Alan Gewirth's Reason and Morality directed philosophical attention to the possibility of presenting a rational and rigorous demonstration of fundamental moral principles. Now, these previously unpublished essays from some of the most distinguished philosophers of our generation subject Gewirth's program to thorough evaluation and assessment. In a tour de force of philosophical analysis, Professor Gewirth provides detailed replies to all of his critics--a major, genuinely clarifying essay of intrinsic philosophical interest.

Recent re-evaluation of the question of the exact role of experience in the Cartesian philosophy has emerged from many quarters. The metaphysical issue of innate ideas has been raised by such scholars as McRae and Miles, and a close examination of the role of empirical enquiry and methodology in Cartesian science have been undertaken by Clarke, Garber, Buchdahl and Laudan, to mention only a few. These recent reappraisals of the role of experience in Descartes's philosophy have been cast mostly in (...) twentieth-century terms with a specific view to concerns of the present. ;My research centres on an examination of the philosophical works of three Cartesians, Antoine Le Grand, Robert Desgabets, and Pierre-Sylvain Regis. Though they are relatively minor figures in the history of ideas, their defence of Descartes's thesis concerning the free creation of the eternal truths, and their emphasis on the importance of experience, provide a unique opportunity to reevaluate the role of experience in the Cartesian philosophy in terms that are common in the period. ;There was a strongly empirical component in the philosophical doctrines and practices of these seventeenth-century Cartesians. Le Grand's view of truth as created and dependent on the will of God led him to assign experiment and experience the role of "making manifest" the operation of laws in the physical universe. Desgabets rejected innate ideas, and argued that all ideas depend on the operation of the senses. Regis emphasized the immutability and total dependence of truths and essences on the free will of God, and thereby undermined the rationalist foundation for the Cartesian doctrine of essences. ;My goal in this approach to the question of the nature and role of experience in the Cartesian philosophy is to explore the philosophical basis of the empiricist tendencies found in Descartes as developed by three of his disciples. My hope is that my study of Le Grand, Regis, and Desgabets, who are relatively unknown today, will not only serve to place them appropriately within the history of ideas, but will dislodge the common misconception of Cartesianism as having been an inherently rationalist philosophy. (shrink)

The Itinerarium provides a concise introduction to Bonaventure's theological understanding. This new translation presents Latin and English on facing pages, followed by an extensive and detailed commentary on the historical, scriptural, and linguistic contexts of the text and its translation.

Nietzsche once proclaimed himself the 'Buddha of Europe', and throughout his life Buddhism held enormous interest for him. While he followed Buddhist thinking in demolishing what he regarded as the two-headed delusion of Being and Self, he saw himself as advocating a response to the ensuing nihilist crisis that was diametrically opposed to that of his Indian counterpart. In this book Antoine Panaïoti explores the deep and complex relations between Nietzsche's views and Buddhist philosophy. He discusses the psychological models (...) and theories which underlie their supposedly opposing ethics of 'great health' and explodes the apparent dichotomy between Nietzsche's Dionysian life-affirmation and Buddhist life-negation, arguing for a novel, hybrid response to the challenge of formulating a tenable post-nihilist ethics. His book will interest students and scholars of Nietzsche's philosophy, Buddhist thought and the metaphysical, existential and ethical issues that emerge with the demise of theism. (shrink)

An examination of the difference between communication and transmission that stresses technologies and institutions long overlooked in the study of symbols and signs throughout the history of civilizations.

Assembly of minimal genomes revealed many genes encoding unknown functions. Three overlooked functional categories account for some of them. Cells are prone to make errors and age. As a first key function, discrimination between proper and changed entities is indispensable. Discrimination requires management of information, an authentic, yet abstract, cur- rency of reality. For example proteins age, sometimes very fast. The cell must identify, then get rid of old proteins without destroying young ones. Implementing discrimination in cells leads to the (...) second set of functions, usually ignored. Being abstract, information must nevertheless be embodied into material entities, with unavoidable idiosyncratic properties. This brings about novel unmet needs. Hence, the buildup of cells elicits specific but awkward material implementations, ‘kludges’ that become essential under particular settings, while difficult to identify. Finally, a third functional category char- acterizes the need for growth, with metabolic implementations allowing the cell to put together the growth of its cytoplasm, membranes, and genome, spanning different spatial dimensions. Solving this metabolic quandary, critical for engineering novel synthetic biology chassis, uncovered an unexpected role for CTP synthetase as the coordinator of nonhomothetic growth. Because a significant number of SynBio constructs aim at creating cell factories we expect that they will be attacked by viruses (it is not by chance that the function of the CRISPR system was identified in industrial settings). Substantiating the role of CTP, natural selection has dealt with this hurdle via synthesis of the antimetabolite 30-deoxy-30,40-didehydro- CTP, recruited for antiviral immunity in all domains of life. (shrink)

It is often thought that the literature dealing with religion is nothing more than the expression of a thought elaborated by the theologian, which he struggles to express: the Bible, the primary text, is initially interpreted by theologians, and then writers gather their interpretations. But it is not always so, as the reception of Judas Iscariote testifies: from Klosptock to Kazantzakis through Victor Hugo and Gérard de Nerval, it is the people of letters who preceded the exegetes in the interpretation (...) of the figure of the one who betrayed Jesus. (shrink)

Our aim is to show that translating the modal graphs of Moretti’s “n-opposition theory” (2004) into set theory by a suited device, through identifying logical modal formulas with appropriate subsets of a characteristic set, one can, in a constructive and exhaustive way, by means of a simple recurring combinatory, exhibit all so-called “logical bi-simplexes of dimension n” (or n-oppositional figures, that is the logical squares, logical hexagons, logical cubes, etc.) contained in the logic produced by any given modal graph (an (...) exhaustiveness which was not possible before). In this paper we shall handle explicitly the classical case of the so-called 3(3)-modal graph (which is, among others, the one of S5), getting to a very elegant tetraicosahedronal geometrisation of this logic. (shrink)

To fulfill their crucial duty of relieving suffering in their patients, physicians may have to administer palliative sedation when they implement treatment-limitation decisions such as the withdrawal of life-supporting interventions in patients with poor prognosis chronic severe brain injury. The issue of palliative sedation deserves particular attention in adults with serious brain injuries and in neonates with severe and irreversible brain lesions, who are unable to express pain or to state their wishes. In France, treatment limitation decisions for these patients (...) are left to the physicians. Treatment-limitation decisions are made collegially, based on the presence of irreversible brain lesions responsible for chronic severe disorders of consciousness. Before these decisions are implemented, they are communicated to the relatives. Because the presence and severity of pain cannot be assessed in these patients, palliative analgesia and/or sedation should be administered. However, palliative sedation is a complex strategy that requires safeguards to prevent a drift toward hastening death or performing covert euthanasia. In addition to the law on patients' rights at the end of life passed in France on April 22, 2005, a recent revision of Article 37 of the French code of medical ethics both acknowledges that treatment-limitation decisions and palliative sedation may be required in patients with severe brain injuries and provides legal and ethical safeguards against a shift towards euthanasia. This legislation may hold value as a model for other countries where euthanasia is illegal and for countries such as Belgium and Netherlands where euthanasia is legal but not allowed in patients incapable of asking for euthanasia but in whom a treatment limitation decision has been made. (shrink)

Deux décennies après les premières vagues de démocratisation en Afrique, le temps n'est-il pas venu d'instruire le " procès " de la démocratie ?

This article endeavours to present an overview rather than a complete inventory of LGBTQ studies undertaken in France, in French, mainly in the social and human sciences, in particular in history, but also in law, psychology and psychiatry. A number of explanatory hypotheses will also be advanced to account for why France has lagged behind in this particular area, as well as more broadly in feminist, gender and sexuality studies.

The epistemology of models has to face a conundrum: models are often described as highly idealised, and yet they are considered to be vehicles for scientific explanations. Truth-oriented—veritist—conceptions of explanation seem thereby undermined by this contradiction. In this article, I will show how this apparent paradox can be avoided by appealing to the notion of fiction. If fictionalism is often thought to lead to various flavours of instrumentalism, thereby weakening the veritist hopes, the fiction view of models offers a framework (...) much richer than it seems at first sight. To do so, I will call upon the concepts of modality, counterfactual structure and credible worlds. In the end, veritism of explanation and fiction can indeed go hand in hand, but the scope of explanations we can hope to draw from models must be more precisely delineated. (shrink)

In the present article I attribute to the common topic in the Rhetoric a two-fold suggestive function and a guarantee function. These three functions are possible because this type of topic, while often quite abstract, nevertheless contains thought-steering, substantial terms, and formulates a generally empirical or normative endoxon. Assuming that according to Aristotle an enthymeme has at least two premises, it would appear that a common topic is the abstract principle behind the often implicit major premise. This means that the (...) topic may be regarded as the – generalizing – if-then statement in a modern argumentation scheme. Therefore it should be possible to see the enthymemes of Rhetoric 2.23 as a combination of a logical argument form (which can usually be reconstructed as modus ponens) and an argumentation scheme – even though we may not attribute this idea to Aristotle himself. (shrink)

Il est donc devenu banal de dire que Marx n'a pas laissé de théorie achevée de l'Etat et de la politique. Nombreux sont cependant les textes dans lesquels Marx apporte des éléments décisifs à l'analyse de la dimension politique d'une conjoncture et sur l'évolution des formes étatiques du XIXe siècle. Mais on ne trouve pas chez lui une théorie de l'Etat moderne équivalente à son analyse des rapports de production dans le " capital ". Cela laisse en suspens des problèmes (...) d'importance. Ainsi, comment concevoir le lien entre le rapport salarial, la forme juridique et la représentation politique? Il en est de même pour les phénomènes bureaucratiques. Cela lègue aussi un point aveugle sur une question cruciale : que faut-il entendre par dépérissement de l'Etat? Antoine Artous aborde ces problèmes sans chercher à les esquiver, au travers d'un effort pour "faire parler les textes de Marx". Il ne s'agit pas de restituer une pensée mal comprise ou trahie. Il s'agit d'une lecture critique qui n'hésite pas à relever les lacunes, à mettre Marx à l'épreuve de sa postérité. Un dialogue ainsi s'organise avec des auteurs tels que Max Weber, Nicos Poulantzas ou Ernst Bloch. Pour Antoine Artous, l'œuvre de Marx ne peut sortir indemne de l'inscription historique du marxisme dans ce siècle. Croire le contraire serait illusoire. Elle apparaît néanmoins incontournable pour qui veut penser la formidable rupture dans l'histoire des sociétés que représente l'avènement de l'Etat moderne. Incontournable aussi pour qui veut réfléchir sur les perspectives politiques des luttes d'émancipation. (shrink)

The paper presents a research programme for the neuroscience of consciousness called 'neurophenomenology' and illustrates it with a recent pilot study . At a theoretical level, neurophenomenology pursues an embodied and large-scale dynamical approach to the neurophysiology of consciousness . At a methodological level, the neurophenomenological strategy is to make rigorous and extensive use of first-person data about subjective experience as a heuristic to describe and quantify the large-scale neurodynamics of consciousness . The paper focuses on neurophenomenology in relation to (...) three challenging methodological issues about incorporating first-person data into cognitive neuroscience: first-person reports can be biased or inaccurate; the process of generating first-person reports about an experience can modify that experience; and there is an 'explanatory gap' in our understanding of how to relate first-person, phenomenological data to third-person, biobehavioural data. (shrink)

The Rhetoric to Alexander (about 340 B.C.) contains a list of proofs (pisteis) and other types of argumentation which may be seen as the oldest surviving typology of argumentation schemes (avant la lettre). In the present article this typology is derived and compared with modern proposals. The conclusion is that the oldest typology is surprisingly similar to the most recent classifications.

The lasting effects of the debate over canon-formation during the 1980s affected the whole field of Humanities, which became increasingly engaged in interrogating the origin and function of the Western canon. In philosophy, a great deal of criticism was, as a result, directed at the traditional narrative of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophies—a critique informed by postcolonialism as well as feminist historiography. D. F. Norton, L. Loeb and many others1 attempted to demonstrate the weaknesses of the tripartite division between rationalism, empiricism and (...) critical philosophy.2 As time went on, symptoms of dissatisfaction with what has... (shrink)

Este artigo analisa diversos textos da obra de Tomás de Aquino relativos aostemas do conhecimento divino e das ideias divinas com o intuito de mostrar como duasinterpretações sustentadas por comentadores recentes da obra tomásica não se mantêmdiante da análise rigorosa dos textos. Uma primeira e menos radical interpretaçãosustenta haver ideias práticas distintas de cada coisa particular, enquanto que, deacordo com uma interpretação ainda mais forte, ideias em sentido estrito pertencemprimordialmente a coisas singulares. O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar que, emboraTomás (...) sustente que Deus conhece todas as coisas, inclusive os particulares, a doutrinadas ideias, tal como Tomás a concebe, tem limites muito estreitos, não permitindo opleno desenvolvimento de suas convicções de cunho aristotélico concernentes àcognoscibilidade dos particulares. (shrink)

A epistemologia histórico-racionalista de Canguilhem, seu gosto pelo concreto, as áreas a que se refere - a medicina, o estudo da patologia, a fisiologia, a biologia - parecem longe dos grandes estudos metafísicos do "primeiro" Deleuze e de seu interesse pela sistematização conceitual abstrata. Mas nos situaremos aqui num outro nível: o dos problemas e projetos filosóficos. Sobre esse plano, apresentamos o entrecruzamento das leituras do Essai e de Nietzsche et la philosophie, para ver como é esclarecedor: enquanto um Canguilhem (...) menos exclusivamente racionalista aí aparece, vemos na pesquisa filosofia efetivada por Deleuze algo distinto de um gesto que eleva a reflexão a um grau suplementar de abstração. Mais profundamente, tal aproximação coloca sob novas perspectivas a tripla significação da refundação do criticismo kantiano como uma filosofia de valores, de sua relação com uma "filosofia de vida" e de seu ponto culminante na problematização da imagem do pensamento.  . (shrink)

C'est une vieille évidence qu'il n'est rien sujet à plus de continuelle agitation que les lois. Et en effet, l'ordre juridique est toujours instable. Il traduit un point d'équilibre momentané, qui n'était pas le seul possible, ni le seul prévisible. Le meilleur des Codes n'a jamais pu le fixer. Son contenu évolue sans cesse. Car, à l'image de la vie, le champ du droit est un espace ouvert, où s'affrontent un chaos de forces en perpétuel mouvement. Ni Providence, ni Progrès (...) n'y apparaissent avec certitude, l'esprit souffle apparemment où il veut et nul ne sait où il va. La preuve en est que la meilleure des règles en un temps donné finit toujours par avoir des effets pervers et qu'il est peu de lois vicieuses qui n'aient parfois d'heureux effets. Dans ces conditions, il ne faut pas attendre de l'enseignement du droit qu'il fournisse un catalogue de recettes pratiques, stables et sûres. Son seul but devrait être d'apprendre à poser les bonnes questions, qui sont presque toujours les mêmes, pour parvenir un jour à trouver de bonnes réponses, toujours provisoires. Or, aucune démarche n'est plus propice à la réalisation d'un tel but que la méthode historique. Elle révèle qu'il n'y a jamais de solution bonne et durable et que chaque civilisation, chaque génération doit trouver elle même ses propres réponses, avec une étroite marge de manœuvre. Pour trouver sa voie, explique l'auteur, ni la science, ni la philosophie ne livrent de clé. Si l'une peut l'éclairer et l'autre le guider, le droit n'est ni assimilable à une science, ni réductible à une philosophie. C'est un art subtil, qui nécessite de se plier à une discipline spécifique, mais dont la parfaite maîtrise dépasse celle des règles techniques qui lui sont indispensables. Elle suppose la sagesse d'admettre les pesanteurs, la complexité et la relativité de la vie, ainsi que la sérénité d'accepter ce qui ne peut être changé, le courage de modifier ce qui peut l'être et le désir de chercher à distinguer l'un de l'autre sans parti-pris. Ceci requiert une tournure d'esprit et une culture à laquelle il ne paraît pas concevable d'accéder sans le secours de l'expérience et le recours à l'histoire. (shrink)

Abstract In initial teacher training, the micro-teaching activities and retroaction have for goals to develop reflexive practitioners and competent professionals with a high professional identity. The double analyze of the teacher’s action – observation of teacher gestures and analysis of retroaction - requires two complementary methods to make the links between interactive and postactive phase. In this article, the authors describe the different training activities, and explain the research approach with an illustration of a concrete case. -/- En formation initiale (...) des enseignants, les activités de micro-enseignement et de rétroaction vidéo ont pour objectif de former des praticiens réflexifs et des professionnels compétents dotés d’une identité forte. La double lecture de l’action, via l’observation des gestes professionnels et l’analyse des traces de réflexivité survenues contenu lors des entretiens de rétroactions, nécessite de mettre en place deux méthodes complémentaires, ceci afin de faire les liens entre phase interactive et phase postactive. Dans cet article, après avoir détaillé le dispositif de formation, les auteurs exposent leurs démarches en les illustrant par le cas concret d’une future enseignante. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that fiction is necessarily incomplete, but some recent work postulates the existence of universal fictions—stories according to which everything is true. Building such a story is supposedly straightforward: authors can either assert that everything is true in their story, define a complement function that does the assertoric work for them, or, most compellingly, write a story combining a contradiction with the principle of explosion. The case for universal fictions thus turns on the intuitive priority we assign (...) to the law of non-contradiction. My goal in this paper is to show that our critical and reflective literary practices set constraints on story-telling which preclude universal fictions. I will raise four stumbling blocks for universal fictionalists: the gap between saying and making true, our actual interpretive reactions to story-level contradictions, the criteria we accept for what counts as a story in our literary practices, and the undesirability of the universal fictionalist’s closure principles. (shrink)

The premise that every work belongs to an art-kind has recently inspired a kind-centred approach to theories of art. Kind-centred analyses posit that we should abandon the project of giving a general theory of art and focus instead on giving theories of the arts. The main difficulty, however, is to explain what makes a given kind an art-kind in the first place. Kind-centred theorists have passed this buck on to appreciative practices, but this move proves unsatisfactory. I argue that the (...) root of this dissatisfaction stems not from the act of kicking the can down the road, but from not kicking it far enough. The missing ingredient, I argue, is a notion of convention which does the work of marking the difference between art and non-art for a given physical medium. (shrink)

Spiritualism designates a philosophy that lays claim to the separation of mind and body and the ontological and epistemological primacy of the former. In France, it is associated with the names of Victor Cousin and René Descartes, or more precisely with what Cousin made of Descartes as the founding father of a brittle rational psychology, closed off from the positive sciences, and as a critic in respect to the empiricist legacy of the idéologues. Moreover, by considering merely the end result, (...) severed from its polemical genesis, we are prevented from understanding how the category of experience constituted a crucial question for spiritualism itself. Through returning to the origin of these discussions in the 1826 preface to Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques, this essay pursues a threefold path: to show that the public birth of Cousinian spiritualism coincides with the affirmation of applying the experimental method, issuing from Bacon, to the study of facts of consciousness; that Cousin’s later evolution follows a process of radicalization—that is, in this context, of ontologization and of reduction; and that by recovering this genesis, we can distinguish many forms of spiritualisms committed to the experimental method, both in alliance with the early Cousin and against the later Cousin. In this way, we can rediscover the interwoven philosophical links, lost in the process of institutionalization, between metaphysical demands and empiricist concerns, or between “French” philosophy and the legacy of Condillac. (shrink)

Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Imagerie Ce´re´brale (LENA), Hoˆpital de La Salpeˆtrie`re, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

Examines the theories of translation by German romantics in the early 19th century, from Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and A.W. Schlegel to Schleiermacher, and compares them briefly to the contemporary, but contrasting, theories by Herder, ...

Why is Butterfield's best-seller The Origins of Modern Science (1949) such a powerful big picture, nearly impossible to move away from? Considered in the context of his life, the contrast between his attacks on Whig history and the contents of his best-seller reveals that his big picture of science continues at the centre because of his spiritual beliefs and practices. Butterfield did not make explicit his Christian (Methodist) world view to his history of science readers, although one could infer this (...) from his point that Christianity and the Scientific Revolution were the most significant events in universal history, transcending cultural boundaries. As long as Christian beliefs and practices continue to be at the centre of Western Society, so will Butterfield's big picture be at the centre. Western society is a Christian civilization. For Butterfield, the meaning of history is Christianity and The Origins of Modern Science is very much a Christian statement of the evolution of knowledge acquisition in Western society. To de-centre The Origins would require first a de-centred view of Christianity. (shrink)

L’objectif de cet article est de questionner l’opposition classique entre la connaissance tacite et la connaissance explicite et de montrer qu’il n’existe pas de césure entre ces deux aspects de la connaissance, mais seulement des situations d’expression, de transmission et d’apprentissage de la connaissance plus ou moins complexes et plus ou moins exigeantes. Pour ce faire, la stratégie consistera à présenter certaines difficultés et contradictions auxquelles peut conduire le traitement de la notion de connaissance explicite dans le dernier ouvrage de (...) Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. (shrink)

L’objectif de cet article est de questionner l’opposition classique entre la connaissance tacite et la connaissance explicite et de montrer qu’il n’existe pas de césure entre ces deux aspects de la connaissance, mais seulement des situations d’expression, de transmission et d’apprentissage de la connaissance plus ou moins complexes et plus ou moins exigeantes. Pour ce faire, la stratégie consistera à présenter certaines difficultés et contradictions auxquelles peut conduire le traitement de la notion de connaissance explicite dans le dernier ouvrage de (...) Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. (shrink)

Dans un monde dominé par les conflits, il arrive qu’il faille se défendre. L’invention des armes a évolué en parallèle avec le savoir technique, puis scientifique, et il est même arrivé que la recherche d’applications militaires ait joué un rôle moteur dans la découverte scientifique. Lorsque les armes ne servent pas à attaquer d’autres nations, leur fabrication et leur commerce se justifient morale- ment. Il faut cependant qu’elles ne puissent échapper à ceux qui les construisent et doivent en contrôler la (...) diffusion. Facilement mise en œuvre, la guerre utilisant des organismes vivants ou ce qu’ils pro- duisent comme armes est très ancienne. Or l’originalité des êtres vivants est qu’ils se multiplient, qu’un seul individu suffit à recouvrir la Terre de ses descendants. La biologie ne se prête jamais à un usage militaire moralement défendable parce que le confinement au champ de bataille est impossible. De ce fait, les applications de la biologie ont été vite écartées du domaine de la Défense permise par les traités internationaux. La Convention de 1972 sur l’Interdiction des Armes Biologiques et à Toxines (CIABT), entrée en vigueur en 1975, est aujourd’hui signée par 183 pays (ratifiée par 175) sur un total de 193, sans compter Taïwan qui l’a ratifiée mais n’est pas reconnu par l’ONU. Elle interdit la mise au point, la fabrication, l’acquisition, le transfert, la conservation, le stockage et l’utilisation des armes bio- logiques et à toxines. Elle constitue un élément essentiel de la lutte contre la prolifération des armes de destruction massive. (shrink)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

_sciousness called ‘neurophenomenology’ (Varela 1996) and illustrates it with a_ _recent pilot study (Lutz et al., 2002). At a theoretical level, neurophenomenology_ _pursues an embodied and large-scale dynamical approach to the_ _neurophysiology of consciousness (Varela 1995; Thompson and Varela 2001;_ _Varela and Thompson 2003). At a methodological level, the neurophenomeno-_ _logical strategy is to make rigorous and extensive use of first-person data about_ _subjective experience as a heuristic to describe and quantify the large-scale_ _neurodynamics of consciousness (Lutz 2002). The paper (...) foocuses on_ _neurophenomenology in relation to three challenging methodological issues_ _about incorporating first-person data into cognitive neuroscience: (i) first-person_ _reports can be biased or inaccurate; (ii) the process of generating first-person_ _reports about an experience can modify that experience; and (iii) there is an ‘ex-_ _planatory gap’ in our understanding of how to relate first-person, phenomeno-_ _logical data to third-person, biobehavioural data._. (shrink)

Recent brain imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have implicated insula and anterior cingulate cortices in the empathic response to another’s pain. However, virtually nothing is known about the impact of the voluntary generation of compassion on this network. To investigate these questions we assessed brain activity using fMRI while novice and expert meditation practitioners generated a loving-kindness-compassion meditation state. To probe affective reactivity, we presented emotional and neutral sounds during the meditation and comparison periods. Our main hypothesis (...) was that the concern for others cultivated during this form of meditation enhances affective processing, in particular in response to sounds of distress, and that this response to emotional sounds is modulated by the degree of meditation training. The presentation of the emotional sounds was associated with increased pupil diameter and activation of limbic regions (insula and cingulate cortices) during meditation (versus rest). During meditation, activation in insula was greater during presentation of negative sounds than positive or neutral sounds in expert than it was in novice meditators. The strength of activation in insula was also associated with self-reported intensity of the meditation for both groups. These results support the role of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. The comparison between meditation vs. rest states between experts and novices also showed increased activation in amygdala, right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in response to all sounds, suggesting, greater detection of the emotional sounds, and enhanced mentation in response to emotional human vocalizations for experts than novices during meditation. Together these data indicate that the mental expertise to cultivate positive emotion alters the activation of circuitries previously linked to empathy and theory of mind in response to emotional stimuli.. (shrink)

Antoine Pecquet wrote in the eighteenth century during the reign of Louis XV. Although he included Pascal among those he admired, he considered Alexander Pope his true mentor. In Part 1 of "Diverse Thoughts on Man," Pecquet reflects on Man's responsibilities as an individual: in Part 2, on Man's responsibilities as a member of society. Among these responsibilities he includes human and social concerns, such as parental and filial obligations, and the transfer of wealth between generations. In the tradition (...) of Montaigne, Pecquet intended his "Diverse Thoughts on Man" to help his readers learn more about themselves. Although he felt that those who would profit most from his book were readers who had not greatly pondered about themselves, he believed that every reader could find something of value in it. (shrink)

Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole were philosophers and theologians associated with Port-Royal Abbey, a centre of the Catholic Jansenist movement in seventeenth-century France. Their enormously influential Logic or the Art of Thinking, which went through five editions in their lifetimes, treats topics in logic, language, theory of knowledge and metaphysics, and also articulates the response of 'heretical' Jansenist Catholicism to orthodox Catholic and Protestant views on grace, free will and the sacraments. In attempting to combine the categorical theory of (...) the proposition with a Cartesian account of knowledge, their Logic represents the classical view of judgment which inspired the modern transformation in logic and semantic theory by Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and recent philosophers. This edition presents a new translation of the text, together with a historical introduction and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)