The question of justice in Western philosophy finds its humble beginnings in the interplay of life and death. I am referring here to Plato’s Apology. The Apology is not only a text tracing the fate of the great philosopher Socrates by recounting his final speech before the judges of Athens, but it is also a text that, on a more subtle level, announces the advent of a promising justice that is birthed from death, or, to be more precise, from a (...) specific kind of death. Socrates, here, develops a justice that does not surge from the defence of one’s determination as a singular accused, or from the reconciliation of the criminal singularity into the ethical social body through pardon or punishment, but which rather derives from a negation, a radical annihilation of the category of pure singularity. Socrates does not defend himself as an accused who is determinately and definitively singular, but rather affirms the fact that, in some sense, there is no such singular to be defended, that he is not even one (οὐδείς), less than one, nothing. It is, precisely, in this affirmation of a negative, in this opening of a chasm, that a radically other conception of justice and its relation to the singular is subtly proposed. By pushing the singular to the margins of its possibility, by challenging, bending, pushing the question of the singular and its defence to its outmost limit, Socrates redeploys justice not as a remedying balance, but as the abysmal economy of the bottomless question, a fall into the void, in which life, death, the singular and justice co-incide to burst all definitive determination, substantial opposition and the possibility of establishing a firm ground for any such categories to hold as such. In gradually shedding off the substantial presuppositions of his singularity (knowledge, self-relation and relation to others), he unleashes a modality of the singular which deploys a kind of justice, a wholly other justice, which has shaken the tradition ever since, and, as this article will seek to show, reverberates again in what Jacques Derrida called deconstruction. (shrink)

This paper looks at how the idea of pointless topology itself evolved during its pre-localic phase by analyzing the definitions of the concept of topological space of Menger and Nöbeling. Menger put forward a topology of lumps in order to generalize the definition of the real line. As to Nöbeling, he developed an abstract theory of posets so that a topological space becomes a particular case of topological poset. The analysis emphasizes two points. First, Menger's geometrical perspective was superseded by (...) an algebraic one, a lattice-theoretical one to be precise. Second, Menger's bottom–up approach was replaced by a top–down one. (shrink)

Pierre Mathieu L’analyse des publications et des textes de conférences du cistercien québécois Yves Girard permet de dégager un thème majeur de sa théologie spirituelle : le désir de l’être, interprété par lui comme un désir de rencontre avec Dieu. C’est un désir inconscient, inscrit dans la structure de l’être par le Créateur qui désire être en relation avec ses créatures. Selon l’auteur, nous possédons déjà ce que nous désirons, une richesse intérieure à laquelle le silence nous donne (...) accès. (shrink)

Widespread preservation of fossilized biomolecules in many fossil animals has recently been reported in six studies, based on Raman microspectroscopy. Here, we show that the putative Raman signatures of organic compounds in these fossils are actually instrumental artefacts resulting from intense background luminescence. Raman spectroscopy is based on the detection of photons scattered inelastically by matter upon its interaction with a laser beam. For many natural materials, this interaction also generates a luminescence signal that is often orders of magnitude more (...) intense than the light produced by Raman scattering. Such luminescence, coupled with the transmission properties of the spectrometer, induced quasi‐periodic ripples in the measured spectra that have been incorrectly interpreted as Raman signatures of organic molecules. Although several analytical strategies have been developed to overcome this common issue, Raman microspectroscopy as used in the studies questioned here cannot be used to identify fossil biomolecules. (shrink)

Bringing Pierre Bourdieu to Science and Technology Studies Content Type Journal Article Pages 263-273 DOI 10.1007/s11024-011-9174-2 Authors Mathieu Albert, Wilson Centre and Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, 200 Elizabeth Street , Eaton-South 1-581, Toronto, ON M5G 2C4, Canada Daniel Lee Kleinman, Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 348 Agricultural Hall 1450 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA Journal Minerva Online ISSN 1573-1871 Print ISSN 0026-4695 Journal Volume Volume 49 Journal Issue Volume (...) 49, Number 3. (shrink)

Eduardo Arroyo, Armelle Auris, François Boissonnet, Paul HENRY, Pierre-Jean LABARRIERE, MATIEU, Gilles AILLAUD, Gérad THALMANN, Nicole MATHIEU, Jacques VIMARD, Michel QUAREZ, Leonardo CREMONINI, L'atelier d'Eduardo Arryo: Le carré blanc du ring, Rue Descartes, No. 7, Logiques de l'éthique (Juin 1993), pp. 149-168.

Droit et complexité. Le rapprochement de ces deux mots pourrait passer pour incongru. L'idéal du droit ne tend-il pas, en effet, à la rigueur et à la clarté garantes de certitudes et d'efficacité? Cet ouvrage, tiré des travaux du colloque tenu à Brest en mars 2006 a pris un parti inverse en faisant le choix, d'une certaine façon pascalien, de dialoguer avec l'incertitude dans des échanges très ouverts qui ont confirmé l'ampleur du changement de perspectives sur le droit. Un changement (...) que traduit bien le vocabulaire : régulation, pluralisation des ordres normatifs, dissémination dans des réseaux, internormativité, droit de coordination, procéduralisation, ajustement, négociation, expérimentation, flexibilité d'un droit devenu " droit souple ", voire " droit soluble "... Le système semble s'être converti à la modestie en perdant non de sa massivité comme l'a récemment souligné le Conseil d'Etat, mais en perdant de sa monumentalité pyramidale intimidante au profit d'un plasma de normes de plus en plus imbriquées dans des rapports de complémentarité, de négociation, de synergie déployés dans la dimension horizontale. La frontière entre les différentes catégories de normes persiste certes, mais elle se brouille, vire au " flou ". Si bien que là où prévalaient des distinctions nettes et des normes chimiquement pures, stables, s'imposent désormais des alliages, des rapports d'interdépendance analogues aux fils de trame d'un tissu. Edgar Morin aime à rappeler que le mot complexe signifie " tisser ensemble " et il définit la complexité comme " un tissu [...] de constituants hétérogènes inséparablement associés ". (shrink)

This article focuses on defective conditionals ? namely indicative conditionals whose antecedents are false and whose truth-values therefore cannot be determined. The problem is to decide which formal connective can adequately represent this usage. Classical logic renders defective conditionals true whereas traditional mathematics dismisses them as irrelevant. This difference in treatment entails that, at the propositional level, classical logic validates some sentences that are intuitively false in plane geometry. With two proofs, I show that the same flaw is shared by (...) a family of trivalent logics. I go on to examine the strict conditional and its derivatives. This family is the only one to avoid the faulty inference but it does so without addressing the status of the truth-value assigned to defective conditionals. (shrink)

After presenting the rules of Eleatic antilogic, i.e., dialectic, I argue that Zeno was a practitioner, and, on the basis of key passages from Plato’s Parmenides (127e-128e and 135d-136c), that his paradoxes of divisibility and movement were notreductio ad absurdum, but simple derivation of impossibilities (adunaton) meant to ridicule Parmenides’ adversaries. Thus, Zeno did not try to prove that there is no motion, but simply derived this consequence from premises held by his opponents. I argue further that these paradoxes were (...) devised, in accordance with Eleatic antilogic, following a scheme that included hypotheses and their contradictories, within which the subject is to be treated both “in relation to itself,” and “in relation to other things”. (shrink)

According to Clifford Geertz, the purpose of anthropology is not to explain culture but to explicate it. That should cause us to rethink our relationship with machine learning. It is, we contend, perfectly possible that machine learning algorithms, which are unable to explain, and could even be unexplainable themselves, can still be of critical use in a process of explication. Thus, we report on an experiment with anthropological AI. From a dataset of 175K Facebook comments, we trained a neural network (...) to predict the emoji reaction associated with a comment and asked a group of human players to compete against the machine. We show that a) the machine can reach the same accuracy as the players, b) it fails in roughly the same ways as the players, and c) easily predictable emoji reactions tend to reflect unambiguous situations where interpretation is easy. We therefore repurpose the failures of the neural network to point us to deeper and more ambiguous situations where interpretation is hard and explication becomes both necessary and interesting. We use this experiment as a point of departure for discussing how experiences from anthropology, and in particular the tension between formalist ethnoscience and interpretive thick description, might contribute to debates about explainable AI. (shrink)

Bien des difficultés que nous éprouvons à comprendre les oeuvres philosophiques des Anciens proviennent souvent du fait que nous commmettons en les interprétant un double anachronisme: nous croyons que, comme beaucoup d'oeuvres modernes, elles sont destinées à communiquer des informations concernant un contenu conceptuel donné et que nous pouvons aussi en tirer directement des renseignements clairs sur la pensée et la psychologie de leur auteur. Mais en fait, elles sont très souvent des exercices spirituels que l'auteur pratique lui-même et fait (...) pratiquer à son lecteur. Elles sont destinées à former les âmes. Elles ont une valeur psychagogique. (shrink)

Are there any advantages to thinking and speaking about ethical business in the language of citizenship? We will address this question in part by looking at the possible relevance of a vast literature on individual citizenship that has been produced by political philosophers over the last fifteen years. Some of the central elements of citizenship do not seem to apply straightforwardly to corporations. E.g., “citizenship” typically implies membership in a state and an identity akin to national identity; but this connotation (...) of citizenship is obviously problematic for multinational corporations. However, the language of citizenship does help to focus our attention on various legal and political virtues (or vices) for corporations—topics that have been largely neglected by discussions under other rubrics, such as CSR or sustainability. We finish with an evaluation of the potential benefits and costs of conceptualizing and talking about ethical business practices in the language of citizenship. (shrink)

Are there any advantages to thinking and speaking about ethical business in the language of citizenship? We will address this question in part by looking at the possible relevance of a vast literature on individual citizenship that has been produced by political philosophers over the last fifteen years. Some of the central elements of citizenship do not seem to apply straightforwardly to corporations. E.g., “citizenship” typically implies membership in a state and an identity akin to national identity; but this connotation (...) of citizenship is obviously problematic for multinational corporations. However, the language of citizenship does help to focus our attention on various legal and political virtues (or vices) for corporations—topics that have been largely neglected by discussions under other rubrics, such as CSR or sustainability. We finish with an evaluation of the potential benefits and costs of conceptualizing and talking about ethical business practices in the language of citizenship. (shrink)

In traditional epistemology, psychological self-knowledge is taken to be the paradigm of privleged a priori knowledge. According to an influential incompatibilist line of thought, traditional epistemic features attributed to psychological self-knowledge are supposed to be inconsistent with content externalism. In this paper, I examine one prominent compatibilist response by an advocate of content externalism, i.e., Fred Dretske's answer tot he incompatibilist argument, based on the model of displaced perceptual knowledge. I discuss the costs and benefits of his answer.

Prominent ethical and policy issues such as affirmative action and female enrollment in science and engineering revolve around the idea that diversity is good. However, a precise definition is seldom provided. I show that diversity may be construed as a factual description, a craving for symmetry, an intrinsic good, an instrumental good, a symptom, or a side effect. These acceptions differ vastly in their nature and properties. Some are deeply mistaken and some others cannot lead to concrete policies. It is (...) thus necessary to clarify what one means by ‘diversity.’ It may be a neutral description of a given state; but this is insufficient to act. The idea that there should be the same representation in a specific context as in the overall population is both puzzling and arbitrary. Diversity as intrinsic good is a mere opinion, which cannot be concretely applied; moreover, the most commonly invoked forms of diversity are not intrinsically good. On the other hand, diversity as instrumental good can be evaluated empirically and can give rise to policies, but these may be very weak. Finally, symptoms and side effects are not actually about diversity. I consider the example of female enrollment in science and engineering, interpreting the various arguments found in the literature in light of this polysemy. (shrink)

There is now an awakening to and recognition of the emotionally complex lives of some non-human animals. While their forms of consciousness may vary, some are indeed conscious and deserve political consideration. What that political consideration ought to be is the central topic of this article. First, I argue that interspecies justice must be understood in terms of the relationships that foster individual flourishing of all concerned. The obstacles to such flourishing are the five faces of oppression famously identified by (...) Iris Marion Young: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. By extending Young’s concept of the social group to intra- and interspecies groups, we become more attuned to differences between and among species. Theorizing the existence of interspecies groups brings forward new avenues to explore oppression and simultaneously theorize its opposite – interspecies justice. Second, I argue that a positive theory of interspecies flourishing can be developed on the basis of Marx’s materialist philosophy and reclamation of species-being. Though Marx uses humanist language throughout the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, attention to his methodological commitments reveals that some non-human animals can no longer be excluded from the capability of flourishing and species-being. Some non-human animals are conscious, act purposefully, and labor creatively and must be included in our circle of moral and political concern. (shrink)

A Polish space is not always homeomorphic to a computably presented Polish space. In this article, we examine degrees of non-computability of presenting homeomorphic copies of compact Polish spaces. We show that there exists a $\mathbf {0}'$ -computable low $_3$ compact Polish space which is not homeomorphic to a computable one, and that, for any natural number $n\geq 2$, there exists a Polish space $X_n$ such that exactly the high $_{n}$ -degrees are required to present the homeomorphism type of $X_n$. (...) Along the way we investigate the computable aspects of Čech homology groups. We also show that no compact Polish space has a least presentation with respect to Turing reducibility. (shrink)

This article maps a controversy in network science over the last 15 years, dividing the field about the epistemic status of a central notion, scale-freeness. The article accounts for the two main disputes, in 2005 and in 2018, as they unfolded in academic publications and on social media. This article analyzes the conflict, and the reasons why it reignited in 2018, to the surprise of many. It is argued that the concept of complex networks is shared by the distinct subcultures (...) of theorists and experimentalists; and that these subcultures have incompatible approaches to knowledge: nomothetic and idiographic. Following Galison, this article contends that network science is a trading zone where theorists and experimentalists can trade knowledge across the epistemic divide. (shrink)

This paper presents the first possible world semantics for concessive conditionals (i.e., even if A, C conditionals) constructed in a compositional way. First, the meaning of if is formalized through a semantics that builds on the proposal given by Stalnaker (1968). A major difference from Stalnaker’s approach is that irrelevant conditionals (i.e., conditionals where the antecedent and the consequent have no connection) are false in this new setting. Second, the meaning of even is analyzed through a formal semantics based on (...) the notion of scale. This analysis overcomes the problems arising in standard approaches, in which even is analyzed with the help of pragmatic presuppositions. Finally, the two particles are combined in order to provide a formal analysis of even if. This theory predicts the major phenomena concerning the behavior of concessive conditionals and without any call to pragmatic explanations. More generally, this approach creates the possibility of a compositional analysis of other conditionals such as if then or only if forms. (shrink)

Research has shown that context influences how sincere a smile appears to observers. That said, most studies on this topic have focused exclusively on situational cues (e.g. smiling while at a party versus smiling during a job interview) and few have examined other elements of context. One important element concerns any knowledge an observer might have about the smiler as an individual (e.g. their habitual behaviours, traits or attitudes). In this manuscript, we present three experiments that explored the influence of (...) such knowledge on ratings of smile sincerity. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated the sincerity of Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles after having been exposed to cues about the smiler’s tendency to reciprocate (this person always, never or occasionally returns favours). In Experiment 3 they performed the same task but with cues about the smiler’s love of learning (this person always, never or occasionally enjoys learning new tasks). The results show that cues about the smiler’s reciprocity tendency influenced participants’ ratings of smile sincerity and did so in a stronger manner than cues about the smiler’s love of learning. Overall, these results both strengthen and broaden the literature on the role of context on judgements of smile sincerity. (shrink)

This paper argues that most contemporary accounts of weakness of will either implicitly or explicitly assume that regret is a typical or even necessary element of standard cases of weakness of will and that this assumption is mistaken. I draw on empirical and philosophical work on self-assessment to show that regret need not accompany typical weak-willed behavior, and that we should therefore revise the dominant account of the difference between weakness of will and changes of mind.

Thesis (Ph.D, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2009-08-31 12:18:30.156.

La thèse que présuppose ce livre est la suivante : la modernité, que l'on dit "désenchantée", est triste, parce que désenchantée. Les textes qui y sont rassemblés veulent mettre en présence, mais aussi en question, les deux sens du mot "désenchantement" : l'idée que l'avancement de la "raison instrumentale" (C Taylor)s'est accompagné du recul du domaine du magique, du merveilleux, du mythe, et celle selon laquelle la modernité est morose. Mais il s'agit ici de penser moins la morosité que la (...) joie liée à ce que pourrait être une philosophie du réenchantement du monde. Non pas tant, donc, replonger dans les thèses sur le désenchantement qu'imaginer ce que pourrait être un certain réenchantement. A cet égard, on a voulu porter un regard privilégié sur l'enfance, "terre de l'humain" (T De Koninck), comme sur une manière d'idéal qui pointerait vers la question du sens d'une existence qui vaille d'être vécue. Le pari de ce projet est en définitive qu'une philosophie du réenchantement du monde témoignera que la vie peut être une aventure exaltante, passionnante, un parcours sensé et par conséquent rempli d'espoir, comme dans ces contes pour enfants qui jadis faisaient notre joie. (shrink)