“Old Black Joe still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows. And everybody knows.” - Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows.” African-Americans and other minorities are suffering disproportionately duri...

La Mettrie shows in his philosophical and medical works, and particularly in Ouvrage de Pénélope, a real interest in the natural sciences of his time and above all in the works of Linnaeus with whom he is the exact contemporary. Even if he speaks ironically about his botanical and zoological classification and criticizes his teleological conception of nature, La Mettrie appreciates the analogical reasoning of Linnaeus which is the fundamental method of the Linnaean apprehension of knowledge, as much as the (...) metaphoric language that he will use in L'homme-plante. From this point of view, La Mettrie is one of the first French popularizers of Linnaeus' works and, at the same time, his first critic. (shrink)

The Covid crisis has revealed profound fragility in advanced societies. And yet antidotes to this fragility exist in biological, cultural and relational fields and allow us to think of a ….

I) Introduction : la phénoménologie expérientielle Depuis la plus haute Antiquité, et dans plusieurs continents, les philosophes, les religieux, les sages, les mystiques mais aussi d’autres humains n’ayant que la prétention de moins mal comprendre ce qu’il en est de leur vie mentale, posent un regard réflexif sur le contenu et l’organisation de la vie de l’esprit. En Occident, une étape décisive fut franchie par Husserl, quand il prit le parti d’une analyse systématique et scientifique des vé...

Summary The Italian naturalist F. Redi established in 1668 that insects are not produced by the way of equivocal generation, contrary to what was affirmed since the Antiquity. For that reason, many historians of sciences acknowledge his experiments, like those of Galileo, Boyle or Huygens, contributed to the scientific revolution that emerges in the seventeenth century in Western Europe. Based on the commentaries sparked off by the works of Redi, in his time and today, our contribution shows on the contrary (...) that nothing at all in his approach reveals such an intention. Questioning without arrogance the knowledge and the authority of the Ancients, careful interrogation of the literariness of the Scriptures, adoption of an experimental reasoning still dependent on the scholastic argumentation, those are the main characteristics of his work. But those also could be the ones of Harvey, Borelli or Swammerdam's works. To defend the idea of a scientific revolution in the life sciences similar in its conditions and tempo to the one described in the history of the physical sciences would be a mistake, not to say an anachronism. (shrink)

The essay on Husserl’s phenomenology of touch in Derrida’s recent On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy represents his only substantial re-engagement with Husserlian phenomenology to be published following the series of texts dating from the period marked by his Mémoire of 1955 through to the essay ‘Form and Meaning’ included in Margins (1972). The essay, devoted to some key sections of Husserl’s Ideas II, appears to break new ground in Derrida’s readings of Husserl, but in fact demonstrates a profound continuity with his earlier (...) readings. In fact, I argue that this continuity is in a part an effect of Derrida’s ongoing commitment to the ‘methodology’ of deconstruction. I show how this commitment leads Derrida to conflate three separate distinctions within Husserl’s discussion, a conflation that obliges Derrida to misread the letter of Husserl’s text, and which, in turn, blinds him to a certain radical potentiality within Husserl’s phenomenology of sensibility. (shrink)

DARWIN’S FUNDAMENTAL INSIGHT is that evolution consists in “ descent with heritable variations that are sifted by natural selection to retain the adaptive changes.” Contemporary Darwinian biology tends to be restricted to an exclusively twofold focus: first, the gene, which is conceived as the basic element of biological reality, and hence of life, to the extent that it represents the fundamental unit of heredity; and second, selection, which is conceived as the sole source of order in biological organisms, to the (...) extent that inherited genetic variations leading to a better adaptation of an organism to its environment are selected to survive within this environment. This focus is fundamentally reductionist and functional. The integrity of the organism is. (shrink)

Les jeux vidéo sont aujourd’hui reconnus par de nombreux cliniciens et chercheurs comme des outils très pertinents dans la prise en charge des enfants et des adolescents. Le présent article a pour objectif de s’inscrire dans la continuité de ces travaux, en cherchant plus précisément à se focaliser sur l’intérêt du médium vidéoludique dans le cadre de la rencontre avec les jeunes souffrant d’un trouble autistique. Ainsi, à travers le récit du début d’une prise en charge psychothérapique individuelle d’un adolescent (...) présentant un autisme de haut niveau, il cherchera à expliquer en quoi le jeu vidéo semble bien être un outil de médiation thérapeutique accompagnant le sujet vers une augmentation de ses interactions avec le thérapeute, offrant au sujet autiste une possibilité de faciliter la mise en relation avec un autre, l’accompagnant vers une possible rencontre intersubjective. (shrink)

This thesis examines the nature of the supplementary relationship between Husserlian phenomenology and deconstruction. Chapter 1 gives an account of the strategies and aims of deconstruction, determining these to be an attempt to respond, using ‘other names’, to the other which is excluded by phenomenology/philosophy in its attempts to master its own limits. In Chapter 2, it is found that alterity is encountered by phenomenology on its own thresholds, informing the genetic turn in phenomenology which is necessitated as a result (...) of the inquiries into the temporal constitution which founds the possibility of an object’s being given as such to consciousness. Furthermore, it is shown how the possibility of the genetic turn resides in the indication relation examined in the phenomenology of signification. Chapter 3 focusses on the deconstruction of phenomenology, and investigates the double movement in phenomenology which the deconstruction reveals, taking time and language as guiding threads. On the one hand, the genetic turn appears to reveal a founding alterity, which, on the other hand, phenomenology strives to suppress in accordance with its adherence to its own ‘principle of principles’. It is argued that the deconstruction aims to accord phenomenological respect to the alterity uncovered by phenomenological descriptions. This is done through thematising certain operative concepts, concepts which remain unthemtised in phenomenology precisely because such thematisation would reveal a founding non-presence intolerable to phenomenology. Deconstruction supplements phenomenology to the extent that it attempts to name, on the fissured margins of phenomenology, the radical alterity uncovered by phenomenology in a way which does not reduce the very otherness of the alterity. However, in the final Chapter, it is argued, from the perspective of Levinas, that Derrida does not in fact manage to find a sense for founding alterity in phenomenology which is ‘beyond metaphysics’. The thesis concludes by arguing that, in order to achieve its strategic aims, as detailed in Chapter 1, the deconstruction of phenomenology needs to be ethically supplemenred, one example of such an ethically supplemented deconstructive reading of Husserl being found in some of the most recent texts of Levinas. (shrink)

The Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Introduction. By Nicolai Sinai. The New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Pp. viii + 242. £90 ; £24.99.

Debating the nature of time, this collection of essays includes both the physicist's and the philosopher's viewpoint, questioning whether time exists, whether it is absolute or relative and whether it is continuous or fragmented.

Summary The Italian naturalist F. Redi established in 1668 that insects are not produced by the way of equivocal generation, contrary to what was affirmed since the Antiquity. For that reason, many historians of sciences acknowledge his experiments, like those of Galileo, Boyle or Huygens, contributed to the scientific revolution that emerges in the seventeenth century in Western Europe. Based on the commentaries sparked off by the works of Redi, in his time and today, our contribution shows on the contrary (...) that nothing at all in his approach reveals such an intention. Questioning without arrogance the knowledge and the authority of the Ancients, careful interrogation of the literariness of the Scriptures, adoption of an experimental reasoning still dependent on the scholastic argumentation, those are the main characteristics of his work. But those also could be the ones of Harvey, Borelli or Swammerdam's works. To defend the idea of a scientific revolution in the life sciences similar in its conditions and tempo to the one described in the history of the physical sciences would be a mistake, not to say an anachronism. (shrink)

One of the earliest examples of articulating the “discordance of time”—a theme that serves as a guiding thread woven throughout much of the re-engagement with time that is characteristic of continental philosophy—can be found in a series of essays written by Levinas in the aftermath of World War II. I show how these essays derive from a set of key texts by Bergson and how Bergson already anticipated the distinctive ways of conceptualizing the movement of time that are advanced by (...) Levinas in his early essays. Nevertheless, as I will show, Levinas chooses not to acknowledge this Bergsonian anticipation of his theory of time, despite his recognition, repeated throughout many texts and interviews, of the influence of Bergson on the formation of his own thought. I conclude by reflecting on the complexity of the Bergsonian inheritance in Levinas's philosophy of time. (shrink)