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

Transmissible cancers are elusive and understudied parasitic life forms caused by malignant clonal cells (nine lineages are known so far). They emerge by completing sequential steps that include breaking cell cooperation, evade anti‐cancer defences and shedding cells to infect new hosts. Transmissible cancers impair host fitness, and their importance as selective force is likely largely underestimated. It is, therefore, crucial to determine how common they might be in the wild. Here, we draw a parallel between the steps required for a (...) transmissible cancer to emerge and the steps required for an intelligent civilisation to emerge in the Milky Way using a modified Drake equation. Using numerical analyses, we estimate the potential number of extant marine and bivalve species in which transmissible cancers might exist. Our results suggest that transmissible cancers are more common than expected, and that new lineages can be found by screening a large number of species. (shrink)

Familial disclosure of genetic information is an important, long-standing ethical issue that still gives rise to much debate. In France, recent legislation has created an innovative and unprecedented procedure that allows healthcare professionals, under certain conditions, to disclose relevant information to relatives of a person carrying a deleterious genetic mutation. This article will analyse how HCPs in two medical genetics clinics have reacted to these new legal provisions and show how their reticence to inform the patients’ relatives on their behalf (...) leads them to use this option sparingly. (shrink)

Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut across various theories and domains of ecology. These assumptions should be clearly addressed, notably for the sake (...) of an effective comparison and integration across domains, and for assessing whether or not to use functional diversity approaches for developing ecological management strategies. The objective of this contribution is to identify and critically analyze the most salient of these assumptions. To this aim, we provide an “epistemic roadmap” that pinpoints these assumptions along a set of historical, conceptual, empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions. (shrink)

Le nouveau livre de Frédéric Brahami montre comment il faut considérer globalement la réaction des penseurs postrévolutionnaires à la Révolution pour saisir la façon dont s’est élaborée la philosophie politique qui est encore la nôtre, pour autant que nous lisions notre actualité politique à la lumière des sciences sociales. Pour fournir les schèmes de notre pensée politique, il a fallu que les critiques contre-révolutionnaires de la modernité politique soient reprises par les progressistes sensibles à la « question sociale ». (...) La pensée sociale du xixe siècle pouvait alors dégager la raison immanente aux mœurs modernes, en découvrant la double nécessité d’en faire l’objet d’une science et de les comprendre politiquement. Au-delà d’une généalogie alternative et stimulante de la politique moderne, c’est tout une philosophie de l’histoire sociale et intellectuelle qui est là engagée, au terme de laquelle nos sociétés démocratiques apparaissent comme ces sociétés qui ne cessent de se réfléchir elles-mêmes en se pensant politiquement. (shrink)

Le nouveau livre de Frédéric Brahami montre comment il faut considérer globalement la réaction des penseurs postrévolutionnaires à la Révolution pour saisir la façon dont s’est élaborée la philosophie politique qui est encore la nôtre, pour autant que nous lisions notre actualité politique à la lumière des sciences sociales. Pour fournir les schèmes de notre pensée politique, il a fallu que les critiques contre-révolutionnaires de la modernité politique soient reprises par les progressistes sensibles à la « question sociale ». (...) La pensée sociale du xixe siècle pouvait alors dégager la raison immanente aux mœurs modernes, en découvrant la double nécessité d’en faire l’objet d’une science et de les comprendre politiquement. Au-delà d’une généalogie alternative et stimulante de la politique moderne, c’est tout une philosophie de l’histoire sociale et intellectuelle qui est là engagée, au terme de laquelle nos sociétés démocratiques apparaissent comme ces sociétés qui ne cessent de se réfléchir elles-mêmes en se pensant politiquement. (shrink)

This paper analyzes community ecologist Charles Elton’s ideas on animal communities, and situates them with respect to the classical opposition between organicist–holistic and individualistic–reductionist ecological views drawn by many historians of ecology. It is argued that Elton espoused a moderate ecological holism, which drew a middle way between the stricter ecological holism advocated by organicist ecologists and the merely aggregationist views advocated by some of their opponents. It is also argued that Elton’s moderate ecological holism resonated with his preference for (...) analogies between ecological communities and human societies over more common ones between communities and individual organisms. I discuss, on the one hand, how the functionalist-interactionist approach to community ecology introduced by Elton entailed a view of ecological communities as more or less self-maintaining functionally organized wholes, and how his ideas on this matter were incorporated into their views by organicist ecologists Frederic Clements, Victor Shelford, and Warder C. Allee et al. On the other hand, I identify some important divergences between Elton’s ecological ideas and those of organicist ecologists. Specifically, I show how Elton’s ideas on species distribution, animal migrations, and ecological succession entailed a view of animal communities as exhibiting a weaker degree of part-whole integration than that attributed to them by Clements and Shelford; and how Elton’s mixed stance on the balance of nature idea and his associated views on community stability attributed to communities a weaker form of self-regulation than that attributed to them by Allee et al. (shrink)

Un passage biffé d’une lettre à Antoine Arnauld du 14 janvier 1688 rappelle un projet ancien chez Leibniz, celui d’augmenter l’extension de la logique démonstrative. Il écrit : « votre Art de penser contient déjà de belles méditations, qu’on peut augmenter et pousser plus avant ». Le compliment est évidemment fort ambigu, et rappelle la fonction que Leibniz donne parfois à des auteurs appartenant grosso modo au même espace intellectuel que Descartes ou Pascal, c’est-à-dire celle d’avoir comme...

L’histoire du couple formé par Amélie et Frédéric Ozanam n’est pas une page blanche : Frédéric Ozanam est l’un des fondateurs des sociétés de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, associations de patronage qui ont contribué à façonner le paysage charitable de Paris au xixe siècle. Cette notoriété a contribué, ces dernières années, à porter l’attention sur la place et l’influence d’Amélie Ozanam, sa femme, dans les activités charitables et intellectuelles de cette figure du catholicisme « romantique », pour...

To fulfill their crucial duty of relieving suffering in their patients, physicians may have to administer palliative sedation when they implement treatment-limitation decisions such as the withdrawal of life-supporting interventions in patients with poor prognosis chronic severe brain injury. The issue of palliative sedation deserves particular attention in adults with serious brain injuries and in neonates with severe and irreversible brain lesions, who are unable to express pain or to state their wishes. In France, treatment limitation decisions for these patients (...) are left to the physicians. Treatment-limitation decisions are made collegially, based on the presence of irreversible brain lesions responsible for chronic severe disorders of consciousness. Before these decisions are implemented, they are communicated to the relatives. Because the presence and severity of pain cannot be assessed in these patients, palliative analgesia and/or sedation should be administered. However, palliative sedation is a complex strategy that requires safeguards to prevent a drift toward hastening death or performing covert euthanasia. In addition to the law on patients' rights at the end of life passed in France on April 22, 2005, a recent revision of Article 37 of the French code of medical ethics both acknowledges that treatment-limitation decisions and palliative sedation may be required in patients with severe brain injuries and provides legal and ethical safeguards against a shift towards euthanasia. This legislation may hold value as a model for other countries where euthanasia is illegal and for countries such as Belgium and Netherlands where euthanasia is legal but not allowed in patients incapable of asking for euthanasia but in whom a treatment limitation decision has been made. (shrink)

En l’espace de quasiment deux siècles, la profession d’avocat a connu des bouleversements considérables. Le bâtonnier et le conseil de l’Ordre existent toujours, mais la déontologie et la discipline ont été largement modifiées. Après un âge d’or de l’avocat plaidant jusqu’à la Première Guerre mondiale, le barreau a dû ensuite se remettre en question. Il a d’abord lentement évolué avant d’être réformé en deux temps entre 1971 et 1991. Depuis, il ne cesse de s’interroger sur ce qui fait son identité (...) et il se demande aujourd’hui quel avenir l’attend. Mais il doit être le premier acteur de son destin futur. (shrink)

This paper addresses the use of noun-class markers in Tagbana from the perspective of a cognitively-inspired approach based on Langacker’s (2000. Grammar and conceptualization. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter) semiological principle. Drawing on this basic tenet of Cognitive Grammar according to which the symbolic function of language consists in making speakers’ conceptualizations auditorily or visually perceptible, it demonstrates that in syntactic constructions composed of ‘noun-stem+noun-class marker’ and ‘noun-class marker+identifier’, noun-class markers fulfil the semantic function of making explicit the (...) way the speaker conceives of the experiential entity referred to in the utterance.This view goes beyond form-centred functions such as referent-tracking to include the signifying of complex conceptualizations involving more than one noun-class marker with the same noun-stem, as well as the discourse functions of indicating topicality, insistence on a referent’s existence and contrastive focus. (shrink)

Deux décennies après les premières vagues de démocratisation en Afrique, le temps n'est-il pas venu d'instruire le " procès " de la démocratie ?

In the present article I attribute to the common topic in the Rhetoric a two-fold suggestive function and a guarantee function. These three functions are possible because this type of topic, while often quite abstract, nevertheless contains thought-steering, substantial terms, and formulates a generally empirical or normative endoxon. Assuming that according to Aristotle an enthymeme has at least two premises, it would appear that a common topic is the abstract principle behind the often implicit major premise. This means that the (...) topic may be regarded as the – generalizing – if-then statement in a modern argumentation scheme. Therefore it should be possible to see the enthymemes of Rhetoric 2.23 as a combination of a logical argument form (which can usually be reconstructed as modus ponens) and an argumentation scheme – even though we may not attribute this idea to Aristotle himself. (shrink)

We argue that a fashionable interpretation of the theory of natural selection as a claim exclusively about populations is mistaken. The interpretation rests on adopting an analysis of fitness as a probabilistic propensity which cannot be substantiated, draws parallels with thermodynamics which are without foundations, and fails to do justice to the fundamental distinction between drift and selection. This distinction requires a notion of fitness as a pairwise comparison between individuals taken two at a time, and so vitiates the interpretation (...) of the theory as one about populations exclusively. (shrink)

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

The Rhetoric to Alexander (about 340 B.C.) contains a list of proofs (pisteis) and other types of argumentation which may be seen as the oldest surviving typology of argumentation schemes (avant la lettre). In the present article this typology is derived and compared with modern proposals. The conclusion is that the oldest typology is surprisingly similar to the most recent classifications.

The lasting effects of the debate over canon-formation during the 1980s affected the whole field of Humanities, which became increasingly engaged in interrogating the origin and function of the Western canon. In philosophy, a great deal of criticism was, as a result, directed at the traditional narrative of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophies—a critique informed by postcolonialism as well as feminist historiography. D. F. Norton, L. Loeb and many others1 attempted to demonstrate the weaknesses of the tripartite division between rationalism, empiricism and (...) critical philosophy.2 As time went on, symptoms of dissatisfaction with what has... (shrink)

Spiritualism designates a philosophy that lays claim to the separation of mind and body and the ontological and epistemological primacy of the former. In France, it is associated with the names of Victor Cousin and René Descartes, or more precisely with what Cousin made of Descartes as the founding father of a brittle rational psychology, closed off from the positive sciences, and as a critic in respect to the empiricist legacy of the idéologues. Moreover, by considering merely the end result, (...) severed from its polemical genesis, we are prevented from understanding how the category of experience constituted a crucial question for spiritualism itself. Through returning to the origin of these discussions in the 1826 preface to Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques, this essay pursues a threefold path: to show that the public birth of Cousinian spiritualism coincides with the affirmation of applying the experimental method, issuing from Bacon, to the study of facts of consciousness; that Cousin’s later evolution follows a process of radicalization—that is, in this context, of ontologization and of reduction; and that by recovering this genesis, we can distinguish many forms of spiritualisms committed to the experimental method, both in alliance with the early Cousin and against the later Cousin. In this way, we can rediscover the interwoven philosophical links, lost in the process of institutionalization, between metaphysical demands and empiricist concerns, or between “French” philosophy and the legacy of Condillac. (shrink)

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

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

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

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

As a singular witness and actor of the tumultuous 20th century, Ernst Jünger remains a controversial and enigmatic figure known above all for his vivid autobiographical accounts of experience in the trenches of the First World War. This article will argue that throughout his entire oeuvre, from personal diaries to novels and essays, he never ceased to grapple with what he viewed as the central question of the age, namely that of the problem of nihilism and the means to overcome (...) it. Inherited from Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Western civilization in the late 19th century, to which he added an acute observation of the particular role of technology within it, Jünger would employ this lens to make sense of the seemingly absurd industrial slaughter of modern war and herald the advent of a new voluntarist and bellicist order that was to imminently sweep away timorous and decadent bourgeois societies obsessed with security and self-preservation. Jünger would ultimately see his expectations dashed, including by the forms of rule that National Socialism would take, and eventually retreated into a reclusive quietism. Yet he never abandoned his central problematique of nihilism, developing it further in exchanges with Martin Heidegger after the Second World War. And for all the ways in which he may have erred, his life-long struggle with meaning in the age of technique and its implications for war and security continues to make Jünger a valuable interlocutor of the present. (shrink)

Which properties are characteristic of the enthymeme in Aristotle's Rhetoric? There is no consensus on this point. The present discussion centres on three properties. 1. Is there always an implicit premise? (Answer: Above all, a pragmatic level and a logical level must be distinguished.) 2. Do the premises consist by definition of probabilities and signs? (Answer: No.). 3. Are all enthymemes reducible to a syllogistic form? (Answer: The literature pertaining to this question is dominated by a false dilemma: an enthymeme (...) does not have either a topical or a syllogistic structure). In general, Aristotle's approach to the enthymeme in the Rhetoric appears to shift from argumentation theory to logic. (shrink)

Examines the theories of translation by German romantics in the early 19th century, from Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and A.W. Schlegel to Schleiermacher, and compares them briefly to the contemporary, but contrasting, theories by Herder, ...

Dans un monde dominé par les conflits, il arrive qu’il faille se défendre. L’invention des armes a évolué en parallèle avec le savoir technique, puis scientifique, et il est même arrivé que la recherche d’applications militaires ait joué un rôle moteur dans la découverte scientifique. Lorsque les armes ne servent pas à attaquer d’autres nations, leur fabrication et leur commerce se justifient morale- ment. Il faut cependant qu’elles ne puissent échapper à ceux qui les construisent et doivent en contrôler la (...) diffusion. Facilement mise en œuvre, la guerre utilisant des organismes vivants ou ce qu’ils pro- duisent comme armes est très ancienne. Or l’originalité des êtres vivants est qu’ils se multiplient, qu’un seul individu suffit à recouvrir la Terre de ses descendants. La biologie ne se prête jamais à un usage militaire moralement défendable parce que le confinement au champ de bataille est impossible. De ce fait, les applications de la biologie ont été vite écartées du domaine de la Défense permise par les traités internationaux. La Convention de 1972 sur l’Interdiction des Armes Biologiques et à Toxines (CIABT), entrée en vigueur en 1975, est aujourd’hui signée par 183 pays (ratifiée par 175) sur un total de 193, sans compter Taïwan qui l’a ratifiée mais n’est pas reconnu par l’ONU. Elle interdit la mise au point, la fabrication, l’acquisition, le transfert, la conservation, le stockage et l’utilisation des armes bio- logiques et à toxines. Elle constitue un élément essentiel de la lutte contre la prolifération des armes de destruction massive. (shrink)

Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole were philosophers and theologians associated with Port-Royal Abbey, a centre of the Catholic Jansenist movement in seventeenth-century France. Their enormously influential Logic or the Art of Thinking, which went through five editions in their lifetimes, treats topics in logic, language, theory of knowledge and metaphysics, and also articulates the response of 'heretical' Jansenist Catholicism to orthodox Catholic and Protestant views on grace, free will and the sacraments. In attempting to combine the categorical theory of (...) the proposition with a Cartesian account of knowledge, their Logic represents the classical view of judgment which inspired the modern transformation in logic and semantic theory by Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and recent philosophers. This edition presents a new translation of the text, together with a historical introduction and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

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

Les théoriciens du droit se heurtent sans cesse à la question élémentaire de leur matière, celle de la définition du droit, plus précisément de sa délimitation par rapport à ce qui contraint sans en être et par rapport à ce qui y ressemble fort mais ne contraint pas de la même manière . En s’attachant dans sa thèse à la norme sociale de conduite saisie par le droit, Samuel Benisty prend en considération ce deuxième versant de la question et cherche (...) à démontrer que certains concepts du droit privé doivent être reconsidérés grâce à la prise en compte des normes sociales de conduite, qui constitueraient un système de normes à part entière.S. Benisty entend d’abord, dans la première partie de la thèse, établir un concept de norme qui lui permette de mener à bien son projet. Il considère en effet que le concept de norme le plus largement accepté parmi .. (shrink)

Building upon a non-standard understanding of evolutionary process focusing on variation and persistence, I will argue that communities and ecosystems can evolve by natural selection as emergent individuals. Evolutionary biology has relied ever increasingly on the modeling of population dynamics. Most have taken for granted that we all agree on what is a population. Recent work has reexamined this perceived consensus. I will argue that there are good reasons to restrict the term “population” to collections of monophyletically related replicators and (...) interactors, which explains why many existing models in population biology exclude by definition many genuine evolving biological individuals such as communities and ecosystems. By studying a case of community evolution, we will see that it is variation that is important to evolutionary processes, not populations. Variation within a population is only one of many types of variation that can lead to evolution by natural selection. The upshot of focusing on variation is that cases of community and ecosystem adaptive change become tractable in evolutionary terms. I will show that complex emergent individuals such as communities and ecosystems cannot be fully accommodated by conventional population/reproduction models but can be accommodated by variation/persistence models. (shrink)