In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophers, Carers, and Psychodramatic GamesCorinne Gal (bio), Alexandre Chapy (bio), Marielle Fau (bio), and Muriel Guaveia (bio)Dear Jonathan D. Moreno,Thank you for the honor of taking the time to comment on the work we do. It is very meaningful for us to be able to talk with you.We, too, see a big difference between philosophers and carers (in the broadest sense) who deal with the suffering of (...) patients and try to find methods to help them. But, if theory is at the service of the clinic, it becomes a formidable asset to refine our therapeutic methods and better understand what is happening to our patients.Indeed, patients suffering from psychosis, severe neurosis … are difficult to accompany and “recalcitrant to therapy by word alone” to use your terms. It is on this point that Ludwig Binswanger distanced himself from psychoanalysis. Binswanger ran a sanatorium in Switzerland (the Bellevue Clinic) and took in patients suffering from this type of psychological pathology. Aware that “the divan” and the analysis of the transference (unconscious) made little progress, he sought other ways of understanding his patients. The work of Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement, and then the work of Martin Heidegger1 fascinated him because they attempted to answer fundamental questions about being. The patients we work with ask themselves and us the same question: What is being? How can we feel existence within ourselves? Binswanger then created daseinsanalysis as an analysis of existence in which he was able to develop, among other dimensions, what he called “artists’ gestures,” including the possibility of (physical) contact with the patients. The body regained existential importance in the therapy.There are also strong similarities between psychiatric phenomenology and the work of Jacob Levy Moreno (2014, p. 214). We would like to quote your work: “ Nonetheless, there were links between them. Heidegger and J.L. shared preoccupation with personal authenticity and meaning [End Page 230] just enough to be considered part of the trends that led to postwar existentialism and fueled the new humanistic psychology, NTL, and encounter groups.”Jacob Levy Moreno’s working methods are much more powerful, allowing us to work as closely as possible with bodily feelings, since the body involved in the action is so present in psychodrama. Because, to this question of being posed by our patients, is linked the body as a felt, sensing body: the body that I am (which differs from the object body). Schizophrenic patients often express, and this is a terrible suffering, that they no longer feel anything, that they no longer feel they exist, that they no longer feel emotions or feelings. They do not know how to be in the world and with others. For us it is a fundamental symptom, as much as hallucinations. We link it to the loss of natural evidence (Blankenburg, 1991), the loss of contact with reality (Minkowski, 1929). Most of the time, in psychodrama, we “externalize” what the patients feel in different roles played by players, which allows us to work at the heart of each person’s difficulties in interaction. Trained in psychodrama by Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, we have to our credit a set of techniques to support the expression of psychodramatic play, a sort of “toolbox.” Depending on the context, the moment of the patient, our own state, we open our toolbox and try to choose and use the technique that best fits the needs of the game, of what we understand about the difficulty of the protagonist or the group. We do not do anything systematic, we are craftsmen. We have chosen to present a very simple game, without any technique used, except for the initial soliloquy, with a stabilized patient suffering from paucisymptomatic forms of schizophrenia. This is to demonstrate how the possibility of encounter, constitutive of existence, is a fundamental dimension of psychodrama.We thank you for the examples you have given us, they will be a source of inspiration and will fill our toolbox.To John Nolte:We thank you very much for your comments which honor us.The aim of the article was to present how the encounter in... (shrink)

The authors argue that Morenian-inspired existential psychodrama turns out to be a formidable lever for opening up existence as it allows schizophrenic patients to incorporate the experience of an “absolutely other” on which the foundation of any autonomous self is built. More precisely, by relying on their clinical experiences, the authors show how psycho-dramatic play goes along with an intense movement of original projection which carries psychotic patients externally in relation to themselves. Offset from their pathological world, these patients feel (...) more inclined to “wear someone else’s shoes,” for the duration of the game, and they do so in a manner that is both sensorial and pathic. This surprising and creative “journey,” which allows them to return to the world better attuned to others and to themselves, is merely an enactment of a “true” intersubjective encounter: the very essence of existential psychodrama. By applying phenomenology to this psychodramatic method, notably by relying on the hypothesis of psychosis being a disorder of what Bin Kimura calls the “ aida,” the authors hope to contribute to the advancement of psychosis’ psychotherapy. (shrink)

Computational reproducibility possesses its own dynamics and narratives of crisis. Alongside the difficulties of computing as an ubiquitous yet complex scientific activity, computational reproducibility suffers from a naive expectancy of total reproducibility and a moral imperative to embrace the principles of free software as a non-negotiable epistemic virtue. We argue that the epistemic issues at stake in actual practices of computational reproducibility are best unveiled by focusing on software as a pivotal concept, one that is surprisingly often overlooked in accounts (...) of reproducibility issues. Software is not only about designing and coding but also about maintaining, supporting, distributing, licensing, and governance; it is not only about developers but also about users. We focus on openness debates among computational chemists involved in molecular modeling software packages as empirical grounding for our argument. We then identify and analyse four epistemic characteristics as key to the role of software in computational reproducibility. (shrink)

Using emotional film clips is one of the most popular and effective methods of emotion elicitation. The main goal of the present study was to develop and test the effectiveness of a new and comprehensive set of emotional film excerpts. Fifty film experts were asked to remember specific film scenes that elicited fear, anger, sadness, disgust, amusement, tenderness, as well as emotionally neutral scenes. For each emotion, the 10 most frequently mentioned scenes were selected and cut into film clips. Next, (...) 364 participants viewed the film clips in individual laboratory sessions and rated each film on multiple dimensions. Results showed that the film clips were effective with regard to several criteria such as emotional discreteness, arousal, positive and negative affect. Finally, ranking scores were computed for 24 classification criteria: Subjective arousal, positive and negative affect (derived from the PANAS; Watson & Tellegen, 1988), a positive and a negative affect scores derived from the Differential Emotions Scale (DES; Izard et al., 1974), six emotional discreteness scores (for anger, disgust, sadness, fear, amusement and tenderness), and 15 “mixed feelings” scores assessing the effectiveness of each film excerpt to produce blends of specific emotions. In addition, a number of emotionally neutral film clips were also validated. The database and editing instructions to construct the film clips have been made freely available in a website. (shrink)

In a previous article on cosmological arguments, I have put forward a few examples of complete infinite and circular explanations, and argued that complete non-wellfounded explanations such as these might explain the present state of the world better than their well-founded theistic counterparts (Billon, 2021). Although my aim was broader, the examples I gave there implied merely causal explanations. In this article, I would like to do three things: • Specify some general informative conditions for complete and incomplete non-wellfounded causal (...) explanations that can be used to assess candidate explanations and to generate new examples of complete non-wellfounded explanations. • Show that these conditions, which concern chains of causal explanations, easily generalize to chains of metaphysical, grounding explanations and even to chains involving other “determination relations” such as supervenience. • Apply these general conditions to the recent debates against the existence of nonwellfounded chains of grounds and show, with a couple of precise examples, that the latter can be complete, and that just like in the case of causal explanations, non-wellfoundedness can in fact be an aset rather than a liability. (shrink)

This paper focuses on one particular case that connects climate justice and climate economics. Its contribution is twofold. First, it aims at providing a sound normative foundation for carbon pricing mechanisms around the notions of a ‘right to energy’, the ‘duty not-to-harm’ and an argument for ‘restricted compensation’. Second, it identifies the normative elements from theories of climate justice that should guide the design of market-based instruments for climate change mitigation. This will cast light on the particular moral relevance of (...) the act of internalizing a negative externality and of the funds generated by putting a price on carbon. (shrink)

Patients suffering from the Cotard syndrome can deny being alive, having guts, thinking or even existing. They can also complain that the world or time have ceased to exist. In this article, I argue that even though the leading neurocognitive accounts have difficulties meeting that task, we should, and we can, make sense of these bizarre delusions. To that effect, I draw on the close connection between the Cotard syndrome and a more common condition known as depersonalisation. Even though they (...) are not delusional, depersonalised patients seem to have experiences that are quite similar to those of Cotard patients. I argue that these experiences are essentially characterised by a lack of subjective character and of two other structural features of experience, which I call ‘the present character’ and ‘the actual character’. Cotard's nihilistic delusions simply consist in taking these anomalous experiences at face value. (shrink)

Several advocates of the lively field of “metaphysics of science” have recently argued that a naturalistic metaphysics should be based solely on current science, and that it should replace more traditional, intuition-based, forms of metaphysics. The aim of the present paper is to assess that claim by examining the relations between metaphysics of science and general metaphysics. We show that the current metaphysical battlefield is richer and more complex than a simple dichotomy between “metaphysics of science” and “traditional metaphysics”, and (...) that it should instead be understood as a three dimensional “box”, with one axis distinguishing “descriptive metaphysics” from “revisionary metaphysics”, a second axis distinguishing a priori from a posteriori metaphysics, and a third axis distinguishing “commonsense metaphysics”, “traditional metaphysics” and “metaphysics of science”. We use this three-dimensional figure to shed light on the project of current metaphysics of science, and to demonstrate that, in many instances, the target of that project is not defined with enough precision and clarity. (shrink)

In this theoretical contribution, we interpret the notion of professional development in the light of concepts coming from cognitive development. This brings us to consider teacher training as not only having to allow the elaboration of skills, but also as having to encourage the development of new cognitive structures. We explore the theoretical concepts in relation with certain processes revealed by the reflexive texts of the students. Finally, we propose ways that could foster certain dimensions of global professional development in (...) learners, among which self-regulated learning, the focus on certain concerns and taking into account certain types of information. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to identify general characteristics attributed to ethical business cultures by executives from a variety of industries. Our research identified five clusters of characteristics: Mission- and Values-Driven, Stakeholder Balance, Leadership Effectiveness, Process Integrity, and Long-term Perspective. We propose that these characteristics be used as a foundation of a comprehensive model that can be engaged to influence operational practices in creating and sustaining an ethical business culture.

In this paper, we put forward a new account of emergence called “transformational emergence”. Such an account captures a variety of emergence that can be considered as being diachronic and weakly ontological. The fact that transformational emergence actually constitutes a genuine form of emergence is motivated. Besides, the account is free of traditional problems surrounding more usual, synchronic versions of emergence, and it can find a strong empirical support in a specific physical phenomenon, the fractional quantum Hall effect, which has (...) long been touted as a paradigmatic case of emergence. (shrink)

This is a commentary on Andrea Lavazza and Murilo Vilaça's article "Human Extinction and AI: What We Can Learn from the Ultimate Threat" (Lavazza & Vilaça, 2024). I discuss the potential concern that their proposal to create artificial successors to "insure" against the tragedy of human extinction might mean being too quick to accept that catastrophic prospect as inevitable, rather than single-mindedly focusing on avoiding it. I also consider the question of the value that we might reasonably assign to such (...) a future of artificial successors under the assumption that they do not enjoy phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

This collection of six essays centers on Professor Koyre;'s great theme: the relative importance of metaphysics and observation, with controlled experiment a kind of marriage between the two. Professor Koyre;'s thesis might be summed up as a claim that when one is seeking to explain the scientific revolution, attention must be concentrated on the philosophical outlook of the scientist and away from speculative theories. At the time of his death, Alexandre Koyre; was a professor at the Ecole Pratique des (...) Hautes Études (Sorbonne) and a memeber of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. (shrink)

Cet article propose une analyse croisée du discours médical sur la masturbation et sur la lecture en France au XVIIIe siècle. Son but est d’interroger la construction de la définition « naturalisante » des qualités attribuées à l’un et l’autre sexe. A partir de traités physiologiques sur les maladies des femmes, la réflexion porte sur trois points principaux. Pourquoi la lecture et la masturbation sont-ils devenus des problèmes médicaux? Comment un médecin neutralise-t-il le danger, pour une femme, de lire un (...) traité sur un sujet tel que la masturbation? Comment le discours sur la lecture et la masturbation fonctionne-t-il comme système discriminant entre les sexes? (shrink)

(2013). Does consciousness entail subjectivity? The puzzle of thought insertion. Philosophical Psychology: Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 291-314. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2011.625117.

According to what we will call subjectivity theories of consciousness, there is a constitutive connection between phenomenal consciousness and subjectivity: there is something it is like for a subject to have mental state M only if M is characterized by a certain mine-ness or for-me-ness. Such theories appear to face certain psychopathological counterexamples: patients appear to report conscious experiences that lack this subjective element. A subsidiary goal of this chapter is to articulate with greater precision both subjectivity theories and the (...) psychopathological challenge they face. The chapter’s central goal is to present two new approaches to defending subjectivity theories in the face of this challenge. What distinguishes these two approaches is that they go to great lengths to interpret patients’ reports at face value – greater length, at any rate, than more widespread approaches in the extant literature. (shrink)

This collection of six essays centers on Professor Koyre's great theme: the relative importance of metaphysics and observation, with controlled experiment a kind of marriage between the two. Professor Koyre's thesis might be summed up as a claim that when one is seeking to explain the scientific revolution, attention must be concentrated on the philosophical outlook of the scientist and away from speculative theories. At the time of his death, Alexandre Koyre was a professor at the Ecole Pratique des (...) Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) and a memeber of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. (shrink)

The concept of genidentity has been proposed as a way to better understand identity through time, especially in physics and biology. The genidentity view is utterly anti-substantialist in so far as it suggests that the identity of X through time does not presuppose whatsoever the existence of a permanent “core” or “substrate” of X. Yet applications of this concept to real science have been scarce and unsatisfying. In this paper, our aim is to show that a well-defined concept of functional (...) genidentity can be crucial to shed light on identity through time in classical physics and especially in biology. Finally, we show that understanding identity on the basis of continuity suggests a move towards an ontology of processes. (shrink)

One objection to enhancement technologies is that they might lead us to live inauthentic lives. Memory modification technologies (MMTs) raise this worry in a particularly acute manner. In this paper I describe four scenarios where the use of MMTs might be said to lead to an inauthentic life. I then undertake to justify that judgment. I review the main existing accounts of authenticity, and present my own version of what I call a “true self” account (intended as a complement, rather (...) than a substitute, to existing accounts). I briefly describe current and prospective MMTs, distinguishing between memory enhancement and memory editing . Moving then to an assessment of the initial scenarios in the light of the accounts previously described, I argue that memory enhancement does not, by its very nature, raise serious concerns about authenticity. The main threat to authenticity posed by MMTs comes, I suggest, from memory editing. Rejecting as inadequate the worries about identity raised by the President’s Council on Bioethics in Beyond Therapy , I argue instead that memory editing can cause us to live an inauthentic life in two main ways: first, by threatening its truthfulness, and secondly, by interfering with our disposition to respond in certain ways to some past events, when we have reasons to respond in such ways. This consideration allows us to justify the charge of inauthenticity in cases where existing accounts fail. It also gives us a significant moral reason not to use MMTs in ways that would lead to such an outcome. (shrink)

The paper covers the origins, development, perspectives and solutions of the civilizational catastrophe of humanity. Humanity is defined as the restricted number of ideal, material, and temporal qualities of human beings. Its civilizational catastrophe is the contingent evolution of the specific element of human consciousness implementing rationality and technique, knowing no limits and no purposes, progressing outside ideal, material, and temporal boundaries of humanity, overcoming on its way limitations of human savagery and transcendental elements. Due to the particular quality of (...) civilizational development, the law of humanity catastrophe could be stated, as the stage of civilization is inversely proportional to the level of humanity in human beings. Civilization catastrophe couldfinalize into other-being or non-being of humanity. Its evolution canalizes into different fields of activity, which are named categories of humanity civilization catastrophe, because each of them leads towards cardinal qualitative changes of humanity or its annihilation. The basic categories are elimination – civilized ability of humans to kill one another, speedization – permanent acceleration of the overhuman speed of civilizational processes; babylonization – the cobeingof different collective qualitative realizations; supermanization – scientific production of over-human being; transsexualization – the negation of sexual immobility of humanity; ballastization – the overproduction of information; ritualizatin – the murder of simple love activity in Jesus manner into ecclesiastic discourse. The onlysalvation of humanity is the total negation of civilization and selftransformation of humankind on the basis of its transcendental element which is love knowing no exceptions. (shrink)

In their target article, Kammerer and Frankish (K&F) wonder what forms introspection could take in non-human animals, enhanced humans, artificial intelligences, and aliens. In this short note, I focus on disordered or neurodiverse minds. More specifically, I assess a claim that has often been made more or less implicitly to the effect that, in virtue of their conditions, people with schizophrenia or depersonalization disorder have superior introspective abilities that allow them to discern some important but normally hidden characteristics of our (...) experiences — call this the superintrospectionitis thesis. In the course of my argumentation, I introduce distinctions and questions concerning the nature of the architecture and the function of introspection that might enrich K&F's framework. (shrink)

The potential of using personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) or “generative AI” (GenAI) to enhance productivity in academic research, as highlighted by Porsdam Mann and colleagues (Porsdam Mann...

Consider an infinite series whose items are each explained by their immediate successor. Does such an infinite explanation explain the whole series or does it leave something to be explained? Hume arguably claimed that it does fully explain the whole series. Leibniz, however, designed a very telling objection against this claim, an objection involving an infinite series of book copies. In this paper, I argue that the Humean claim can, in certain cases, be saved from the Leibnizian “infinite book copies” (...) objection, and that this provides an interesting way to defuse some cosmological arguments for the existence of God and to give a non-theistic but complete explanation of the Universe. In the course of my argumentation, I also show that circular explanations can be “self-explanatory” as well: explaining two items by each other can explain the couple of items tout court. (shrink)

An important challenge in bilingualism research is to understand the mechanisms underlying sentence processing in a second language and whether they are comparable to those underlying native processing. Here, we focus on verb-particle constructions (VPCs) that are among the most difficult elements to acquire in L2 English. The verb and the particle form a unit, which often has a non-compositional meaning (e.g., look up or chew out), making the combined structure semantically opaque. However, bilinguals with higher levels of English proficiency (...) can develop a good knowledge of the semantic properties of verb-particle constructions (Blais and Gonnerman, 2013). A second difficulty is that in a sentence context, the particle can be shifted after the direct object of the verb, (e.g., The professor looked it up). The processing is more challenging when the object is long (e.g. The professor looked the student’s last name up.). This shifted structure favors syntactic processing at the expense of VPC semantic processing. We sought to determine whether or not bilinguals’ reading time (RT) patterns would be similar to those observed for native monolinguals (Gonnerman and Hayes, 2005) when reading VPCs in sentential contexts. French-English bilinguals were tested for English language proficiency, working memory and explicit VPC semantic knowledge. During a self-paced reading task, participants read 78 sentences with verb-particle constructions that varied according to parameters that influence native speakers’ reading dynamics: verb-particle transparency, particle adjacency and length of the object noun phrase (NP; 2, 3, or 5 words). RTs in a critical region that included verbs, NPs and particles were measured. Results revealed that RTs were modulated by participants’ English proficiency, with higher proficiency associated with shorter RTs. Examining participants’ explicit semantic knowledge of VPCs and working memory, only readers with more native-like knowledge of VPCs and a high working memory presented RT patterns that were similar to those of monolinguals. Therefore, given the necessary lexical and computational resources, bilingual processing of novel structures at the syntax-semantics interface follows the principles influencing native processing. The findings are in keeping with theories that postulate similar representations and processing in L1 and L2 modulated by processing difficulty. (shrink)

This article discusses the acquisition of a physical impairment/disability through voluntary body modification, or transability. From the perspectives of critical genealogy and feminist intersectional analysis, the article considers the ability and cis*/trans* axes in order to question the boundaries between trans and transabled experience and examines two assumptions impeding the conceptualization of their placement on the same continuum: 1) trans studies assumes an able-bodied trans identity and able-bodied trans subject of analysis; and 2) disability studies assumes a cis* disabled identity. (...) The perception of transsexuality and transability as mutually exclusive phenomena results from a nonintersectional analysis of transsexuality as an issue of sex/gender, but not of ability, and of transability as an issue of ability, but not of sex/gender. Difficulty recognizing continuities between these phenomena thus stems from an ableist interpretation of sex/gender and a cisnormative* interpretation of ability. This article aims to: 1) enrich intersectional analysis in trans and disability studies and transability scholarship; 2) complicate disability studies, in which disabilities are often presumed to be “involuntary,” and encourage the decentering of a cis* subject; 3) encourage trans studies to decenter an able-bodied subject; and 4) advocate for increased dialogue and the creation of alliances between trans and disability studies and movements. (shrink)

Descartes was certain that he was thinking and he was accordingly certain that he existed. Like Descartes, we seem to be more certain of our thoughts and our existence than of anything else. What is less clear is the reason why we are thus certain. Philosophers throughout history have provided different interpretations of the cogito, disagreeing both on the kind of thoughts it characterizes and on the reasons for its cogency. According to what we may call the empiricist interpretation of (...) the cogito, I can only claim to be certain of having experiences, and this certainty, as well as that of my own existence, stems from their phenomenal and subjective character. According to rationalist interpretations, on the other hand, I am certain of having some self-reflexive propositional attitudes, and this certainty derives from their rational features. Psychiatric patients suffering from acute forms of depersonalization or of the Cotard syndrome often doubt that they think and exist, and might even believe that they don't. I argue that their study allows us to favor the empiricist interpretation of the cogito. (shrink)

Gilbert and colleagues are to be commended for drawing our attention to the need for a sounder empirical basis, and for more careful reasoning, in the context of the neuroethics debate on Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) and its potential impact on the dimensions of personality, identity, agency, authenticity, autonomy and self (PIAAAS). While acknowledging this, this extended commentary critically examines their claim that the real-world relevance of the conclusions drawn in the neuroethics literature is threatened by the fact that the (...) concepts at the center of the discussion have “weak empirical grounding”. First, I show that while some possible understandings of multifaceted concepts like identity, authenticity and autonomy may indeed be unsuitable for a purely empirical inquiry, this is not the case of all of them. Secondly, I call into question the authors’ apparent suggestion that reliance on constructs involving an irreducibly normative dimension makes for a suboptimal state of affairs, and that they should ideally be replaced with substitutes taken from the language of neuroscience or social science in order to ensure an adequate empirical grounding for the debate. Such a suggestion, I argue, commits the authors to a controversial reductionist view in metaethics that the valid empirical concerns they raise in the rest of their article do not presuppose, and which could potentially us lead to lose sight of important ethical considerations. (shrink)

This study focuses on comparison of perceptions of ethical business cultures in large business organizations from four largest emerging economies, commonly referred to as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), and from the US. The data were collected from more than 13,000 managers and employees of business organizations in five countries. The study found significant differences among BRIC countries, with respondents from India and Brazil providing more favorable assessments of ethical cultures of their organizations than respondents from China and (...) Russia. Overall, highest mean scores were provided by respondents from India, the US, and Brazil. There were significant similarities in ratings between the US and Brazil. (shrink)

Basic self-awareness is the kind of self-awareness reflected in our standard use of the first-person. Patients suffering from severe forms of depersonalization often feel reluctant to use the first-person and can even, in delusional cases, avoid it altogether, systematically referring to themselves in the third-person. Even though it has been neglected since then, depersonalization has been extensively studied, more than a century ago, and used as probe for understanding the nature and the causal mechanisms of basic self-awareness. In this paper, (...) I argue that depersonalized patients indeed have an impaired basic self-awareness, and that their study allows us both to favor one specific theory of basic self-awareness and to understand what is wrong with its rivals. According to the favored theory, which I call Cartesian, we are basically self-aware in virtue of being acquainted with ourselves through introspection. (shrink)

In this article I interpret John Rawls’s concept of the original position as a spiritual exercise. In addition to the standard interpretation of the original position as an expository device to select principles of justice for the fundamental institutions of society, I argue that Rawls also envisages it as a “spiritual exercise”: a voluntary personal practice intended to bring about a transformation of the self. To make this argument, I draw on the work of Pierre Hadot, a philosopher and classicist, (...) who introduced the idea of spiritual exercises as central to ancient and modern conceptions of philosophy. By reading Rawls alongside Hadot, this article portrays Rawls as a thinker deeply concerned with the question of how subjects can lead more just and fulfilling lives. It also proposes that the original position as a spiritual exercise can help defend liberalism as a social and political doctrine. (shrink)

Depersonalization is a pathological condition consisting in a deep modification of the way things appear to a subject, leading him to feel estranged from his body, his actions, his thoughts, his mind and even from himself. In this article, I argue that the study of depersonalization raises three challenges for recent theories of the sense of bodily ownership. These challenges—which I call the centrality challenge, the dissociation challenge and the grounding challenge— thwart most of these theories and suggest that the (...) sense of bodily ownership hinges on a phenomenal mark of mineness that can not be accounted for in terms of our sensory, interoceptive, agentive, cognitive or affective dispositions and that is psychologically primitive. In short: that mineness is first. (shrink)

Authenticity has recently emerged as an important issue in discussions of mental disorder. We show, on the basis of personal accounts and empirical studies, that many people with psychological disorders are preoccupied with questions of authenticity. Most of the data considered in this paper are from studies of people with bipolar disorder and anorexia nervosa. We distinguish the various ways in which these people view the relationship between the disorder and their sense of their authentic self. We discuss the principal (...) modern ac-counts of authenticity within the analytic philosophical tradition. We argue that accounts based on autonomous, or wholehearted, endorsement of personal characteris-tics fail to provide an adequate analysis of authenticity in the context of mental disorder. Significant elements of true self accounts of authenticity are required. The concept of authenticity is a basic one that can be of particular value, in the context of self-development, to people with mental disorder and to others experiencing substantial inner conflict. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the main issues and themes of the volume. Approaches to individuality from metaphysics and philosophy of science are contrasted. Recent philosophical developments regarding concepts of biological and physical individuality are exposed. These research trends show how philosophy of physics and philosophy of biology address differently the question of what an individual is. Five main divergences are identified: the centrality of part-whole questions, the issue of identical individuals, the importance of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles and, (...) finally, the importance of structuralist concerns. At the end of the chapter, the structure of the book is explained in detail. (shrink)

I first propose to distinguish between two kinds of external validity inferences, predictive and explanatory. I then argue that we have a satisfactory answer to the question of the conditions under which predictive external validity inferences are good. If this claim is correct, then it has two immediate consequences: First, some external validity inferences are deductive, contrary to what is commonly assumed. Second, Steel’s requirement that an account of external validity inference break what he calls the ‘Extrapolator’s Circle’ is misplaced, (...) at least when it comes to predictive external validity inferences. (shrink)

Alexandre Koyré. of the fixed stars is infinite commit a contradiction in adjecto. In truth, an infinite body cannot be comprehended by thought. For the concepts of the mind concerning the infinite are either about the meaning oftheterm "infinite,"  ...

The notion of a strongly determined type over A extending p is introduced, where p .S. A strongly determined extension of p over A assigns, for any model M )- A, a type q S extending p such that, if realises q, then any elementary partial map M → M which fixes acleq pointwise is elementary over . This gives a crude notion of independence which arises very frequently. Examples are provided of many different kinds of theories with strongly determined (...) types, and some without. We investigate a notion of multiplicity for strongly determined types with applications to ‘involved’ finite simple groups, and an analogue of the Finite Equivalence Relation Theorem. Lifting of strongly determined types to covers of a structure is discussed, and an application to finite covers is given. (shrink)

Basic self-awareness is the kind of self-awareness reflected in our standard use of the first-person. Patients suffering from severe forms of depersonalization often feel reluctant to use the first-person and can even, in delusional cases, avoid it altogether, systematically referring to themselves in the third-person. Even though it has been neglected since then, depersonalization has been extensively studied, more than a century ago, and used as probe for understanding the nature and the causal mechanisms of basic self-awareness. In this paper, (...) I argue that depersonalized patients indeed have an impaired basic self-awareness, and that their study allows us both to favor one specific theory of basic self-awareness and to understand what is wrong with its rivals. According to the favored theory, which I call Cartesian, we are basically self-aware in virtue of being acquainted with ourselves through introspection. (shrink)

Foucault repeatedly argued that his work on techniques of the self were not a denial of his previous work on 18th- and 19th-century Europe, but a different way to make our present intelligible. Although Foucault explicitly associated modern techniques of the self with the Christian model, he never considered Christian techniques of the self in a comprehensive manner. The recent publication of his last two lectures at the Collège de France in 1983 and 1984 seems to fill this gap. Christian (...) techniques of the self are characterized by an ascetic of obedience, and are considered as antithetical to ethical, parrhesiastic techniques of the self. Foucault’s detailed analysis of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Euripides’ Ion in these lectures also provides valuable insights into the rationality that presides over the modern techniques of the self, and the logic that animates the Christian politics of obedience. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper puts forward a normative framework to differentiate between the climate-related responsibilities of different countries in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement. It offers reasons for applying the chief moral principles of ‘historical responsibility’ and ‘capacity’ to climate finance instead of climate change mitigation targets. This will provide a normative basis to realize the goal of climate change mitigation while allowing for developing and newly industrialized countries to develop economically and offer an account of the distributive principles that can (...) regulate climate finance. This is a real-world interpretation of the 1992 UNFCCC principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ that takes into account the progress accomplished at the COP21 in Paris and offers a solution to the still unsolved problem of differentiated responsibilities. This paper offers an application of this proposal to the Green Climate Fund. (shrink)

Cauchy’s contribution to the foundations of analysis is often viewed through the lens of developments that occurred some decades later, namely the formalisation of analysis on the basis of the epsilon-delta doctrine in the context of an Archimedean continuum. What does one see if one refrains from viewing Cauchy as if he had read Weierstrass already? One sees, with Felix Klein, a parallel thread for the development of analysis, in the context of an infinitesimal-enriched continuum. One sees, with Emile Borel, (...) the seeds of the theory of rates of growth of functions as developed by Paul du Bois-Reymond. One sees, with E. G. Björling, an infinitesimal definition of the criterion of uniform convergence. Cauchy’s foundational stance is hereby reconsidered. (shrink)

Entre la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et le début des années 1960, certaines des figures majeures du courant phénoménologique en France, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty et Trần Đức Thảo, considèrent que le projet d’articuler marxisme et phénoménologie constitue l’un des principaux enjeux de la philosophie dans le monde contemporain. L'objet de cet ouvrage est de comprendre la spécificité du travail philosophique effectué par chacun de ces penseurs sur ces deux courants de pensée apparemment incompatibles afin de rendre possible (...) leur synthèse. L'auteur retrace la manière dont le projet initial de 1944 a été progressivement mis en question et reconfiguré au contact des mutations politiques et historiques, des débats philosophiques et du développement des sciences humaines. Ce volume, qui s’adresse aux étudiants et chercheurs, met ainsi en lumière les enjeux et les innovations conceptuelles de ce qui reste l'un des moments les plus féconds et originaux de la philosophie française contemporaine. This text covers the period between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the 1960s, when the phenomenological school in France was represented by Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Tran Duc Thao, who endeavored to combine Marxism with phenomenology as the major task of philosophy in the modern world. The object of this text is to understand the specificity of the philosophical work each performed on these two apparently incompatible schools of thought, in order to make their synthesis possible. The author traces the way in which the initial project of 1944 was progressively questioned and reworked in the wake of political and historical change, philosophical debates and the development of human sciences. This volume appeals to students and researchers while bringing to light the underlying stakes and conceptual innovations of what remains one of the most fertile and original moments in contemporary French philosophy. (shrink)