethics of care, Nussbaum’s narrative ethics, and Ricoeur’s ethics of solicitude mutually reinforce each other through a renewed comprehension of the role of the imagination in the philosophy of action. Although Gilligan’s psychological investigation, Nussbaum’s philosophy of literature, and Ricoeur’s textual hermeneutics differ, these three authors have something in common: a discontent with the misdeeds of an instrumental rationality that shackles the practical creativity of moral actors. It is up to the ethical imagination to size up the complexity of moral situations and to appreciate their subtle variations, in order to take care of forms of life made invisible and vulnerable existences. (shrink)

Dans cet article, je tente de montrer que le principe d’impartialité et de généralisation qui définit le point de vue moral s’accommode mal de la distinction entre discours moral et discours éthique proposée par Habermas. Alors que celuici relie le jugement moral à un processus de décontextualisation qui affranchit le discours de ses réferences symboliques immédiates, je suggère plutôt, à la suite d’A. Wellmer, d’y voir une règle d’impartialité immanente aux situations d’action. Dans cette foulée, je propose un (...) examen critique du Principe “U” qui gît au coeur de la Diskursethik mais aussi de la théorie du consensus sur laquelle s’appuie ce principe, tout en reconnaissant par ailleurs l’importance de la philosophie de Habermas pour la théorie morale contemporaine. A la toute fin, j’aborde la question de l’enracinement du moral point of view dans la forme de vie moderne, en suggérant que sa conception de I’impartialité est peut-être elle-même liée à une certaine représentation du bien qui lui est propre. Faut-il alors maintenir la séparation étanche qu’etablir Habermas entre discours moral et discours éthique? Rien n’est moin sûr.I attempt to show that the principle of impartiality and generalization that defines the moral point of view is irreconcilable with Habermas’s distinction between moral and ethical discourse. While Habermas imposes a process of decontextualization upon moral judgment, which frees discourse from its immediate symbolic references, I suggest, following A. Wellmer, that an impartiality rule be extracted from them. Similarly, I undertake a critical analysis of the “U” principle at the heart of the Diskursethik and the underlying consensus theory, while recognizing the importance of Habermas’s philosophy for contemporary moral theory. Finally, I address the question of the entrenchment of the moral point of view in the modern life form. I suggest that his concept of impartiality is perhaps linked to a certain representation of the good peculiar to him. Should the impermeable division established by Habermas between moral and ethical discourse be maintained? Nothing is less certain. (shrink)

Cet article se veut une illustration de nos recherches sur les scandales et la production de connaissance concernant les vulnérabilités organisationnelles. Il présente un segment des résultats de l’analyse découlant de la recherche exploratoire faite au sein de la nouvelle administration municipale de la Ville de Laval. Cette recherche voulait valider l’utilité des diagnostics des risques éthiques pour les organisations qui tentent de se sortir de la tourmente d’un scandale. Notre chantier de recherche sur la gestion des risques éthiques (...) class='Hi'>dans les organisations publiques a été développé pour pallier les limites du champ d’intervention traditionnel de l’éthique appliquée, c’est-à-dire une éthique purement individuelle qui se limite trop souvent à mettre en doute la responsabilité professionnelle des acteurs et faire la promotion de la stricte compétence éthique des acteurs. Nous embrassons ici plutôt une démarche de recherche orientée vers une éthique dite institutionnelle, c’est-à-dire une éthique qui invite à remettre en question les actions individuelles et collectives en les mettant en contexte dans les situations d’actions. L’éthique institutionnelle qui est sous-jacente à l’approche défendue dans ce texte nous amène à réfléchir tant sur la qualité des conduites professionnelles que sur les facteurs qui, dans l’environnement du travail, ont une incidence négative sur la qualité des conduites. Le but de cet article est de démontrer que la recherche sur l’éthique dans les services publics ne peut plus se faire en vase clos autour de l’analyse des valeurs éthiques et la résolution des dilemmes éthiques, elle doit plutôt s’ouvrir à des analyses plus systémiques en jetant un regard analytique tant sur le cadre normatif, les instances régulatoires, la culture organisationnelle, le design institutionnel et les processus de gestion ; tout cela pour mieux saisir toutes les dimensions institutionnelles qui influencent la qualité des conduites des acteurs organisationnels. (shrink)

Dans l'univers des soins de santé, l'éthique doit se construire D à partir de l'expérience de la personne malade et s'adapter à elle. Mais de quelle éthique parle-t-on au juste? Sur les valeurs qui la fondent – l'autonomie, la bienfaisance, la non-malfaisance et la justice –, tout le monde semble s'entendre. Pourtant, à observer un groupe de médecins ou d'infirmières discuter d'une situation problématique, une autre conclusion s'impose : le rapport à l'éthique change selon la conception qu'on se (...) fait de la tâche clinique. Hubert Doucet, spécialiste reconnu, expose ici les principales théories de l'éthique clinique et cherche à les faire dialoguer, en convoquant au passage la pensée du philosophe Paul Ricoeur. Il en présente les fondements et le vocabulaire, s'attarde à son histoire et pose la résolution de problème au coeur de son action. Ce faisant, il apporte une contribution autant théorique que pratique à tous ceux qui, étudiants et professionnels, veulent en comprendre le sens et en tirer le meilleur parti dans le cadre de leur travail. (shrink)

À suivre Gérard Genette, son passage de la critique littéraire à la poétique, puis de celle-ci à l’esthétique résulterait d’un « processus génétique en quelque sorte oblique », d’une « filiation collatérale » qui voit le détail d’un livre devenir le sujet du suivant. Un retour sur son parcours fait apparaître que l’enchaînement métonymique est lissé par le tuilage des moments : ceux-ci, pour être focalisés, n’en sont pas moins cumulatifs. Mieux, même, au fil du temps, dans la (...) dynamique cumulative d’un œuvre complet in progress, le principe de cohérence se sera appliqué non seulement à l’idéalité des textes, mais à la physicalité qui détermine le régime d’immanence de la littérature. On peut voir dans « Du texte à l’œuvre », « exercice d’autodiction préposthume » qui ouvre Figures IV, en 1997, plus que le simple bilan d’un chercheur, fût-il de grande envergure, dressant le bilan de son parcours au soir de sa carrière : sous couleur de rendre compte des liens qui unissent ses livres, il s’agit ni plus ni moins de montrer en quoi les textes qu’il a publiés constituent une œuvre. (shrink)

Résumé Juste avant sa mort précoce il y a près de vingt ans, Edward Saïd nous a légué en signe de testament l’un de ses derniers ouvrages Humanisme et démocratie dans lequel il a étalé sa vision du monde futur et montré l’impact que doit avoir l’humanisme sur la conception démocratique de la praxis politique. Son projet consiste en effet à réhabiliter l’humanisme pris déjà pour cible par le courant structuraliste antihumaniste au milieu du vingtième siècle et à le (...) réintégrer dans le processus démocratique de l’action politique et sociale. Il s’agit en effet, comme il l’exprime, « d’une méditation approfondie sur les possibilités concrètes de l’humanisme comme pratique durable et non comme propriété, sur ce qu’une activité humaniste implique, plutôt qu’une énumération des qualités souhaitables chez un humaniste ». Tout en se référant aux événements politiques des dernières décennies et à ses expériences propres dans ce domaine, particulièrement son engagement pour la cause palestinienne, Edward Saïd considère que l’humanisme présente une base solide pour bâtir une société et une culture séculaires ouvertes au monde dominé actuellement par l’impérialisme et la mondialisation. Ce qui lui importe au fond le plus, « c’est l’humanisme en tant que praxis utile aux intellectuels qui veulent comprendre ce qu’ils font, à quoi rime leur engagement en tant que chercheurs, et qui veulent également relier ces principes au monde dans lequel ils vivent comme citoyens ». Ce n’est pas en vérité une recette toute prête à résoudre les crises ou les problèmes politiques actuels mais, à la lueur de la synthèse théorique et pratique qu’il opère dans cette œuvre, Saïd nous permet aujourd’hui de relire et comprendre les événements des révolutions arabes et d’en tirer les conséquences critiques, car son projet offre la possibilité de se pencher de manière critique sur le rôle public que doit jouer l’intellectuel dans la consolidation du processus démocratique. Il indique également comment on peut participer à l’élaboration d’une culture humaniste de coexistence et de partage à la place d’une culture d’exclusion, de terreur et de guerre telle qu’on est en train de vivre actuellement dans plusieurs pays du monde. Notre feuille de travail tend à rappeler le trajet qu’a suivi Edward Saïd dans son cursus théorique et pratique depuis la parution de son écrit l’Orientalisme tout en passant par Culture et impérialisme jusqu’à Humanisme et Démocratie, et de mettre en exergue les idées fortes de cette œuvre et leurs répercussions sur les études post-orientalistes et postcoloniales. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage réunit des contributeurs du monde entier pour explorer l'enjeu du courage des alternatives dans le contexte actuel d'un changement paradigmatique où la complexité, le pluralisme et l'interculturalisme émergent comme nouveaux horizons de sens. "La vie n'est pas un vide à remplir. C'est une plénitude à découvrir". Oser la vie, oser l'Autre, s'ouvrir à soi-même, aux autres et au monde, voilà de grands défis éternels qui prennent toute leur actualité dans un contexte contemporain de globalisation qui exacerbe (...) la tension entre unité et diversité, tension qui peut se révéler destructrice ou au contraire extrêmement créatrice selon la manière dont on l'aborde. Les contributeurs à cet ouvrage invitent le lecteur à décaler son regard sur le monde en le faisant passer du "centre" vers les "marges". Ils explorent la richesse du monde tel qu'il apparaît dès lors que l'on accepte de sortir de l'univers de nos certitudes pour s'ouvrir au plurivers des possibles expérimentés ou esquissés dans la diversité humaine. Oser l'Autre, c'est oser s'ouvrir à la vie qui est transformation permanente et confronte constamment l'humanité, individuellement et collectivement, à ses limites tout en révélant ses potentialités cachées. Cette découverte ne peut se faire seule et appelle des approches interdisciplinaires et interculturelles. L'ouvrage articule ainsi des approches anthropologiques, philosophiques, juridiques, politiques, psychologiques et mobilise des points de vue d'Afrique, d'Amérique, d'Asie et d'Europe, non seulement pour décrire ou critiquer les situations et paradigmes dominants, mais aussi pour dégager de nouveaux horizons d'un vivre ensemble dans le dialogue et la complémentarité des différences. (shrink)

Une interprétation éprouvée de la philosophie moderne – défendue de façons diverses par Martin Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, Jürgen Habermas ou encore la tradition herméneutique – voit la marque distinctive de la modernité dans l’émergence d’une conception de l’homme comme sujet autonome de pensée, d’action et de droits. Cette étude cherche à contester cette évidence historiographique, en montrant que les trois moments les plus communément invoqués dans les généalogies modernes de la subjectivité ont en réalité été des tentatives de (...) déconstruction radicales de cette idée d’un sujet comme fondement : dans la critique réformée du libre-arbitre d’abord, dans la tradition cartésienne ensuite, et dans les débats internes à l’idéalisme allemand enfin. Cette lecture permet également d’expliquer pourquoi des approches antisubjectives de la philosophie ont pu se réclamer de la tradition de la philosophie européenne.La triple mort du sujet moderneThe classical interpretation of modern philosophy sees the distinctive mark of modernity in the conception of man as an autonomous subject of thought, action and rights – a feature common to the interpretations of Martin Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, Jürgen Habermas or in the hermeneutical tradition. This study challenges this historical evidence, by showing that the three moments most commonly highlighted in the modern genealogies of subjectivity were actually attempts of a radical deconstruction of the very notion of an all-sustaining subject : first in the reformed criticism of freewill, second in the Cartesian tradition, and third in the internal debates with German idealism. Such a reading also allows us to understand why anti-subjective approaches of philosophy could actually claim the heritage of a much older European philosophical tradition. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École (...) normale supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

Selon le romantisme allemand, l'être humain entre de plein droit parmi les processus naturels, mais en même temps, les particularités de l'humain demeurent. Le romantisme allemand offre une alternative à l'opposition homme / nature, de même qu'il prend ses distances à l'égard de l'idée selon laquelle les sciences humaines pourraient reléguer l'homme au rang de simple phénomène naturel. Mais comment se décline concrètement une telle position dans les différents domaines du savoir ? Telle est la question à laquelle cet (...) ouvrage cherche à répondre. -/- Der deutschen Romantik zufolge ist der Mensch ein Teil der Natur, zugleich aber bleiben die Besonderheiten des Menschen bestehen. Die deutsche Romantik bietet eine Alternative zum Gegensatz Mensch - Natur, ebenso distanziert sie sich von der Vorstellung, die Geisteswissenschaften könnten den Menschen als bloßes Naturphänomen behandeln. Wie aber konkretisiert sich eine solche Position in den verschiedenen Wissensbereichen? Dies ist die Frage, die das vorliegende Buch zu beantworten versucht. (shrink)

Les analyses des parcours de vie s’intéressent surtout au repérage des régularités du cycle de vie ou, tout au plus, aux écarts aux modèles types, en termes de retard des événements ou d’allongement des transitions sur les calendriers scolaires, professionnels, résidentiels ou familiaux. Les études empiriques suggèrent pourtant la présence de dynamiques non linéaires évoquant la possibilité que les parcours comportent des « bifurcations » où tout peut être remis en question, pouvant entraîner des changements durables de situation. Ce (...) phénomène est plus souvent interprété en référence à la capacité des individus de faire leurs propres choix qu’en fonction de l’influence possible des cadres institutionnels. L’étude de parcours scolaires et professionnels de jeunes Québécois dans les années 1990 constitue la base de cette réflexion sur la place des bifurcations dans les parcours de vie qui met l’accent sur le rôle des dispositifs institutionnels dans la création d’une flexibilité des structures, sur les phénomènes d’appropriation par les individus des opportunités offertes par cette flexibilité et sur le mouvement des réversibilités et irréversibilités construites à travers ce processus. L’analyse suggère que les individus peuvent s’engager dans des actions en évaluant les possibilités offertes par les institutions qui encadrent la vie sociale, qu’ils sont capables de percevoir les irréversibilités associées aux choix offerts et ainsi, de les prévenir, les exploiter ou s’y adapter. La croissance du nombre de personnes adoptant les mêmes comportements dans une situation donnée accroît ainsi la possibilité que ce choix se transforme en une convention sociale et que les bifurcations s’institutionnalisent.Life course analyses are mainly interested in identifying regularities in the life cycle or, at most, in deviations from typical patterns in terms of a postponing of events or of transitions within educational, career, residential or family trajectories. However, empirical studies point to the existence of non-linear dynamics and suggest the possibility that life paths may also include « bifurcations », where everything is placed in question, and that may lead to lasting changes in situations. This phenomenon is more often interpreted in reference to the individual’s capacity to make personal choices rather than in terms of the potential influence of institutional frameworks. This study is based on an analysis of the educational and career trajectories of Québec youth during the 1990s : it looks at the role of bifurcations in the life course, in emphasizing how institutional arrangements may help to create a flexibility of structures, and explores the phenomena of individuals seizing the opportunities offered by this flexibility. The study suggests that individuals may undertake actions after evaluating the opportunities presented by social institutions, and that they are able to grasp the irreversibility of certain choices and anticipate them, use them to their advantage or adjust their actions accordingly. An increase in the number of persons adopting the same behaviours in a given situation thus also increases the possibility that such a choice may evolve into a social convention and that these bifurcations may become institutionalized. (shrink)

L’objectif de cet article est d’analyser les relations entre les mères ayant des enfants en situation de handicap ou présentant des difficultés développementales et les professionnelles au sein de crèches collectives dites inclusives. Dans le cadre d’une étude plus vaste, réalisée en France, portant sur le soutien des familles de jeunes enfants porteurs de handicap ou présentant des difficultés développementales, un entretien semi-directif a été réalisé auprès de neuf mères et de dix professionnelles pour analyser leurs relations. L’analyse (...) qualitative de données est réalisée selon l’approche de Braun et Clarke (2006). Les principaux résultats mettent en évidence, pour les mères, l’importance du partage d’informations, le soutien apporté par les professionnelles ainsi que leurs compétences. Les professionnelles, quant à elles, soulignent l’échange d’informations et leur rôle d’accompagnement dans l’acceptation du handicap de l’enfant ou dans le processus de parentalité. Les résultats sont discutés et des pistes d’intervention sont proposées. (shrink)

L'article propose de distinguer deux modèles pour décrire la fragmentation croissante des activités dans les situations de travail, fondés respectivement sur le basculement successif d'un engagement à ur autre et la pertinence à chaque instant d'une pluralité d'engagements plus ou moins « préoccupants» . Il montre comment les logiques d'innovation et de design des technologies de communication favorisent d'une part l'inscription durable de sollicitation dans l'environnement sur des modalités peu coûteuses en attention et en engagement, et d'autre par (...) l'organisation séquentielle des cours d'action. L'analyse d'un cas d'usage de la messagerie instantanée ai travail permet de saisir comment séquentialité et format de « présence obstinée » des repères se combinent pour rendre visible la préoccupation, distribuée entre le sujet et son environnement équipé: l'homme communiquant est constitué comme sujet multiacti et carrefour d'engagements pluriels.The article proposes to distinguish two models to describe the increasing fragmentation of activities in work situations, based respectively on successive tipping a commitment to other core and relevance at every moment of plurality of more or less commitments "concern" . He shows how the logic of innovation and design of communication technologies on the one hand promote sustainable solicitation registration in the environment in terms inexpensive attention and commitment, and on the other by the sequential organization courses of action. The analysis of a case of use of instant messaging have work captures how sequential format and "obstinate presence" markers combine to make visible concern, distributed between the subject and the environment equipped: the man constituted as a subject is communicating multiacti crossroads commitments and plurals. (shrink)

Le lecteur non averti n’aura peut-être retenu de "Où atterrir ?" que le fait que son auteur semble animé de bonnes intentions, pour ainsi dire (on fermera les yeux sur le complotisme et le populisme) : la défense de l’environnement, l’accueil des migrants, l’intégration européenne, etc. À cela je voudrais opposer quelques remarques. La première est que la conception de Latour correspond tout à fait à ce qu’Ernst Cassirer appelait la pensée mythique. La pensée mythique, d’après Cassirer, ne conçoit pas (...) le monde comme constitué de choses stables, qui peuvent se manifester sous différents points de vue et à différentes occasions, mais plutôt comme un flux mouvant d’évènements liés entre eux par des qualités émotionnelles (menaçantes ou réconfortantes) et des caractères physionomiques. Ce monde obéit à des catégories de causalité, d’espace et de temps très différentes des nôtres : chaque partie contient le tout auquel elle appartient et dispose par conséquent du pouvoir causal du tout ; les différents lieux, directions ou moments sont déterminés en fonction de leur nature sacrée ou profane, menaçante ou désirable, etc. De plus, il n’y pas de différence essentielle entre le nom d’un objet et l’objet lui-même, etc. On aura constaté, à l’issue de cette note, qu’à bien des égards la pensée animiste et théologique de Latour fonctionne de la même manière. Par conséquent il faut considérer les livres de Latour comme des œuvres mythologiques, voire artistiques, qui peuvent éventuellement avoir un intérêt émotionnel ou esthétique, mais pas comme des ouvrages de sciences humaines et sociales. Je laisse à chacun le soin de juger de la qualité de ces œuvres, et du (dé)plaisir qu’elles procurent. C’est, bien sûr, tout à fait le droit de Latour d’écrire de tels livres, tant que, ce faisant, il ne fait pas montre de prétentions proprement scientifiques. Or, le problème est précisément qu’il prétend faire de la science (sociale), expliquer des phénomènes complexes et graves, et nous dire quoi faire face à eux. De ce point de vue, il faut tempérer les bonnes intentions dont je parlais, et on peut déceler une forme d’imposture voire de malhonnêteté intellectuelle dans le « pseudo-profound bullshit » que produit Latour. Ce dernier en effet, ne se contente pas de livrer un propos globalement dénué de sens, mais l’agrémente de termes et de faits scientifiques reconnus (comme le changement climatique) pour donner (faussement) l’impression qu’il fait sens. Il y a pire : même si le message de l’ouvrage est pour l’essentiel incompréhensible, le lecteur distrait gardera l’impression d’un brouillage irrémédiable des frontières entre nature et société, entre science et politique. Or ce brouillage non seulement rend incompréhensible toute notion de crise environnementale au niveau théorique, mais nuit évidemment à toute action pour y faire face au niveau politique. Ceci vaut en particulier pour le changement climatique, et les sciences qui le prennent pour objet – dont Latour préconise la politisation accrue. Or, si les sciences du climat sont avant tout politiques, plus rien ne distingue leurs énoncés de ceux des climato-négationnistes : il ne s’agit que d’énoncés également politiques en concurrence. La réalité du changement climatique d’origine anthropique peut ainsi facilement être remise en question. Et contrairement à ce qu’affirme Latour depuis qu’il prétend défendre la science, insister sur le fait que les faits scientifiques sont culturellement déterminés, et que l’objectivité scientifique dépend de processus sociaux et de négociations politiques, ne contribue pas à renforcer l’autorité de la science, au contraire. Par exemple, le scandale du climategate a miné la crédibilité des sciences du climat dans l’opinion publique américaine. Espérons donc que les recommandations de Latour ne fassent pas trop d’émules dans le grand public ou parmi les décideurs politiques – ce qui est hélas tout à fait possible étant donnée la grande notoriété dont il jouit. (shrink)

This article reflects on the skills required in trades services to people dedicated to coordinate services in complex clinical situations because of their multidimensionality and chronicity. All human activity requires for its proper effectuation, the coordination of interdependencies between actors. Coordination of interdependencies is done in ordinary mode, in everyday activities, but also in dedicated mode, that is to say, through a practice that has a primary mandate to manage them in a conscious, voluntary and accountable for intervention situations whose (...) complexity is high. This passage from the ordinary form in the form of dedicated coordination undertakes a transformation of skills and professional knowledge mobilized in the professional gesture. Further skills and knowledge relating to the disciplinary control of clinical objects, the case manager or professional figure who best embodies this form of coordination, should mobilize expertise and procedural knowledge (assessment, planning, communication, negotiation, activation networks, etc..) required to control the interfaces between technical systems and professional and organizational actors, posing as the interdependence of actants primary purpose in work. For this he must do it in a time of temporality combining organizational project in clinical time. e présent article réfléchit aux compétences requises dans les métiers de services aux personnes dédiés à coordonner les services dans les situations cliniques complexes en raison de leur multi-dimensionnalité et leur chronicité. Toute activité humaine exige, pour sa bonne effectuation, la coordination des interdépendances entre les acteurs concernés. La coordination des interdépendances se réalise en mode ordinaire, dans les activités de tous les jours, mais aussi en mode dédié, c’est-à-dire à travers une pratique qui a pour mandat principal de les gérer de manière consciente, volontaire et imputable pour les situations d’intervention dont la complexité est grande. Ce passage de la forme ordinaire à la forme dédiée de coordination engage une transformation des compétences et savoirs professionnels mobilisés dans le geste professionnel. En outre des compétences et savoirs relatifs à la maîtrise des objets cliniques disciplinaires, le gestionnaire de cas, soit la figure professionnelle qui incarne le mieux cette modalité de coordination, doit mobiliser des compétences et savoirs procéduraux (évaluation, planification, communication, négociation, activation de réseaux, etc.) requis à la maîtrise des interfaces entre systèmes techniques et acteurs professionnels et organisationnels, en posant l’interdépendance des actants comme objet premier de son action professionnelle. Pour cela, il doit effectuer cette dernière dans une temporalité conjuguant le temps du projet organisationnel au temps clinique. (shrink)

In 1762, Socrates’ last moments was the first examination topic for the « prix de Rome » not to be taken from sacred history. Yet this subject is unfit to visualisation, because it lacks action. This paper exposes the formal and conceptual difficulties implied by this subject which was nevertheless profoundly neoclassical. It also offers a reflexion on the assimilation of new themes in the painting of historical subjects at the end of the Enlightenment.

Israel Kirzner’s concept of “alertness” is recast in the language of phenomenological psychology. Our ideas about things are either openended ideas posing no particular problem of choice, “open possibilities”, or alternatives to choose between, “problematic possibilities”. Choice is the process of formulating problematic possibilities; it is the process of reinterpreting one’s situation. The fully formed reinterpretation generates the chosen outcome as a necessary consequence of preferences and perceived constraints. Reinterpretation precedes choice, both logically and temporally. This understanding of alertness (...) helps to clarify Austrian ideas such as the idea that preferences do not exist apart from action.Le concept de “vigilance” d’Israel Kirzner est reformulé dans le langage de la psychologie phéno- ménologique. Nos idées à propos des choses sont souvent des idées à finalité ouverte ne soulevant pas de problème particulier de choix, “des possibilités ouvertes”, ou des alternatives de choix entre des “possibilités problématiques”. Le choix est un processus de formulation de possibilités problématiques ; c’est le processus consistant à réinterpréter nos propres situations. Dans sa formulation ultime, la réinterprétation génère le résultat choisi comme conséquence nécessaire des préférences et des contraintes perçues. La réinterprétation précède le choix, et logiquement et temporellement. Cette compréhension de la vigilance aide à clarifier les idées Autrichiennes telle que l’idée selon laquelle les préférences n’existent pas indépendamment de l’action. (shrink)

Les New Age Travellers, groupe social nomade en Grande-Bretagne, caractérisé à lafois par la contre-culture des années 1970 et les formes de précarisation actuelles, parviennent sous certains aspects à surmonter des situations de risques diversifiées. À partir de trois dimensions qui leur sont spécifiques : le rapport au travail, la solidarité communautaire et le nomadisme, ces individus tentent au quotidien, de façon non conventionnelle, fragile et bricolée, de reconstruire des liens sociaux, de forger de nouveaux supports de reconnaissance sociale en (...) faisant preuve d’inventivité. L’objectif de notre article est double : placer les notions de processus social d’individualisation ou encore de subjectivation au sein d’un mode de vie ou d’une situation qui en semblent très éloignés : la précarité. Dans cette mesure, les populations désaffiliées apparaissent également susceptibles d’action et d’initiative, à condition d’en définir les modalités et les limites qui y sont associées. En outre, l’idée consiste à proposer un nouvel éclairage de ce groupe social et à souligner son intérêt pour saisir, à une échelle microsociologique et sous des aspects particuliers, les transformations du lien social aujourd’hui.The New Age Travellers, a nomadic social group living in Great Britain, characterized by modern expressions of poverty and by a counter-culture inspired by the seventies, manage to overcome various situations of risk. In various domains which may be peculiar to this social group – work, communal solidarity and nomadism –, these individuals attempt, in a fragile, non-conventional and inventive way, to reconstruct social memberships and to forge new bases for social recognition. This paper has two complementary goals : using the notion of social process of individualization or of subjectivation , it first wishes to analyse the New Age Travellers’ way of life or various situations of precariousness which seem very far removed from these notions. In this way, desaffiliated individuals also appear capable of action and initiative, provided one has defined their forms and specified the limits of the process. The paper will then cast new light on this social group, and will demonstrate its importance for the understanding, at a small-scale level and from a particular perspective, of broader transformations in today’s social link. (shrink)

Notre temps est, dit-on, celui des catastrophes. Sur les nouveaux fronts de l’écologie, du changement climatique ou de la menace nucléaire, les idéologies du progrès ont cédé la place à l’angoisse. Mais la résurgence des thèmes apocalyptiques est bien plus que le symptôme d’une période de crise : dès les XVIe et XVIIe siècles, avec la disparition du cosmos comme ordre hiérarchisé au sein duquel l’homme occupait une position privilégiée, est née une nouvelle inquiétude : celle de devoir vivre « (...) après la fin du monde ». Ce livre voudrait montrer que le plus urgent n’est pas d’éviter la catastrophe à venir, mais de repenser et de réinvestir le monde de manière nouvelle. Michaël Foessel interprète les peurs apocalyptiques actuelles à partir des expériences contemporaines où les sujets se sentent dépossédés du monde : triomphe de la technique sur l’action, du capital sur le travail, du besoin sur le désir. Pour cela, il propose une généalogie de l’idée de « fin du monde » qui distingue deux voies de la modernité : celle qui privilégie la vie et sa conservation, aujourd’hui à l’oeuvre dans la plupart des conceptions écologiques et précautionneuses du réel ; celle qui fait du monde le thème principal de la philosophie en même temps qu’un enjeu politique de premier ordre. Nous sommes désormais face à une alternative : perpétuer la vie ou édifier un monde. Les théories de la catastrophe ne se soucient plus de savoir quel monde mérite d’être défendu. En ce sens, le fait que la fin du monde a déjà eu lieu est une bonne nouvelle : cela nous invite à inventer des espaces pour l’action et à fonder un nouveau cosmopolitisme. (shrink)

Le « réalisme critique », dans ses nombreuses variantes, garde une place importante dans le débat scientifique et théologique d’aujourd’hui. Alors qu’il a été mis substantiellement en avant par Ian Barbour, John Polkinghorne et Arthur Peacocke, une analyse de son origine et de son sens conduit à se demander si cette position proposée par les théologiens-scientifiques n’omet pas une caractéristique intrinsèque de la dimension personnelle de la réalité incorporée dans les sciences humaines. Compte tenu de la (...) vision des sciences sociales qui considèrent que des personnes responsables de leurs conclusions et actions conduisent le processus scientifique, l’aspect éthique de la science ne peut être ignoré. Pour intégrer ces aspects dans une approche cohérente, il faut un modèle épistémologique plus différencié, qui se fonde dans l’éthique. L’idée proposée dans cet article est de modifier le réalisme critique en réalisme critique-constructif. (shrink)

Il importe de situer les enjeux humains de ce mouvement que d'aucuns qualifient de « nouvel ordre mondial » : quel souci de l'être humain en tant que tel manifeste-t-il ? L'homme est un être d'appartenances individuelles et collectives, il s'éprouve dans sa liberté et dans sa participation à l'histoire qui se fait. La société qui s'annonce sera-t-elle pour lui, offerte à son engagement, ou contre lui, le contraignant à se soumettre ou à se démettre ? Des penseurs (...) contemporains montrent que l'homme se construit en habitant l'écart entre particulier et universel , individualité et solidarité , « territoire » et « planète » . Comment cette « dialectique » pourra-t-elle s'exercer demain dans un univers aux contours flous et aux logiques opaques? On ne peut fonder un « contrat » éthique et politique avec d'autres si le temps social, économique ou culturel dissout les particularités et rend l'avenir improbable. Il se pourrait que la mondialisation oblige les « instances de sens » à faire mémoire, à raconter comment on devient hommes ensemble dans la complexité d'une histoire à faire. L'urgence est à la transmission. It is important to situate the human stakes of this movement that some people qualify as « new world order » : what concern of the human being as such does it manifest ? Man is a being of individual and collective belonging. He tests himself in his freedom and in his participation in history in the making. Will future society be for him, inviting him to participate, or against him, forcing him to submit or to give up ? Contemporaneous thinkers show that man constructs himself in living the gap between the particular and universal , individuality and solidarity , « territory » and « planet » . How can this « dialectic » be practiced tomorrow in a universe with vague outlines and opaque logics ? One cannot establish an ethical and political « contract » with others if the social, economic, or cultural time dissolves particularities and makes the future improbable. Il is possible that globalization obliges the « moments of sense » to remember, to tell about how we become human together in the complexity of a history to be made. The urgency is the transmission. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Republicanism, Religion, and Machiavelli’s Savonarolan MomentMarcia L. ColishMachiavelli’s readers often take at face value his claim that Christianity has weakened Italy’s civic spirit and martial valor, leaving it open to priestcraft and foreign invasion. Some scholars see this critique of Christianity as an expression of the irreligious, immoral, neopagan, or scientific Machiavelli, making it the chief index of his modernity. 1 One subset within this group treats Machiavelli’s (...) [End Page 597] anthropology as a secularized version of Augustine on original sin, absent an Eden behind it and a redemption before it. 2 Another view of Machiavelli on religion sees him as treating religion, whatever its teachings, functionally, as an instrument promoting desirable political behavior. 3 This is why they regard [End Page 598] Machiavelli as original and modern; although Maury D. Feld notes rightly that Machiavelli is here simply imitating the ancient Roman historians, who all treat religion in just this way. 4 For some proponents of the functionalist interpretation, it does not preclude Christian belief on Machiavelli’s part. For them his brief is not against Christianity itself but against clericalism, the papacy, and Christianity as it is currently interpreted. 5 Still others recognize Machiavelli’s acceptance of signs and portents, saintly behavior and miracles, and other indices of God’s existence and action in human history. They also note Machiavelli’s praise of biblical leaders seen as divinely inspired and his inclusion of them among the founders of religions and states who head his list of heroes. 6 Going farther, some scholars argue that Machiavelli was a conventional, if not an ardent or impeccable, Christian, who joined a religious confraternity before which he preached his Exhortation to Penitence, and the apparent recipient of the last rites of his church after a deathbed confession. 7 [End Page 599]Can these conflicting assessments of Machiavelli and religion be integrated? To some extent, yes. Once, that is, we consider a number of issues not always brought to bear on this question. Machiavelli recognizes that the foreigners who have overrun Italy and deprived Florence of the republic he had served are as Christian as the Italians. At home and abroad, their Christianity has not undermined their military strength or the civic virtue Machiavelli associates with republics. Within contemporary Florence there were three kinds of republicanism on offer, for those unhappy with the Medici restoration of 1512. One group sought to restore the pre-Medici governo stretto constitution dominated by the ottimati. Their opponents defended governo largo republicanism. Machiavelli advocated this type of polity, informed by his reading of ancient history and his assessment of human nature. But another, competing version of governo largo was put forth by Girolamo Savonarola during the Dominican friar’s stormy career as de facto head of the Florentine state from 1494 to 1498. Savonarola’s republican theory combined a number of ideas that Machiavelli loathed: the appeal to the Venetian Great Council as a model, the wish to purge Florence of her sins so that she could serve as the New Jerusalem in the coming apocalypse, and the notion that governo largo was a means to these religious ends, since the more broad-based the government, the more readily could it legislate and enforce moral reform. And, far from self-destructing after the friar’s ashes had been strewn on the Arno, Savonarolan republicanism continued to draw support from a diverse and substantial group of Florentines. Equally alarming, the agents [End Page 600] of this protracted Savonarolan moment seemed to have preempted Machiavelli’s own anticlerical, antipapal, antioligarchic, and antiMedicean positions, as well as a theory of governo largo. If we foreground Machiavelli’s desire to defend his own version of republicanism by undermining the Savonarolan alternative and if we recall that he treats Christianity positively in other contexts, it becomes possible to read those passages where he criticizes Christianity as practiced in Italy as texts with an antiSavonarolan subtext. Read this way, they are not incompatible with his acceptance of Christianity as true or as politically constructive elsewhere. In approaching this topic, we should also remember the longstanding associations that bound Christianity to politics and warfare.Addressing this last point... (shrink)

Comment l'intention apologétique de Blondel dans L’Action est-elle compatible avec le caractère philosophique de l’œuvre ? Comment éviter le soupçon de préjugé, de pétition de principes ? R. Virgoulay montre comment le projet mis en œuvre dans L’Action et défini dans la Lettre de 1896, ouvrait la philosophie à l'examen du problème religieux par la détermination a priori de la notion de surnaturel. Après avoir exposé « la méthode de L’Action » pour faire passer (...) d'une conviction subjective, d'un témoignage vécu, à une « science », c'est-à-dire à l'exposé qui conjugue nécessité et universalité, il s'attarde sur la cinquième partie de L’Action. Celle-ci, après l'élaboration des quatre autres parties, peut être alors une philosophie de la religion qui porte sur le contenu même du Christianisme, et pour laquelle la notion décisive est celle du surnaturel. Les questions que pose cette notion amènent l'auteur à comparer la problématique blondélienne à celle de Laberthonnière, comparaison qui manifeste la différence entre la démarche théologique de ce dernier et celle, philosophique, de Blondel. Alors que laberthonnière tente de justifier théologiquement l'entreprise philosophique de Blondel, la Lettre distingue rigoureusement la théologie de la philosophie. How is the apologetic intention of Blondel in Action compatible with the philosophical character of the work ? How can one avoid the suspicion of prejudice, of begging the question ? R. Virgoulay shows how the project put to work in Action and defined in the Lettre of 1896, opened philosophy to the examination of the religious problem by the a priori determination of the notion of the supernatural. After discussing « the method of Action » in order to move from a subjective conviction, from a lived witnessing, to a « science », that is to say, to an analyses that conjugate necessity and universality, the author concentrates on the fifth part of Action. This latter, after, the elaboration of the four other parts, could be, then, a philosophy of religion that carries to the very content of Christianity, and for which the decisive notion is that of the supernatural. The questions that this idea brings up led the author to compare Blondel’s field of inquiry to that of Laberthonnière, a comparison that, manifests the difference between a theological approach of the latter and that, philosophical, of Blondel. While Laberthonnière tries theologically to justify the philosophical enterprise of Blondel, the Lettre rigorously distinguishes theology from philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:La poétique d’Ovide, de l’élégie à l’épopée des Métamorphoses: Essai sur un style dans l’histoirePramit ChaudhuriAnne Videau. La poétique d’Ovide, de l’élégie à l’épopée des Métamorphoses: Essai sur un style dans l’histoire. Rome et ses renaissances. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010. 608 pp. Paper, €22.Anne Videau’s detailed study of Ovidian elegy and epic is, above all, about the stylistic manifestations of Ovid’s response to power: (...) how the macroscopic interplay of lover and beloved, ruler and subject, are represented in antitheses, allusions, and verbal conceits. In addition to several smaller, recurrent themes [End Page 528] running through the book—ambiguity of expression and apotheosis, to name but two—the larger argument attempts to sketch a unified picture of Ovid’s poetics as informed by generic expectations and historical context. The book consists of two parts, the first of which is as much a history of Roman elegy as a study of Ovid and identifies some distinguishing features of the genre that will resurface in the Metamorphoses. The second part, though it begins with a similar attempt to contextualize the epic’s place in the genre, focuses on a selection of episodes in the Metamorphoses, principally the Theban cycle of Books 3–4 (those interested in this part of the poem now have plenty to digest in Videau’s substantial reading set alongside Micaela Janan’s recent monograph). Despite the politico-cultural analyses promised at the outset and discussed mainly in the final chapter and conclusion, concerns of generic tradition and verbal play predominate and, indeed, this is where the strength of the book lies.The author engages with a wide range of scholarship in multiple languages, though she makes especially extensive use of work by Gilles Tronchet and Jacqueline Fabre-Serris. Readers less familiar with the French scholarship will find Videau’s concerns and approach a particularly refreshing complement to recent Anglophone studies of Ovid and Augustan culture by, e.g., Andrew Feldherr and Michèle Lowrie. Those who know Videau’s own earlier work, however, will recognize an unusually large proportion of the book’s content from previous publications. The attempt to yoke them together has mixed results, and some readers will find the whole less compelling than the individual components, despite their frequent brilliance.The chapters in part 1 explore the coherence in the Roman elegiac tradition both internally and in its relationship to Greek precedents. Videau is primarily interested in the historical moment of Roman elegy, its meditations on erotics and power, and (in part 2) the related developments of the erotika pathēmata theme in the Metamorphoses. Before getting to Ovid, she introduces the main topics through an extended reading of Catullus 66 (chap. 1), a precursor to Roman love elegy and a useful comparandum with the Hellenistic tradition (given the length of her analysis, a text of the poem might have been included). Videau traces its themes of liminality, feminine perspective, and dependency on a figure of power through the later poets, culminating with Ovid’s exile poetry. She shows in particular how Catullus’ poem inaugurates a tradition by combining and adapting the generic functions of ex-voto and funerary epigram through Berenice’s dedication of the lock for the welfare of Ptolemy and the lock’s separation from the queen through catasterism (59 ff.). The duality of the poem and its unusual protagonist—hovering between generic roles and states of existence—describes the situation of the elegiac poet and lover learning to cope with a new and destabilizing condition, whether political or erotic. These issues are explored in greater depth in the subsequent chapters, which discuss, among other subjects, the generic roots of the oscillation between anger and peace in Ovid’s depiction of the princeps (178 ff.), and the increasingly marked tension between elegy and epic from Tibullus to Ovid (205 ff.). In certain cases the exposition of familiar [End Page 529] issues can seem belabored, but even the overlong treatment of liminality in Tibullus, for instance, contains rewarding close readings of the text, such as the spatio-temporal effects... (shrink)

The working situation prevailing in theoretical and experimental physics today is held to be inseparable from the interpretation of quantum theory, and constitutes an embodiment of its implicit difficulties. Such an understanding of the present situation in fundamental physics provides a quite different basis for ideas than the formulation of alternative courses of action (experiments) or alternative forms of knowledge (theories), which proceeds from the belief in a full separation of theory from experiment in this field. It is (...) argued that this underlying belief is not well founded. One must therefore consider the technical details of the field together with its foundations, and thus especially the situation produced by fundamental physics, including, in particular, the growth of high-energy technology, which exerts a determining influence on the further course of the subject. (shrink)

Joël Dolbeault | : D’abord, nous expliquons comment Bergson caractérise la liberté, et pourquoi celle-ci s’oppose à la fois au déterminisme et au hasard. Ensuite, nous montrons que la théorie bergsonienne de la liberté repose principalement sur l’idée que les états psychiques ne sont pas les occurrences de certains types, ce qui conduit à penser que leur apparition n’est pas gouvernée par l’action de lois. L’acte libre est causé par un sujet empirique, mais cette causalité n’est pas gouvernée par (...) des lois. Puis, nous soulignons l’originalité de cette théorie, notamment le fait qu’elle rejette le principe des possibilités alternatives, défendu par la plupart des libertariens actuels. À la fin de l’article, nous examinons plusieurs objections possibles contre cette théorie, en particulier l’objection inspirée par les expériences de Libet, ainsi que les réponses possibles. | : To begin with, we explain how Bergson characterizes free will and why it is opposed to both determinism and chance. Then we show that Bergson’s theory of free will is primarily based on the idea that mental states are not occurrences of certain types, which suggests that their appearance is not governed by the action of laws. The free act is caused by an empirical subject, but this causality is not governed by laws. Next, we highlight the originality of this theory, including the fact that it rejects the principle of alternative possibilities, defended by most of libertarians today. At the end of the article, we examine several possible objections against this theory, particularly the objection inspired by Libet’s experiments, and the possible answers. (shrink)

Dans L'essence du christianisme, Ludwig Feuerbach jette les bases d'une critique philosophique de la religion chrétienne qui vise pour l'essentiel à mettre en lumière le mode de constitution spécifique de l’illusion religieuse. Celle-ci relève d'un processus complexe d'objectivation aliénante selon lequel l'homme n'accède paradoxalement à la conscience de soi qu'à partir de la fiction projective d'un Autre que soi, Dieu, posé comme sa garantie ontologique et pratique. L'analyse de ce processus « renversant » et de la dialectique du (...) sujet et de l’objet qui le sous-tend revient à mettre en évidence le fondement anthropologique de la conscience religieuse ; mais elle débouche également sur le thème problématique d’une religion de l’Homme où s’alimentent les figures modernes de l’ « humanisme athée » (H. de Lubac). (shrink)

" Il y a des livres qui nous présentent des théories, ils sont assez fréquents. D'autres, plus rares, offrent à talais une théorie et une méthodologie originale. Voici un livre rare: un livre outil! Ce livre se situe dans un courant de recherche caractérisé par la complexité, l'éco-organisation systémique, et la transdisciplinarité. Cette évolution épistémologique critique peut être décrite comme l'émergence d'un nouveau paradigme transdisciplinaire caractérisé d'une part, par la prise en compte de la complexité du réel et (...) d'autre part, par l'implication du sujet dans toute construction cognitive. La transdisciplinarité et l'épistémologie de la complexité se présentent comme des approches fondamentales qui renouvellent la pensée dans la perspective d'un nouveau paradigme qui cherche à relier les différents niveaux de la réalité, le sujet et l'objet, le tout et les parties. Une des difficultés actuelles est de rendre opérationnelles ces réflexions épistémologiques fondamentales. Il faut pour cela créer des démarches, des méthodes et des outils adaptés aux différents champs de pratiques et de recherche. L'ouvrage de Gérard Ligand me semble répondre parfaitement à ce besoin de mise en pratique des grands principes épistémologiques. " Extrait de la préface. Cet ouvrage est un outil indispensable à l'Homme du XXIe, et notamment pour toutes les personnes impliquées dans les processus de formation et d'animation de projets. (shrink)

La philosophie économique, dont le développement implique un accroissement accéléré de complexité (ce qui est la définition même de la complexité). Les prémices en ont été le second théorème sur l’équilibre général, et les théorèmes d’impossibilité sur le choix collectif, ou le dilemme des biens publics. Certes, il est possible d’utiliser certains facteurs de complexité, comme des mutations aléatoires, pour définir par exemple des équilibres évolutionnaires, mais ces facteurs sont aussi une source d’instabilité. L’économie expérimentale a mis en lumière la (...) dépendance de nos choix par rapport à leurs évolutions et références antérieures, ce qui est une autre source de complexité. Une exploration rationnelle de ces dépendances met elle-même en jeu la complexité de leurs processus, et implique d’incessantes révisions. Il semble inévitable, puisqu’on ne peut pas réduire les complexités qui tiennent à ces réajustements, qui impliquent un bayésianisme multi-niveaux généralisé, d’admettre que ces révisions n’aient qu’une portée limitée (« minimiser l’énergie libre »). On peut réinterpréter en ce sens les expériences sur des incohérences temporelles dans nos choix, une fois pris en compte l’application de cette minimisation aux processus mêmes d’évaluation des situations de choix. D’autres limitations pourraient être définies en combinant les contraintes neurologiques, psychologiques et économiques. Là encore, une telle combinaison est aussi une source de complexités. Mais dans un autre sens, développer ces relations complexes peut permettre de dépasser les circularités de l’inférence inverse (du neurologique à l’économie expérimentale et inversement). Enfin les simulations computationnelles nous révèlent que des évolutions que l’on croyait asymptotiques sont capables de plus lointaines divergences. Compliquer les modèles computationnels peut limiter leur généralité. Inversement les simplifier n’est utile que si cela révèle aussi quelles simplifications nous font manquer quelle complexité des interactions économiques. L’exploration de ces relations entre cette croissance accélérée de complexité liée non seulement à ces interactions mais à l’entreprise même de leur rationalisation est d’abord la tâche de l’économie dans ses différents champs, mais la philosophie de l’économie peut avoir un rôle dans l’élucidation des rapports entre ces différentes sources de complexité et leurs modalités de limitation les plus raisonnablesCode JEL : B490. (shrink)

Alors qu’un nombre important de situations relevant d’une souffrance psychique du lien est régulièrement rapporté par les professionnels de la protection de l’enfance, peu d’études se sont penchées sur le processus psychique inconscient nécessairement à l’œuvre pour permettre l’accueil et l’intégration, même provisoire, dans une famille d’un enfant qui initialement n’en fait pas partie. Les auteurs de cet article cherchent à étudier la dynamique de fonctionnement psychique sous-jacent à l’accueil de l’enfant, en appui sur les conceptualisations théoriques psychanalytiques groupales (...) et psychanalytiques familiales. Les propositions de lecture offrent un modèle de compréhension des ruptures de liens rencontrées dans les problématiques du placement familial. (shrink)

Although the context, such as the social policies or the professional world in mutation, highlights the emergence of a new professional project for educators of young children during their training period, the process of professionalization and the identity building involved during the training period will be more especially studied, in relation to the practical experience gathered during the internships (Wittorski, 2009). This experience awakes in the subject a reflection and a situation of identity building through the encounter and the (...) interactions with practical communities. While confronting with others, the student involves the realization, the self-continuity. Emotions and biographical facts are involved as well (Bourgeois et Barbier, 2006), thus maintaining the subject’s continuity and identity uniqueness through the perception of others. In this article, we will relate the process of professionalization and identity building to the concept of reliance, developed by Bolle de Bal (2003), within the scope of block-release training of educators of young children. (shrink)