The rise of blockchain as a techno-solution in the development sector underscores the critical imbalances of data power under ‘computational capitalism’. This article will consider the political economy of techno-solutionist and blockchain discourses in the developing world, using as its object of study blockchain projects in Pacific Island nations. Backed by US State Department soft power initiatives such as Tech Camp, these projects inculcate tech-driven notions of economic and political development, or ICT4D, while opening up new terrains for data accumulation (...) and platform control. Blockchain developers in search of proof of concept have found the development sector a fecund space for tech experimentation as they leverage a desire for tech-development and exploit regulatory weakness. The material implications of blockchain projects and discourse have been to create governance solutions which bypass the developing world state as a largely corrupting intermediary. In the Pacific, this has meant blockchain supply-chain management systems, proprietary financial innovation in humanitarian relief and an Asian Development Bank project to manage indigenous Fijian lands exclusively on the blockchain. In all these instances, discourses of solutionism, innovation and data empowerment have been deployed in aid of blockchain cartographies of control. (shrink)

This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind. _Enaction_, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in _The Embodied Mind_, breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied (...) action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. _Enaction_ offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science. Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science. Contributors: Renaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Véronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Núñez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson. (shrink)

Of all the things we do and say, most will never be repeated or reproduced. Once in a while, however, an idea or a practice generates a chain of transmission that covers more distance through space and time than any individual person ever could. What makes such transmission chains possible? For two centuries, the dominant view was that humans owe their cultural prosperity to their powers of imitation. In this view, modern cultures exist because the people who carry them are (...) gifted at remembering, storing and reproducing information. How Traditions Live and Die proposes an alternative to this standard view. What makes traditions live is not a general-purpose imitation capacity. Cultural transmission is partial, selective, often unfaithful. Some traditions live on in spite of this, because they tap into widespread and basic cognitive preferences. These attractive traditions spread, not by being better retained or more accurately transferred, but because they are transmitted over and over. This theory is used to shed light on various puzzles of cultural change and to explain the special relation that links the human species to its cultures. Morin combines recent work in cognitive anthropology with new advances in quantitative cultural history, to map and predict the diffusion of traditions. This book is both an introduction and an accessible alternative to contemporary theories of cultural evolution. (shrink)

The first of its kind, this book is an in-depth history of hydrodynamics from its eighteenth-century foundations to its first major successes in twentieth-century hydraulics and aeronautics. It documents the foundational role of fluid mechanics in developing a new mathematical physics. It gives full and clear accounts of the conceptual breakthroughs of physicists and engineers who tried to meet challenges in the practical worlds of hydraulics, navigation, blood circulation, meteorology, and aeronautics, and it shows how hydrodynamics at last began to (...) fulfill its early promise to unify the different worlds of flow. Richly illustrated, technically thorough, and sensitive to cross-cultural effects, this history should attract a broad range of historians, scientists, engineers, and philosophers and be a standard reference for anyone interested in fluid mechanics. (shrink)

This book is a long-term history of optics, from early Greek theories of vision to the nineteenth-century victory of the wave theory of light. It is a clear and richly illustrated synthesis of a large amount of literature, and a reliable and efficient guide for anyone who wishes to enter this domain.

The main contention of this article is that current approaches to ontological emergence are not comprehensive, in that they share a common bias that make them blind to some conceptual space available to emergence. In this article, I devise an alternative perspective on ontological emergence called ‘flat emergence’, which is free of such a bias. The motivation is twofold: not only does flat emergence constitute another viable way to fulfill the initial emergentist promise, but it also allows for making sense (...) of some emergence ascriptions that traditional accounts are unable to accommodate. (shrink)

This book recounts a few ingenious attempts to derive physical theories by reason only, beginning with Descartes' geometric construction of the world, and finishing with recent derivations of quantum mechanics from natural axioms.

This study examines to what extent different types of CEOs in family firms influence external and internal stakeholder-related CSP as compared to CEOs in nonfamily firms. Linking family CEO and nonfamily CEO with CSR outcomes, we provide evidence that family CEOs are positively associated with both external and internal CSR, whereas nonfamily CEOs within family firms tend to be negatively associated with both external and internal CSR. We show that the incumbent CEO’s age moderates the above relationships, indicating the existence (...) of shifting family priorities and suggesting a tendency toward CSR conformity as the salience of succession concerns increases. (shrink)

Sixteen years after Kim’s seminal paper offering a welcomed analysis of the emergence concept, I propose in this paper a needed extension of Kim’s work that does more justice to the actual diversity of emergentism. Rather than defining emergence as a monolithic third way between reductive physicalism and substance pluralism, and this through a conjunction of supervenience and irreducibility, I develop a comprehensive taxonomy of the possible varieties of emergence in which each taxon—theoretical, explanatory and causal emergence—is properly identified and (...) defined. This taxonomy has two advantages. First, it is unificatory in the sense that the taxa it contains derive from a common unity principle, which consequently constitutes the very hallmark of emergentism. Second, it can be shown that the emergence taxa it contains are able to meet the challenges that are commonly considered as being the hot topics on the emergentists’ agenda, namely the positivity, the consistency and the triviality/liberality challenges. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that it is not a conceptual truth about laws of nature that they are immutable (though we are happy to leave it as an open empirical question whether they do actually change once in a while). In order to do so, we survey three popular accounts of lawhood—(Armstrong-style) necessitarianism, (Bird-style) dispositionalism and (Lewis-style) ‘best system analysis’—and expose the extent, as well as the philosophical cost, of the amendments that should be enforced in order to leave (...) room for the possibility of changing laws. (shrink)

Dans cet article, je me propose de réfléchir, à partir de certains travaux de Thomas Nagel, sur la nature de la réflexion métaphysique. Nous qualifions certains problèmes de métaphysiques et leur attribuons par là une certaine unité. Il est cependant difficile de caractériser cette unité, et l’ensemble de ces problèmes peut apparaître comme une simple rhapsodie : quel rapport existe-t-il entre des questions comme « sommes-nous libres? », « quelle est la place de l’esprit dans la nature? » ou « (...) pouvons-nous connaître la réalité extérieure? ». J’avance une hypothèse à propos de l’origine, de la nature et de l’unité de ces problèmes, ainsi que de la fonction de leur examen à l’intérieur de la métaphysique, du moins à propos de certains d’entre eux, ceux qui portent sur ce qui est et non sur ce en quoi consiste le fait d’être. J’essaie également de dégager de cette hypothèse une compréhension plus précise de la nature d’une part centrale de l’enquête métaphysique. (shrink)

Le « droit » tient aussi dans les discours qu’on tient sur lui, notamment les discours des juristes. L’analyse des discours des juristes engagés du Troisième Reich fait ressortir un schéma général de justification, un principe grammatical génératif de ces discours qu’on peut qualifier de « décisionnisme substantiel ». Le positivisme juridique, parce qu’abstrait et « juif », fut désigné comme l’ennemi principal de la science du « droit » nazi, une « science » qui ne pouvait se concevoir elle-même (...) que comme politique. En analysant la construction idéologico-juridique de l’État total, la destruction de la notion de droits subjectifs, la substitution au concept de personnalité juridique d’une notion « concrète » de l’« être-membre-de-la-communauté », puis en montrant le fonctionnement de ces discours dans la pratique, la présente contribution met en évidence la double logique de l’incorporation et de l’incarnation à l’œuvre dans la science nazie du droit, une « science » dont Carl Schmitt fait la « théorie » en 1934 à travers la « pensée de l’ordre concret ». (shrink)

The study of classes of models of a finite diagram was initiated by S. Shelah in 1969. A diagram D is a set of types over the empty set, and the class of models of the diagram D consists of the models of T which omit all the types not in D. In this work, we introduce a natural dependence relation on the subsets of the models for the 0-stable case which share many of the formal properties of forking. This (...) is achieved by considering a rank for this framework which is bounded when the diagram D is 0-stable. We can also obtain pregeometries with respect to this dependence relation. The dependence relation is the natural one induced by the rank, and the pregeometries exist on the set of realizations of types of minimal rank. Finally, these concepts are used to generalize many of the classical results for models of a totally transcendental first-order theory. In fact, strong analogies arise: models are determined by their pregeometries or their relationship with their pregeometries; however the proofs are different, as we do not have compactness. This is illustrated with positive results as well as negative results . We also give a proof of a Two Cardinal Theorem for this context. (shrink)

Dans les nations industrialisées, les goûts des individus sont désormais employés à doper la consommation. L'industrialisation de la jouissance privilégie le superflu au nécessaire, la sensibilité à la raison, la séduction à la faculté de juger. Pourtant, avec l'exploitation du goût, le capitalisme est loin d'avoir découvert une terre inconnue. A l'âge classique, la noblesse de cour cultivait un style de vie commandé par les loisirs et le goût, tout en faisant du bon goût un critère de distinction et de (...) promotion individuelle. Ces relations de compétition entre courtisans ont-elles été les premières notes en prélude au libéralisme? Si l'improductivité, au sens économique, a pu constituer une valeur fondatrice du goût, comment l'industrie a-t-elle pu transformer le goût en moteur économique de la consommation? Le devenir esthétique du capitalisme repose sur la captation et la conversion de ce qu'il aurait de plus individuel en valeurs mesurables, échangeables et massifiables, susceptibles de coloniser les moindres recoins de l'existence et de al culture. L'ouvrage montre que les enjeux du capitalisme esthétique excèdent le territoire angélique des agréments : les batailles esthétiques sont au cœur d'une guerre économique pour le contrôle des émotions et des affections. (shrink)

A l'aune de la philosophie marginalisant le goût et la cuisine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau parait occuper une place à part et novatrice. Tout en condamnant l'hybris des facéties gastronomiques, il valorise le goût par son lien étroit avec les besoins, avec l'amour de soi, sens utile à juguler les faux désirs et déjouer l'amour-propre. Toutefois, dans l'Emile, ce sens tend à souffrir de la préséance de l'appétit, notion essentielle car utile en société à reconditionner la faim, réorganiser les besoins jusqu'aux moyens (...) de les satisfaire, afin de récréer, par le truchement de la dépense physique, la mesure du plaisir faisant défaut à l'homme civil. En outre, jusqu'à quel point ce schéma de subjectivation par l'appétit est-il compatible avec le dessein politique? (shrink)

Pour faire l'histoire des fondements philosophiques et politiques de l'engagement civique et humanitaire, ce livre part de l'invention des héros civiques à Rome à la fin de la République. C'est alors que sont recensés et décrits de manière insistante les exploits vertueux de quelques personnages qui se sacrifièrent ou sacrifièrent leur confort pour le bien de tous : Scaevola, Marcus Curtius, P. Decius Mus et d'autres encore, dont le souvenir s'estompa, jusqu'à ressurgir soudainement dans le contexte des républiques italiennes du (...) Moyen Age.0Cette enquête analyse la façon dont ces héros civiques ont été utilisés à travers l'histoire, depuis l'humanisme italien jusqu'à l'activisme révolutionnaire en passant par le culte de la gloire des monarchies européennes et la naissance du concept d'humanité. Elle dévoile par là les origines de l'engagement politique moderne. (shrink)

This paper analyses the differing receptions of the Old French Partonopeus de Blois in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by revisiting a little known text, a peculiar prolongation in the form of an Art d'aimer which has been added to a versified French translation of the Disciplina clericalis. This continuation exists in only one manuscript; recent advances in technology and new research have allowed the author to determine that quite large parts of this Art d'aimer have been borrowed from Partonopeus. (...) He analyses these borrowings, reassesses the judgments of his predecessors, and concludes that Partonopeus de Blois might have had a much greater literary impact on the authors of other Old French texts than has previously been thought. (shrink)

With several never-before published writings, this volume gathers Althusser's major essays on psychoanalytic thought----documenting his intense and ambivalent relationship with Lacan, and dramatizing his intellectual journey and troubled personal life.

In this paper, I put forward a benchmark account of emergence in terms of non-explainability and explicate the relationship that exists between its synchronic and diachronic declinations. I develop an argument whose conclusion is that emergence is essentially a “two-faceted” notion, i.e. it always encapsulates both synchronic and diachronic dimensions. I then compare this account with alternative recent accounts of emergence that define the concept through the notion of unpredictability or topological non-equivalence.

Depuis 70 ans, les avocats peuvent créer des structures d’exercice pour exercer en commun la profession d’avocats. Depuis 1990, la grande innovation réside dans la possibilité pour les avocats de structurer leur activité au moyen de sociétés commerciales particulières, les sociétés d’exercice libéral (SEL), dont l’objectif est la préservation de l’indépendance et de la déontologie des professionnels qui exercent en son sein. En 2015, les avocats sont autorisés à avoir recours aux sociétés commerciales de droit commun (SA, SAS, SARL), sauf (...) celles qui confèrent à leur associé la qualité de commerçant (SNC et SCA). Ce dispositif vient d’être réformé par la très récente ordonnance no 2023-77 du 8 février 2023 qui soulève la difficile distinction entre les SEL et les sociétés de droit commun. L’étude de cette distinction met en lumière la caractéristique de ces sociétés, l’exercice en commun d’une profession libérale réglementée, dont le régime juridique est posé par des règles professionnelles d’ordre public. (shrink)

Emergentism is often misleadingly described as a monolithic “third way” between radical monism and pluralism. In the particular case of biology, for example, emergentism is perceived as a middle course between mechanicism and vitalism. In the present paper I propose to show that the conceptual landscape between monism and pluralism is more complex than this classical picture suggests. On the basis of two successive analyses—distinguishing three forms of tension between monism and pluralism and a distinction between derivational and functional reduction—I (...) define three different versions of emergentism that can be considered as consistent middle courses between monism and pluralism . I then emphasise the advantage of this taxonomy of the concepts of emergence by applying the results of my analysis to the historical controversy that pertains to the relationship between life and matter. (shrink)

We present a theoretical framework bearing on the evolution of written communication. We analyze writing as a special kind of graphic code. Like languages, graphic codes consist of stable, conventional mappings between symbols and meanings, but (unlike spoken or signed languages) their symbols consist of enduring images. This gives them the unique capacity to transmit information in one go across time and space. Yet this capacity usually remains quite unexploited, because most graphic codes are insufficiently informative. They may only be (...) used for mnemonic purposes or as props for oral communication in real-time encounters. Writing systems, unlike other graphic codes, work by encoding a natural language. This allows them to support asynchronous communication in a more powerful and versatile way than any other graphic code. Yet, writing systems will not automatically unlock the capacity to communicate asynchronously. We argue that this capacity is a rarity in non-literate societies, and not so frequent even in literate ones. Asynchronous communication is intrinsically inefficient because asynchrony constrains the amount of information that the interlocutors share and limits possibilities for repair. This would explain why synchronous, face-to-face communication always fosters the development of sophisticated codes (natural languages), but similar codes for asynchronous communication evolve with more difficulties. It also implies that writing cannot have evolved, at first, for supporting asynchronous communication. (shrink)

Un essai sur l'avant-garde des années 1990 (un recueil des textes les plus significatifs d'Olivier Zahm – co-fondateur et directeur du magazine Purple, concepteur de plus d'une cinquantaine d'expositions dans le monde –, écrits sur les trente dernières années, qui offre une lecture radicale de l'art, des années 1990 à nos jours).

Three experimental studies are reported in which we tested the prediction that negative emotion elicits the social sharing of the emotional experience. In two experiments, participants arrived at the laboratory with a friend and then viewed one of three film excerpts (nonemotional, moderate emotion, or intense emotion) alone. Afterwards, the participants who saw the film had an opportunity to interact with the friend and their conversation was recorded. In both experiments participants who had seen the intense emotion excerpt engaged in (...) significantly more social sharing than did participants in the other two conditions. A third experiment extended the investigation to social sharing in everyday life and replicated the previous results. Nonemotional explanations of the effects observed were also ruled out. Results are discussed in the context of the relation between emotional intensity and amount of social sharing. (shrink)

L’auteur commente deux termes apparaissant dans le Discours de rectorat et dans certains textes de 1933-1934, les mots « Gefolgschaft » et « Studentenrecht » qui se renvoient l’un à l’autre par leurs contenus puisque le Führerprinzip, dont la Gefolgschaft est le corrélat indissociable, s’infiltre partout comme le principe général d’organisation sociale et qu’il est donc au cœur du « nouveau droit des étudiants ». La présence de ces deux éléments lourds et centraux du lexique lti, si elle ne suffit (...) pas à réduire la parole du recteur à celle, contemporaine, des idéologues nationaux-socialistes, soulève la question complexe de leur portée philosophique pour Heidegger dans le Discours et au-delà.By focusing on two terms that appear in the Rectorial Address and texts of 1933-1934: « Gefolgschaft » and « Studentenrecht », the author turns our attention to their relation since the « Führerprinzip », inseparable from its « Gefolgschaft », shows itself as the general principle of social organization and lies therefore at the heart of the « new rights of students ». The presence of these heavy and central elements of the lti, if it does not reduce the discourse of the Rector to contemporary ideologues of National Socialism, raises the complex question of their philosophical significance for Heidegger in the Address and beyond. (shrink)

From the Tin Pan Alley 32-bar form, through the cyclical forms of modal jazz, to the more recent accumulation of digital layers, beats, and breaks in Electronic Dance Music, repetition as both an aesthetic disposition and a formal property has stimulated a diverse range of genres and techniques. From the angles of musicology, psychology, sociology, and science and technology, Over and Over reassesses the complexity connected to notions of repetition in a variety of musical genres. The first edited volume on (...) repetition in 20th- and 21st-century popular music, Over and Over explores the wide-ranging forms and use of repetition - from large repetitive structures to micro repetitions - in relation to both specific and large-scale issues and contexts. The book brings together a selection of original texts by leading authors in a field that is, as yet, little explored. Aimed at both specialists and neophytes, it sheds important new light on one of the fundamental phenomena of music of our times. (shrink)

The election of Barack Obama corresponding with the dramatic implosion of the neo-liberal world order of finance, represents a dramatic return of history as attempts are made to forge the new consensus of global capitalism. The financial crisis has come to represent the culmination of Third Way neo-liberalism with Obama signifying the commodity logic and emancipatory potential of the new spirit of capitalism. Obama’s biography has allowed for a self-confident re-articulation of American imperial power, while fetishizing a civil society notion (...) of transformation that has eclipsed the anti-capitalist left. Resistance to Obama’s vision of a reconciled America, leading the moral correction of capitalism, has come in the form of a right wing populist campaign of delegitimization. The Tea Party populists speak to the return of the political and the ontological necessity of antagonism as they present themselves as the only radical alternative to actually existing neo-liberalism. (shrink)

L'étude des mathématiques de la préhistoire ne peut être fondée uniquement sur les documents archéologiques bruts, sous peine de stérilité ; elle a tout intérêt à les mettre en situation grâce au comparatisme ethnographique, selon lequel les sociétés primitives actuelles ou récemment disparues nous renseignent sur nos ancêtres de la préhistoire. D'abord utilisée spontanément par quelques historiens des mathématiques, cette méthode est de nos jours rejetée en principe par le courant récent des ethnomathématiciens. Il s'agit de montrer par quelques exemples (...) que la méthode est pourtant féconde, d'une part parce qu'elle ruine les constructions fantastiques dont raffolent certains mathématiciens, et d'autre part parce qu'elle ouvre un vaste champ de recherches pratiquement inexploré. (shrink)

This discussion paper responds to two recent articles in Biology and Philosophy that raise similar objections to cultural attraction theory, a research trend in cultural evolution putting special emphasis on the fact that human minds create and transform their culture. Both papers are sympathetic to this idea, yet both also regret a lack of consilience with Boyd, Richerson and Henrich’s models of cultural evolution. I explain why cultural attraction theorists propose a different view on three points of concern for our (...) critics. I start by detailing the claim that cultural transmission relies not chiefly on imitation or teaching, but on cognitive mechanisms like argumentation, ostensive communication, or selective trust, whose evolved or habitual function may not be the faithful reproduction of ideas or behaviours. Second, I explain why the distinction between context biases and content biases might not always be the best way to capture the interactions between culture and cognition. Lastly, I show that cultural attraction models cannot be reduced to a model of guided variation, which posits a clear separation between individual and social learning processes. With cultural attraction, the same cognitive mechanisms underlie both innovation and the preservation of traditions. (shrink)

Generic stereotypes are generically formulated generalizations that express a stereotype, like “Mexican immigrants are rapists” and “Muslims are terrorists.” Stereotypes like these are offensive and should not be asserted by anyone. Yet when someone does assert a sentence like this in a conversation, it is surprisingly difficult to successfully rebut it. The meaning of generic sentences is such that they can be true in several different ways. As a result, a speaker who is challenged after asserting a generic stereotype can (...) often simply dismiss the objection and maintain that the stereotype is true in a way that is compatible with the challenger’s objection. In this paper, a semantic theory for generics is presented that accounts for this type of defensive shifting in upholding generic stereotypes. This theory is then used to develop two strategies to object more efficiently. The first strategy is to immediately deny that either of the two possible ways in which a generic can be true obtains. The second strategy is to deny the satisfaction of an additional condition that is necessary for a generic sentence to be true. (shrink)