Étienne Pouliot | Résumé : On convient aisément que tout témoignage peut renvoyer à une expérience, passée ou du moins présupposée, ou encore qu’il peut véhiculer en quelque sorte un message. Il ne se réduit pas pour autant à n’être qu’une fenêtre sur autre chose, voire sur lui-même. En vérité, parce qu’il est avant tout parole, le témoignage constitue toujours et se constitue précisément en un certain ratage de l’expérience là représentée, du message là livré, du vécu là (...) offert. Un examen de certaines conditions épistémologiques de cet enjeu de la représentation au coeur du témoignage, en écho à la philosophie de Paul Ricoeur mais pour en signaler le point aveugle, permet d’élucider que cet enjeu y est second — ce qui ne signifie en rien : secondaire — par rapport à un enjeu herméneutique bien plus originaire, bien plus radical et fondamental que la représentation elle-même : celui de la parole. Au travers du témoignage, une parole atteste autant qu’elle efface. |: We all agree that witnessing may refer back to experience — to something from the past or at least to something that is presupposed — or that it may be the vehicle for some message. This does not mean that witnessing is merely a window onto something else, or onto itself. Indeed, because it is first and foremost “word”, it always stands as a reminder of its inability to represent what it purports to represent and as a failure to deliver the message it intends to deliver. This examination of some of the epistemological underpinnings of representation — which echoes the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur even as it points to a blind spot in his position — intends to show that the issue of representation comes second in witnessing and that a far more radical and fundamental issue — a hermeneutical one — also comes into play here. Thus witnessing, and more precisely the word that is witnessing, both attests to and obliterates itself. (shrink)

Two essays, one by Althusser, the other by Balibar which were presented as papers at a seminar on Marx's "Capital" at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1965, and included al.

Excerpt from Traites de Legislation Civile Et PenaleMais ce n'est pas un panegyrique que je fais. Il faut bien avouer que le soin d'arranger et de polir a peu d' attraits pour le genie de l'auteur. Tant qu'il est pousse par une force creatrice, il ne sent que le plaisir de la composition. S'agit-il de donner des formes, de rediger, de finir, il n'en sent plus que la fatigue. Que l'ouvrage soit interrompu, le mal est irreparable: le charme disparait, le (...) degout succede, et la passion eteinte ne se rallume que pour un objet nouveau.La meme disposition l'a eloigne de contribuer a la redaction que je donne au public; je n'ai pu Obtenir que rarement les eclaircissements et les secours dont j'avais besoin il lui en coutait tr0p de suspendre le cours actuel de ses idees pour revenir sur d'anciennes traces.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

We applied a technique borrowed from the field of bioethics to test whether justice-related factors influence laypersons’ decisions concerning business ethics. In the first experiment, participants judged the acceptability of remuneration policies and in the second that of executive bonuses. In each study, participants judged a set of 36 situations. To create the scenarios, we varied retributive justice—the amount of remuneration; procedural justice—the clarity of the procedure that determined the remuneration; distributive justice—the extent of the distribution of bonus payments amongst (...) employees; and restorative justice—a special compensation for hazardous working conditions or accidents at work. K-means clustering of all 36 judgments revealed four different personal positions in both experiments. One group of people readily accepted all situations. The other three groups’ judgments were mainly a function of distributive justice modulated in different ways by the context determined by the other variables. Furthermore, people conceive of distributive justice as categorical: Acceptability judgments only increase if companies give bonuses to all employees. Granting bonuses to a subset does not increase acceptability. Our results are useful for policy makers and provide business ethics researchers with a novel technique. (shrink)

In the organelles of plants and mammals, recent evidence suggests that genomic instability stems in large part from template switching events taking place during DNA replication. Although more than one mechanism may be responsible for this, some similarities exist between the different proposed models. These can be separated into two main categories, depending on whether they involve a single‐strand‐switching or a reciprocal‐strand‐switching event. Single‐strand‐switching events lead to intermediates containing Y junctions, whereas reciprocal‐strand‐switching creates Holliday junctions. Common features in all the (...) described models include replication stress, fork stalling and the presence of inverted repeats, but no single element appears to be required in all cases. We review the field, and examine the ideas that several mechanisms may take place in any given genome, and that the presence of palindromes or inverted repeats in certain regions may favor specific rearrangements. (shrink)

Dans cette contribution, nous présentons la base CLAPI développée au laboratoire ICAR dans le contexte de l’évolution des bases de données de langues parlées en France au cours des trente dernières années. Nous détaillons les deux composantes de CLAPI, l’archive de corpus de langue parlée en interaction audio et vidéo enregistrés dans des situations sociales naturelles variées, et la plateforme d’outils.L’usage et l’apport de CLAPI sont illustrés par deux études. L’une décrit comment la base peut être utilisée pour des travaux (...) de linguistique interactionnelle intégrant la multimodalité (« oh là là ») ; l’autre concerne une recherche combinant données et métadonnées (« trop »). L’article est aussi l’occasion d’un bilan plus général. La mise en perspective montre en effet qu’après la période des questions est venue celle des dilemmes. La période des questions, choix et décisions à toutes sortes de niveaux a accompagné la mise en place des bases de données. L’expérience permet maintenant de mesurer leurs indéniables apports en termes non seulement de quantité de données disponibles (et traitables grâce aux outils), mais aussi de qualité (comme conséquence des exigences de standardisation liées au partage des données). La période des dilemmes nous conduit à nous interroger sur les meilleurs choix à opérer aujourd’hui dans les relations entre la poursuite des recherches sur des corpus variés (et parfois sensibles) et les exigences des bases de données ouvertes. (shrink)

Depuis longtemps, la recherche met en relief les influences françaises et allemandes de la pensée de Georges Gurvitch. De récents travaux ouvrent désormais la voie à l’étude de ses sources russes. Cet article vise à poser les bases de l’étude des sources russes de la pensée de Gurvitch. Pour ce faire, il recourt à onze articles publiés par Gurvitch, entre 1924 et 1931, dans la revue russe de l’émigration Annales contemporaines, dont il dégage une propension marquée à l’endroit des totalités (...) sociales. L’article comprend, en outre, une brève étude du parcours russe de Gurvitch ainsi qu’une traduction intégrale de la dernière partie de l’article « Éthique et religion ». (shrink)

La figure de l’entrepreneur est aujourd’hui utilisée dans une grande variété de discours publics. Ce travail cherche à remonter à l’une des sources théoriques de la constitution de cette figure : la théorie de l’entrepreneur de Schumpeter (1911a et 1911b). Ce retour montre que Schumpeter, dans son contexte intellectuel et théorique, est amené à importer une anthropologie philosophique en économie, celle de Nietzsche, auteur largement lu dans l’Autriche du début du xx e siècle. En transposant, à l’intérieur de sa théorie (...) économique, certaines caractéristiques majeures du grand homme créatif nietzschéen dans la figure de l’entrepreneur, Schumpeter développe une explication originale de la nature dynamique du marché et de l’évolution économique. Néanmoins il importe aussi de Nietzsche une série d’ambiguïtés, notamment en ce qui concerne l’origine de l’exceptionnalité individuelle de l’entrepreneur, et plus particulièrement de sa puissance créatrice. Une seconde ambiguïté est très largement héritée, qui concerne l’extension du modèle de l’individu entrepreneur : constitue-t-il une théorie de l’action valable pour tous les individus ou uniquement pour un type d’individus particuliers? Comment concilier exceptionnalité de l’entrepreneur et norme d’un entreprenariat pour tous? La dernière partie de ce travail s’attache ainsi à explorer ces ambiguïtés, qui apparaissent chez Schumpeter et ses successeurs, notamment Israël Kirzner. Codes JEL : B13, B25, B31, B40. (shrink)

Etienne Gilson Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, first delivered as the Richard Lectures in 1937, was published in 1938 and became an immediate success. Not only does it contribute to a major question of debate in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophy and religion in the medieval period but it also insists on the validity of truth obtainable through reason as well as revelation, on rational argument alongside religious faith. This message is as important in the twenty-first century as (...) it was in the fourth century of the young Augustine, the thirteenth of St Thomas Aquinas, and the twentieth of the mature Gilson. (shrink)

Vous menez depuis plusieurs années des enquêtes sur le personnel politique en France, avec l’ambition de reconsidérer la notion de « professionnel » de la politique et par extension les ressorts d’une « professionnalisation » de la vie politique en France. Un point de départ, semble-t-il, de votre réflexion porte sur le fait que ces termes servent souvent (à l’instar du vocable péjoratif de « politicien » auquel ils se substituent souvent) à dévaloriser le personnel politique. Ils avaient pourtant été (...) conçus par les sciences sociales pour mettre à distance tout jugement de valeur à propos des élus. On pense bien sûr à Max Weber, mais aussi aux travaux fondateurs de Daniel Gaxie ou Jacques Lagroye, notamment. Comment vos propres travaux se situent-ils par rapport à la dimension normative inévitablement attachée à cet objet qu’est le « métier » de député? Il est vrai que je mène une critique des « professionnels de la politique », mais pas tout à fait dans le sens de celle qui domine... (shrink)

In this classic work, the eminent Catholic philosopher Étienne Gilson deals with one of the most important and perplexing metaphysical problems: the relation between our notion of God and demonstrations of his existence. Gilson examines Greek, Christian, and modern philosophy as well as the thinking that has grown out of our age of science in this fundamental analysis of the problem of God. “[I] commend to another generation of seekers and students this deeply earnest and yet wistfully gentle little (...) essay on the most important of all metaphysical—and existential—questions.... The historical sweep is breathtaking, the one-liners arresting, and the style, both intellectual and literary, altogether engaging.” —Jaroslav Pelikan, from the foreword “We have come to expect from the pen of M. Gilson not only an accurate exposition of the thought of the great philosophers, ancient and modern, but what is of much more importance and of greater interest, a keen and sympathetic insight into the reasons for that thought. The present volume does not fail to fulfill our expectations. It should be read by every Christian thinker.” —Ralph O. Dates, _America_. (shrink)

First published in French in 2010, _Equaliberty_ brings together essays by Étienne Balibar, one of the preeminent political theorists of our time. The book is organized around _equaliberty_, a term coined by Balibar to connote the tension between the two ideals of modern democracy: equality and liberty. He finds the tension between these different kinds of rights to be ingrained in the constitution of the modern nation-state and the contemporary welfare state. At the same time, he seeks to keep (...) rights discourse open, eschewing natural entitlements in favor of a deterritorialized citizenship that could be expanded and invented anew in the age of globalization. Deeply engaged with other thinkers, including Arendt, Rancière, and Laclau, he posits a theory of the polity based on social relations. In _Equaliberty_ Balibar brings both the continental and analytic philosophical traditions to bear on the conflicted relations between humanity and citizenship. (shrink)

A collection of Essays over the last 20 years, exploring different dimensions of the philosophical debate on "subjecthood" and "subjectivity" in Modernity, as it was framed by the "Controversy on the subject" from the 1960's, and showing how it is now continued in a "controversy on the Universal.".

CHAPTER I LOGICISM AND PHILOSOPHY In the preface to his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel rightly remarks that knowing a philosophical system is something more ...

Autonomous vehicle moral dilemmas matter less for the particular outcomes of potential accidents than for their role in defining the values of the society we wish to live in. Different approaches have been suggested to determine the ethical settings that autonomous vehicles should be implemented in and identify the legitimate agents for making such decisions. Most of these, however, fail on theoretical grounds, facing severe issues related to moral justifications and compliance to the law, or on practical grounds, being insufficiently (...) universal, action-guiding, or technically viable to be implemented. The analogy with the “trolley problem” has been extensively discussed. However, researchers have rarely tried to adapt this framework to autonomous vehicle cases or investigate how it could be used to address these issues. In doing so, this paper aims to answer the two key problems of autonomous vehicle dilemmas. With regards to the decision-maker, it rejects autonomous vehicle users’ choice-based models, showing the absurdity of both switch of control and adaptative preferences and arguing for common legislator-determined ethical settings. With regards to the decisions themselves, it criticizes both utilitarian views and those based on individuals’ criteria to suggest a deontologist rights-based approach. This allows for the defence of a morally coherent, regulatory compliant, explainable, and easily implementable framework capable of addressing all autonomous vehicle moral dilemma scenarios present in the literature. (shrink)

Si l'histoire de la pensee medievale inclut celle de ses influences, comme l'histoire de la pensee moderne celle de ses sources, il est alors doublement legitime de se demander ce que peut nous apprendre sur la pensee cartesienne sa confrontation historique avec la pensee medievale, au contact de laquelle elle s'est formee, et a l'encontre de laquelle elle s'est developpee. Prenant la suite de travaux anterieurs, cet ouvrage d'Etienne Gilson envisage tout d'abord la confrontation dans une perspective genetique (en cherchant (...) dans certaines doctrines medievales les sources de theses cartesiennes comme l'inneisme, l'etude des meteores ou de la circulation sanguine), avant de considerer plus precisement le rapport de la metaphysique cartesienne et de la metaphysique medievale a travers l'examen de certains points de doctrine particulierement delicats. C'est ici notamment que sont rencontres et eclaircis les problemes de la critique cartesienne des formes substantielles, du dialogue de Descartes avec saint Augustin a l'occasion du cogito, avec saint Thomas dans la preuve de l'existence de Dieu par la causalite de l'idee, et avec saint Anselme dans la preuve dite ontologique. Le caractere novateur de la pensee cartesienne se trouve ainsi etabli avec une acuite inedite. (shrink)

The article reflects on the present confusion between the category of enemy and that of stranger as result of a process of multiplication and reinforcement of territorial borders along ethnic and racial criteria. In particular, the text considers the external and internal borders of Europe as complex dispositivs of territorial control, which produce specific forms of foreigners as strangers and as cultural enemies. In order to analyze and stop this process, a cosmopolitan rethinking of the idea of citizenship is at (...) stake here. Transnational citizenship will be discussed in the frame of a philological model of translation between cultures and opposed to the model of an absolute untranslatability that characterizes the global civil wars. Cosmopolitics is thus conceived as a practical universalism, a progressive overcoming of the idea of the stranger in view of an idea of co-citizenship. Transnational co-citizenship does not suppress national identities but puts them in relation to all other sorts of particular identities and interests in order to create a contingent, maybe precarious but always concrete world of commons and communality. (shrink)

The article explores the inter-relations between episteme, ideology and knowledge in biblical translations and the underlying historical and intellectual questions that emerge. Through four narratives, drawn across differing timelines, this article maps the implications of theological and temporal power. Besides, it is also argued for how translations are sites of transgressions that eventually shape knowledge and impact epistemology. In conclusion, the article argues that Jerome and Wycliffe represent the role of public intellectuals and the dissident lessons of history.

Etienne Balibar, one of the foremost living French philosophers, builds on his landmark work 'Spinoza and Politics' with this exploration of Spinoza's ontology. Balibar situates Spinoza in relation to the major figures of Marx and Freud as a precursor to the more recent French thinker Gilbert Simondon's concept of the transindividual. Presenting a crucial development in his thought, Balibar takes the concept of transindividuality beyond Spinoza to show it at work at both the individual and the collective level.

Jeffrey Friedman convincingly argues that technocrats may often lack the knowledge required to enact public policies that will effectively promote their consequentialist goals. Friedman’s argument is strong enough to produce technocratic paralysis, in many cases, but “epistemic gambles” may present a way out of this problem. His discussion of exitocracy also raises the question of how to square his internal form of technocratic critique with the question of democratic legitimacy.

One central objection to philosophical defences of liberal neutrality is that many neutrally justified laws and policies are nonetheless discriminatory as they unilaterally impose costs or confer unearned privileges on the bearers of a particular conception of the good. Call this the false neutrality objection. While liberal neutralists seldom consider this objection to be a serious allegation, and often claim that it rests on a misunderstanding, I argue that it is a serious challenge for proponents of justificatory neutrality. Indeed, a (...) careful examination of recent French and Canadian laws which impede the members of cultural minorities from freely practising their religion reveals that the state can hide its discriminatory aims by cloaking the policies it enacts in neutral language. In order to avoid the problem of false neutrality, I contend, liberal neutralists should defend a combination of neutrality of justification and neutrality of aim and operationalize neutrality of aim through a practical test that has been a defining feature of American jurisprudence on religious freedom in the last thirty years: the general applicability requirement. (shrink)

When Gilson died in 1978, a great deal of his work on the history of philosophy, and specifically God, the primacy of existence or esse over essence, and the impact of Christianity on philosophy had been translated. A significant amount of material, however, has not yet appeared into English. The publication of Medieval studies represents a vital step in bringing these important works into the English-speaking world. The opening piece revisits a battle now won (and won in great measure by (...) Gilson’s efforts), namely the fight to acknowledge the very existence of medieval philosophy and win its place in the academic world. But the article also makes the effort--which becomes a connecting thread throughout the nine articles--to pinpoint the uniqueness of what Gilson calls Christian philosophy. All the articles give an insight into the great synthetic visions articulated by the better-known works of Gilson like The Spirit of Medieval philosophy. "The Middle Ages and ancient naturalism" contrasts Renaissance humanists and Reformers with the medievals on the defining issue of their attitude toward nature to understand who actually stands closer to the Greeks. In his examination of the Latin Averroist Boethius of Dacia’s book on the eternity of the world, Gilson finds that Boethius never expresses the view attributed to Latin Averroism that there are contradictory truths in religion and philosophy. The closing article studies the profound influence of the great Muslim thinker Avicenna on Latin Europe drawing a parallel between Avicenna’s work and that of the great Christian medievals like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. (shrink)

In this final edition of his classic study of St. Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson presents the sweeping range and organic unity of Thomistic philosophical thought. The philosophical thinking of Aquinas is the result of reason being challenged to relate to many theological conceptions of the Christian tradition. Gilson carefully reviews how Aquinas grapples with the relation itself of faith and reason and continuing through the existence and nature of God and His creation, the world and its creatures, especially human beings (...) with their power of intellect, will, and moral life. He concludes this study by discussing the life of people in society, along with their purpose and final destiny. Gilson demonstrates that Aquinas drew from a wide spectrum of sources in the development of his thought-from the speculations of the ancient Greeks such as Aristotle, to the Arabic and Jewish philosophers of his time, as well as from Christian writers and scripture. The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas offers students of philosophy and medieval studies an insightful introduction to the thought of Aquinas and the Scholastic philosophy of the Middles Ages, insights that are still revelant for today. (shrink)

A biological function is supposed to be performed adequately, and hence may fail to do so: this is dysfunction. This raises two questions. One is how to make explicit the way in which function can be discriminated from dysfunction without confusing dysfunction with non-function. The second question is how what is “right” and “wrong” can be legitimated by natural regulatory norms. A function can be viewed as a quality to which at least one variable with a definite set of values (...) is associated. Accordingly, function and dysfunction are the same quality of the same trait, but differ in the values associated to this variable. Dysfunction occurs when the associated set of values does not match this normal state. Biological systems have the epistemic singularity that their existence is the consequence of two distinct causal regimes, the so-called “proximate” and “ultimate” causes, whose convergence defines a system’s prescriptive normality. Each cause imposes restrictive rules that limit the possible ways these systems can putatively exist. When a system is insensitive to ultimate cause, it is determined by proximate causation alone, and hence escapes its own prescriptive norms. In conclusion: The normality of a biological system is defined by the convergence of proximate and ultimate causes. A function is a variable-associated quality whose values are defined relative to the norms of the system. Dysfunction occurs when the set of values of the same variable does not match the normality of the system, which can occur when the system is insensitive to ultimate causation. (shrink)

What is the relationship between cosmopolitanism and secularism—the worldwide and the worldly? While cosmopolitan politics may seem inherently secular, existing forms of secularism risk undermining the universality of cosmopolitanism because they privilege the European tradition over all others and transform particular historical norms into enunciations of truth, valid for all cultures and all epochs. In this book, the noted philosopher Étienne Balibar explores the tensions lurking at this troubled nexus in order to advance a truly democratic and emancipatory cosmopolitanism, (...) which requires a secularization of secularism itself. Balibar argues for the idea of the universal against its particular dominant institutions. He questions the assumptions that underlie popular ideas of secularism and religion and outlines the importance of a new critique for the contemporary world. Balibar holds that conflicts between religious and secular discourses need to be reframed from a point of view that takes into account the cultural hybridization, migration and mobility, and transformation of borders that have reshaped the postcolonial age. Among the topics discussed are the uses and misuses of the category of religion and the religious, the paradoxical genealogy of monotheism, French laïcité’s identitarian turn, and the implications of the responses to the Charlie Hebdo attacks for an extended definition of free speech. Going beyond circumscribed notions of religion and the public sphere, Secularism and Cosmopolitanism is a profound rethinking of identity and difference that seeks to make room for a renewed political imagination. (shrink)