Letter-position tolerance varies across languages. This observation suggests that the neural code for letter strings may also be subtly different. Although language-specific models remain useful, we should endeavor to develop a universal model of reading acquisition which incorporates crucial neurobiological constraints. Such a model, through a progressive internalization of phonological and lexical regularities, could perhaps converge onto the language-specific properties outlined by Frost.

L’avocat est une figure emblématique de la société américaine, régulée par le droit, et dans laquelle les juristes occupent une position de premier plan. Cette prééminence et l’unité de la profession juridique ont contribué à son influence bien au-delà de la sphère du droit et des frontières des États-Unis.

Comment savons-nous distinguer le bien du mal, reconnaître que telle action est bonne ou telle règle injuste ? Comme l'écrit Adam Smith, « selon certains, le principe de l'approbation est fondé sur un sentiment d'une nature originale, sur une faculté de perception particulière que l'esprit exerce au spectacle de certaines actions ou dispositions... lls lui donnent un nom particulier et l'appellent sens moral ». L'histoire moderne du sens moral, anglaise et surtout écossaise, commence par un dilemme. L'obligation suppose une règle (...) extérieure à la conscience qui est obligée. Comment juger, si nous ne disposons pas d'une règle de justice ? Mais les partisans du sens moral objectent : comment reconnaître et nous assurer que cette règle est bien juste, si nous n'avons pas d'abord la capacité de discerner ce qui est juste, indépendamment de l'obéissance à cette règle ? De deux choses l'une : soit nous sommes d'emblée et comme naturellement sensibles aux qualité morales, soit la moralité se réduit à la conformité à un univers de conventions. Cette notion est-elle autre chose qu'une chimère de moralistes ? Son étude permet de reconstituer une histoire de la philosophie morale et des polémiques qui l'animent au XVIIIe siècle - depuis Cudworth et Locke, en passant par Shaftesbury, Bayle, Hutcheson, Hume et Smith, jusqu'à Kant et Bentham. Textes de Jean-Pierre Cléro, Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Laurent Jaffro, Alain Petit, Jean-Michel Vienne. (shrink)

Beginning my third year with the Kansas City Chiefs and being also a medical student at McGill University, I was at first a little reluctant to comment on Glenn Cohen et al.’s critique of the National Football League's structure involving player health and team doctors, but the opportunity to provide a perspective as both a football player and a medical student was too much to forgo. Because of my athletic and academic background, I am often asked what I think (...) about injuries in professional sports and about the role of sports medicine physicians, and Cohen et al.’s article demands a thoughtful reaction. I want to suggest that the fundamental principles concerning the medical profession and the doctor-patient relationship provide additional arguments for some of the solutions that Cohen et al. discuss. The professional self-regulation that the proposed medical committee could provide and the reliance on a doctor who was not hired by the player's employer—the club—for a second opinion are both good ways to minimize conflicts of interest. (shrink)

This is the first volume of a two-volume project whose aim is to publish all the known Middle English manuscript translations of the French Somme le mi, a thirteenth-century manual of religious instruction offering teaching on the Decalogue, the seven deadly sins and their remedies, compiled by the Dominican friar Laurent of Orleans. The project extends and deepens our knowledge of the influence of this popular French text, known today only from the versions entitled The Ayen bite of Inwit (...) and The Book of Vices and Virtues, published in 1866 and 1942, respectively. This volume presents the versions extant in BL MSS Royal 18. A. x and Add. 37677; the second will cover the versions in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 494, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1286, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Musaeo 23. The texts of both volumes have been prepared with the help of the recently-published edition of the French text, a circumstance from which the earlier English editions were unable to benefit. It is likely that the versions edited here for the first time will make a considerable contribution to our understanding of the processes of textual transmission and to that of translation itself in English literary circles of the fifteenth century. (shrink)

Color provides an instance of a general puzzle about how to reconcile the picture of the world given to us by our ordinary experience with the picture of the world given to us by our best theoretical accounts. The Red and the Real offers a new approach to such longstanding philosophical puzzles about what colors are and how they fit into nature. It is responsive to a broad range of constraints --- both the ordinary constraints of color experience and the (...) more theoretical constraints of color science, psychology, semantics, and ontology. (shrink)

Malgré l’important renouveau que connaît la théologie naturelle depuis environ un demi-siècle dans le champ de la philosophie de la religion, Charles Taylor soutient que celle-ci appartient à une époque désormais révolue. Cette étude propose de restituer de manière aussi fidèle et précise que possible les raisons de ce verdict. Une telle analyse vise à combler une lacune importante dans la littérature secondaire. Cette lacune tient, d’une part, au fait que Taylor lui-même ne développe jamais ces raisons de façon systématique (...) ; d’autre part, elle tient également au fait que plusieurs commentateurs semblent présupposer qu’un tel argument n’existe pas : Taylor récuserait la théologie naturelle simplement parce qu’elle ne correspond pas à la manière dont il est enclin à justifier ses propres convictions religieuses. (shrink)

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

A long tradition of criticism, which has its roots in the Romantic era, admires Pascal as a dark, a tortured writer, an incomparable representative of human misery, of the anguish of existence, of the abysses that threaten us all. It is commonly understood that he is a magnificently sinister writer. This perspective, well established today in most minds, in the honest man as well as in the student or teacher, reduces Pascal’s work to a poor apologetic manoeuvre and transforms his (...) anthropology into a one-sided indictment, impressive by its very excesses, which we savour with a shudder. The present study aims: 1) to sketch a genealogy of this error of perspective, 2) to examine its dangers and measure its damage, to indicate why it is not acceptable, and 3) to propose some reflections on the place of the greatness of man in Pascalian anthropology. Three patterns of greatness can be identified in the Pensées: logical, paradoxical and phenomenological. (shrink)

This book presents G. A. Cohen's Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. Focusing on Marxism and Rawlsian liberalism, Cohen draws a connection between these thought systems and the choices that shape a person's life. In the case of Marxism, the relevant life is his own: a communist upbringing in the 1940s in Montreal, which induced a belief in a strongly socialist egalitarian doctrine. The narrative of Cohen's reckoning with that inheritance develops through a (...) series of sophisticated engagements with the central questions of social and political philosophy. In the case of Rawlsian doctrine, Cohen looks to people's lives in general. He argues that egalitarian justice is not only, as Rawlsian liberalism teaches, a matter of rules that define the structure of society, but also a matter of personal attitude and choice. Personal attitude and choice are, moreover, the stuff of which social structure itself is made. Those truths have not informed political philosophy as much as they should, and Cohen's focus on them brings political philosophy closer to moral philosophy, and to the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition, than it has recently been. (shrink)

Students of perception have long puzzled over a range of cases in which perception seems to tell us distinct, and in some sense conflicting, things about the world. In the cases at issue, the perceptual system is capable of responding to a single stimulus — say, as manifested in the ways in which subjects sort that stimulus — in different ways. This paper is about these puzzling cases, and about how they should be characterized and accounted for within a general (...) theory of perception. After rehearsing the sort of case at issue (§1), I’ll examine critically some of the strategies by which philosophers and perceptual psychologists have attempted to account for them (§2). Finally, I’ll present an alternative computational account of the puzzle cases, argue that this view is superior to its competitors, and examine some of its implications (§3). (shrink)

Kant’s notorious remark about the impossibility of there ever being a Newton of a blade of grass has often been interpreted as a misguided pre-emptive strike against Darwin and evolutionary theories in general: 'It would be absurd for humans even to make such an attempt or to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered; rather, we must absolutely deny (...) this insight to human beings. (CPJ 5:400) My aim in this chapter is to re-evaluate this claim in the context of Kant’s account of organic generation and argue that, contrary to what is usually thought, it does leave room for the possibility of evolution. After spelling out the constraints Kant identifies for any scientific study of the history of living beings, I examine his theory of generation and draw its implications for biological heredity, species diversity, and the role played by environmental factors in organic development. On this basis, I conclude that first, evolution is a possible albeit far-fetched hypothesis for Kant; second, Darwin’s theory of natural selection would have turned a far-fetched possibility into a plausible candidate; and third, it would not have disposed of the need for teleology. This is why, I argue, Darwin could never have been a Newton of a blade of grass. (shrink)

A first-of-its kind, in-depth investigation into how companion animals and their humans have carved out a new type of family - the multi-species family - in which identities like parent, child, grandparent, and sibling transcend species to create new forms of kinship.

Kant en France n'est pas seulement un phénomène de réception: c'est l'histoire même de la philosophie française depuis le début du XIXe siècle. Et pourtant, quoi qu'on ait prétendu à ce sujet, il n'a jamais existé de néo-kantisme français. Cousin, Renouvier, Lachelier, Boutroux, Brunschvicg, Benda n'ont pas la même vision du kantisme. La manière dont ils s'approprient cette référence permet de tracer entre eux tantôt des points de rencontre, tantôt des lignes de clivages et d'opposition. Leur rapport à Kant nous (...) donne un éclairage remarquable sur leurs débats internes"--Back cover. (shrink)

This book provides an analytical and critical appraisal of Rousseau's political thought that, while frank about its limits, also explains its enduring power.

We live in a market system with much economic inequality. This may not be an essential characteristic of market systems but seems historically inevitable. How we should evaluate it, on the other hand, is contentious. I propose that bleeding heart libertarianism provides the best diagnosis and prescription.

This chapter contains section titled: I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII Coda Appendix Acknowledgements.

Les auteurs de ce livre partent d'un constat clair : il n'y a pas de problème d'intelligence artificielle, il n'y a que le problème de nos attentes à l'égard de ce que nous avons nous-mêmes créé. L'ouvrage étudie donc un enjeu sociétal actuel décisif : notre rapport aux technologies. Mené à deux voix, il interroge notre vision de l'intelligence artificielle en tant que technologie. Il présente l'intérêt du double éclairage de la philosophie et de l'informatique. L'informaticien sait ce que fait (...) ou ne fait pas la machine. Le philosophe interroge, par sa position délibérément "naïve" vis-à-vis de la technologie, le sens et la pertinence des usages que nous en faisons sur tous les plans : personnel, économique, commercial, social, politique, etc. Ces échanges montrent que, s'il y a un sujet, il n'est pas tant relatif aux technologies elles-mêmes, mais bien aux usages que nous en faisons, à ce que nous en attendons et à ce dont nous rêvons. (shrink)

This article highlights the challenge of environmental inequality in France within the framework of social-ecology, an approach relating ecological crises to social issues, especially inequality. It starts by defining the notions of environmental inequality and environmental justice within the framework of the; ‘capability approach’ and then reviews recent empirical studies that show how air pollution, chemical and noise pollutions, access to environmental resources and exposure to social-ecological disasters are socially differentiated in France and can be understood, under the definition adopted (...) in this article, as a form of injustice. It concludes by reviewing issues raised by environmental inequality in France and exploring policy solutions able to address this challenge. (shrink)

Ecouter est une tâche d'humanité. C'est ce que tout homme doit pouvoir offrir à l'autre en proie à une détresse dont il a envie de parler. Mais écouter peut devenir, dans certains cas, affaire de spécialistes. Les Eglises chrétiennes ont une longue, très longue expérience de ce qui s'appelait jadis la direction spirituelle et que l'on nomme plus volontiers de nos jours l'accompagnement spirituel. Les modalités et le but de ces accompagnements visent à faire grandir la relation avec Celui que (...) les Eglises confessent comme le Dieu de Jésus-Christ et, conséquemment, avec autrui. Or, depuis la fin du XIXe siècle, la psychanalyse, une toute nouvelle discipline, profane en son essence et en son déploiement concret, s'est donné comme tâche similaire d'écouter la souffrance et la détresse qui cherchent à se dire. Les modalités peuvent apparaître, dans un premier temps, assez proches de la relation pastorale ou de la cure d'âmes des prêtres ou des pasteurs chrétiens : il s'agit, dans l'un et l'autre cas, de parloirs en vue du dialogue, afin qu'une parole se fasse chair là où elle a fait défaut et là où, donc, le symptôme a surgi. Le but est, cependant, très différent : permettre au sujet souffrant de pouvoir à nouveau aimer et travailler est l'unique objectif d'une analyse qui ne saurait être confondue avec la poursuite d'une éthique, étrangère à Freud... mais peut-être un peu moins à Lacan. Cet ouvrage expose les thèses et les méthodes de la psychanalyse susceptibles de jeter des lumières nouvelles au profit de la relation pastorale. Des générations pionnières en la matière, celles de plusieurs théologiens et/ou spirituels chrétiens - comme Albert Plé, Louis Beirnaert, Marc Oraison - ont osé engager le dialogue avec la psychanalyse, aussi explosif qu'il puisse se révéler de prime abord. Il a fallu, d'abord, mettre au point une méthodologie du dialogue pour éviter, autant que possible, des jonctions injustifiées. Et puis, pour nombre de ces pionniers, c'est le vif de l'expérience psychanalytique qui est apparu comme le lieu-source d'où le matériau le plus riche sur les plans théorique et clinique peut être extrait au bénéfice d'une pratique chrétienne de l'écoute qui n'ignore pas les ruses de nos conflits intrapsychiques, ces ruses toutes passionnelles que la Tradition chrétienne avait déjà pressenties. (shrink)

Most scholars have not assigned much interpretive importance to the specific use of the term ‘persuasion’ in the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus. This paper suggests understanding cosmological ‘persuasion’ in conjunction with ‘force,’ another trait of divine agency in the Timaeus. It analyses the nature of intelligent causation in the cosmology of the Timaeus, particularly in the construction of the cosmic body and soul. Then, it gives a detailed characterization of the causation of necessity, appearing in the Timaeus in three different (...) versions, and relates it to the complex notion of intelligent agency. Ultimately, it claims that the cosmic music in the Timaeus, the primary agent of ordered causation in the cosmos, functions on two levels of conflict with the disorder of the sensible aspect of the world. (shrink)

This article argues that many situations in social life can be analyzed by their requirement for the justification of action. It is in particular in situations of dispute that a need arises to explicate the grounds on which responsibility for errors is distributed and on which new agreement can be reached. Since a plurality of mutually incompatible modes of justification exists, disputes can be understood as disagreements either about whether the accepted rule of justification has not been violated or about (...) which mode of justification to apply at all. The article develops a grammar of such modes of justification, called orders of worth (grandeur), and argues that the human capacity for criticism becomes visible in the daily occurrence of disputes over criteria for justification. At the same time, it is underlined that not all social situations can be interpreted with the help of such a sense of justice, which resides on a notion of equivalence. Regimes of love, of violence or of familiarity are systematically distinct from regimes of justification. (shrink)

On a souvent résumé la présence importante des avocats dans la vie politique française sous la III e République à travers l’expression de « République des avocats. » De manière plus complexe, il s’agit de montrer comment les avocats sont au cœur, dans les premières décennies de la République, de la construction d’un champ politique marquée par la codification des règles électorales et une certaine démocratisation du personnel politique. Dans les décennies qui suivent, on note une diversification des formes d’investissement (...) du barreau en politique, moins marqué par l’investissement dans le champ politique proprement dit que par l’engagement à travers la défense judiciaire de causes. (shrink)

"What one cannot compute, one must poetize." So concludes this remarkable sequence of propositions on the centrality of poetry for what we call cognition. Developed through brief, lucid, and eloquent logical elaborations that are punctuated by incisive readings of a range of poems--Western and non-Western, low culture and high--Poetry and Mind offers to theorists and practitioners of literature, together with logicians and cognitive scientists, a more sophisticated account of the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience. Poetry grants us the ability (...) to move "beyond the limits of thought" and to explore the beyond of cognition. It teaches us to think differently. An elliptic response to Wittgenstein's point of arrival in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, this book is first and foremost an interdisciplinary study of poetry, drawing on literary, philosophical, and scientific traditions. The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience cannot be ignored if, as humanists, we are interested in the way we think. Dubreuil thus calls for a constant dialogue with the positive examination of cognition to better situate the normal regimes of thought, as well as to underline the other mental possibilities that literature opens up. Poetry and Mind shows that poetry--a widespread and perhaps universal phenomenon among humans--arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations, but that, in going through them, it also exceeds them. The best poems, then, are not only thought experiments but actual thinking experiments for the unthinkable. They expand the usual semantics of natural languages, and singularly deploy the rhetorical armature of speech. Made of iterations and linguistic reorganizations, they exceed their own algorithms and, often, they become reflexive, strange, and cognitively dissonant. They provide detachable, movable, and livable significations to our selves. The literary scope of this book is more than "global": it is uniquely broad and comparative, encompassing dozens of different traditions, oral or written, from all continents, from Ancient times to the contemporary era, with some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, and from cuneiform tablet to rap music. Together, Dubreuil's readings and elaborations offer a major reappraisal of the relations between creation, language and our embodied brains."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Cet essai sur la Dialectique négative montre, contre son prétendu échec, pourquoi et comment le potentiel utopique de la pensée critique, le sauvetage de la liberté et de la raison, exigent une confrontation rigoureuse avec la tradition de l'idéalisme allemand, Kant et Hegel tout d'abord.

Wes Morriston contends that William Lane Craig's argument for the impossibility of a beginningless past results in an equally good argument for the impossibility of an endless future. Craig disagrees. I show that Craig's reply reveals a commitment to an unmotivated position concerning the relationship between actuality and the actual infinite. I then assess alternative routes to the impossibility of a beginningless past that have been offered in the literature, and show that, contrary to initial appearances, these routes similarly seem (...) to support the impossibility of an endless future. (shrink)

Counseling Ethics for the 21st Century prepares students to address ethical issues arising in contemporary counseling practice. Drawing on their own clinical and practical experiences, authors Elliot D. Cohen and Gale Spieler Cohen present detailed, realistic, and engaging clinical case studies along with a comprehensive five-step model that can be used to manage the complex ethical problems raised throughout the book. Each chapter focuses on particular virtues in the context of examining a particular counseling issue, including online counseling, (...) digital record keeping, and social media. Students will be empowered to define problems, identify relevant facts, conduct ethical analyses, and make the best decisions for their clients. (shrink)

This book examines Aristotle's metaphysics and his account of nature, stressing the ways in which his desire to explain observed natural processes shaped his philosophical thought. It departs radically from a tradition of interpretation, in which Aristotle is understood to have approached problems with a set of abstract principles in hand, principles derived from critical reflection on the views of his predecessors. A central example of the book interprets Aristotle's essentialism as deriving from an examination of the kinds of unity (...) that various sorts of things have: elemental motion, alteration, transformation and the growth of organisms. An important conclusion of this argument is that an essence may, under certain circumstances, lack some of its essential attributes. This is a major re-evaluation of Aristotle's metaphysics that will interest philosophers, classicists and historians of science. (shrink)