This book is intended to contribute towards a justification of the human sciences.

The theories on symbolization of the Neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan are described and compared. Their common conception of man as an _animal symbolicum_ has been applied to a number of topics within the humanities to offer proof for its fruitfulness.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Bundel filosofische essays over literatuurwetenschap.

Les auteurs de cet essai, spécialistes reconnus de l'écologie, reviennent sur le sens de l'écologie, notion cruciale et pourtant sujette à toutes les confusions. Ils retracent avec force et simplicité son origine historique et philosophique afin d'en saisir les enjeux politiques, économiques et urbains dans le monde d'aujourd'hui. Cette mise au point est l'occasion de redéfinir le sens du progrès ou de la modernité, à l'heure où la planète souffre d'une surexploitation de ses ressources par l'Homme. Cet ouvrage critique nous (...) offre l'opportunité de redéfinir la place de l'Homme dans un monde où l'hégémonie d'un anthropocentrisme inconsidéré n'est plus viable. C'est enfin un hymne à la beauté du monde et une revendication : le droit de chacun à préserver ses racines et ses repères. L'écologisme politique doit s'opposer à l'effacement des signes naturels, culturels et historiques qui donnent aux territoires leurs personnalités et les ancrent dans une histoire. L'écologisme ne peut se résumer à une simple tendance : il s'agit d'un humanisme se souciant des générations à venir, qui s'attache à préserver et à transmettre un héritage commun à tous. (shrink)

Cet article vise à caractériser les grandes dynamiques géomorphologiques à l’œuvre dans la plaine d’Itéa. S’appuyant sur trois années de prospections pédestres, de nombreux documents cartographiques, des missions océanographiques ainsi que sur les nombreuses coupes stratigraphiques accessibles dans la plaine, il présente ces résultats sous la forme de deux cartes géomorphologiques inédites. Les résultats obtenus mettent en avant la prédominance du fleuve Hylaithos dans la construction holocène de la plaine ainsi qu’une nette dissymétrie entre des environnements deltaïques au niveau d’Itéa (...) et un marais littoral récemment comblé au niveau de l’actuelle Kirrha. L’étude des dynamiques littorales, associée aux relevés océanographiques sonar et de sismique sous‑marine, a en outre permis de localiser des structures immergées dont l’appartenance au port antique de Delphes doit être discutée. (shrink)

Certaines sculptures d’époque archaïque trouvées dans les fouilles de l’École française d’Athènes à Délos sont encore très peu connues : c’est le cas des œuvres étudiées dans cet article, qui datent toutes de la fin de la période considérée. La paire de lions A 4103 et A 4104, trouvée par Homolle en 1878 dans l’Artémision (voir, en appendice, un bilan sur les sculptures archaïques découvertes à cette occasion), appartient à une série de fauves figurés dans une attitude menaçante qui est (...) représentée, en particulier, par deux exemplaires de l’Acropole d’Athènes également étudiés ici ; placés sur de hauts supports, peut‑être vers l’entrée du sanctuaire, ils soulignaient la puissance redoutable de l’Apollon Délien et de sa sœur Artémis. La sirène A 3995, un des rares exemples en ronde bosse de ce type de monstre à l’époque archaïque, se rapportait probablement au culte d’Artémis. Enfin, il est certain que la paire d’oiseaux A 3122 et A 3123 (pigeons ou colombes) provient non pas de l’Héraion, comme on l’a pensé, mais d’une zone située au sud‑est du lac : ils appartenaient peut‑être au sanctuaire GD4 68, comme la lionne A 4105. (shrink)

The paper presents a research programme for the neuroscience of consciousness called 'neurophenomenology' and illustrates it with a recent pilot study . At a theoretical level, neurophenomenology pursues an embodied and large-scale dynamical approach to the neurophysiology of consciousness . At a methodological level, the neurophenomenological strategy is to make rigorous and extensive use of first-person data about subjective experience as a heuristic to describe and quantify the large-scale neurodynamics of consciousness . The paper focuses on neurophenomenology in relation to (...) three challenging methodological issues about incorporating first-person data into cognitive neuroscience: first-person reports can be biased or inaccurate; the process of generating first-person reports about an experience can modify that experience; and there is an 'explanatory gap' in our understanding of how to relate first-person, phenomenological data to third-person, biobehavioural data. (shrink)

We develop a mathematical formalism that allows to study decoherence with a great level generality, so as to make it appear as a geometrical phenomenon between reservoirs of dimensions. It enables us to give quantitative estimates of the level of decoherence induced by a purely random environment on a system according to their respectives sizes, and to exhibit some links with entanglement entropy.

This paper examines Claude Tresmontant's attempt to provide a philosophical argument in favour of God's existence using the results of modern science. Like many contemporary theists, Tresmontant believes that discoveries in the field of astrophysics, rightly interpreted, lead to the postulation of a deity. This paper challenges the philosophical presuppositions of Tresmontant's argument and the thesis that current cosmological theories can be used to construct a valid proof of the existence of God.

Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Imagerie Ce´re´brale (LENA), Hoˆpital de La Salpeˆtrie`re, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

_sciousness called ‘neurophenomenology’ (Varela 1996) and illustrates it with a_ _recent pilot study (Lutz et al., 2002). At a theoretical level, neurophenomenology_ _pursues an embodied and large-scale dynamical approach to the_ _neurophysiology of consciousness (Varela 1995; Thompson and Varela 2001;_ _Varela and Thompson 2003). At a methodological level, the neurophenomeno-_ _logical strategy is to make rigorous and extensive use of first-person data about_ _subjective experience as a heuristic to describe and quantify the large-scale_ _neurodynamics of consciousness (Lutz 2002). The paper (...) foocuses on_ _neurophenomenology in relation to three challenging methodological issues_ _about incorporating first-person data into cognitive neuroscience: (i) first-person_ _reports can be biased or inaccurate; (ii) the process of generating first-person_ _reports about an experience can modify that experience; and (iii) there is an ‘ex-_ _planatory gap’ in our understanding of how to relate first-person, phenomeno-_ _logical data to third-person, biobehavioural data._. (shrink)

Recent brain imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have implicated insula and anterior cingulate cortices in the empathic response to another’s pain. However, virtually nothing is known about the impact of the voluntary generation of compassion on this network. To investigate these questions we assessed brain activity using fMRI while novice and expert meditation practitioners generated a loving-kindness-compassion meditation state. To probe affective reactivity, we presented emotional and neutral sounds during the meditation and comparison periods. Our main hypothesis (...) was that the concern for others cultivated during this form of meditation enhances affective processing, in particular in response to sounds of distress, and that this response to emotional sounds is modulated by the degree of meditation training. The presentation of the emotional sounds was associated with increased pupil diameter and activation of limbic regions (insula and cingulate cortices) during meditation (versus rest). During meditation, activation in insula was greater during presentation of negative sounds than positive or neutral sounds in expert than it was in novice meditators. The strength of activation in insula was also associated with self-reported intensity of the meditation for both groups. These results support the role of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. The comparison between meditation vs. rest states between experts and novices also showed increased activation in amygdala, right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in response to all sounds, suggesting, greater detection of the emotional sounds, and enhanced mentation in response to emotional human vocalizations for experts than novices during meditation. Together these data indicate that the mental expertise to cultivate positive emotion alters the activation of circuitries previously linked to empathy and theory of mind in response to emotional stimuli.. (shrink)

This paper analyzes an explicit instantiation of the program of “neurophenomenology” in a neuroscientific protocol. Neurophenomenology takes seriously the importance of linking the scientific study of consciousness to the careful examination of experience with a specific first-person methodology. My first claim is that such strategy is a fruitful heuristic because it produces new data and illuminates their relation to subjective experience. My second claim is that the approach could open the door to a natural account of the structure of human (...) experience as it is mobilized in itself in such methodology. In this view, generative passages define the type of circulation which explicitly roots the active and disciplined insight the subject has about his/her experience in a biological emergent process. (shrink)

Perfect adaptation in a dynamical system is the phenomenon that one or more variables have an initial transient response to a persistent change in an external stimulus but revert to their original value as the system converges to equilibrium. With the help of the causal ordering algorithm, one can construct graphical representations of dynamical systems that represent the causal relations between the variables and the conditional independences in the equilibrium distribution. We apply these tools to formulate sufficient graphical conditions for (...) identifying perfect adaptation from a set of first-order differential equations. Furthermore, we give sufficient conditions to test for the presence of perfect adaptation in experimental equilibrium data. We apply this method to a simple model for a protein signalling pathway and test its predictions in both simulations and using real-world protein expression data. We demonstrate that perfect adaptation can lead to misleading orientation of edges in the output of causal discovery algorithms. (shrink)

"Le roseau pensant, les deux infinis, le pari ou le nez de Cléopâtre : les Pensées renferment tant de formules et d'images inoubliables. Pascal fut un virtuose de la langue française, mais d'abord un mathématicien et un physicien incomparable, et encore un philosophe et un théologien hors pair. Plusieurs de ses sentences sont inscrites dans le cerveau de tout Français : "Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie" ; Qui veut faire l'ange fait la bête" ; "Le coeur a (...) ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point". Au moins depuis Chateaubriand, nous négligeons que les Pensées offrent les rudiments d'une Apologie de la religion chrétienne", et Pascal représente pour nous l'homme moderne partagé entre la science et la foi, soumis au tragique du Dieu caché et à l'angoisse de la condition humaine. On devrait mettre dans le journal, moi je ne sais pas, les... Pensées de Pascal", disait le Swann de Proust. C'est un peu ce que nous avons tenté de faire dans cet Été avec Pascal."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Nietzsche once proclaimed himself the 'Buddha of Europe', and throughout his life Buddhism held enormous interest for him. While he followed Buddhist thinking in demolishing what he regarded as the two-headed delusion of Being and Self, he saw himself as advocating a response to the ensuing nihilist crisis that was diametrically opposed to that of his Indian counterpart. In this book Antoine Panaïoti explores the deep and complex relations between Nietzsche's views and Buddhist philosophy. He discusses the psychological models (...) and theories which underlie their supposedly opposing ethics of 'great health' and explodes the apparent dichotomy between Nietzsche's Dionysian life-affirmation and Buddhist life-negation, arguing for a novel, hybrid response to the challenge of formulating a tenable post-nihilist ethics. His book will interest students and scholars of Nietzsche's philosophy, Buddhist thought and the metaphysical, existential and ethical issues that emerge with the demise of theism. (shrink)

Blaise Pascal is a marquee name, yet little read outside France. Antoine Compagnon provides an ideal introduction to one of the great intellects, contextualizing Pascal in his own time and offering insightful readings of the Pensées and the Provincial Letters. Compagnon proves a welcoming guide to Pascal's challenging and rewarding thought.

La 4e de couverture indique : "Les Lumières sont souvent invoquées dans l'espace public comme un combat contre l'obscurantisme, combat qu'il s'agirait seulement de réactualiser. Des lectures, totalisantes et souvent caricaturales, les associent au culte du Progrès, au libéralisme politique et à un universalisme désincarné. Or, comme le montre ici Antoine Lilti, les Lumières n'ont pas proposé une doctrine philosophique cohérente ou un projet politique commun. En confrontant des auteurs emblématiques et d'autres moins connus, il propose de rendre aux (...) Lumières leur complexité historique et de repenser ce que nous leur devons : un ensemble de questions et de problèmes, bien plus qu'un prêt-à-penser rassurant. Les Lumières apparaissent dès lors comme une réponse collective au surgissement de la modernité, dont les ambivalences forment aujourd'hui encore notre horizon. Partant des interrogations de Voltaire sur le commerce colonial et l'esclavage pour arriver aux dernières réflexions de Michel Foucault, en passant par la critique post-coloniale et les dilemmes du philosophe face au public, L'Héritage des Lumières propose ainsi le tableau profondément renouvelé d'un mouvement qu'il nous faut redécouvrir car il ne cesse de nous parler.". (shrink)

in Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness edited by Zelazo P., Moscovitch M. and Thompson E. (2007).

We argue that ecology in general and biodiversity and ecosystem function research in particular need an understanding of functions which is both ahistorical and evolutionarily grounded. A natural candidate in this context is Bigelow and Pargetter’s evolutionary forward-looking account which, like the causal role account, assigns functions to parts of integrated systems regardless of their past history, but supplements this with an evolutionary dimension that relates functions to their bearers’ ability to thrive and perpetuate themselves. While Bigelow and Pargetter’s account (...) focused on functional organization at the level of organisms, we argue that such an account can be extended to functional organization at the community and ecosystem levels in a way that broadens the scope of the reconciliation between ecosystem ecology and evolutionary biology envisioned by many BEF researchers. By linking an evolutionary forward-looking account of functions to the persistence-based understanding of evolution defended by Bouchard and others, and to the theoretical research on complex adaptive systems, we argue that ecosystems, by forming more or less resilient assemblages, can evolve even while they do not reproduce and form lineages. We thus propose a Persistence Enhancing Propensity account of role functions in ecology to account for this overlap of evolutionary and ecological processes. (shrink)

The capacity to stabilize the content of attention over time varies among individuals, and its impairment is a hallmark of several mental illnesses. Impairments in sustained attention in patients with attention disorders have been associated with increased trial-to-trial variability in reaction time and event-related potential deficits during attention tasks. At present, it is unclear whether the ability to sustain attention and its underlying brain circuitry are transformable through training. Here, we show, with dichotic listening task performance and electroencephalography, that training (...) attention, as cultivated by meditation, can improve the ability to sustain atten- tion. Three months of intensive meditation training reduced variability in attentional processing of target tones, as indicated by both enhanced theta-band phase consistency of oscillatory neural responses over anterior brain areas and reduced reaction time variability. Furthermore, those individuals who showed the greatest increase in neural response consistency showed the largest decrease in behav- ioral response variability. Notably, we also observed reduced variability in neural processing, in particular in low-frequency bands, regardless of whether the deviant tone was attended or unattended. Focused attention meditation may thus affect both distracter and target processing, perhaps by enhancing entrainment of neuronal oscillations to sensory input rhythms, a mechanism important for controlling the content of attention. These novel findings highlight the mechanisms underlying focused attention meditation and support the notion that mental training can significantly affect attention and brain function. (shrink)

This is the first book-length treatment of the philosophical thought of one of the major thinkers at the University of Paris in the late thirteenth century. The book examines all major areas of James’s philosophical thought, exploring his connections with other important masters of the time and highlighting his originality in the context of late medieval philosophy.

This volume explores the philosophy of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. It presents, for the first time, English-language essays on Condillac's philosophy, making the complexity and sophistication of his arguments and their influence on early modern philosophy accessible to a wider readership. Condillac's reflections on the origin and nature of human abilities, such as the ability to reason, reflect and use language, took philosophy in distinctly new directions. This volume showcases the diversity of themes and methods inspired by Condillac's work. The (...) chapters are divided into four thematic sections. Part 1 highlights themes and discussions that were central to Condillac's own philosophical thinking, thus laying the ground for the subsequent discussions that trace Condillac's influence in the 19th century and beyond. Part 2 focuses on the different ways in which Condillac's philosophy has been taken up, criticised and further developed in France. Part 3 discusses thinkers working in other European countries and parts of the world who took up Condillac's work. Finally, Part 4 looks at the practical applications of Condillac's philosophy in a variety of different fields, such as economics, psychology, psychopathology and deaf studies. Condillac and His Reception will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on early modern philosophy, history of science and intellectual history. (shrink)

Understanding the emergence of a tangible 4-dimensional space-time from a quantum theory of gravity promises to be a tremendously difficult task. This article makes the case that this task may not have to be carried. Space-time as we know it may be fundamental to begin with. I recall the common arguments against this possibility and review a class of recently discovered models bypassing the most serious objection. The generic solution of the measurement problem that is tied to semiclassical gravity as (...) well as the difficulty of the alternative make it a reasonable default option in the absence of decisive experimental evidence. (shrink)

Au cœur de la pensée philosophique, une tension essentielle : des textes écrits dans une conjoncture donnée et incarnés dans des hommes singuliers conquièrent progressivement une forme d'intemporalité. Ils deviennent «classiques». L'objectif de ce volume collectif, réunissant une vingtaine d'études de cas, est de soumettre ces classiques à une double épreuve. D'une part, l'étude des réceptions et médiations intellectuelles montre que le travail de l'historien de la philosophie ne se résume pas à celui d'un antiquaire. D'autre part, la mise au (...) jour des mécanismes d'activations et d'actualisations intellectuelles des classiques atteste de ce que la pensée philosophique ne saurait se réduire à un inventaire d'arguments décontextualisés. Il s'agit, en somme, de proposer une approche anthropologique de la pensée philosophique. (shrink)