La morale est un des sujets majeurs de la réflexion de Diderot, où se jouent l’originalité, la pertinence et la praticabilité de sa visée matérialiste. Les questions de morale traversent tous ses textes, des ouvrages philosophiques aux lettres, des récits aux pièces de théâtre, des pamphlets politiques aux Salons, mais, comme le suggèrent les articles rassemblés dans ce dossier, paradoxalement, elles ne font l’objet d’aucun texte synthétique et eles trouvent leurs apparitions les plus consist...

Un des débats les plus intéressants et les plus passionnés qui traversent la période du XVIIè et XVIIIè siècle concerne la finalité et les causes finales. L'importance du sujet se conçoit aisément si l'on songe à l'étendue et à la profondeur de ses implications. Par ses enjeux, le problème concerne les domaines épistémologique, esthétique, métaphysique et théologique. Comment doit-on penser, comprendre et étudier la nature? La philosophie s'interroge alors sur la scientificité non seulement des explications qu'elle donne, mais aussi des (...) questions qu'elle pose. Peut-on encore faire une théodicée, c'est-à-dire justifier d'un ordre final et providentiel de l'univers? La question porte tout autant sur la nature et Dieu que sur les pouvoirs de la raison humaine. L'étude de ces deux siècles de débats permet de comprendre la genèse de nos conceptions contemporaines de la nature. (shrink)

Dès lors que la morale ne se fonde plus dans les commandements divins, la nature pourrait devenir un fondement, une norme et un principe de légitimation. Mais cette substitution d’un fondement à l’autre n’a rien d’une évidence car la nature du matérialiste n’est pas spontanément un principe de sens. Nous analyserons tout d’abord la manière dont se pose la question de l’articulation de la nature et de la morale chez Diderot, en montrant qu’elle peut être liée à des choix d’écriture (...) philosophique. Puis, nous nous demanderons ce qu’est la nature pour Diderot et en quoi on peut dire à la fois qu’il est difficile d’en déduire des vérités morales et qu’elle doit être néanmoins pensée comme norme. Enfin, on s’attachera à montrer comment les textes dialogués et les fictions de Diderot permettent de mettre en scène l’immanence des normes morales et la difficulté de les formuler. (shrink)

L’ère du divertissement n’est pas celle du triomphe, mais bien celle de la misère du jeu. Le jeu est partout, mais la pauvreté spirituelle qui accompagne la dilution du jeu dans n’importe quoi a pour rançon l’appauvrissement ludique maximal. Quand on considère avec attention ce qu’est le jeu dans le monde contemporain, du bingo des marques des supermarchés, aux tuez-les-tous informatiques..

Un des résultats anthropologiques importants du matérialisme de Diderot et de sa critique du finalisme est la description du moi comme irréductiblement multiple. Nous analysons dans cet article les raisons et les conséquences d’une des formulations que Diderot a donnée de cette idée de moi-multiple : « C’est le rapport constant, invariable de toutes les impressions à cette origine commune qui constitue l’unité de l’animal. […] C’est la mémoire de toutes ces impressions successives qui fait pour chaque animal l’histoire de (...) sa vie et de son soi ».One of the most important anthropological results of Diderot’s materialism and his critique of finalism is the description of the self as multiple. This paper attempts to understand the causes and consequences of one of the author’s expressions of this idea of a multiple self : « It is the unvarying constant relation of all impressions to this common origin which constitutes the animal’s unity […]. The memory of all these successive impressions is for every animal the story of his life and his self. ». (shrink)

En 1748, Diderot publie son premier roman, Les Bijoux indiscrets, s’inscrivant dans la veine du conte oriental parodique et libertin à la manière de Crébillon fils. Mais il y a un autre modèle de fiction orientale, celui des Lettres persanes, qui se sert de la trame romanesque pour aborder les débats intellectuels de son temps et mettre en scène les questions philosophiques les plus fondamentales. Trois ans avant la parution du premier volume de l’ Encyclopédie, Diderot expérimente à son tour (...) les possibilités philosophiques de la fiction en inventant une nouvelle forme de philosophie narrative. (shrink)

Un des résultats anthropologiques importants du matérialisme de Diderot et de sa critique du finalisme est la description du moi comme irréductiblement multiple. Nous analysons dans cet article les raisons et les conséquences d’une des formulations que Diderot a donnée de cette idée de moi-multiple: « C’est le rapport constant, invariable de toutes les impressions à cette origine commune qui constitue l’unité de l’animal. [...] C’est la mémoire de toutes ces impressions successives qui fait pour chaque animal l’histoire de sa (...) vie et de son soi ». (shrink)

Propõe o ensino das duas linguagens fundamentais - de Língua Materna e de Matemática - através da argumentação para que se articule o ensino de todas as disciplinas. Ao final, faz uma proposta global de avaliação para a escola, centrada em textos argumentativos, transformando a "cola" consentida em consulta necessária.

Le titre de ce recueil indique trois fonctions et une période. Heureux complément au très beau volume, plus historique, dirigé par Ran Halévi (Le savoir du Prince du Moyen Age aux Lumières, Paris, Fayard, 2002), son intérêt repose sur le jeu permis par cette triade problématique. Du conseiller professionnel au pur littéraire, de nombreux auteurs et textes aux statuts différents sont examinés. Au-delà de la question classique de l’engagement du philosophe dans un domaine qui n’est pas pour lui..

according to Plotinus, it is possible for the soul of the philosopher to follow a way of ascension towards the superior realities. This way is composed of two parts. The first one goes from the sensible world to the Intellect and the second, from the Intellect to the one. In this paper, I investigate the trópos and mēkhanaí, as Plotinus writes in I, 6, necessary to this journey.

Political theory is a field that finds nourishment in others. From economics, history, sociology, psychology, and political science, theorists have drawn a rich repertoire of schemas to parse the social world and make sense of it. With each of these encounters, new subjects are brought into focus as others recede into the background, ushering a change not only in how questions are tackled but also in what questions are thought worth asking.

How can an incomplete and uncertain model of the environment be used to perceive, infer, decide and act efficiently? This is the challenge that both living and artificial cognitive systems have to face. Symbolic logic is, by its nature, unable to deal with this question. The subjectivist approach to probability is an extension to logic that is designed specifically to face this challenge. In this paper, we review a number of frequently encountered cognitive issues and cast them into a common (...) Bayesian formalism. The concepts we review are ambiguities, fusion, multimodality, conflicts, modularity, hierarchies and loops. First, each of these concepts is introduced briefly using some examples from the neuroscience, psychophysics or robotics literature. Then, the concept is formalized using a template Bayesian model. The assumptions and common features of these models, as well as their major differences, are outlined and discussed. (shrink)

Turing’s much debated test has turned 70 and is still fairly controversial. His 1950 paper is seen as a complex and multilayered text, and key questions about it remain largely unanswered. Why did Turing select learning from experience as the best approach to achieve machine intelligence? Why did he spend several years working with chess playing as a task to illustrate and test for machine intelligence only to trade it out for conversational question-answering in 1950? Why did Turing refer to (...) gender imitation in a test for machine intelligence? In this article, I shall address these questions by unveiling social, historical and epistemological roots of the so-called Turing test. I will draw attention to a historical fact that has been only scarcely observed in the secondary literature thus far, namely that Turing’s 1950 test emerged out of a controversy over the cognitive capabilities of digital computers, most notably out of debates with physicist and computer pioneer Douglas Hartree, chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson. Seen in its historical context, Turing’s 1950 paper can be understood as essentially a reply to a series of challenges posed to him by these thinkers arguing against his view that machines can think. Turing did propose gender learning and imitation as one of his various imitation tests for machine intelligence, and I argue here that this was done in response to Jefferson's suggestion that gendered behavior is causally related to the physiology of sex hormones. (shrink)

I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters (...) of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the current debate on how imitation in early Greek epic can be identified and assessed. Two divine scenes in Iliad Book 7 and Odyssey Book 13 are compared in the light of their traditional background and contextual significance. It is suggested that there are grounds to interpret this as a case of imitation on the Odyssey poet’s part which, however, was not necessarily meant to elicit recognition of the subtext. A methodological point is made (...) by showing that it is possible to argue for a specific intertextual relation by considering the traditional techniques involved. (shrink)

Compared with the Greek and Latin fields, the systematic study of the concept of textual criticism in classical India has made little progress, despite the quality of work produced by specialists. And yet research of this nature would probably lead, paradoxically, to a clearer formulation of the aims and methods of modern critical editions of Indian texts.

En el presente ensayo intentaremos exponer algunos aspectos de la crítica de Graeber al capitalismo financiarizado. En el primer apartado introduciremos su concepto de alienación, clave para entender el sentido de su obra. En los apartados posteriores presentaremos las ideas principales que se pueden encontrar en Bullshit Jobs, su último libro. En él expone una teoría de los trabajos basura o inútiles, que considera uno de los pilares fundamentales de la ideología neoliberal, junto con la omnipresencia de la burocracia y (...) la moralidad de la deuda. El fenómeno social de los trabajos basura es estudiado desde diversos niveles: qué son, cómo afectan a los que los realizan, cuáles son las causas económicas y por qué nadie hace nada para acabar con ellos.In the present paper I try to delve into some of Graeber’s critiques of the financialised capitalism. In the first section, I will introduce his idea of alienation, key to understand the sense of his work. In the rest of the paper I will present the main ideas of his last book, Bullshit Jobs. There Graeber presents a theory of bullshit jobs, which he believes to be an important base of the neoliberal system, along with the bureaucracy and the debt. He analyses the social phenomenon of bullshit jobs from different perspectives: what they are, how they affect the people doing them, which are the economic causes and why nothing is done. (shrink)

Resumo Plotino é um pensador estranho para o filósofo contemporâneo: nas suas Enéadas, ele discute experiência mística e prática filosófica como se fosse uma mesma coisa. De fato, no pensamento plotiniano, o ápice da vida filosófica é a contemplação mística: não pensamento irracional, mas uma forma supra-racional de consciência que é alcançada pela prática ascética e pelo procedimento dialético. Este artigo tenta entender o que é a experiência mística em Plotino. Na verdade, uma leitura atenta dos textos das Enéadas que (...) tratam do assunto mostram que não existe apenas um, mas dois tipos de contemplação mística supra-racional: a experiência da alma humana unida ao Intelecto divino e a experiência da alma humana unida ao Um, o princípio supremo da realidade de acordo com a filosofia plotiniana. Ambos são tipos de intuição intelectual interior, mas, se a experiência mística do Intelecto é a contemplação da totalidade do mundo inteligível, a contemplação do Um é a intuição da identidade pura, além de toda a diferença. Palavras-chave: Plotino; Neoplatonismo; Mística.Plotinus is a strange scholar to the contemporary philosopher: in his Enneads, he discusses mystical experience and philosophical practice as if they were the same thing. Indeed, according to his thoughts, the summit of philosophical life is mystical contemplation: not irrational thinking, but a supra-rational form of consciousness achieved through ascetic practice and dialectical procedure. This paper attempts to understand the mystical experience in Plotinus. In fact, a close reading of the texts of the Enneads on the subject demonstrates that there are not only one, but two kinds of supra-rational mystical contemplation: the experience of the human soul united to the divine Intellect and the experience of the human soul united to the One, the supreme principle of reality according to Plotinus's philosophy. Both are kinds of interior intellectual intuition, but if the mystical experience of the Intellect is the contemplation of the whole of the intelligible world, the contemplation of the One is the intuition of pure identity, beyond all difference. Key words: Plotinus; Neo-Platonism; Mysticism. (shrink)

The Turing test has been studied and run as a controlled experiment and found to be underspecified and poorly designed. On the other hand, it has been defended and still attracts interest as a test for true artificial intelligence (AI). Scientists and philosophers regret the test’s current status, acknowledging that the situation is at odds with the intellectual standards of Turing’s works. This article refers to this as the Turing Test Dilemma, following the observation that the test has been under (...) discussion for over seventy years and still is widely seen as either too bad or too good to be a valuable experiment for AI. An argument that solves the dilemma is presented, which relies on reconstructing the Turing test as a thought experiment in the modern scientific tradition. It is argued that Turing’s exposition of the imitation game satisfies Mach’s characterization of the basic method of thought experiments and that Turing’s uses of his test satisfy Popper’s conception of the critical and heuristic uses of thought experiments and Kuhn’s association of thought experiments to conceptual change. It is emphasized how Turing methodically varied the imitation game design to address specific challenges posed to him by other thinkers and how his test illustrates a property of the phenomenon of intelligence and suggests a hypothesis on machine learning. This reconstruction of the Turing test provides a rapprochement to the conflicting views on its value in the literature. (shrink)

Several alternatives vie today for recognition as the most plausible ontology, from physicalism to panpsychism. By and large, these ontologies entail that physical structures circumscribe consciousness by bearing phenomenal properties within their physical boundaries. The ontology of idealism, on the other hand, entails that all physical structures are circumscribed by consciousness in that they exist solely as phenomenality in the first place. Unlike the other alternatives, however, idealism is often considered implausible today, particularly by analytic philosophers. A reason for this (...) is the strong intuition that an objective world transcending phenomenality is a self-evident fact. Other arguments—such as the dependency of phenomenal experience on brain function, the evidence for the existence of the universe before the origin of conscious life, etc.—are also often cited. In this essay, I will argue that these objections against the plausibility of idealism are false. As such, this essay seeks to show that idealism is an entirely plausible ontology. (shrink)

Decision making in any brain is imperfect and costly in terms of time and energy. Operating under such constraints, an organism could be in a position to improve performance if an opportunity arose to exploit informative patterns in the environment being searched. Such an improvement of performance could entail both faster and more accurate (i.e., reward-maximizing) decisions. The present study investigated the extent to which human participants could learn to take advantage of immediate patterns in the spatial arrangement of serially (...) presented foods such that a region of space would consistently be associated with greater subjective value. Eye movements leading up to choices demonstrated rapidly induced biases in the selective allocation of visual fixation and attention that were accompanied by both faster and more accurate choices of desired goods as implicit learning occurred. However, for the control condition with its spatially balanced reward environment, these subjects exhibited preexisting lateralized biases for eye and hand movements (i.e., leftward and rightward, respectively) that could act in opposition not only to each other but also to the orienting biases elicited by the experimental manipulation, producing an asymmetry between the left and right hemifields with respect to performance. Potentially owing at least in part to learned cultural conventions (e.g., reading from left to right), the findings herein particularly revealed an intrinsic leftward bias underlying initial saccades in the midst of more immediate feedback-directed processes for which spatial biases can be learned flexibly to optimize oculomotor and manual control in value-based decision making. The present study thus replicates general findings of learned attentional biases in a novel context with inherently rewarding stimuli and goes on to further elucidate the interactions between endogenous and exogenous biases. (shrink)

The Idea of the World offers a grounded alternative to the frenzy of unrestrained abstractions and unexamined assumptions in philosophy and science today. This book examines what can be learned about the nature of reality based on conceptual parsimony, straightforward logic and empirical evidence from fields as diverse as physics and neuroscience. It compiles an overarching case for idealism - the notion that reality is essentially mental - from ten original articles the author has previously published in leading academic journals. (...) The case begins with an exposition of the logical fallacies and internal contradictions of the reigning physicalist ontology and its popular alternatives, such as bottom-up panpsychism. It then advances a compelling formulation of idealism that elegantly makes sense of - and reconciles - classical and quantum worlds. The main objections to idealism are systematically refuted and empirical evidence is reviewed that corroborates the formulation presented here. The book closes with an analysis of the hidden psychological motivations behind mainstream physicalism and the implications of idealism for the way we relate to the world. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

I argue for an idealist ontology consistent with empirical observations, which seeks to explain the facts of nature more parsimoniously than physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This ontology also attempts to offer more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ or the ‘subject combination problem’, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: spatially unbound consciousness is posited to be nature’s sole ontological primitive. We, as well as (...) all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of this unbound consciousness. The universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of phenomenality surrounding—but dissociated from—our alter. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. As such, the challenge to artificially create individualized consciousness becomes synonymous with the challenge to artificially induce abiogenesis. (shrink)

Résumé Ce compte rendu de Formes de vie de Jacques Fontanille cherche à montrer que l’ouvrage s’inscrit dans une certaine continuité, notamment par rapport à Pratiques sémiotiques, mais qu’il constitue aussi un nouveau tournant, qui fait évoluer la sémiotique et la positionne dans le champ des sciences humaines et sociales. D’abord, nous discutons le fait que, selon Jacques Fontanille, les formes de vie font « vaciller » la frontière entre la nature et la culture. Nous soulignons le fait que Jacques (...) Fontanille développe après Descola, Latour et Lotman les notions de régimes de croyance d’identification, de mode d’existence social et de sémiosphère. Ensuite, l’accent est mis sur le « vivre-avec » comme macro-expérience. Il s’agit de mesurer les conséquences d’un double choix qui permet de dépasser le stade de l’auto-organisation : d’une part, le rapport au monde est médié par l’actant-corps ; d’autre part, l’activité sémiotique consciente d’elle-même est une activité méta-sémiotique. Enfin, il importe d’évaluer la part du culturel dans la constitution des formes de vie. Nous nous interrogeons sur l’« instanciation » des formes de vie dans un lieu et dans un temps déterminés. (shrink)

In 2005, an essay was published in Nature asserting that the universe is mental and that we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things. Since then, experiments have confirmed that — as predicted by quantum mechanics — reality is contextual, which contradicts at least intuitive formulations of realism and corroborates the hypothesis of a mental universe. Yet, to give this hypothesis a coherent rendering, one must explain how a mental universe can — at least in principle — accommodate (...) (a) our experience of ourselves as distinct individual minds sharing a world beyond the control of our volition; and (b) the empirical fact that this world is contextual despite being seemingly shared. By combining a modern formulation of the ontology of idealism with the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, the present paper attempts to provide a viable explanatory framework for both points. In the process of doing so, the paper also addresses key philosophical qualms of the relational interpretation. (shrink)

The present framing of the cultural debate in terms of materialism versus religion has allowed materialism to go unchallenged as the only rationally-viable metaphysics. This book seeks to change this. It uncovers the absurd implications of materialism and then, uniquely, presents a hard-nosed non-materialist metaphysics substantiated by skepticism, hard empirical evidence, and clear logical argumentation. It lays out a coherent framework upon which one can interpret and make sense of every natural phenomenon and physical law, as well as the modalities (...) of human consciousness, without materialist assumptions. According to this framework, the brain is merely the image of a self-localization process of mind, analogously to how a whirlpool is the image of a self-localization process of water. The brain doesn’t generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. It is the brain that is in mind, not mind in the brain. Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness. The book closes with a series of educated speculations regarding the afterlife, psychic phenomena, and other related subjects. (shrink)

El trabajo expone el significado de la obra de Marsilio de Padua, la primera teoría medieval no clerical del Estado. Marsilio se propone combatir la doctrina de la plenitudo potestatis papal, porque la considera causa de la guerra civil en Italia a principios del siglo XIV. Se basa para ello en la unidad de la soberanía, frente al dualismo que caracteriza a otros defensores del poder secular, como Juan de Paris, Ockham o Dante. Sostiene que no existe fundamento espiritual para (...) un poder diferente del poder del legislador humano y que el único poder supremo o plenitudo potestatis no corresponde al Papa sino al gobernante secular. De lo cual se sigue la completa absorción de la Iglesia por el Estado y la atribución al gobernante temporal de toda la organización eclesiástica. La filosofía marsiliana representa un esfuerzo sin precedentes por dar al poder un fundamento racional, pero está lejos de la idea moderna de soberanía, así como del liberalismo y de la voluntad general de Rousseau. No tuvo éxito en su tiempo, pero influyó en la reforma anglicana y en el erastianismo de Hobbes. (shrink)