The Prometheus myth has long now provided inspiration for those who envision solutions to environmental issues. Prometheus is the figure par excellence of human forethought and progress in the anthropocene. In this article, we introduce the concept of ambient Prometheanism to describe the way of thinking that foregrounds foresight and anticipation and advances technological solutions developed by capital and energy-intensive projects. We question this stance, arguing that ambient Prometheanism, with its emphasis on technofix, leads to the economisation and depoliticisation of (...) planetary environmental issues. Following Bernard Stiegler, we recover from the myth the figure of Epimetheus, Prometheus’ brother, as well as his associated faculty, epimetheia to theorise what we call an ‘Epimethean politics’. Thinking the anthropocene from the perspective of ambient Prometheanism and Epimetheanism means to consider the role of technology in climate politics, and in particular to make the case for the importance of afterthought in face of unintended consequences and accumulated errors. To substantiate our argument, we outline the challenge posed by emerging solutions focussed on technological intensification and socio-economic acceleration. An Epimethean politics of the climate requires to use reflexivity as a capacity to anticipate, but also to mobilise epimetheia to account for accidents and past mistakes. Such a politics builds from an alternative conception of technology, one that radically differs from ambient Prometheanism. Finally we read as actualisations of Epimethean politics contemporary eco-political struggles and their imperatives for multispecies living and convivial livelihoods. (shrink)

When on the last page of What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari (1995: 218) claim that philosophy needs a non-philosophy, this statement is the result of a long engagement with the problem of thinking in society. It is this engagement that we intend to reconstruct in this article. By developing an original definition of thinking after Heidegger, Deleuze is able to claim that philosophy is not the only ‘thinking’ discipline. Our point of departure is Deleuze's constant reference to a phrase (...) from Heidegger's lecture course What Is Called Thinking?: ‘We are not yet thinking’ (Deleuze 1988: 116, 1989: 167, 1994: 144, 2002: 108; Deleuze and Guattari 1995: 56). This phrase points to the demand for a new distribution of the relation between philosophy and its outside. The purpose of this article is to trace Heidegger's influence on Deleuze's definition of thinking and to raise two points. First, Deleuze borrows some elements of Heidegger's definition of thinking to further his own understanding of politics as an involuntary practice. For both, the question of thinking is political. Second, by departing from Heidegger, Deleuze can democratise the definition of thinking, beyond its confinement to philosophy, by turning to cinema. Deleuze calls cinema the art of the masses because it brings the masses in contact with external signs. Finally, in the last part of this article, we will discuss how Deleuze raises stupidity (and not error) as a transcendental problem that should be constantly fought. In this way, we hope to shed light on how Deleuze moves from Heidegger's question ‘what is called thinking?’ to the problem of stupidity and shame. (shrink)

This book discusses the work of four different kinds of artists from four different countries to examine how they create a space for politics in their work.

This new translation of four revised radio interviews, conducted in December 2002 at France Culture with Elie During, is the best introduction to Stiegler's Time and Technics series. This collection includes a new interview conducted specially for this volume and an interview with Artpress from 2001. In Philosophising By Accident, Stiegler introduces some of the key arguments about the technical constitution of the human and its relation to politics, aesthetics and economics. He reads philosophical texts from the perspective of his (...) controversial thesis about the three types of memory and speaks about concepts central to his later works, such as synchrony/diachrony, grammatisation and the industrial temporal object. (shrink)

The object of this study is the presence and the operation of space in the films of the Dardenne brothers. In this paper, we will examine three films - Rosetta , The Child and The Silence of Lorna - and present the argument that they depict an original account of the contemporary European city as a totality (in this case an eastern Belgian steel town). The construction of the characters, their relationships, and the moral implications of their actions are usually (...) the most discussed aspect of the Dardennes' cinema. Instead, we want to shift focus to the city, focusing on its concrete, visceral materiality. The aim of this paper is to chart out the leaden landscape of these films, by tracing the movements of the protagonists in two particular kinds of recurring spaces: the woods that lie next to motorways in Rosetta and The Silence of Lorna , and the motorways that feature prominently in The Child . Even though these spaces are the left-over spaces of the city, cut out and discarded from the inner spaces of the city, they are still heavily inscribed and symbolic sites. Not only do they move the plot forward and are expressive of the characters that inhabit them, they also engage in a sustained, though understated, political critique. (shrink)

This book discusses the work of four different kinds of artists from four different countries to examine how they create a space for politics in their work.

New materialists have challenged our thinking about matter in important and meaningful ways. Building a critique of the work of Diana Coole, Samantha Frost, and Jane Bennett, this article introduces a special section which challenges the direction of their work in a constructive manner. We provide a four-fold critical appraisal here: of the historical, posthumanist, technological and emancipatory facets of the new materialisms. Our central claim is that the new materialisms are plural and that they need to be understood in (...) a wider sense than is claimed in much of the literature. This article addresses the question: to what extent can a pluralism of new materialisms be compatible with the radical and emancipatory agenda of its founding theorists? Our answer is that it is not only possible to achieve such radical emancipation, but also necessary to address these concerns. (shrink)

A book review of Janae Sholtz, The Invention of a People.

The last sentence of Chapter 10 of the Analects describes a brief encounter between Confucius and a hen-pheasant, and it does so in puzzling terms, ridden with lexical difficulties. At the same time, intertextual references insert this fragment into the context of Confucius’ life mission as well as of Chinese mythological narratives. This contribution assesses the fragment’s meaning and significance: Confucius’ reaction to the hen-pheasant unveils his evolving understanding of the Heavenly Mandate bestowed upon him. The fragment thus forcefully concludes (...) the chapter in which it is inserted. Additionally, I put forward a hypothesis: the focus of this narrative, coupled with its positioning at the end of Chapter 10, induce us to postulate that it may have been purposefully located at the very center of the Analects, a proposition that reverberates on the way we look at the composition of the book. (shrink)

In this book, Benoît Dubreuil explores the creation and destruction of hierarchies in human evolution. Combining the methods of archaeology, anthropology, cognitive neuroscience and primatology, he offers a natural history of hierarchies from the point of view of both cultural and biological evolution. This volume explains why dominance hierarchies typical of primate societies disappeared in the human lineage and why the emergence of large-scale societies during the Neolithic period implied increased social differentiation, the creation of status hierarchies, and, eventually, political (...) centralisation. (shrink)

One of the first frameworks developed for understanding the relation of science and technology to the economy has been the linear model of innovation. The model postulated that innovation starts with basic research, is followed by applied research and development, and ends with production and diffusion. The precise source of the model remains nebulous, having never been documented. Several authors who have used, improved, or criticized the model in the past fifty years rarely acknowledged or cited any original source. The (...) model usually was taken for granted. According to others, however, it comes directly from V. Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier. This article traces the history of the linear model, suggesting that it developed in three steps corresponding to three scientific communities looking at science analytically. The article argues that statistics is a main reason the model is still alive despite criticisms, alternatives, and having been proclaimed dead. (shrink)

The recent literature on social norms has stressed the centrality of emotions in explaining punishment and norm enforcement. This article discusses four negative emotions (righteous anger, indignation, contempt, and disgust) and examines their relationship to punitive behavior. I argue that righteous anger and indignation are both punitive emotions strictly speaking, but induce punishments of different intensity and have distinct elicitors. Contempt and disgust, for their part, cannot be straightforwardly considered punitive emotions, although they often blend with a colder form of (...) indignation to favor low-cost, indirect, and collective forms of punishment such as mockery, exclusion, and ostracism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT : Many philosophers and psychologists think that moral norms have a different nature as rules from convention: while we are obliged to respect moral norms because of what they are in themselves, our respect for conventions depends on our attitude toward a particular social context. I question this distinction between moral norms and conventions and argue that conventions depend on social context because the context structures the agents’ expectations, sets reference points for the assessment of gains and losses, and (...) helps the observer to infer the presence and the seriousness of harms. (shrink)

My main aim in this paper is to contribute to the elucidation of the nature of non-religious faith. I start by summarising several well-known arguments that belief is neither necessary nor sufficient for faith. I then try to identify the nature of the positive cognitive attitude towards p that is involved in having faith that p. After dismissing some candidates for the role, I explore the idea that faith and hope are similar attitudes. On this basis, I then advance a (...) new characterisation of faith. Finally, I turn to the question of the rationality of faith. I argue that faith is intrinsically irrational because it is an intrinsically incoherent propositional attitude, but that there is nonetheless a sense in which faith is neither intrinsically epistemically irrational nor intrinsically practically irrational. (shrink)

Written by experts in their field, this Companion surveys the challenges and provocations raised by the major voices of poststructuralism: Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Guattari, Kristeva, Irigaray, Barthes and Baudrillard. Thematically organised and clearly written, it will guide students and researchers in philosophy, literature, art, geography, politics, sociology, law, film and cultural studies around the nature and contemporary relevance of poststructuralism.

This contribution explores the reciprocal links between the organisational transformation of Western European Green parties and the access of some of these parties to national government participation. On the one hand, a series of hypotheses with regard to the possible link between prior organisational adaptation and eventual access to governmental participation are examined. On the other hand, the opposite question is addressed : that of the potential impact of governmental participation on further organisational adaptation. Following both a qualitative and Qualitative (...) Comparative Analysis, one does ultimately identify a link between prior organisational adaptation and eventual access to government, but a much more indirect and contrasted link between governmental participation and further organisational adaptation. (shrink)

La présente étude rassemble les passages de l’Ab Vrbe condita de Tite-Live où un terme lié au rire est associé à un discours ou à une parole rapportée, afin de les confronter aux vues exprimées par Cicéron et Quintilien sur le rire en contexte rhétorique. Si tous les passages étudiés s’insèrent très bien dans la conception rhétorique du rire, l’historien latin s’appuie sur celle-ci pour offrir une répartition originale entre usages acceptables et formes abusives du rire qui participe à la (...) construction des portraits personnages et de l’œuvre. (shrink)

Introduction: the Study of Argumentation Although our overall organization of the readings suggests one way of dividing our selected literature, ...

A mass problem is a set of functions $\omega \to \omega $. For mass problems ${\mathcal {C}}, {\mathcal {D}}$, one says that ${\mathcal {C}}$ is Muchnik reducible to ${\mathcal {D}}$ if each function in ${\mathcal {C}}$ is computed by a function in ${\mathcal {D}}$. In this paper we study some highness properties of Turing oracles, which we view as mass problems. We compare them with respect to Muchnik reducibility and its uniform strengthening, Medvedev reducibility.For $p \in [0,1]$ let ${\mathcal {D}}$ (...) be the mass problem of infinite bit sequences y such that for each computable bit sequence x, the bit sequence $ x {\,\leftrightarrow\,} y$ has asymptotic lower density at most p = y$ ). We show that all members of this family of mass problems parameterized by a real p with $0 p$ for each computable set x. We prove that the Medvedev complexity of the mass problems ${\mathcal {B}}$ is the same for all $p \in $, by showing that they are Medvedev equivalent to the mass problem of functions bounded by ${2^{2}}^{n}$ that are almost everywhere different from each computable function.Next, together with Joseph Miller, we obtain a proper hierarchy of the mass problems of type $\text {IOE}$ : we show that for any order function g there exists a faster growing order function $h $ such that $\text {IOE}$ is strictly above $\text {IOE}$ in the sense of Muchnik reducibility.We study cardinal characteristics in the sense of set theory that are analogous to the highness properties above. For instance, ${\mathfrak {d}} $ is the least size of a set G of bit sequences such that for each bit sequence x there is a bit sequence y in G so that $\underline \rho >p$. We prove within ZFC all the coincidences of cardinal characteristics that are the analogs of the results above. (shrink)

This article deals with the nature and the evolution of the relationships between the Belgian French-speaking Green party Ecolo and the new social movements in Wallonia and Brussels, from the larger identified sectors of these movements to various other movements. To start with, the status of these movements in the emergence of the Greenparty is scrutinised. Then, on the basis of a survey conducted amongst members of the party elite, different modalities of the party/movements links are analysed: joint activism, selective (...) communication channels between the elites, structural links. The bottom line is that, altogether, the links are tighter than one might expect, but that the Green party new social movements linkage remains ambiguous in many respects. (shrink)

The infinite pigeonhole principle for 2-partitions asserts the existence, for every set A, of an infinite subset of A or of its complement. In this paper, we study the infinite pigeonhole pr...

Benoit Mathot À partir du cadre théorique de la décoïncidence proposé par le philosophe François Jullien, cet article explore les enjeux d’humanisation des soins médicaux, ainsi que l’introduction de la dimension spirituelle dans la prise en charge des patients. Il revient enfin sur le dialogue possible entre ces réflexions contemporaines et les considérations du théologien luthérien Paul Tillich sur la santé.

My aim in this article is to elucidate the nature of a form of intellectual and practical neutrality that is not covered by existing accounts of suspension of judgment. After rejecting some inadequate characterizations of this attitude of neutrality, I provide a positive characterization of it: it is a successful effort to resist certain tendencies that are part of the dispositional profile of the doxastic state one is in on a given issue. I conclude by saying a few words about (...) the reasons for which this effort can be made, and by answering in the negative the question of whether all the attitudes that can be characterized as attitudes of committed neutrality are of the same type. (shrink)

My main intention in this article is to settle the question whether having the ability to \ is, as Ryleans think, necessary for knowing how to \, and to determine the kind of role played by procedural knowledge in knowing how to \ and in acquiring and possessing the ability to \. I shall argue, in a seemingly anti-Rylean fashion, that when it comes to know-hows that are ordinarily categorised as physical skills, or—to be, for the moment, philosophically neutral—as enabling (...) one to possess such skills, it is necessary to have procedural knowledge of how to \ in order to possess those know-hows. However, I shall contend that this knowledge cannot be acquired without acquiring the kind of ability to \ in which having the skill to \ consists. And that having acquired the ability to \ is not only necessary but also sufficient for having acquired procedural knowledge of how to succeed in \-ing. (shrink)

Book Reviews Benoît Dubreuil, Economics and Philosophy, FirstView Article.

Benoit Delbecq reflects upon the conditions under which his creative activity, as a pianist, a composer and an improviser, has to take place within the French context. Status of the copyrights, contribution of public funding, new modes of distribution, ambiguous irruptions of the show business mega-machine, fictions of freedom generated within the creative moment, polymorphous collective structures: this concrete work of knitting a new autonomous artistic network sheds light, beyond the microcosm of jazz, on the production of sociality in (...) today’s France. (shrink)

In his most recent books, Piketty offers a global history of inequality in its economic, social, political, and intellectual dimensions, arguing that history is moved by the struggle of ideologies. To take part in this battle of ideas, he conceives a new ideal model of society, ‘participative socialism’, as an egalitarian alternative to the dominant neoproprietarian ideology and to the dangerous resurgence of nationalism and populism. This paper provides a new interpretation of Piketty’s view of history and of his participatory (...) socialism in light of Paul Ricoeur’s study of the dialectics of ideology and utopia. First, I present Ricoeur’s singular analysis of ideology and utopia, which he sees as two inseparable facets of social imagination. Then I show how Ricoeur’s concepts can be fruitfully applied to Piketty’s conception of history and to his conception of a new form of socialism for the 21st century, drawing lessons from history and forming a ‘good’ or ‘realist’ utopia. Finally, I demonstrate that this interpretation of Piketty’s socialism can help to better understand some of the criticisms he has received. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that humans have specific abilities for cooperation and culture that evolved since their split with their last common ancestor with chimpanzees. Many uncertainties remain, however, about the exact moment in the human lineage when these abilities evolved. This article argues that cooperation and culture did not evolve in one step in the human lineage and that the capacity to stick to long-term and risky cooperative arrangements evolved before properly modern culture. I present evidence that Homo heidelbergensis (...) became increasingly able to secure contributions form others in two demanding Paleolithic public good games (PPGGs): cooperative feeding and cooperative breeding. I argue that the temptation to defect is high in these PPGGs and that the evolution of human cooperation in Homo heidelberngensis is best explained by the emergence of modern-like abilities for inhibitory control and goal maintenance. These executive functions are localized in the prefrontal cortex and allow humans to stick to social norms in the face of competing motivations. This scenario is consistent with data on brain evolution that indicate that the largest growth of the prefrontal cortex in human evolution occurred in Homo heidelbergensis and was followed by relative stasis in this part of the brain. One implication of this argument is that subsequent behavioral innovations, including the evolution of symbolism, art, and properly cumulative culture in modern Homo sapiens , are unlikely to be related to a reorganization of the prefrontal cortex, despite frequent claims to the contrary in the literature on the evolution of human culture and cognition. (shrink)

The progressive dominance of historical-critical methods in the reading of ancient Chinese classics has led scholars to privilege micro levels of textual analysis. Consequently, the question as to whether laws of composition could be identified in this corpus has often been ignored, or considered irrelevant. Working on Chinese number symbolism as well as on rules governing “ring composition” in other cultural contexts, this article aims at fashioning anew the question of the possibility of an ancient Chinese “structural rhetoric” and at (...) envisioning the patterns that might have governed it. It specifically applies the approach it propounds to Huainanzi 淮南子, showing how numerology frames its structure and argument, the text being built after the image of the “roundness” of the Way and of the Ruler. It then endeavors to apply these results to the unearthing of “inter-structural” patterns that would help us to locate Huainanzi, Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋, the versions at hand of Zhuangzi 莊子, Lunyu 論語, or yet Laozi 老子 into a textual universe that shares correlated rhetorical features. (shrink)

En quel sens le scepticisme causal de Hume permet-il la solution qu’il revendique au problème de la liberté et de la nécessité? D’abord, on soutient qu’une interprétation épistémologique (et non sémantique) de ce scepticisme suffit au nécessitarisme proposé. Ensuite, on soutient que, parce qu’il s’accompagne d’une explication naturaliste de l’inférence, ce scepticisme rend raison de l’imputation morale requise par la défense d’un compatibilisme. Le caractère sceptique de ce naturalisme permet de qualifier l’ensemble du propos humien de solution sceptique de réconciliation.

When one tries to determine what the iconic dimension of thought consists in for Peirce and what its range is, one might have the impression that his remarks on this matter are inconsistent. For instance, on the one hand he writes the following: Remember it is by icons only that we really reason, and abstract statements are valueless in reasoning except so far as they aid us to construct diagrams. The sectaries of the opinion I am combating seem, on the (...) contrary, to suppose that reasoning is performed with abstract "judgments," and that an icon is of use only as enabling me to frame abstract statements as premisses. In an apparently similar fashion, Peirce argues that the predicate of a... (shrink)

Há anos ou décadas, vemos países que estavam em marcha em direção à democracia como a Rússia, a Turquia e mesmo reais democracias como o Brasil, se tornarem verdadeiras democraduras, ou se encaminharem para esse tipo de regime, a Hungria por exemplo, mas igualmente outros países. Os analistas políticos continuam lutando para entender a origem e a natureza desse direcionamento sobre o qual a leitura de Tocqueville ainda fornece um esclarecimento notável, cujas análises mantêm perfeita atualidade; é um grande pensador (...) para os dias atuais que estabelece como, para pensar o surgimento da democracia e os problemas que aparecem a ela, é apropriado partir do estado social democrático. (shrink)

This is a critical essay of Claude Gamel's theory of social justice and liberal utopia exposed in his book "Esquisse d'un libéralisme soutenable".