Cette méditation en première personne tourne autour de l’antique et grande question : Que faire? et s’appuie sur le texte des Essais de Montaigne. La question du « faire » y est interrogée et relancée par-delà le « produire » et la production qui, aujourd’hui, plus que jamais, risquent de l’emporter et de l’engloutir tandis qu’est brossé un portrait chinois (taoïste!) de celui dont Nietzsche disait si bien : « c’est à lui que je m’attacherais si l’on me donnait pour (...) tâche de faire de cette terre une patrie ». (shrink)

Du temps du confinement et de la dévastation qui affectent si profondément notre sens de la temporalité, la philosophie aurait-elle quelque chose à dire? L’occasion en tout cas de relire quelques textes d’Aristote et d’Augustin et d’essayer de nous orienter dans Être et temps de Heidegger en nous interrogeant sur l’expression avoir le temps au moment où, pour chacun, s’amenuise le temps qui reste.

À partir d’une certaine idée de la finitude, nous avons voulu simplement dénoncer le fantasme d’un monde sans frontières.

Sans la mort, arche du rien, exit, avec la philosophie, la question fondamentale de la métaphysique : pourquoi y a-t-il quelque chose et non pas plutôt rien? Depuis son commencement, la philosophie n’a cessé de s’affronter à la mort, n’a cessé d’essayer de la penser, hésitant entre un memento mori et un memento vivere. Mais se demander si la pensée de la mort nous invite à la jouissance ou à l’abnégation et si on peut apprendre à mourir sont peut-être questions (...) oiseuses et indécidables. Pour sortir de cette indétermination, il faut sortir du cercle de la morale, distinguer d’abord le pur fait contingent de la mort, du mourir lui-même comme structure de l’existence humaine et reconnaître à la fois que, si nous ne cessons de lutter contre la mort et si, le plus souvent, nous lui tournons le dos, nous sommes, à elle, adossés et que, sans elle, nous ne ferions rien. (shrink)

L’invention au xii e siècle de la fin’amor va occuper, pour la première fois en Occident, le cœur du chant poétique, avec lequel il va entièrement s’identifier. Cette forme aristocratique, raffinée et intrinsèquement peccamineuse du sentiment amoureux exerce encore sur nos mœurs une profonde influence alors même que nous avons tendance à confondre mariage, amour et sexualité. Ne faut-il pas pourtant toujours, à l’amour, une « racine d’impossible » pour utiliser un terme commun à J. Lacan et à G. Bataille?

L’enseignement serait devenu, selon certains, tout bonnement impossible. Et en effet les changements récents de la société, le développement de l’individualisme démocratique, la crise de l’autorité et de la transmission, le bouleversement sans précédent provoqué par l’extension des technologies numériques… nous montrent que nous sommes en train de basculer complètement dans une autre époque et de changer radicalement de paradigme. Mais l’éducation en général n’a-t-elle pas toujours été impossible ainsi que Freud le constatait en 1925? Et contre une certaine idéologie (...) scientifique qui la confond avec une impuissance momentanée, n’est-ce pas pourtant à cette impossibilité qu’il nous faut, comme jamais, nous confronter? (shrink)

Comment écrire sur Bataille sans s’épargner et se mettre soi-même hors jeu sinon en entrant dans le jeu de ce qu’on appellera, en un sens majeur, la parodie ? Dans ce retour, dans cet éternel retour des pensées et des mots – dans cette déconstruction créatrice qu’est la réécriture – Bataille n’y entra-t-il pas lui même en écrivant sur Nietzsche ?

Oui, malgré le travail de déconstruction de la pensée « postcoloniale », on peut encore parler de pensée « orientale ». Comme une gageure et un défi supplémentaire, nous avons pris comme miroir d’un monde une chose, un petit rien, une technique très ancienne, un art de la terre portant le nom de « raku », art né à la croisée de plusieurs traditions du monde oriental. Par bien des aspects, cet art se distingue fondamentalement des caractères que nous attribuons (...) à notre « Occident ». La pensée européenne est pourtant depuis longtemps entrée en rapport avec cet Orient et a tenté de lancer bien des passerelles diverses entre ces deux mondes. (shrink)

A history of colonization inflicts psychological, physical, and structural disadvantages that endure across generations. For an increasing number of Indigenous Australians, environmental epigenetics offers an important explanatory framework that links the social past with the biological present, providing a culturally relevant way of understanding the various intergenerational effects of historical trauma. In this paper, we critically examine the strategic uptake of environmental epigenetics by Indigenous researchers and policy advocates. We focus on the relationship between epigenetic processes and Indigenous views of (...) Country and health—views that locate health not in individual bodies but within relational contexts of Indigenous ontologies that embody interconnected environments of kin/animals/matter/bodies across time and space. This drawing together of Indigenous experience and epigenetic knowledge has strengthened calls for action including state-supported calls for financial reparations. We examine the consequences of this reimagining of disease responsibility in the context of “strategic biological essentialism,” a distinct form of biopolitics that, in this case, incorporates environmental determinism. We conclude that the shaping of the right to protection from biosocial injury is potentially empowering but also has the capacity to conceal forms of governance through claimants’ identification as “damaged,” thus furthering State justification of biopolitical intervention in Indigenous lives. (shrink)

Common sense has it that animals matter considerably less than humans; the welfare and suffering of a cow, a chicken or a fish are important but not as much as the welfare and suffering of a human being. Most animal ethicists reject this “speciesist” view as mere prejudice. In their opinion, there is no difference between humans and other animals that could justify such unequal consideration. In the opposite camp, advocates of speciesism have long tried to identify a difference that (...) would fit the bill, but they have consistently seemed to fail. In light of this, some naturally began to appeal to Moorean arguments: the case against speciesism must be flawed somehow, these philosophers maintain, because speciesism is supported by a strong and widespread intuition. This chapter draws on recent findings in social psychology to criticize this defence of speciesism. It argues that the strong and widespread intuition that humans count more than animals is epistemically defective because it is causally shaped by a pair of irrelevant influences: cognitive dissonance and tribalism. Accordingly, it is no suitable basis for a Moorean argument. (shrink)

Our societies are marked by anthropocentrism: most people treat animals in ways in which they would by no means treat fellow humans. One might nonetheless expect this prejudice to be much less prevalent in animal shelters since these places are created for the very sake of non-humans and generally managed by people who truly care about animal welfare. This chapter questions this expectation. It discusses three practices that are widespread in animal shelters and yet could be suspected of anthropocentrism: killing (...) animals for lack of resources, partnering with the livestock industry, and feeding animals meat. Drawing on the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory, the chapter argues that management euthanasia and cooperation with animal agriculture are acceptable in non-ideal theory even though they would be condemned by ideal theory. Then it argues that meat-based pet food should be rejected even in the non-ideal circumstances faced by animal shelters. (shrink)

We propose a new approach to the study of introspection. Instead of asking what form introspection actually takes in humans or other animals, we ask what forms it could take, in natural or artificial minds. What are the dimensions along which forms of introspection could vary? This is a relatively unexplored question, but it is one that has the potential to open new avenues of study and reveal new connections between existing ones. It may, for example, focus attention on possible (...) forms of introspection radically different from the human one and help to integrate competing theories of human introspection in a non-adversarial manner. We introduce and motivate the project, provide a preliminary mapping of the space of possible forms of introspection, and sketch a programme for interdisciplinary research on the topic. (shrink)

The philosophical tradition in the West has always subjected life to conceptualdivisions and questions about meaning. In Vital Nourishment, François Jullien contends that althoughthis process has given rise to a rich history of inquiry, it proceeds too fast. In their anxietyabout meaning, Western thinkers since Plato have forgotten simply to experience life. In thisinstallment of his continuing project of plumbing the philosophical divide between Eastern andWestern thought, Jullien slows down, and, using the third and fourth century B.C.E. Chinese thinkerZhuanghi (...) as a foil, begins to think about life from a point outside of Western inquiry.The questionof how to "feed life," or nourish it, is the point of departure for the Chinese traditionthat Jullien locates in Zhuanghi. Life passes through each of us, and we have a duty to becomeamenable to its ebbs and flows. We must cultivate a sense of being adequate to it so that we canhouse it. Exploring notions of breath, energy, and immanence, Jullien reopens a vibrant space ofintellectual exchange between East and West. In doing so, he refuses to commit to a rigid frameworkof meaning, and his text unfolds as an elegant process that mirrors the very type of thought heexplores. Pointing out that it seems intellectually and politically imperative today to reinvigorateWestern thought with ideas from the East, Jullien seeks to create a space of mutual inquiry thatmaintains the integrity of both Eastern and Western thinking. Vital Nourishment is both a richintellectual historical journey and a text very much attuned to the philosophical politics of thepresent.François Jullien is Professor at the Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot and director at theInstitut de la Pensée Contemporaine. He is the author of Detour and Access: Stratgies of Meaning inChna and Greece, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China, and In Praise ofBlandness: Proceeding from Chinsese Thought and Aesthetics, all published by Zone Books. (shrink)

Environmental epigenetics is increasingly employed to understand the health outcomes of communities who have experienced historical trauma and structural violence. Epigenetics provides a way to think about traumatic events and sustained deprivation as biological “exposures” that contribute to ill-health across generations. In Australia, some Indigenous researchers and clinicians are embracing epigenetic science as a framework for theorising the slow violence of colonialism as it plays out in intergenerational legacies of trauma and illness. However, there is dispute, contention, and caution as (...) well as enthusiasm among these research communities.In this article, we trace strategies of “refusal” (Simpson, 2014) in response to epigenetics in Indigenous contexts. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Australia with researchers and clinicians in Indigenous health, we explore how some construct epigenetics as useless knowledge and a distraction from implementing anti-colonial change, rather than a tool with which to enact change. Secondly, we explore how epigenetics narrows definitions of colonial harm through the optic of molecular trauma, reproducing conditions in which Indigenous people are made intelligible through a lens of “damaged” bodies. Faced with these two concerns, many turn away from epigenetics altogether, refusing its novelty and supposed benefit for Indigenous health equity and resisting the pull of postgenomics. (shrink)

This article explores a theoretical legacy that underpins the ways in which many social scientists come to know and understand obesity. In attempting to distance itself from essentialist discourses, it is not surprising that this literature focuses on the discursive construction of fat bodies rather than the materiality or agency of bodily matter. Ironically, in developing arguments that only critique representations of obesity or fat bodies, social science scholars have maintained and reproduced a central dichotomy of Cartesian thinking – that (...) between social construction and biology. In this article I examine the limitations of social constructionist arguments in obesity/critical fat studies and the implications for ignoring materiality. Through bringing together the theoretical insights of material feminism and obesity science’s attention to maternal nutrition and the fetal origins hypothesis, this article moves beyond the current philosophical impasse, and repositions biological and social constructionist approaches to obesity not as mutually exclusive, but as one of constant interplay and connectedness. (shrink)

In this highly insightful analysis of Western and Chinese concepts of efficacy, François Jullien subtly delves into the metaphysical preconceptions of the two civilizations to account for diverging patterns of action in warfare, politics, and diplomacy. He shows how Western and Chinese strategies work in several domains (the battlefield, for example) and analyzes two resulting acts of war. The Chinese strategist manipulates his own troops and the enemy to win a battle without waging war and to bring about victory (...) effortlessly. Efficacity in China is thus conceived of in terms of transformation (as opposed to action) and manipulation, making it closer to what is understood as efficacy in the West. Jullien’s brilliant interpretations of an array of recondite texts are key to understanding our own conceptions of action, time, and reality in this foray into the world of Chinese thought. In its clear and penetrating characterization of two contrasting views of reality from a heretofore unexplored perspective, A Treatise on Efficacy will be of central importance in the intellectual debate between East and West. (shrink)

Several authors have noted the proximity of Marty’s and Grice’s ideas. Both Marty and Grice distinguish natural meaning and the sort of meaning involved in human communication; and they both attempt to provide a characterization of human communication that does not essentially appeal to the conventional nature of its linguistic devices. In this contribution, I single out what I take to be a main difference between Marty and Grice. Marty views linguistic communication as continuous with natural meaning while Grice insists (...) on their irreducible difference. I argue that Marty is better positioned than Grice to account for intermediate cases like Grice’s Salome example, and that this can be done without losing the benefits of Grice’s reflexive analysis of communicative intentions. (shrink)

This enlarged edition of Mario Bunge's Dictionary of Philosophy is a superb reference work for both students and professional philosophers.

Developmental origins of health and disease and epigenetics have expanded understanding of how the environment affects the health of women before and during pregnancy—with lifelong health consequences for the fetus. This has translated to a narrow focus on women’s lifestyle during pregnancy, especially for women classified as obese. In this study, we show that psychosocial harms such as distress or shame felt by pregnant women are rarely countenanced in these endeavors. To demonstrate this, we examine published documents about a large (...) set of trials of lifestyle interventions united through an international consortium. Yet there is now a literature in which pregnant women with large bodies report feeling humiliated and a wider literature on the stigma of obesity. We argue that shame is produced and reproduced through the discursive and material knowledge-making scientific practices of DOHaD translation. Interventions that intensify the shame of large body size in pregnancy may be stressful, and neurophysiological stress pathways are well-known within DOHaD to have consequences for fetal development, so these interventions potentially undermine the very processes they set out to protect. A feminist response may protect women from shame and redirect attention to the social and structural determinants of health. (shrink)

The term “biology” was introduced in 1802 by a German, Treviranus, and by a Frenchman whose name would remain well known to posterity, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

The advent of science brought about a radical division between the means of expression it made possible and the one it disavowed: in the centuries preceding its establishment such a break was not possible, even though it was often desired.Medical treatises of the Renaissance that analyze the plague and melancholy used categories that were not different from those used by theologians (and sometimes doctors) as far as their reference to the Devil was concerned. Since it is no less a question (...) of the imagination in one case than in the other, we can try to associate these three “objects”-three figures of misfortune-and treat them as though they belonged to the same level of expression. Such a decision is not at all arbitrary; it proceeds, completely a posteriori, from the observation of a noticeable proximity between them, aside from their diversity: it is as though they offered variations on a certain number of themes, variations requested by a logic of the imaginary that we shall try to elucidate here by showing the several categories that serve as a point of departure for the functioning of that logic. (shrink)

La notion de passage n’a pas été conceptualisée en linguistique ; cependant, elle se révèle utile dans des domaines d’application aussi divers que la thématique, la recherche d’information ou la représentation des connaissances.En s’appuyant sur l’expérience de la sémantique de corpus, cette étude précise la notion de passage par l’examen des rapports de sémiosis entre contenu et expression du passage, comme par l’étude des rapports contextuels au sein du passage et entre passages. Tenant compte des rapports entre fonds et formes (...) sémantiques, puis des transformations entre passages, l’investigation conduit à préciser des phénomènes qui intéressent tant la textualité que l’intertextualité, de la citation à la traduction. (shrink)

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the most important French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. His impact has been felt across many disciplines: sociology; cultural studies; art theory and politics. This volume presents a diverse selection of interviews, conversations and debates which relate to the five decades of his working life, both as a political militant, experimental philosopher and teacher. Including hard-to-find interviews and previously untranslated material, this is the first time that interviews with Lyotard have been presented as (...) a collection. Key concepts from Lyotard's thought – the differend, the postmodern, the immaterial – are debated and discussed across different time periods, prompted by specific contexts and provocations. In addition there are debates with other thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, which may be less familiar to an Anglophone audience. These debates and interviews help to contextualise Lyotard, highlighting the importance of Marx, Freud, Kant and Wittgenstein, in addition to the Jewish thought which accompanies the questions of silence, justice and presence that pervades Lyotard's thinking. (shrink)

La question de l'esthétique a été abordée à maintes reprises dans l'ensemble de mes écrits. Quand on s'engage dans l'écriture d'un ouvrage philosophique, il est impossible d'ignorer ce terme. Mais que recouvre-t-il exactement? Si on considère les origines grecques de ce mot, l'esthétique (aisthêsis) est la faculté de ressentir quelque chose ; l'esthète (aisthêtès) est ainsi celui qui sent. C'est-à-dire chacun d'entre nous. L'être humain possède cette faculté de réception du sens des choses. L'Homme est capable d'en comprendre l'idée, d'en (...) retenir l'information. Je pars de cette affirmation pour établir mon esthétique. Ainsi le sens, l'idée, l'information, ce qu'on appelle communément la vérité lorsqu'ils sont accompagnés de la puissance, sont à la fois la source, le processus et le résultat de toute création de formes artistiques ou non."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The second international Chromatiques whiteheadiennes conference was devoted exclusively to the exegesis and contextualization of Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1925). In order to elucidate the meaning and significance of this epoch-making work, the Proceedings are designed to form "companion" volume. With one paper devoted to each of its thirteen chapters, the Proceedings aim, on the one hand, to identify the specific contribution of each chapter to Whitehead's own research program - that is to say, to put its categories (...) into perspective by means of an internal analysis- and, on the other hand, to identify its global impact in the history of ideas. (shrink)

Ce livre voudrait offrir un itinéraire en philosophie, a priori éloigné de l'actualité donc; mais il part malgré tout de nos inquiétudes d'aujourd'hui. Alors que la violence semble s'imposer de nouveau, dans les confrontations géopolitiques, mais aussi dans notre société et même dans les mots de la vie publique, faut-il nous y résigner? Est-ce se bercer d'illusion que de croire qu'un bien peut advenir? La politique et la vie éthique peuvent-ils se fixer pour cap une vie meilleure, une vie heureuse?"--Page (...) 4 of cover. (shrink)

Quel message la nature nous livre-t-elle? La force s'impose-t-elle automatiquement? La théorie de l'évolution, trahie par le darwinisme social, répond-elle suffisamment aux problèmes éthiques de notre temps? Finalement, la raison du plus fort est-elle toujours la meilleure? Le préjugé est tenace : les plus forts feraient la loi. La nature le dément pourtant : les plus faibles, à l'exemple de l'enfant à naître, sont l'objet d'une protection remarquable dès leur conception et bénéficient génétiquement de pouvoirs de survie considérables. Dans cet (...) ouvrage, François Guery rétablit une vérité : la loi du plus faible. Il entreprend de réécrire l'histoire de la vie évoluée, en nuançant les apports du darwinisme à l'éthique. Il expose en profondeur l'erreur de ces idéologies qui tournent le dos à la notion de transmission intergénérationnelle. Un grand livre d'éthique qui renouvelle les débats de notre époque sur l'identité, la transmission et le droit du vivant à vivre et à s'imposer par une force qui lui est propre."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

La lección de metafísica que imparte Heidegger durante el invierno de 1929/30 caracteriza el pensamiento metafísico como un pensamiento comprensivo, es decir, un pensamiento que “entiende” y que “incluye”. En este contexto, Heidegger busca definir con mayor precisión el vínculo que une su propia metafísica con la tradición moderna criticada unos años antes por “incluir”, precisamente, al sujeto humano en su propia elaboración. Es la ocasión para Heidegger de presentar un retrato mucho más matizado de su vinculación con la filosofía (...) moderna, retrato que pone de manifiesto lo que el Dasein ha heredado del sujeto moderno. (shrink)

Dans son choix grec, la philosophie a pensé la vie, mais non pas vivre ; et le religieux, qui prenait en charge la question du vivre, est aujourd'hui en retrait. De là que vivre soit laissé en friche, abandonné au prêche ou bien au truisme ; et que prospèrent le Développement Personnel et le marché du Bonheur vendant vivre comme du ± tout positif?.00Or vivre est paradoxal, s'étendant du vital au vivant. Il est à la fois la condition de toutes (...) les conditions : être en vie ; et l'aspiration de toutes nos aspirations : vivre enfin! Nous sommes en vie, mais nous n'accédons pas pour autant à vivre. Car la vie d'elle-même rabat la vie. De là que nous puissions être nostalgiques de la vie au sein même de la vie - ou que ± la vraie vie est absente?.00Or, c'est à travers cette inanité même de ± la vie? que nous pourrons voir transparaître à l'envers l'inouï de vivre débordant le déjà vécu et l'ouvrant à de l'± in-vécu?, quitte à s'y heurter à de l'invivable ; et, puisque vivre n'est, au fond, qu'ouvrir des possibles, nous pourrons alors rouvrir des possibles dans nos vies, au lieu de les laisser s'étioler.00Car répéter qu'il faut ± cueillir le jour?, ± profiter de la vie?, n'a pas prise sur la vie. Traçons donc plutôt, pour nous y repérer, une carte de ces possibles intensifs entre lesquels décider vivre.00Vivre y reparaît alors dans sa ressource, dans son essor, dans son ± matin?, dégagé de ce qui l'enlisait, au fil des jours, et l'emmurait.00Telle est la ± transparence du matin?, en amont de tous les enseignements de la morale.0F. J. (shrink)

What characterizes indexical thinking is the fact that the modes of presentation through which one thinks of objects are context-bound and perspectival. Such modes of presentation, I claim, are mental files presupposing that we stand in certain relations to the reference : the role of the file is to store information one can gain in virtue of standing in that relation to the object. This raises the communication problem, first raised by Frege : if indexical thoughts are context-bound and relation-based, (...) how is it possible to communicate them to those who are not in the same context and do not stand in the right relations to the object? Following Frege, I argue that the solution comes from an important distinction between linguistic and psychological modes of presentation. Psychological modes of presentation are mental files. They are perspectival and context-bound. But linguistic modes of presentation are fixed by the conventions of the language and they are shared by the language users. They are public and serve to coordinate mental files in communication by constraining them to contain the piece of information they encode. In this way communication takes place even though the indexical thoughts entertained by the speaker are, in some sense, private and cannot be shared by the audience. (shrink)

When dealing with the moving worlds of migration among the Persian diaspora in Australia, memories cannot simply be removed to dusty attic boxes to be stored as an archive. Rather, this analysis takes the body and its sensory engagement with the world as a central focus, arguing that memories are crafted, tasted, smelt and touched in everyday temporalities. In the kitchens and lounges of Persian migrant women the lived past refuses to become undone from the countless revolutions of food, talk (...) and domestic activity that are central to the patterning of memory. In this paper, we argue that these intimate practices have references beyond their domestic dimensions, for they point to a worldly movement of life writ domestically small. It is via a sensory network that the spatially and temporally disparate worlds of homeland and new homes are remembered and forgotten, and where miniature worlds call out to the movement of migration. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 2 September 2007. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

t. 1. Classes, propositions et prédicats.--t. 2. Logiques non classiques, relations et structures.