Analisa a influência do pensamento da “Escola de Frankfurt” na Ciência da Informação. Realiza estudo descritivo, de caráter epistemológico, subsidiado pela hermenêutica habermasiana. Apresenta interlocuções da “Teoria Crítica” de Frankfurt no campo das ciências sociais, notadamente, no contexto da Ciência da informação, por meio dos estudos e pesquisas publicados junto ao campo, na contemporaneidade. Dimensiona os pensadores frankfurtianos mais referenciados no campo da informação, com base no cenário contemporâneo do conhecimento no campo. Destaca as articulações dos constructos frankfurtianos às tendências (...) e tópicos teóricos, metodológicos e temáticos da Ciência da Informação, evidenciando aqueles mais expressivos, propulsores e representativos dessa articulação na contemporaneidade. Conclui destacando que os encaminhamentos frankfurtianos erguem-se sobremaneira fecundos como via para se conceber e perceber a informação e a Ciência da Informação em termos humanos, sociais e crítico-reflexivos, de modo a reafirmar seu pertencimento à condição de ciência social, muito além de projeções pragmatistas, tecnicistas e positivistas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Reasonable Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense by William GreenwayVictor AndersonA Reasonable Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense William Greenway LOUISVILLE, KY: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2015. 170 PP. $30.00This book offers an apology for the reasonableness of Christian belief in the God of love and the gift of God in Jesus, agape, against its secular detractors from early modern philosophy to the late twentieth (...) century. Intentionally apologetic in tone, the argument moves from old-school Evangelical kinds of defenses that characterized early 1970s apologetic revivals by thinkers like Josh McDowell and his "evidences demanding a verdict" or Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason. Greenway, however, incrementally shifts from defense language to affirmation of the face, agape, and the gift. He discloses a philosophical spirituality embodied in Christian belief in the ethical realities of freedom, obligations, justice, and love.The book illustrates how these spiritual realities feed back into Christian substantive beliefs through expositions of scripture and doctrine, especially the parables and life of Jesus. Greenway brings insightful readings of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean-Luc Marion to bear on these sources. What begins as a strictly philosophical defense of Christian belief movingly invites readers to travel from apologetics, evidences, and warrants to the spiritual sphere where Christians and non-Christians alike may reasonably affirm the priority of agape love. "Agape names the reality of our having been seized in and by love for others," Greenway argues (xiii).This book insightfully and passionately presents the complexities of faith and life in the world of face-to-face human encounters and our planetary ecological and environmental interactions with nonhuman others. Greenway's relational phenomenology provides an ethical pattern for human-to-human reception of divine agape, the gift, which is available to all in our moral struggles with a pluralism of faiths, even as Christians seek to demonstrate the ethical demands of agape, love, which, according to Greenway, is the spiritual essence of the Gospel.Part I, "The Secular Condition" (chapters 1–4), is classically apologetic in tone, mapping the philosophical skeptical terrain where reason and science rob Christian belief in God of any noetic validity. The Cartesian and Darwinian revolutions hold center in the production of the "secular" dismissal of reasonable belief in God, spiritual realities, and what ethical powers they bear on human face-to-face encounters with God. Part II, "The Essence of Reasonable Christianity" (chapters 5–9), draws on the French phenomenology of [End Page 194] Lévinas and Marion to restore, Greenway argues, a "spiritually attuned rationality, an awakened rationality that facilitates the unfolding of a philosophical spirituality" that considers "classic teachings of Jesus in light of this restored rationality, expecting that dimensions of Jesus' spiritual genius will shine forth with renewed brilliance" (xiii). Greenway contends that these renewed spiritual insights, informed by agape, the gift, yield spiritual understanding and appreciation of formidable Christian belief schemes: original sin, the fall, good, evil, grace, forgiveness, koinonia, salvation, faith, eternal life, and resurrection (xiii).Greenway describes his goal as a constructive philosophical spirituality. "The essence of this philosophical spirituality," Greenway argues, "is continuous with the essence of Christian spirituality," when articulated in an explicitly (although non-exclusivist) Christian voice and in accord with "common public standards of what is good and reasonable" (xiii). He concludes, "love is not something we create or do, but awakening and surrendering to that love in and by which we have been seized" (xiii). A Reasonable Belief offers a rigorous and creative engagement of modern and contemporary continental philosophy and science with Christian love ethics that seeks to restore its centrality in our postmodern moment.Victor AndersonVanderbilt UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This paper elicits a twentieth‐century American story that is deeply rooted in the legacy of American philosophical pragmatism, its impact on a particular school, and its reconstruction of American theology. The paper focuses on three generations of American theologians, and it centers on how these theologians reconstruct theology in light of the science of their day and how they maintain a true plurality of insights about human life in the world. The pragmatic theologian regards the creative exchange between theology and (...) natural science as an opportunity for renewing our understanding of religious life and appreciating the various commitments of scientists and theologians as they meet at the juncture of human interests. The first voice is that of the early Chicago School of Theology represented by Shailer Mathews, Gerald Birney Smith, and George Burman Foster. The second voice is that of Henry Nelson Wieman, a second‐generation theologian at Chicago. The final theologian discussed is James M. Gustafson, former Professor of Theological Ethics at Chicago. (shrink)

Monica A. Coleman achieves remarkable rigor in bringing together in one volume her long-standing interests in process philosophy and theology, womanist theology and ethics, African diaspora studies, West African religions, and African American women’s literature. Making a way out of No Way (2008) is a tour de force in contemporary African American constructive theology and especially in womanist discourse on the religious experience(s) of African American women. Coleman insists on understanding black women’s religious experience through the lens of their complex (...) subjectivity, which is irreducible to singularity or totality. As typically found in academic womanist theology, Coleman does not begin her theology with .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Reasonable Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense by William GreenwayVictor AndersonA Reasonable Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense William Greenway LOUISVILLE, KY: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2015. 170 PP. $30.00This book offers an apology for the reasonableness of Christian belief in the God of love and the gift of God in Jesus, agape, against its secular detractors from early modern philosophy to the late twentieth (...) century. Intentionally apologetic in tone, the argument moves from old-school Evangelical kinds of defenses that characterized early 1970s apologetic revivals by thinkers like Josh McDowell and his "evidences demanding a verdict" or Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason. Greenway, however, incrementally shifts from defense language to affirmation of the face, agape, and the gift. He discloses a philosophical spirituality embodied in Christian belief in the ethical realities of freedom, obligations, justice, and love.The book illustrates how these spiritual realities feed back into Christian substantive beliefs through expositions of scripture and doctrine, especially the parables and life of Jesus. Greenway brings insightful readings of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean-Luc Marion to bear on these sources. What begins as a strictly philosophical defense of Christian belief movingly invites readers to travel from apologetics, evidences, and warrants to the spiritual sphere where Christians and non-Christians alike may reasonably affirm the priority of agape love. "Agape names the reality of our having been seized in and by love for others," Greenway argues (xiii).This book insightfully and passionately presents the complexities of faith and life in the world of face-to-face human encounters and our planetary ecological and environmental interactions with nonhuman others. Greenway's relational phenomenology provides an ethical pattern for human-to-human reception of divine agape, the gift, which is available to all in our moral struggles with a pluralism of faiths, even as Christians seek to demonstrate the ethical demands of agape, love, which, according to Greenway, is the spiritual essence of the Gospel.Part I, "The Secular Condition" (chapters 1–4), is classically apologetic in tone, mapping the philosophical skeptical terrain where reason and science rob Christian belief in God of any noetic validity. The Cartesian and Darwinian revolutions hold center in the production of the "secular" dismissal of reasonable belief in God, spiritual realities, and what ethical powers they bear on human face-to-face encounters with God. Part II, "The Essence of Reasonable Christianity" (chapters 5–9), draws on the French phenomenology of [End Page 194] Lévinas and Marion to restore, Greenway argues, a "spiritually attuned rationality, an awakened rationality that facilitates the unfolding of a philosophical spirituality" that considers "classic teachings of Jesus in light of this restored rationality, expecting that dimensions of Jesus' spiritual genius will shine forth with renewed brilliance" (xiii). Greenway contends that these renewed spiritual insights, informed by agape, the gift, yield spiritual understanding and appreciation of formidable Christian belief schemes: original sin, the fall, good, evil, grace, forgiveness, koinonia, salvation, faith, eternal life, and resurrection (xiii).Greenway describes his goal as a constructive philosophical spirituality. "The essence of this philosophical spirituality," Greenway argues, "is continuous with the essence of Christian spirituality," when articulated in an explicitly (although non-exclusivist) Christian voice and in accord with "common public standards of what is good and reasonable" (xiii). He concludes, "love is not something we create or do, but awakening and surrendering to that love in and by which we have been seized" (xiii). A Reasonable Belief offers a rigorous and creative engagement of modern and contemporary continental philosophy and science with Christian love ethics that seeks to restore its centrality in our postmodern moment.Victor AndersonVanderbilt UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

ECONOMIA CRIATIVA: CONCEITO E RELAÇÃO COM O DIREITO.

The paper inspects Anderson’s central thesis that Kant’s dogmatic slumber was interrupted by Hume’s critique of metaphysics in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, namely, by his critique of the rationalist principle of sufficient reason, which lies at the heart of dogmatic proofs of God’s existence. I recreate the meaning of “Hume’s objection,” define the larger role the principle of sufficient reason plays in Kant’s philosophy, and evaluate the explanatory potential of Anderson’s interpretation in view of Kant’s early and (...) critical texts, as well as his other autobiographical statements. Although Anderson’s hypothesis seems well-founded and even explicates the hidden connection between the entire critical project and the refutation of Spinozism, I argue it is almost impossible to reconcile it with the current research in Kant’s Entwicklungsgeschichte. (shrink)

In The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal, Victor Kestenbaum swims against the current of Dewey scholarship. He declares for and gives close articulation to the importance of transcendence in the philosophy of John Dewey. The guiding thread of the book is "the proposal that Dewey never outgrew his idealistic period. His philosophical achievement is not to be located in his naturalism but in the frontiers along which the natural and the transcendental touch" (137). Kestenbaum does not argue (...) that Dewey defends a supernatural sense of transcendence; instead, he documents the modes of transcendence that, for Dewey, reveal themselves within the flow of experience. This is a learned and carefully developed book, one that will provoke pragmatists to think carefully about how growth, self-revision, and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to My ReadersMichael S. Hogue (bio)I. IntroductionI often begin writing for personal reasons: to slow my thinking, clarify and organize my thoughts, trace ideas, and sort concepts. Generally, a concern for something I consider wrong about the world motivates me to write. Provoked by such a concern, I write to understand why and how what is wrong came to be that way and why and how I (...) think it can or should be different. I write in reply to H. Richard Niebuhr's moral hermeneutic question, "What's going on?" And yet, while writing typically begins (for me) as a personal search for understanding, this search eventually leads me to (re) discover my formative communities of inquiry and interpretation. None of my questions or ideas, none of my orienting values, none of my interpretive impulses are mine alone. They do not, and cannot, exist independently of others' questions, ideas, values, and interpretations. To use Peirce's metaphor, they are slender fibers braided into a larger cable rather than independent links in a chain. The issues and questions that motivate my research; the topics I care about enough to develop into articles and books; the conceptual, critical, and normative vocabularies I bring to my research and writing; the intellectual traditions that shape the patterns of my thinking—none of these are strictly personal or individual. They have taken root and grown in me as I've learned with and from others. Writing reminds me that, as a person, I am a creature of relational processes because it shows me that my mind is not (exclusively) my own—what and how I think have been formed, animated, and limited by my experience with others in a larger world of experience that is broader and deeper than any individual mind.I open this brief essay with this comment to acknowledge my gratitude and indebtedness not only to the authors of the articles in this special issue (Walter Gulick, Robert Smid, John Teehan, and AJ Turner) but also to the larger community of scholars that comprise the readership of the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy (AJTP) and the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought (IARPT). I attended my first IARPT (HIARPT, at the time) conference about seventeen years ago, soon after completing my Ph.D. I didn't know anyone personally then, but I knew several folks as authors of articles and books I had read in recent years. I discovered IARPT through the bibliography of Victor Anderson's book, Pragmatic Theology: Negotiating [End Page 80] the Intersections of an American Philosophy of Religion and Public Theology. I resonated with Anderson's articulation of a socially engaged public theology that drew from American pragmatist, historicist, and naturalist philosophies of religion. His mind had been where mine was going, into the dissenting tradition of American immanence, or the left wing of American radical theology, as I refer to it.While reading Anderson's book, I learned that many of the authors in his bibliography met every summer as a (relatively?) organized group of like-minded scholars. I joined them the next chance I had. And as things go with this group, I was immediately recruited to serve as the book review editor for the AJTP! Since that first meeting, I've attended as many IARPT meetings as my schedule allows, organized one of the summer conferences, served as AJTP book review editor for several years, and then served for several more years as the AJTP editor (following Michael Raposa's illustrious term!). Most recently, I was honored when Andrew Irvine and Austin Roberts made American Immanence a focus of the 2021 IARPT conference, "Political Thought and the Powers of Democracy: American Thought in the Anthropocene." Gulick's, Smid's, Teehan's, and Turner's articles began as papers for that conference.All this is to say what I have heard many others say through the years: the IARPT/AJTP community of interpretation has become a primary intellectual (and even spiritual) home for me. I am (and we are) fortunate to belong to a group of academic philosophers and theologians who collectively embody a rare (let us hope not... (shrink)

This review essay explores Josiah Young's project of developing a liberatory Pan-Africanism that is attuned to cultural diversity and Victor Anderson's advocacy of postmodern cultural criticism in African-American religious thought. After situating African-American religious thought as a branch of Africana thought, the author examines these two religious thinkers' work as an effort to forge a position on African-American religious thought--including its relation to theology--in an age where even theory is treated as a god that is about to die. (...) At the conclusion, secularism emerges as a religious project that normatively undergirds the methodological dimensions of these works. (shrink)

This book examines leadership strategies that allow administrators to be proactive, visionary, and flexible while increasing collaboration, open communication, and closely integrating theory and practice to ensure successful administration in higher education settings.

The present article was partly inspired by G. Pollack’s book, and also Dadoloff, Saxena & Jensen (2010). As a senior physicist colleague and our friend, Robert N. Boyd, wrote in a journal (JCFA, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2022), for example, things and Beings can travel between Universes, intentionally or unintentionally [4]. In this short remark, we revisit and offer short remark to Neil Boyd’s ideas and trying to connect them with geometry of musical chords as presented by D. Tymoczko and (...) others, then to Escherian staircase and then to Jacob’s ladder which seems to pointto possibility to interpret Jacob’s vision as described in the ancient book of Genesis as interdimensional staircase, e.g. an interdimensional bridge between heaven and earth (cf. classic book: Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach). Jacob’s vision of angels going down to earth from that staircase has been depicted for instance in William Blake art etc. In our communication with others via physics literature and discussions etc, we came to several conclusions as follows: Firstly, possibility of wormhole effect to mirror particle universe, which sometimes it is termed non-orientable wormhole. While such mirror particles effect have been more than 50 years predicted with the so-called parity violation (cf. Lee & Yang, 1950s), and that is called symmetry breaking. Secondly, a series of extended experiments on laser irradiated cold water may suggest possible transition from a phase of water to be at least partially fourth phase of water, which may be composed of crystalline water (see e.g. Gerald Pollack, and also Harold Aspden on liquid crystalline). If we can imagine laser cooling effect can be done in protracted time, then we can achieve a physical representation of Aspden‘s liquid crystalline. Therefore, in this article we outline a series of simple experiments of laser irradiated iced-water along with beryl and selenite crystals in order to see possibility of such a quantum tunneling via quantum liquid crystalline Universe hypothesis, which may likely be modeled with iced-water. It is interesting to remark here that certain experiments by Stockholm University scientists have shown that X-ray triggered water can exhibit properties just like liquid crystal (cf. PRL, 2020). That is why we consider it possible that there can be quantum phase transition where liquid water (comprised of iced cubes and water) can exhibit effects such as tunneling in quantum liquid crystalline Universe. Last but not least, we admit that what we outlined here is just aninitial phase; and if you wish, perhaps we can call such experiments as “wormhole-at-lab” experiments (abbreviated: WHALE). (shrink)

John Palmer develops and defends a modal interpretation of Parmenides, according to which he was the first philosopher to distinguish in a rigorous manner the fundamental modalities of necessary being, necessary non-being or impossibility, and non-necessary or contingent being. This book accordingly reconsiders his place in the historical development of Presocratic philosophy in light of this new interpretation. Careful treatment of Parmenides' specification of the ways of inquiry that define his metaphysical and epistemological outlook paves the way for detailed analyses (...) of his arguments demonstrating the temporal and spatial attributes of what is and cannot not be. An appendix presents a Greek text of the fragments of Parmenides' poem with English translation and textual notes. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage de Victor Goldschmidt, pour la premiere fois en edition de poche, est le seul consacre a une notion centrale de la philosophie platonicienne, le paradigme, a la fois exemple, comparaison et modele.En prenant comme fil conducteur la definition donnee dans le Politique, l'auteur commence par etudier le role joue par ce procede privilegie dans la methode dialectique des derniers Dialogues. S'exercer sur une realite banale permet de decouvrir la structure d'un grand sujet, plus difficile a definir, comme (...) le sophiste ou l'art politique. Cependant la reussite d'une demarche en saurait en fonder la legitimite. En s'interrogeant sur son fondement, Victor Goldschmidt montre que l'usage d'un paradigme obeit a un mouvement profond de la pensee platonicienne, il nous mene du visible a l'invisible. (shrink)

A widespread view in moral, legal, and political philosophy, as well as in public discourse, is that responsibility makes a difference to the fair allocation or distribution of things that are valuable or disvaluable independently of responsibility. For example, the fairness of punishing a person for wrongdoing varies with her responsibility for wrongdoing; the fairness of requiring a person to pay compensation varies with her responsibility for the harm that she caused; the fairness of one person being worse off than (...) another varies with her responsibility for being worse off; the fairness of inflicting defensive harm on a person to avert a threat varies with her responsibility for causing or posing the threat; and so on. (shrink)

The inclusion of elite transwomen athletes in sport is controversial. The recent International Olympic Committee guidelines allow transwomen to compete in the women’s division if their testosterone is held below 10 nmol/L. This is significantly higher than that of cis-women. Science demonstrates that high testosterone and other male physiology provides a performance advantage in sport suggesting that transwomen retain some of that advantage. To determine whether the advantage is unfair necessitates an ethical analysis of the principles of inclusion and fairness. (...) Particularly important is whether the advantage held by transwomen is a tolerable or intolerable unfairness. We conclude that the advantage to transwomen afforded by the IOC guidelines is an intolerable unfairness. This does not mean transwomen should be excluded from elite sport but that the existing male/female categories in sport should be abandoned in favour of a more nuanced approach satisfying both inclusion and fairness. (shrink)

Subjects experiencing thought insertion disown thoughts they are introspectively aware of. According to what I call “the rationality hypothesis”, thought-insertion reports are not merely intelligible, but also express, or potentially express, fully rational judgments in the light of highly disruptive experience. I argue that the hypothesis is ethically and theoretically motivated, and provides two insights into the philosophical significance of reports by subjects with schizophrenia. First, the reports can be seen as evidence that rational judgments of ownership of a thought (...) prioritize agency awareness over introspective awareness of it. This point fits with an integrative account of thought insertion at the personal and mechanistic levels. Second, rational and competent uses of the first person purely based on introspection do not necessarily involve a full-fledged first-person perspective over one’s thoughts. This suggests that agency awareness, and not introspection as such, is primarily involved in determining the reference of the first person featuring in the judgments. (shrink)

Recent evidence readily confirms that ethical conduct in human interaction has declined in the context of business, but also in virtually every phase of life. An alarming number of government leaders at all levels have demonstrated by their conduct that their primary goal is the pursuit of self-interest for themselves, their party, and their constituents - regardless of whether the choices they make are in the long-term best interests of those whom they are obligated to serve. Academic institutions and their (...) leaders similarly seem to be either tied to past assumptions and traditions that seem, or blatantly out of touch with the needs of their students and the communities that they serve. Increasingly, college and university academic programs are being taught by part-time and temporary faculty who are paid less than their elementary and high school counterparts who lack their educational preparation, level of knowledge, or responsibility in preparing students for their chosen careers. Non-governmental organizations also struggle to earn the respect of the public, and their trustworthiness has been called into question as chief executive officers and staff receive high salaries, but lack accountability for achieving results or acting with integrity. Those who work in the media are as a group no longer trusted to provide an objective and unbiased assessment of the news. Even religious institutions are under attack and their leaders are being asked to be accountable to the standards which their doctrines advocate. Implicit in ethical conduct is the responsibility to identify the far goals of human achievement - rather than short-term interests that undermine long-term value creation and outcomes that best serve society. Abraham Maslow has wisely noted that the pursuit of efficiency must be evaluated in terms of the specific goals intended to be achieved, but the ramifications of individual and collective actions often seem to be out of focus, misdirected, and short-sighted. (shrink)

Western philosophers have generally neglected honor as a moral phenomenon worthy of serious study. Appiah’s recent work on honor in moral revolutions is an important exception, but even he is careful to separate honor from morality, regarding it as only “an ally” of morality. In this paper we take Appiah to be right about the psychological, social, and historical role honor has played in three notable moral revolutions, but wrong about the moral nature of honor. We defend two new theses: (...) First, honor is an emotional and moral form of recognition respect that can hinder or aid moral progress. Second, honor, so conceived, can play a rational role in progressive moral change, as it did among the working class in the British abolition of slave trade, when the pressure of moral consistency moved them to protest American slavery as an affront to their honor without change in their moral belief that slavery is wrong. (shrink)

Do psychopaths make moral judgments but lack motivation? Or are psychopaths’ judgments are not genuinely moral? Both sides of this debate seem to assume either externalist or internalist criteria for the presence of moral judgment. However, if moral judgment is a natural kind, we can arrive at a theory-neutral criterion for moral judgment. A leading naturalistic criterion suggests that psychopaths have an impaired capacity for moral judgment; the capacity is neither fully present nor fully absent. Psychopaths are therefore not counterexamples (...) to internalism. Nonetheless, internalism is empirically problematic because it is unable to explain psychopaths’ moral deficits. (shrink)

In this article, we present results from a literature review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values of nature conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as part of the Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuations of Nature. We identify the most frequently recurring meanings in the heterogeneous use of different value types and their association with worldviews and other key concepts. From frequent uses, we determine a core meaning for each value type, which is (...) sufficiently inclusive to serve as an umbrella over different understandings in the literature and specific enough to help highlight its difference from the other types of values. Finally, we discuss convergences, overlapping areas, and fuzzy boundaries between different value types to facilitate dialogue, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the methods for valuation of nature's contributions to people, including ecosystem services, to inform policy and direct future research. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. (shrink)

Dans ce monumental ouvrage devenu un classique du commentaire, Victor Goldschmidt, fidele a sa methode structurale et combattant l'idee selon laquelle la pensee de Rousseau ne serait pas organisee, demontre qu'il est possible d'expliciter les principes du systeme de Rousseau. Denoncant l'opposition recue entre la genese et la structure, l'auteur procede a un examen minutieux de la constitution de ces principes, en s'appuyant sur les deux Discours et l'Emile - Rousseau lui-meme disait que son systeme y etait formule -, (...) mais surtout sur le Discours sur l'inegalite, dont le present travail etudie le contenu et les prolongements. Prenant le temps de considerer ce texte comme une oeuvre proprement philosophique et d'etablir la these des interlocuteurs du philosophe pour mieux determiner sa pensee, Victor Goldschmidt montre comment s'elabore et progresse cette pensee et en restitue ainsi le sens, la coherence, en un mot l'unite substantielle. (shrink)

Muscle synergy analysis via surface electromyography is useful to study muscle coordination in motor learning, clinical diagnosis, and neurorehabilitation. However, current methods to extract muscle synergies in the upper limb suffer from two major issues. First, the necessary normalization of EMG signals is performed via maximum voluntary contraction, which requires maximal isometric force production in each muscle. However, some individuals with motor impairments have difficulties producing maximal effort in the MVC task. In addition, the MVC is known to be highly (...) unreliable, with widely different forces produced in repeated measures. Second, synergy extraction in the upper limb is typically performed with a multidirection reaching task. However, some participants with motor impairments cannot perform this task because it requires precise motor control. In this study, we proposed a new isometric rotating task that does not require precise motor control or large forces. In this task, participants maintain a cursor controlled by the arm end-point force on a target that rotates at a constant angular velocity at a designated force level. To relax constraints on motor control precision, the target is widened and blurred. To obtain a reference EMG value for normalization without requiring maximal effort, we estimated a linear relationship between joint torques and muscle activations. We assessed the reliability of joint torque normalization and synergy extraction in the rotating task in young neurotypical individuals. Compared with normalization with MVC, joint torque normalization allowed reliable EMG normalization at low force levels. In addition, the extraction of synergies was as reliable and more stable than with the multidirection reaching task. The proposed rotating task can, therefore, be used in future motor learning, clinical diagnosis, and neurorehabilitation studies. (shrink)

rails to total abstraction, to conjure a perfect social system, between fulfilment of individual and colective will.

Long Range and short range, guns and violence, everyday life in cities and streets, between social and group identity and faith and religious belief, the vision to the "things of the world that cannot be seen" (Heróis do Mar).

Subjects suffering from extreme peripheral deafferentation can recruit vision to perform a significant range of basic physical actions with limbs they can’t proprioceptively feel. Self-ascriptions of deafferented action – just as deafferented action itself – fundamentally depend, therefore, on visual information of limb position and movement. But what’s the significance of this result for the concept of self patently at work in these self-ascriptions? In this paper, I argue that these cases show that bodily awareness grounding employment of the self-concept (...) in self-ascriptions of action can be fundamentally third-personal and concern a body that is not presented as one’s own, but as an object among others. (shrink)

Comment penser une philosophie du droit chez Epicure, sans le trahir? Comment degager des principes politiques dans l'oeuvre de celui dont la maxime etait de vivre cache, loin des affaires administratives concernant la Cite? Le defi peut paraitre ambitieux, c'est pourtant celui que releve Victor Goldschmidt dans cet ouvrage. Et il puise a la source meme, au coeur des dernieres sentences des Maximes Capitales, grace auxquelles il thematie et structure une pensee politique s'inscrivant parfaitement au sein de la logique (...) de la doctrine epicurienne. En effet, pour vivre bien, il est necessaire de penser le vivre ensemble avec des lois pour toile de fonds. La pensee epicurienne se deploie autour des concepts directeurs que sont l'interet, la reciprocite, la securite, le juste se definissant en reference a l'utile. Le droit epicurien veut s'imposer comme une realite et depasser le simple statut de doctrine du droit. C'est dire toute la portee de cette etude, et la place qu'on doit accorder a la pensee epicurienne dans la philosophie politique. (shrink)

Terms for consciousness, used with a cognitive meaning, emerged as count nouns in the 17th century. This transformation repeats an evolution that had taken place in late antiquity, when related vocabulary, used in the sense of conscience, went from being mass nouns designating states to count nouns designating faculties possessed by every individual. The reified concept of consciousness resulted from the rejection of the Scholastic-Aristotelian theory of mind according to which the mind is not a countable thing, but a pure (...) potentiality. This rejection was motivated by an acute sense of the mind’s fallible subjectivity. While conditioned by recent historical events, the 17th century’s pervasive sense of subjectivity also reveals a heavy debt to Hellenistic philosophy, which had been recently rediscovered. But whereas Hellenistic thought, mistrustful of theoria, only reifies conscience, early modern thinking, more mistrustful of praxis and seeking its grounding in theoria, goes a step further and reifies consciousness. Partly modeled on theological ideas, the resulting concept of consciousness is plagued by paradoxes that have becomes notorious for their intractability. But essentially the same model of consciousness underwrites contemporary theory, embroiling contemporary debates in the same controversies that dominated the 17th century. Sidestepping these difficulties by returning to the Scholastic-Aristotelian theory of mind would be a tall order, but it is not impossible. Alfred North Whitehead's theory of consciousness offers an example. His novel theory of time enables Whitehead to rehabilitate the Aristotelian concept of passive mind in a wholly naturalistic way. (shrink)

The problem causation poses is: how can we ever know more than a Humean regularity. The problem consciousness poses is: how can subjective phenomenal experience arise from something lacking experience. A recent turn in the consciousness debates suggest that the hard problem of consciousness is nothing more than the Humean problem of explaining any causal nexus in an intelligible way. This involution of the problems invites comparison with the theories of Alfred North Whitehead, who also saw them related in this (...) way. According to Whitehead, a tempting but false phenomenology of consciousness obscures temporality and leads to the causation problem, which then makes consciousness itself seem causally inexplicable. Bringing the processual nature of consciousness back into view discloses causation at work in the moment-to-moment emergence of consciousness, and it reveals that causation operates in a logically fuzzy domain where the skeptical critique of causality finds no foothold. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Antony Duff’s claim that there are categorical constraints on the scope of the criminal law that are set by its internal standards. I argue against his view that such constraints are categorical, and I suggest that his account of the nature of the criminal law is partial, and narrows the focus of our enquiry into the scope of the criminal law too much. However, I suggest that the project is an important contribution to our understanding (...) of one central element of the criminal law. (shrink)

After more than twenty years of representational debate in the cognitive sciences, anti-representational dynamicism may be seen as offering a rival and radically new kind of explanation of systematicity phenomena. In this paper, I argue that, on the contrary, anti-representational dynamicism must face a version of the old systematicity challenge: either it does not explain systematicity, or else, it is just an implementation of representational theories. To show this, I present a purely behavioral and representation-free account of systematicity. I then (...) consider a case of insect sensorimotor systematic behavior: communicating behavior in honey bees. I conclude that anti-representational dynamicism fails to capture the fundamental trait of systematic behaviors qua systematic, i.e., their involving exercises of the same behavioral capacities. I suggest, finally, a collaborative strategy in pursuit of a rich and powerful account of this central phenomenon of high cognition at all levels of explanation, including the representational level. (shrink)