Background The prioritization protocols for accessing adult critical care in the extreme pandemic context contain tiebreaker criteria to facilitate decision-making in the allocation of resources between patients with a similar survival prognosis. Besides being controversial, little is known about the public acceptability of these tiebreakers. In order to better understand the public opinion, Quebec and Ontario’s protocols were presented to the public in a democratic deliberation during the summer of 2022. Objectives (1) To explore the perspectives of Quebec and Ontario (...) citizens regarding tiebreakers, identifying the most acceptable ones and their underlying values. (2) To analyze these results considering other public consultations held during the pandemic on these criteria. Methods This was an exploratory qualitative study. The design involved an online democratic deliberation that took place over two days, simultaneously in Quebec and Ontario. Public participants were selected from a community sample which excluded healthcare workers. Participants were first presented the essential components of prioritization protocols and their related issues (training session day 1). They subsequently deliberated on the acceptability of these criteria (deliberation session day 2). The deliberation was then subject to thematic analysis. Results A total of 47 participants from the provinces of Quebec (n = 20) and Ontario (n = 27) took part in the online deliberation. A diverse audience participated excluding members of the healthcare workforce. Four themes were identified: (1) Priority to young patients - the life cycle - a preferred tiebreaker; (2) Randomization - a tiebreaker of last resort; (3) Multiplier effect of most exposed healthcare workers - a median acceptability tiebreaker, and (4) Social value – a less acceptable tiebreaker. Conclusion Life cycle was the preferred tiebreaker as this criterion respects intergenerational equity, which was considered relevant when allocating scarce resources to adult patients in a context of extreme pandemic. Priority to young patients is in line with other consultations conducted around the world. Additional studies are needed to further investigate the public acceptability of tiebreaker criteria. (shrink)

Montesquieu: politics and history.--Rousseau: the social contract.--Marx's relation to Hegel.

Louis Pojman and Robert Westmoreland have compiled the best material on the subject of equality, ranging from classical works by Aristotle, Hobbes and Rousseau to contemporary works by John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, Michael Walzer, Harry Frankfurt, Bernard Williams and Robert Nozick; and including such topics as: the concept of equality; equal opportunity; Welfare egalitarianism; resources; equal human rights and complex equality.

Ces cours d'Althusser sur le Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité ont été prononcés en 1972 à l'Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d'Ulm dans le cadre de la préparation à l'agrégation de philosophie. Ils sont intéressants à double titre: ils ont engendré une génération nouvelle de rousseauistes, attentifs non seulement aux idées de Rousseau mais aussi à ses concepts enfouis sous des métaphores, sous des personnages, sous des situations romanesques. Une nouvelle façon d'aborder la rigueur théorique de Rousseau (...) au-dessous de ses apparentes rêveries et élans sentimentaux a été ainsi mise en oeuvre. En second lieu, on découvre à présent que les thèses du " dernier Althusser " sur le matérialisme aléatoire, sur la nécessité de rompre avec le déterminisme strict des théories de l'histoire afin d'apporter une nouvelle philosophie " pour " Marx, étaient en chantier bien avant 1985, dans cette lecture de Rousseau treize ans auparavant, qui introduit sous le texte rousseauiste les notions de vide, d'accident, de contingence nécessaire, de reprise. (shrink)

Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First, they gave rise to a new generation of Rousseau scholars, attentive not just to Rousseau's ideas, but also to those of his concepts that were buried beneath metaphors or fictional situations and characters. Second, we are now discovering that the "late Althusser's" theses about aleatory materialism and the need to (...) break with the strict determinism of theories of history in order to devise a new philosophy "for Marx" were being worked out well before 1985 in this reading of Rousseau dating from twelve years earlier, which introduces into Rousseau's text the ideas of the void, the accident, the take, and the necessity of contingency. (shrink)

1. De Genève à l'Hermitage, 1712-1757.--2. De Montmorency au Val de Travers, 1757-1765.--3. De l'île de Saint-Pierre à Ermenonville, 1765-1778.

La psychologie de Jean-Jacques Rousseau / par Louis Proal,... Date de l'édition originale: 1923 Le présent ouvrage s'inscrit dans une politique de conservation patrimoniale des ouvrages de la littérature Française mise en place avec la BNF. HACHETTE LIVRE et la BNF proposent ainsi un catalogue de titres indisponibles, la BNF ayant numérisé ces oeuvres et HACHETTE LIVRE les imprimant à la demande. Certains de ces ouvrages reflètent des courants de pensée caractéristiques de leur époque, mais qui seraient aujourd'hui (...) jugés condamnables. Ils n'en appartiennent pas moins à l'histoire des idées en France et sont susceptibles de présenter un intérêt scientifique ou historique. Le sens de notre démarche éditoriale consiste ainsi à permettre l'accès à ces oeuvres sans pour autant que nous en cautionnions en aucune façon le contenu. Pour plus d'informations, rendez-vous sur www.hachettebnf.fr. (shrink)

John Rawls’ The Law of Peoples has typically been read as an intervention in the field of ‘global justice’. In this paper, I offer a different and widely overlooked interpretation. I argue that The Law of Peoples is a secular theodicy. Rawls wants to show that the 'great evils' of history do not condemn humankind by using a secularised form of moral faith to search for signs that the social world allows for the possibility of perfect justice. There are, I (...) show, striking homologies between this argument and the Christian theodicy that Rawls wrote in 1942, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith. Perhaps more significantly, I draw out how there is, as Rawls himself appears to acknowledge, an intimate relationship between this redemptive project and Rawls' idealistic and moralistic approach to political philosophy. (shrink)

The possibility of collective action is essential to human freedom. Yet, as Rousseau famously argued, individuals acting together allow themselves to depend on one another’s choices and thereby jeopardize one another’s freedom. These two facts jointly constitute what I call the normative problem of collective action. I argue that solving this problem is harder than it looks. It cannot be done merely in terms of moral obligations; indeed, it ultimately requires putting in place a full-fledged system of contract rights. (...) The point has important ramifications for contract theory. The role that contract rights play in reconciling collective action and freedom turns out to be crucial to understanding how—and by whom—these rights can legitimately be enforced. It also explains why expectation damages should be the standard remedy for breach of contract. (shrink)

Nos sociétés recherchent des principes d'action, en particulier de législation, dont la justice ne soit pas fondée uniquement sur le fait qu'ils sont énoncés dans un code. Où chercher cette légitimité qui échappe à l'arbitraire du moment? L'histoire a décliné ses références: le consentement populaire, la tradition, le génie du peuple, la décision, l'idéal commun, la raison, la religion... L'expression droit naturel a souvent cristallisé cet enseignement du passé, mais la formule a-t-elle encore un sens aujourd'hui? En d'autres termes, faut-il (...) en relancer l'histoire? "Il s'agit donc de signifier une exigence peu commune, quelque chose comme une normativité pure. J'y verrais volontiers une entreprise pluriséculaire et, de ce point de vue, les contributions ici offertes au titre d'une histoire du concept vaudraient pour nous aussi bien comme la mise en scène d'un travail du concept.". Le comité éditorial, réuni aux Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, a sollicité, de part et d'autre de l'Atlantique, la contribution de quinze auteurs afin qu'ils exposent ici le sens et la portée que les grandes figures de la philosophie du droit, de l'Antiquité à la Modernité, attribuent au concept de droit naturel. Précédés d'un Grand angle qui les resitue sur la ligne du temps, ces différents Focus sont suivis de quatre Contre-jours qui les synthétisent dans une relecture chaque fois particulière. Après Platon, Aristote, Cicéron, Augustin, al Fârâbî, Maïmonide, Thomas d'Aquin, Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, et Hegel, nous voici invités, juristes et philosophes, à affronter les mêmes questions qu'eux. (shrink)

Translated into English for the first time, Dark Side of the Light scrutinizes Condorcet’s Reflections on Negro Slavery and the works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot side by side with the Code Noir (the royal document that codified ...

S'approprier un lieu pour l'habiter est un acte fondamental de l'homme. Mais ce que nous sommes, il nous faut aussi apprendre à le faire nôtre, en découvrant, exerçant et habitant nos possibilités. Cet espace intérieur est-il essentiellement celui de ma solitude, où nul autre ne peut pénétrer, ou peut-il être celui d'une hospitalité, un vide central où Dieu vient demeurer? Dans la continuité d'une tradition qui remonte à la Bible, nos diverses demeures (chambre, appartement, maison, temple, château...) ont permis de (...) figurer et de décrire l'intériorité humaine. Il s'agit de schèmes variés, tantôt pour explorer, tantôt pour construire notre personnalité, et par là pour penser le jeu de nos forces et de nos désirs, le déploiement de nos pensées et de nos actes, et en dégager des lois, selon une topique, du mot qui signifie la disposition des lieux. Une rupture et un renversement marquent cette histoire. La topique chrétienne, largement méconnue, forme un modèle diversifié et approfondi au long des siècles, lequel pose l'identité humaine comme habitable par une autre présence que la nôtre. A partir de la Renaissance, et depuis Montaigne jusqu'à Rousseau et Kant, tout comme dans la poésie et le roman, elle tend à s'effacer, avec son horizon mystique, au profit d'un face-à-face avec moi-même, tout en usant des mêmes schèmes. Ainsi se fondent l'identité moderne et la subjectivité. A travers la pensée de nombreux auteurs, de saint Augustin à sainte Thérèse d'Avila, d'Origène à Dante, de Baudelaire à Freud, ce livre décrit et médite, selon une généalogie, un axe oublié de la pensée de l'identité, lourd de questions toujours aiguës. (shrink)

La philosophie de langue française commence avec Montaigne. Après le latin, le français devient une langue philosophique majeure, caractérisée par la clarté, l'économie des mots, l'élégance et la simplicité. Cet ouvrage présente en premier lieu les six grands livres, véritables événements, qui constituent les clefs pour comprendre la philosophie française, les Essais de Montaigne, le Discours de la méthode de Descartes, La Recherche de la vérité de Malebranche, Le Contrat social de Rousseau, L'Evolution créatrice de Bergson et L'Etre et (...) le Néant de Sartre. Il examine ensuite les grands courants philosophiques, en raison de leur rapport à la métaphysique. Les courants antimétaphysiques sont surtout ceux de la philosophie des Lumières. Les courants étrangers à la métaphysique sont les moralistes français, la tradition épistémologique et la phénoménologie. Les courants métaphysiques sont caractérisés d'abord par la tradition classique, puis le spiritualisme du XIXe siècle, le bergsonisme, la philosophie de l'esprit, la philosophie de l'existence et la philosophie de la vie. (shrink)

Louis Althusser is the blemish on the field of political theory. His barely explored and partly forgotten contributions are nonetheless formative for contemporary critical thought. Interestingly, at their very core his interventions are based on his own extensive readings of early modern political thought. Therefore, this study traces Althusser's readings of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu and is the first to do so. Building on this, the study demonstrates how Althusser's new foundation of Marxism, which is very (...) much alive today, arises from this part of his work. Thereby, it becomes visible how the post-Marxist paradigm, which Althusser's many important students further developed, is formed through his readings of the classic thinkers of the bourgeois state. (shrink)

What did Rousseau's readers mean when they called him an ‘Epicurean’? A seemingly simple question with complex implications. This article attempts to answer it by reconstructing Rousseau's contemporary reception as an Epicurean thinker. First, it surveys the earliest and most widely read critics of the second Discourse: Prussian Astronomer Royal Jean de Castillon, Jesuit priest Louis Bertrand Castel, and Hanoverian biblical scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus. These readers branded Rousseau an Epicurean primarily to highlight his atheism, his (...) anti-providential and materialist natural philosophy. Then, it discusses Genevan pastor Jacob Vernet's positive assessment of Rousseau as a critic of ‘fashionable’ Epicureanism, before reconstructing Rousseau's critique of the reception of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man as an Epicurean text. These sources elucidate Rousseau's engagement with a range of ideas and argumentative positions that would inform his later self-identification as a ‘refined’ Epicurean. In particular, they highlight his interest in how a sentimental awareness of beauty might mitigate the potentially vicious effects of hedonism. The article concludes with novelist Mme. de Genlis’ critique of Rousseau's Wise Materialism, using his thoughts on the imagination to suggest some of the ways the neglected aesthetic dimensions of Rousseau's reception of Epicureanism might be developed. (shrink)

Mit Montesquieu und Voltaire gehört Jean-Jacques Rousseau zu den französischen Autoren des 18. Jahrhunderts, die einen großen Teil der Lektürezeit des jungen Alexis de Tocqueville eingenommen und die sein Denken zumindest beeinflusst haben. In einem Brief an Louis de Kergorlay aus dem Jahr 1836, schreibt Tocqueville seinem Freund, dass es drei Menschen gibt, mit denen er jeden Tag lebt, nämlich Pascal (s. Kap. 37), Montesquieu (s. Kap. 36) und Rousseau (OC XIII, 1, 418). Tocqueville liest diese Autoren (...) nicht nur wegen ihrer Gedanken, sondern auch wegen ihres Stils. Setzt er auch Voltaire in dieser Hinsicht an die erste Stelle, so zeigt er doch auch eine große Bewunderung für den Stil Rousseaus, vor allem in den Confessions (OC VI, 2, 346). (shrink)

Mit Montesquieu und Voltaire gehört Jean-Jacques Rousseau zu den französischen Autoren des 18. Jahrhunderts, die einen großen Teil der Lektürezeit des jungen Alexis de Tocqueville eingenommen und die sein Denken zumindest beeinflusst haben. In einem Brief an Louis de Kergorlay aus dem Jahr 1836, schreibt Tocqueville seinem Freund, dass es drei Menschen gibt, mit denen er jeden Tag lebt, nämlich Pascal, Montesquieu und Rousseau. Tocqueville liest diese Autoren nicht nur wegen ihrer Gedanken, sondern auch wegen ihres Stils. (...) Setzt er auch Voltaire in dieser Hinsicht an die erste Stelle, so zeigt er doch auch eine große Bewunderung für den Stil Rousseaus, vor allem in den Confessions. (shrink)

This informative and thought-provocating book gives an intimate portrait of two major 18th-century French philosophers famous for their influence over modern aesthetics. Their personal reflexions on art, beauty and inventive genius are vividly presented in the context of Parisian artistic institutions during the reigns of Louis XIV, XV and XVI. The book offers a refreshing perspective into the pre-Revolutionary movement of the Enlightenment promoted by Diderot and the pre-Romantic sensibility modelled by Rousseau. This look back into the 18th (...) century is very suggestive in regards to the current philosophies of art and may raise new answers to old questions. (shrink)

Theory, theoretical practice, and theoretical formation -- On theoretical work -- Philosophy and the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists (1967) -- Lenin and philosophy -- Is it simple to be a Marxist in philosophy? -- The transformation of philosophy -- Marxism today.

This paper demonstrates how ideology plays a major, but previously neglected role in Rousseau's treatment of politics in the Social Contract. Specifically, it shows how a number of key elements in his line of argument come close to ideology criticism as it is conceived in Louis Althusser's theory of ideological state apparatuses. This is the case not just in relation to the distinction between general will and particular will, but also in relation to such concepts as property and (...) social contract. However, the paper also demonstrates how this pre-Marxist understanding of ideology co-exists in the text with a different and more primitive understanding of ideology which is incompatible with Marxism and which points back to Rousseau's previous discourse on the origins of inequality. The paper concludes that while there are definitely elements in Rousseau's text which point toward a future development of the theme of ideology in Marxist theory, the Social Contract on the whole is characterized by heterogeneity on this topic. (shrink)

Treating mathematical science as a distinct cultural entity subject to environmental factors which influence its evolution, the author examines the creation and development of its major concepts since early times.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 41-50 [Access article in PDF] Encounter Between Hyper-Media and Art Education:A Retrospection of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Memories of Art and EducationToday both art and education are experiencing profound change as a result of emerging technologies. This essay attempts to redefine art education by considering the latest media art as the culmination of change in art. Statements about art education are only (...) viable in the meta-context of art, as art education must start with the work to objectify, as well as structure, "art." Atthe same time, these meta-statements can cast light on the "foundation" of art.Attempts to view the totality of art up to the present time from the "end" of history (meta) and questioning of the "beginning" of art and mankind (foundation) are two sides of the same phenomenon.Media art is an example of this phenomenon which reflects both the meta-context and foundation of art. For example, the work of Jean-Louis Boissier boasts both a radical as well as refined image. 1 His exhibition, "Salle Rousseau" further extends the scale of his conventional work based on the texts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 2 This essay revises the text written for the catalogue for the exhibition and aims at analyzing the close relationship between media art and art education, sketching the phases of [End Page 41] meta-statements and foundations which emerge as a result of the interaction of art, media, and education. A Place for Retrospection Boissier's work is well-known for its references to Rousseau. Having been involved in art education, it was natural for me to develop a strong interest in Rousseau, whom I consider to be a founder of modern art and education. The fact that the Boissier's exhibition was held at the "Kyoto Art Centre" in Muromachi, Kyoto supports this belief. Kyoto was the first place in Japan where primary schools based on the school district system were introduced. The Kyoto Art Centre is located at the former Meirin Primary School which was founded at the dawn of modern Japanese education. In its turn, Meirin Primary School succeeded Shingaku-juku. 3 Thus, the location for the BoissierExhibition, dating back to the very beginning of education in Japan, is a place that encourages reflection on the past.While Boissier recollects Rousseau with his unique interactive texts, Rousseau recollects his own past. We, the spectators, are immersed in multiple layers of memories and recollections. Sometimes, however, Rousseau's recollections break through the intricacy and multiple layers and appear to achieve a rapport with the people and flowers which once existed. I have long been attracted by the fresh literal expressions particularly evident in "The Confessions" and other works. The beauty of such expressions must have been born from his affectionate view of nature as illustrated by his hobby of plant collection. View of Nature I cannot help recalling Rousseau whenever I think about the relationship between nature and mankind. Rousseau was a person who could talk beautifully about the direct relationship between nature and mankind. In his writings of "Les riveries du promeneur solitaire" and "Quoted Passage," Rousseau recollects his peaceful life on St. Pierre Island in Lake Bieler in Switzerland where he spent nearly one and a half months after being deported from France as well as his hometown, Geneva because of problems caused by the publication of The Social Contract and Emile. For me, this text is inseparable from the looped image of shallow water which forms the background of the work entitled Flora petrinsularis (1993 and 1994) by Boissier.The beautiful text by Rousseau captivates us without any external help and, at the same time, shows what nature meant to him. The relationship with nature described here is the food as well as foundation of his life. This attitude of accepting nature in the deepest part of his mind is pure agreement with nature as pointed out by Jean Starobinski and represents an experience of fusion... (shrink)

Empathy remains poorly understood, under-theorized, and subject to conflicting and opportunistic uses. Its systematic role in human experience has not been analyzed and interpreted from top to bottom. In this book, the author attempts to provide such an analysis in the philosophical traditions of hermeneutics, phenomenology, analytic philosophy of language, and psychoanalysis. applying his interpretation of empathy to the philosophical issues of intentionality, the emotions, and the checkered transformations of empathy itself. In doing so the author aims to rescue empathy (...) from the margins of intelligibility and reveal its central role in our understanding of the emotions, the integrity of our relations with others, and human community (“intersubjectivity”). -/- The work draws on both the Anglo-American (“analytic”) tradition of ordinary language philosophy and the continental ones of phenomenology and hermeneutics. This work follows the movement of empathy from the periphery of ethics, aesthetics, and theory of mind to a key place in establishing and maintaining the integrity and emotional equilibrium of dynamic interrelations with other individuals. Beginning with the philosophical infrastructure of the hermeneutics of empathy, this work thoroughly explains the complex architecture of empathy, tracing it downward through the levels of authentic human interrelations, empathy with unexpressed emotions, the empathic penetrability of cognitively impenetrable affect, the first-ever intentional analysis of both the empathizer and the “empathasand” in interrelation, and the hermeneutic infrastructure. The consequences of empathy are exposed in the context of the emotions, cognitive impenetrability, empathy and altruism, and the intentionality of empathy as accessed through language and story telling. Drawing on the multi-method approach of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and story telling, this work demonstrates that empathy forms the foundation for community in ways not clearly appreciated in the on-going debate. In a bootstrap operation that is guided by Heidegger’s call for a “special hermeneutic of empathy,” this work achieves a delicate balancing act of unpacking the rich intellectual traditions from which empathy - the phenomenon itself, not the concept - emerged historically. The result is an exposure of the deep structure of empathy as a fundamentally human capability for creating possibilities of community and human relations. (shrink)

Este artigo examina a ideia de consciência no Emílio de J.-J. Rousseau a partir de uma perspectiva que combina história da filosofia e história lexical. A análise é contextualizada tanto em relação a outros escritos do autor, sobretudo o Discurso sobre a origem da desigualdade, quanto no interior do quadro histórico das ciências nos séculos XVII e XVIII, com atenção para a teoria empirista de John Locke. Busca-se investigar o processo de constituição semântica de “conscience” e “sentiment intérieur” em (...) língua francesa à luz de certos debates envolvendo o inatismo e o mecanicismo, destacando-se a contribuição do médico cartesiano Louis de la Forge. O objetivo do trabalho é mostrar as vias pelas quais a ideia de consciência no Emílio, combinada a uma interpretação do sentimento interior associada à fisiologia cartesiana, estabelece pilares significativos das estruturas mentais e institucionais que tornaram possível a emergência daquilo que passou a ser denominado subjetividade moderna. (shrink)

A milestone in the development of post-war Marxist thought.

Historians of French politics, art, philosophy and literature have long known the tensions and fascinations of Louis XV's reign, the 1750s in particular. David Charlton's study comprehensively re-examines this period, from Rameau to Gluck and elucidates the long-term issues surrounding opera. Taking Rousseau's Le Devin du Village as one narrative centrepiece, Charlton investigates this opera's origins and influences in the 1740s and goes on to use past and present research to create a new structural model that explains the (...) elements of reform in Gluck's tragédies for Paris. Charlton's book opens many new perspectives on the musical practices and politics of the period, including the Querelle des Bouffons. It gives the first detailed account of intermezzi and opere buffe performed by Eustachio Bambini's troupe at the Paris Opéra from August 1752 to February 1754 and discusses Rameau's comedies Platée and Les Paladins and their origins. (shrink)

Imagining being someone else from the inside is something relatively easy to do. In Williams (Imagination and the self, problems of the self: philosophical papers, p 26–45, 1973), for instance, one finds Williams’s famous imaginative scenario consisting in imagining being Napoleon from the inside at the battle of Austerlitz. However, providing an adequate analysis for imagination reports like “(1) Williams imagines being Napoleon (from the inside)” is no easy task, because the logical form of such imagination report is controversial. Following (...) Vendler (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 84(2):161–173, 1979), the logical form of statements “X imagines F-ing” typically involve a _PRO_ construction. Furthermore, it is generally acknowledged following Chierchia (Semant Contextual Exp 11:1–31, 1989) that _PRO_ constructions require a _de se_ reading. Consequently, (1) is argued to be an instance of _de se_ imagination (this is the “genuine _de se_” analysis of (1)). Yet, (1) is also crucially about Napoleon and, as forcefully argued for in Williams (Imagination and the self, problems of the self: philosophical papers, p 26–45, 1973), it is not even clear that it is about Williams. So (1) cannot be an instance of _de se_ imagination in the standard sense, because Williams does not self-ascribe the semantic content of the imagining episode (this is the “quasi-_de se_” analysis of (1)). In this paper, I vindicate the genuine _de se_ analysis, based on some new data involving nested imaginings. I then investigate some consequences of the view, which, I argue, are not available to the quasi-_de se_ theorists, including what the view says about failed imaginings. (shrink)

The perfect books for the true book lover, Penguin’s Great Ideas series features twelve more groundbreaking works by some of history’s most prodigious thinkers. Each volume is beautifully packaged with a unique type-driven design that highlights the bookmaker’s art. Offering great literature in great packages at great prices, this series is ideal for those readers who want to explore and savor the Great Ideas that have shaped our world.

The need for quantitative measurement represents a unifying bond that links all the physical, biological, and social sciences. Measurements of such disparate phenomena as subatomic masses, uncertainty, information, and human values share common features whose explication is central to the achievement of foundational work in any particular mathematical science as well as for the development of a coherent philosophy of science. This book presents a theory of measurement, one that is "abstract" in that it is concerned with highly general axiomatizations (...) of empirical and qualitative settings and how these can be represented quantitatively. It was inspired by, and represents a generalization and extension of, the last major research work in this field, Foundations of Measurement Vol. I, by Krantz, Luce, Suppes, and Tversky published in 1971. (shrink)

No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a "structuralist Marxist," Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in For (...) Marx (1965), and Reading Capital (1968). These works, along with Lenin and Philosophy (1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship. This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science. Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a "humanist" and "historicist." Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," "Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre," and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract." The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history. (shrink)

Reply to John Lewis: Note on "The critique of the personality cult". Remark on the category "Process without a subject or goal(s)"--Elements of self-criticism: On the evolution of the young Marx.--Is it simple to be a Marxist in philosophy? "Something new".