In this article, I argue that the concept of alienation should be mobilized to develop a ‘geo-social’ critique of the generic forms of life that sustain contemporary capitalist societies, in a time when the stability of the Earth system is increasingly at risk. I contend that retrieving the full heuristic potential of the concept demands engaging the fields where it has been traditionally discussed (notably social philosophy and environmental philosophy) to demonstrate how their insights on alienation can be fruitfully combined. (...) By putting greater emphasis on how society and nature are mutually embedded, this new approach to alienation highlights the anthropocentrism that critical theory has long conveyed and indicates how it could be at least partially corrected. (shrink)

We present the paradigm of categories-as-syntax. We briefly recall the even stronger paradigm categories-as-machine-language which led from -calculus to categorical combinators viewed as basic instructions of the Categorical Abstract Machine. We extend the categorical combinators so as to describe the proof theory of first order logic and higher order logic. We do not prove new results: the use of indexed categories and the description of quantifiers as adjoints goes back to Lawvere and has been developed in detail in works of (...) R. Seely. We rather propose a syntactic, equational presentation of those ideas. We sketch the (quasi-equational) categorical structures for dependent types, following ideas of J. Cartmell (contextual categories). All these theories of categorical combinators, together with the translations from -calculi into them, are introduced smoothly, thanks to the systematic use of– - an abstract variable-free notation for -calculus, going back to N. De Bruijn, – - a sequent formulation of the natural deduction. (shrink)

Locke écrit à Molyneux qu’il veut donner à l’association des idées plus de portée encore qu’il ne l’a fait dans l’Essai. S’appuyant sur les textes politiques, pédagogiques, ainsi que sur Of the Conduct of the Understanding, nous y trouvons de fait à dépasser les applications courantes que l’on fait de l’association des idées lockienne (théorie de l’erreur, question de la maîtrise des passions) : nous nous risquons ainsi à montrer que le processus de liaison et d’association est en jeu au (...) niveau fondamental et biologique de l’existence humaine. L’opposition de l’adaptation et de l’inadaptation (cette dernière permettant de nommer et repérer les pathologies de l’association) fonctionne pour le vivant (1), mais aussi pour la description du soi (2). L’association des idées rend en effet difficile à l’esprit de s’approprier lui-même, de comprendre l’origine de ses propres pensées. Enfin, et c’est la troisième application de cette étude, si l’on se tourne du côté de l’expérience (3), alors que l’activité industrieuse et adaptée à l’expérience met la nature à notre disposition parce que nous y avons trouvé les bonnes liaisons, l’association d’idées nous fixe dans des liens stériles avec le monde et permet de comprendre ce qu’est la folie. Ainsi, à propos du vivant, du moi et de l’expérience humaine, l’association des idées apparaît comme le « scrupule sceptique auquel se heurte l’abandon confiant à la voie des idées ». (shrink)

Diauxie is at the origin of research that led Jacques Monod, François Jacob, and André Lwoff to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965 for their description of the first genetic regulatory model. Diauxie is a term coined by Jacques Monod in 1941 in his doctoral dissertation that refers to microbial growth in two phases. In this article, we first examine Monod’s thesis to demonstrate how and why Monod interpreted diauxie as a phenomenon of enzyme inhibition or (...) suppression of adaptive enzymes. We also briefly investigate prior enzyme suppression studies, before Monod’s work, which indicate that he is the first person to observe diauxic growth. Second, we analyse Monod’s post-thesis publications throughout his scientific career, revealing that diauxic inhibition was a significant part of Monod’s scientific activities and greatly fascinated Monod until the end of his life. Paradoxically, Monod’s work and interest on diauxic inhibition are still neglected in historical recounts, focused mostly on Monod’s enzymatic adaptation studies. Indeed, we uncovered a statement by Monod’s colleague, Lwoff, who transformed a quotation from Monod by replacing the word phenomenon with enzymatic adaptation, which we believe has influenced historians. Finally, we offer hypotheses to explain why Lwoff altered Monod’s statement. (shrink)

Writers and readers of literature are, among other things, biological entities that evolve under particular political (geographical/historical) conditions. A comparative study of certain texts by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) can help us establish a fruitful interpretation of this threefold link between literary art, biology and politics. However, careful analysis reveals that Heidegger remains too rooted in an old-world, nationalistic and anthropocentric paradigm. We will attempt to rethink Heidegger’s assumptions on the grounds that literature, a cultural practice, enables us to delineate our (...) natural environment. By reformulating Heidegger’s line of thought, we can more precisely address the plural structure of our biotic and political-literary experiences. (shrink)

Summary This article explores the relations among three forms of representations (artistic, mental, and neural) and immersion, considered as an altered state of consciousness, in the context of literary reading. We first define immersive reading as an intensification of our embodied experience of literary representation, in accordance to neuropsychological studies about embodied cognition. We further consider the style of interpretation demanded by such immersive reading and its ethical and ecological underpinnings.

H.-U. Wiemer opposes the image which Libanius gives of Constantine in his fifty-ninth oration to that which emerges from his later works, especially those of the Theodosian period when hostility is obvious, mirroring the opinion of pagan circles, who held this Emperor responsible for most of the calamities endured by the Empire in the fourth century. As the epideictic genre required, in 344/5 or in 348/9 the father had to be praised so that the sons could be praised too. However, (...) Wiemer claims that ‘the panegyric of 344/5 already foreshadows the critical view’, by remaining silent about Christianity, the founding of Constantinople, and the tax policy on the one hand, and on the other hand by clearly declaring Constantine responsible for the war against Persia, which troubled the entire reign of Constantius. I wish to supplement these remarks with a few others and to suggest that the portrait of Constantine in Oration 59 presents us with a case of ‘disguised intention’—a rhetorical proceeding based on ποδήλωσις and παραψόγους: the orator tries to convey a message that is different from his apparent intentions, even opposite to them. (shrink)

H.-U. Wiemer opposes the image which Libanius gives of Constantine in his fifty-ninth oration (Panegyric of Constantius and Constans) to that which emerges from his later works, especially those of the Theodosian period when hostility is obvious, mirroring the opinion of pagan circles, who held this Emperor responsible for most of the calamities endured by the Empire in the fourth century. As the epideictic genre required, in 344/5 or in 348/9 the father had to be praised so that the sons (...) could be praised too. However, Wiemer claims that ‘the panegyric of 344/5 already foreshadows the critical view’, by remaining silent about Christianity, the founding of Constantinople, and the tax policy on the one hand, and on the other hand by clearly declaring Constantine responsible for the war against Persia, which troubled the entire reign of Constantius. I wish to supplement these remarks with a few others and to suggest that the portrait of Constantine inOration59 presents us with a case of ‘disguised intention’—a rhetorical proceeding based on ὑποδήλωσις and παραψόγους: the orator tries to convey a message that is different from his apparent intentions, even opposite to them. (shrink)

A formal sequent system dealing with Menelaus' configurations is introduced in this paper. The axiomatic sequents of the system stem from 2-cycles of Δ-complexes. The Euclidean and projective interpretations of the sequents are defined and a soundness result is proved. This system is decidable and its provable sequents deliver incidence results. A cyclic operad structure tied to this system is presented by generators and relations.

The object of our paper is to examine how wine-related knowledge and practices play an important role in determining the respective flavour experiences of novice wine drinkers and sommeliers. We defend the idea that sensation is informed by knowledge, as it circulates in a cultural environment. Biosemiotics has developed appropriate concepts helping us understand how the same wine can generate diverging experiences. Within a biosemiotic framework, we consider wine flavours as relational, semiosic experiences produced by the convergence of sensory-discriminative, motivational-affective (...) and cognitive-evaluative factors. Drawing from fundamental biosemiotics we argue that these factors vary according to the creature and its simultaneously biological and cultural umwelt. We conclude by examining a series of empirical studies consolidating the idea that sensation is informed by knowledge and language. (shrink)

La femme de couleur libre fut un acteur économique et social dynamique des sociétés coloniales de la Caraïbe. Son étude permet d’illustrer sa place et sa capacité d’agir dans la société. Les donations, enregistrées dans le fonds des Hypothèques de la Martinique entre 1806 et 1830, offrent l’opportunité d’une approche singulière pour dresser le profil de ces femmes de couleur libres et entrevoir la richesse et les spécificités de leurs interactions sociales à une période où leur groupe connait une croissance (...) numérique et économique importante. L’article montre que leur statut particulier les incitait à s’organiser pour garantir la transmission des biens au sein de la famille, malgré l’absence d’union légitime ou encore à prendre en considération la présence de membres de membres esclaves de la famille. Enfin, il éclaire aussi la manière dont ces femmes mettent en œuvre des solidarités féminines particulières. (shrink)

The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin explores how Le Guins fiction and essays have built a speculative ethical practice engaging indigenous knowledge and feminism, while crafting utopias in which human and other-than-human life forms enter into new relations. Her work also delineates new ways of making sense of the "science" of science fiction. The authors of this collection provide up-to-date discussions of well-known works as well as more experimental writings. Written in an accessible style, Legacies will appeal to any (...) readers interested in literature, science fiction and fantasy, as well as specialists of science and technology studies, philosophy of science, ethics, gender studies, indigenous studies and posthumanism."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Before broaching our main subject, and exploring why, among all disorders of the mind, obsessive-compulsive disorders have a place apart, I would like to start from a dilemma that is well-known to historians interested in mental disorders. According to one approach, a mental illness X is considered as a bona fide or ‘genuine’ illness if, and only if, it originates from a disturbance of the brain. Its neurobiological form is in this case considered as invariant, whatever cultural veneer might give (...) it a different aspect in accord with historical and local settings. The assumption is that this veneer does not, properly speaking, have any deep grounding in reality... (shrink)

La notion de « cause secrète », à laquelle les classiques ont largement eu recours, est liée à une pratique de la science et à une conception de ses méthodes telles que la « loi » se trouve au coeur du dispositif. Si certains phénomènes paraissent ne pas être régis par la loi, il faut alors se mettre à amender la loi par de « petites équations ». Si le calcul des probabilités entre en scène, c'est pour déceler précisément la (...) présence de causes qui, d'abord secrètes, le seront moins par la suite, et seront, de toute façon, conformes aux lois. (shrink)

V.1. livres I-IV V.2. livres V-VII. V.3 livres VIII-X.

t. 1. Sections I à X -- t. 2. Sections XI à XXVII -- t. 3. Sections XXVIII à XXXVIII et index.

Potential speech abilities constitute a key component in the description of the Neandertals and their relations with modern Homo Sapiens. Since Lieberman & Crelin postulated in 1971 the theory that “Neanderthal man did not have the anatomical prerequisites for producing the full range of human speech” their speech capability has been a subject of hot debate for over 30 years, and remains a controversial question. In this study, we first question the methodology adopted by Lieberman and Crelin, and we point (...) out articulatory and acoustic flaws in the data and the modeling. Then we propose a general articulatory-acoustic framework for testing the acoustic consequences of the trade-off between oral and pharyngeal cavities. Specifically, following Honda & Tiede, we characterize this trade-off by a Laryngeal Height Index corresponding to the length ratio of the pharyngeal cavity to the oral cavity. Using an anthropomorphic articulatory model controlled by lips, jaw, tongue and larynx parameters, we can generate the Maximal Vowel Space, which is a triangle in the F1 / F2 plane, the three point vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ being located at its three extremities. We sample the evolution of the position of the larynx from birth to adulthood with four different LHI values, and we show that the associated MVS are very similar. Therefore, the MVS of a given vocal tract does not depend on the LHI: gestures of the tongue body, lips and jaw allow compensations for differences in the ratio between the dimensions of the oral cavity and pharynx. We then infer that the vowel space of Neandertals was potentially no smaller than that of a modern human and that Neandertals could produce all the vowels of the world’s languages. Neandertals were no more vocally handicapped than children at birth are. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that the lowering of the larynx and a concomitant increase in pharynx size are necessary evolutionary pre-adaptations for speech. However, since our study is strictly limited to the morphological and acoustic aspects of the vocal tract, we cannot offer any definitive answer to the question of whether Neandertals could produce human speech or not. (shrink)