The everyday practice of photography by millions of amateur photographers - the family snapshots, the holiday prints, the wedding portraits - may seem to be a spontaneous and highly personal activity. But Bourdieu and his associates show that few cultural activities are more structured and systematic than the social uses of this ordinary art. This perceptive and wide-ranging analysis of the practice of photography brings out the logic implicit in this cultural field. The norms which define the occasions and the (...) objects of photography serve to display the socially differentiated functions of, and attitudes towards, the photographic image and act. For some social groups, photography is primarily a means of preserving the present and reproducing the euphoric moments of collective celebration, whereas for other groups it is the occasion of an aesthetic judgement, in which photos are endowed with the dignity of works of art. (shrink)

The endless waves of migrants that have swept across Europe and North America have led several countries to tighten border controls and tighten immigration criteria. How, moreover, can we ignore the human distress of millions of migrants fleeing war, persecution or food insecurity? How can we reconcile the compelling obligation to help strangers in need with the legitimate and essential need to build a " place to call home "? Therein lies the paradox of hospitality. This book examines how the (...) religious canon, particularly the Golden Rule - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" - deals with the tension created by the two polarities of the hospitality paradox. The Quebec model of interculturalism is presented as satisfying the dual requirements of hospitality: equal respect for the host's " homeland " and the guest's alterity. (shrink)

Pierre Bayle was one of the most important sceptical thinkers of the seventeenth century. His work was a major influence on the development of the ideas of Voltaire (who acclaimed it for its candour on such subjects as atheism, obscenity and sexual conduct), Hume, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Banned in France on first publication in 1697, Bayle's Dictionnaire Historique et Critique became a bestseller and ran into several editions and translations. Sally L. Jenkinson's masterly new edition presents the reader with (...) a coherent path through Bayle's monumental work (which ran to seven million words). This is the first volume in English to select political writings from Bayle's work and to present its author as a specifically political thinker. Sally L. Jenkinson's authoritative translation, careful selection of texts, and lucid introduction will be welcomed by scholars and students of the history of ideas, political theory, cultural history and French studies. (shrink)

Des remèdes miracles comme la baisse des impôts, l'augmentation des dépenses publiques, l'arrêt de l'immigration, la semaine de 32 heures, la réindustrialisation des territoires, ou encore la taxation des transactions financières sont censés nous guérir sans coût de tous nos maux. Ces contre-vérités rabâchées à l'envi par les médias portent un nom : le négationnisme économique. A l'origine de choix stratégiques, il nous appauvrit et se traduit par des millions de chômeurs. Or aujourd'hui on ne peut affirmer tout et son (...) contraire, car l'économie est devenue une science expérimentale fondée sur une analyse rigoureuse des faits. Cette révolution méconnue produit des connaissances qui heurtent souvent de plein fouet les croyances et les intérêts des grands patrons, des syndicalistes, des intellectuels et des politiques. Ils font tout pour semer le doute, même sur les vérités les plus établies. Débusquer le négationnisme économique, tel est l'objet du présent ouvrage. Pour arrêter de perdre notre temps avec des débats déjà tranchés et ne pas nous laisser berner par les impostures et la démagogie. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Haiti Can't BreatheNéhémy Pierre-Dahomey (bio)Translated by David F. BellI'm not particularly familiar with recent politics in Haiti. Nor, as it were, with the contemporary history of the country. In some sense, the difference between recent politics and contemporary history is rather delicate. History would be the most profound social, political, and economic points of contention behind the daily lives of a population under siege. Not simply those talked (...) about while people travel in public transportation (Haitians talk a lot while in public transportation), but also the interpretive matrices mobilized to speak about these problems. As for current events, they are the province of newspaper headlines, those front pages and editorial pages most often read and shared, the public opinion machine.Of course, a few snippets of news come to me: the rise of kidnapping, political instability, the opposition declaring that the presidential mandate has ended, a government sponsored referendum to change the constitution, upcoming elections. As I write this piece (summer 2021), armed banditry is rife in many working-class neighborhoods. There are victims by the dozens nearly every day.As I was asking myself how best to express the bicentennial dyspnea of the Haitian people, I learned about the assassination of the president of the Republic in his private residence.Haiti could not breathe. Now it is suffocating.I recently published a novel entitled Combats (March 2021) in which the characters live in a nineteenth-century rural setting. They experience the full force of the first consequences provoked by the infamous independence debt, well understood by Haitians and analyzed by international specialists such as David Graeber and Thomas Piketty.After its independence in 1804, Haiti was not accepted into the concert of nations. The country, founded by hordes of previously enslaved Blacks and by freed Mulattos, was a bad example, a model not to be emulated so geographically near a slave society, the United States, and the Antilles belonging to France. No economic power, that is, no white country defining itself as such, recognized the independence of the new Black, abolitionist, and egalitarian population. The isolation of Haiti thus began at the very moment of its foundation. [End Page 165]In a vain attempt to escape the embargo and to construct a collective destiny at the international level, Haiti accepted a colossal debt imposed on it by France. Charles X, king of France and Navarre, forced Jean-Pierre Boyer, supreme leader of the Haitian nation, to assume the responsibility for a ransom of 120 million francs. The economist Thomas Piketty calculates that this was equivalent to 28 billion euros in today's currency. David Graeber, in his Debt: The First 500 Years, considers it to be the most egregious debt in history. In truth, for Haitians, this strange transaction consisted in buying lands they had already conquered in their independence struggle, having taken them from the previous colonial settlers representing the French state.Since the previously emancipated ancestors were considered the colonial settlers' property, Haitians, under threat from the French army, assumed the weight of this debt, which really consisted in purchasing—from their previous torturers—their very persons and those of their grandparents. In other words, after the war of independence, begun by Black Maroons as soon as they arrived on the island of Haiti, pursued by Toussaint Louverture against slavery, brought successfully to a conclusion by Jean Jacques Dessalines through victorious military battles (November 1803 at Vertières, for example), after this long road toward emancipation, France, supported by all the foreign powers of the period, extracted from Haiti recognition of the debt in 1826, that is, during the first half of the nineteenth century, at the very moment when the independent countries of the world were beginning to undergo a massive industrialization.Haiti clearly missed out on this entrance into the industrial age of the steam engine. It remained an "essentially agricultural" country because every year it had to pay debt service—including interest—every year until the second half of the 20th century!Like many others I saw the images of the white man, Derek Chauvin, resting his knee on George Floyd's neck for eight... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Moral Responsibility in a Context of Scarcity:the Journey of a Haitian PhysicianPaul PierreAlmost all Haitian physicians have been involved in some sort of "social movement" at one point in their professional life. In a country characterized by a natural inclination to question authority, fighting the status quo of the ineffective, corrupt and disorganized [End Page 89] Haitian health system often appears to be the right thing to do.In 2002, (...) I played an active role in a large protest movement for better working conditions at the largest health facility in Port-au-Prince: the General Hospital (GH). Port-au-Prince is the capital and economic center of Haiti. It is home to close to a third of Haiti's ten million people. At that time, the situation at the GH facility was dire. All of the 400 beds at the GH were dirty. The staff was underpaid and unhappy. Drug and medical supply stock-outs were routine. Medical equipment was rarely maintained and only one of the six operating theatres in the surgery block was working. Unsupervised physicians in training (like me) were the main health care providers. Attending physicians were busy running their own private clinics, and most of them would come to the hospital solely to "recruit" the less poor patients for their clinics. As physicians-in-training, we had the responsibility of caring for the poor, but we had no means. We grew frustrated and angry witnessing our powerless patients losing legs, arms and their lives for lack of care. On many occasions, I had the parents of my patients buy the gloves that I would use to examine their sick relatives. I've seen patients fighting for the inheritance of medications left by others who had just passed away. There was no way for this hospital to fulfill its mission, and no way for its staff to deliver anything other than mediocre care. We could not accept that situation at such an early stage in our medical development, and so we refused to continue to work. We went on a strike, which completely paralyzed the delivery of care at the hospital for nearly two months. After intense negotiation, the strike ended with a signed agreement with the Minister of Health that addressed, more or less, the reasons of our movement. However, the implementation of the agreement was permanently delayed by other competing "state emergencies" including a general insurrection.At the time of our movement, I thought we were making history. After witnessing 11 "social movements" that similarly paralyzed the GH in the following decade for reasons identical to ours, I am now convinced that we were not. We were temporary actors performing in the cynical play of scarcity on permanent display in Port-au-Prince. The social movement that we started ended up hurting the very same people that we were trying to help.Extending access to heath care to poor people seemed to me at that time to be too complicated and too expensive for an unorganized state like Haiti. I realized that local protests could, at best, influence the allocation of local resources. But so-called local resources are so limited in "resource-limited" countries. Haiti spends only $40 U.S. dollars per capita for health care. This is not enough for good care. The options we were provided were not real ones—since all of them would end in more suffering. The case of providing health care to poor people needed to be approached differently.I was born in Port-au-Prince at the same general hospital in which I would later work. I am the third of four children, and the first male child in my family. My father made me understand very clearly that my first responsibility was for my siblings. My sisters made me understand equally clearly that I had no authority over any of them. I ended up with a lot of responsibility but with very little authority. The few of us who completed school, entered university, studied abroad and "emerged" were considered, to some extent, responsible for the others—the ones who couldn't go to school, university, or abroad, the ones who had "sunk... (shrink)

The penetration of the Amazon region by the great religious movements of Europe and Africa began with the first phases of colonial domination, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The initial influence to be felt was Iberian Catholicism (the religion of the conquerors), which spread along the rivers as missions sprang up here and there. This period of missionary activity continued for over a century, bringing with it a host of consequences, most notably waves of epidemics that killed millions of (...) natives. Nevertheless, an initial “syncretic alliance” was forged in the missions between shamanism and Catholicism.From another quarter came legions of black slaves, exiled to the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to replace the decimated native workforce; with them they brought their own religions and religious practices, which they transplanted, in a more or less transformed state, to all corners of the South American continent. The resulting Afro-American religions were practiced secretly by broad masses and in this way were fused with Amerindian religions (the case of pagelano in Brazil) and with “official” forms of Catholicism (tcmbanda and candomblé, among others). (shrink)

The penetration of the Amazon region by the great religious movements of Europe and Africa began with the first phases of colonial domination, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The initial influence to be felt was Iberian Catholicism (the religion of the conquerors), which spread along the rivers as missions sprang up here and there. This period of missionary activity continued for over a century, bringing with it a host of consequences, most notably waves of epidemics that killed millions of (...) natives. Nevertheless, an initial “syncretic alliance” was forged in the missions between shamanism and Catholicism.From another quarter came legions of black slaves, exiled to the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to replace the decimated native workforce; with them they brought their own religions and religious practices, which they transplanted, in a more or less transformed state, to all corners of the South American continent. The resulting Afro-American religions were practiced secretly by broad masses and in this way were fused with Amerindian religions (the case of pagelano in Brazil) and with “official” forms of Catholicism (tcmbanda and candomblé, among others). (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)

Pierre Bourdieu is arguably one of the twentieth century’s greatest socio-philosophical thinkers and his writings have much to offer anyone interested in the ways that people value, consume and produce architecture. Bourdieu spent much of his life attempting to understand cultural consumption and production through detailed empirical research that included studies of dwellings, art, museums, photography and aesthetics. This book introduces the architectural reader to Bourdieu’s key writings on culture and outlines the ways in which they offer powerful practical (...) tools and novel conceptual frameworks for understanding architectural value, taste, and practice. (shrink)

Synthesizing forty years' work by France's leading sociologist, this book exemplifies Bourdieu's unique ability to link sociological theory, historical information, and philosophical thought. It makes explicit the presuppositions of a state of 'scholasticism', a certain leisure liberated from the urgencies of the world. Philosophers have brought these presuppositions into the order of discourse, more to legitimate than analyze them, and this is the primary systematic, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic error that Bourdieu subjects to methodological critique. Pascalian because he, too, was (...) concerned with symbolic power, he refused the temptation of foundationalist thinking, attended to 'ordinary people', and was determined to seek the reason for seemingly illogical behavior rather than simply condemning it. Bourdieu charts a negative philosophy, whose intellectual debt to such other 'heretical' philosophers as Wittgenstein, Austin, Dewey, and Peirce, renews traditional questioning of concepts of violence, power, time, history, the universal, and the purpose and direction of existence. (shrink)

The authors develop an analysis of education. They show how education carries an essentially arbitrary cultural scheme which is actually based on power. More widely, the reproduction of culture through education is shown to play a key part in the reproduction of the whole social system.

Cambrai, Bibl. munic. 940, ff. 1-59 [integralement reproduit]--Bibl. Vatic. Reg. Lat. 689 A, ff. 334-353.--Bibl. Vatic. Reg. Lat. 1653, ff, 1v-2v (feuilles de garde), ff. 3r, 29r-35r.--Pièces justificatives.

Surgical Informed Consent has long been recognized as an important component of modern medicine. The ultimate goals of SIC are to improve clients’ understanding of the intended procedure, increase client satisfaction, maintain trust between clients and health providers, and ultimately minimize litigation issues related to surgical procedures. The purpose of the current study is to assess the comprehensiveness of the SIC process for women undergoing obstetric and gynecologic surgeries. A hospital-based cross-sectional study was undertaken at Hawassa University Comprehensive Specialized Hospital (...) in November and December, 2016. A total of 230 women who underwent obstetric and/or gynecologic surgeries were interviewed immediately after their hospital discharge to assess their experience of the SIC process. Thirteen components of SIC were used based on international recommendations, including the Royal College of Surgeon’s standards of informed consent practices for surgical procedures. Descriptive summaries are presented in tables and figures. Forty percent of respondents were aged between 25 and 29 years. Nearly a quarter had no formal education. More than half of respondents had undergone an emergency surgical procedure. Only 18.4% of respondents reported that the surgeon performing the operation had offered SIC, while 36.6% of respondents could not recall who had offered SIC. All except one respondent provided written consent to undergo a surgical procedure. However, 8.3% of respondents received SIC service while already on the operation table for their procedure. Only 73.9% of respondents were informed about the availability of alternative treatment options. Additionally, a majority of respondents were not informed about the type of anesthesia to be used and related complications. Only 54.2% of respondents reported that they had been offered at least six of the 13 SIC components used by the investigators. There is gap in the provision of comprehensive and standardized pre-operative counseling for obstetric and gynecologic surgeries in the study hospital. This has a detrimental effect on the overall quality of care clients receive, specifically in terms of client expectations and information needs. (shrink)

In Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness, Pierre Keller examines Kant's theory of self-consciousness and argues that it succeeds in explaining how both subjective and objective experience are possible. Previous interpretations of Kant's theory have held that he treats all self-consciousness as knowledge of objective states of affairs, and also that self-consciousness can be interpreted as knowledge of personal identity. By developing this striking new interpretation Keller is able to argue that transcendental self-consciousness underwrites a general theory of objectivity (...) and subjectivity at the same time. (shrink)

We study one way in which stable phenomena can exist in an NIP theory. We start by defining a notion of ‘pure instability’ that we call ‘distality’ in which no such phenomenon occurs. O-minimal theories and the p-adics for example are distal. Next, we try to understand what happens when distality fails. Given a type p over a sufficiently saturated model, we extract, in some sense, the stable part of p and define a notion of stable independence which is implied (...) by non-forking and has bounded weight. (shrink)

" Faire d'Aristote un Aufklârer serait méconnaître ce qu'il y a en lui de religiosité authentique, cette intuition de la transcendance et du chorismos, qui sont la raison profonde de sa prudence spéculative. Faire d'Aristote un tragique serait méconnaître cette confiance en l'homme, en sa recherche et en son action, qui tranche sur les lamentations du chœur de la tragédie et sur une certaine résignation socratique et, avant la lettre, stoïcienne. Mais Aristote exalte l'homme sans le diviniser ; il en (...) fait le centre de son éthique, mais il sait que l'éthique n'est pas ce qu'il y a de plus haut, que Dieu est au-delà des catégories éthiques, ou plutôt que l'éthique se constitue dans la distance qui sépare l'homme de Dieu. Livré à ses seules forces par un Dieu trop lointain, qui est suffisamment visible pour être désiré, mais se tient trop à distance pour être possédé, l'homme est en butte, dans la région du monde qu'il habite, à un hasard qu'il ne peut entièrement dominer. Ou plutôt la vie de l'homme se meut entre deux hasards : le Hasard fondamental de la naissance, qui fait que la bonne nature n'est pas également partagée ; le hasard résiduel de l'action, qui fait que les résultats ne sont jamais tout à fait prévisibles. Mais le hasard de la naissance est le hasard résiduel de l'action divine, et la grandeur de l'homme consiste, en prolongeant par la prudence l'action d'une Providence défaillante, à reculer le plus possible les limites de l'imprévisible et de l'inhumain. " Pierre Aubenque. (shrink)

According to an influential view, one function of mirror neurons (MNs), first discovered in the brain of monkeys, is to underlie third‐person mindreading. This view relies on two assumptions: the activity of MNs in an observer’s brain matches (simulates or resonates with) that of MNs in an agent’s brain and this resonance process retrodictively generates a representation of the agent’s intention from a perception of her movement. In this paper, I criticize both assumptions and I argue instead that the activity (...) of MNs in an observer’s brain is enhanced by a prior representation of the agent’s intention and that their task is to predictively compute the best motor command suitable to satisfy the agent’s intention. (shrink)

Recognized as a masterpiece of Nietzsche scholarship, NIETZSCHE AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE is available here for the first time in English. Author Pierre Klossowski suggests that Nietzsche's ideas and beliefs did not stem from his personal pathology, but rather were applied in a pathological manner. Thereby Nietzsche's beliefs resonated dynamically and intellectually with his alternating lucidity and delirium.

Martin Heidegger's overt alliance with the Nazis and the specific relation between this alliance and his philosophical thought--the degree to which his concepts are linked to a thoroughly disreputable set of political beliefs--have been the topic of a storm of recent debate. Written ten years before this debate, this study by France's leading sociologist and cultural theorist is both a precursor of that debate and an analysis of the institutional mechanisms involved in the production of philosophical discourse. Though Heidegger is (...) aware of and acknowledges the legitimacy of purely philosophical issues, Bourdieu points out that the complexity and abstraction of Heidegger's philosophical discourse stems from its situation in the cultural field, where two social and intellectual dimensions--political thought and academic thought--intersect. Bourdieu concludes by suggesting that Heidegger should not be considered as a Nazi ideologist, that there is no place in Heidegger's philosophical ideas for a racist conception of the human being. Rather, he sees Heidegger's thought as a structural equivalent in the field of philosophy of the "conservative revolution," of which Nazism is but one manifestation. (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 akinto 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 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 thelanguage of citizenship.“Citizen” and “Citizenship” are powerful words. They speak of respect, of rights, of dignity.... We find no perjorative uses. It is a weighty, monumental, humanist word.—Fraser and Gordon 1994: 90[The rhetorical appeal to citizenship often] seems to have no purpose other than to add normative weight to a policy, institution or practice that could just asaptly be described without reference to citizenship.—Weinstock 2002: 244. (shrink)

A presentation and discussion of Gottlob Frege's understanding of language, both natural and artificial, with close attention to his texts.

The French philosopher and intellectual historian Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) is known primarily for his conception of philosophy as spiritual exercise, which was an essential reference for the later Foucault. An aspect of his work that has received less attention is a set of methodological reflections on intellectual history and on the relationship between philosophy and history. Hadot was trained initially as a philosopher and was interested in existentialism as well as in the convergence between philosophy and poetry. Yet he (...) chose to become a historian of philosophy and produced extensive philological work on neo-Platonism and ancient philosophy in general. He found a philosophical rationale for this shift in his encounter with Wittgenstein's philosophy in the mid-1950s (Hadot was one of Wittgenstein's earliest French readers and interpreters). For Hadot, ancient philosophy must be understood as a series of language games, and each language game must be situated within the concrete conditions in which it happened. The reference to Wittgenstein therefore supports a strongly contextualist and historicist stance. It also supports its exact opposite: presentist appropriations of ancient texts are entirely legitimate, and they are the only way ancient philosophy can be existentially meaningful to us. Hadot addresses the contradiction by embracing it fully and claiming that his own practice aims at a coincidence of opposites (a concept borrowed from the Heraclitean tradition). For Hadot the fullest and truest way of doing philosophy is to be a philosopher and a historian at the same time. (shrink)

In this 1999 book Pierre Keller examines the distinctive contributions, and the respective limitations, of Husserl's and Heidegger's approach to fundamental elements of human experience. He shows how their accounts of time, meaning, and personal identity are embedded in important alternative conceptions of how experience may be significant for us, and discusses both how these conceptions are related to each other and how they fit into a wider philosophical context. His sophisticated and accessible account of the phenomenological philosophy of (...) Husserl and the existential phenomenology of Heidegger will be of wide interest to students and specialists in these areas, while analytic philosophers of mind will be interested by the detailed parallels which he draws with a number of concerns of the analytic philosophical tradition. (shrink)

The dissertation seeks to gain a comprehensive understanding of Frege's watershed work of logic, the 1879 Begriffsschrift . The treatise is the first since Aristotle's instauration of the discipline to have succeeded in completely recasting logic. Very generally stated, the dissertation aims at making explicit the conceptual origins of modern logic. To do that will require that each of the achievements of Concept-script be examined from one or more vantage points: either within the perspective of Frege's larger and guiding ambition, (...) that of providing a logical justification of arithmetic; or with respect to the horizon of modernity; or in relation to later developments in logical theory and the philosophy of language, developments stimulated, albeit not exclusively, by Frege's very work. The vantage point adopted in each case will depend on the nature of the topic and the extent to which it requires to be made explicit. One perspective will have preponderance, that of Frege's relationship to his early modern ancestors, a group that includes philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians. Since modernity is constituted in a nearly constant critical, if not polemical, relationship to the Ancients, they will also at times be drawn into the discussion. The elucidation of Frege's breakthrough work will be guided by the following thesis: Frege's attempt to justify arithmetic logically and the fine work of clarification he produced in actualizing this project; his discovery of function-theoretic logic and his fashioning of a concept-script ; and his critique of natural language and the attendant semantics developed over the course of that critique constitute an unfolding and an extension of the primacy of universal method over ontology that is the signature of modern inquiry. (shrink)