This study investigated the mechanisms behind episodic autobiographical memory development in school-age children. Thirty children performed a novel EAM test. We computed one index of episodicity via autonoetic consciousness and two indices of retrieval spontaneity for a recent period and a more remote one . Executive functions, and episodic and personal semantic memory were assessed. Results showed that recent autobiographical memories were mainly episodic, unlike remote ones. An age-related increase in the indices of episodicity and specific spontaneity for recent AMs (...) was mainly mediated by an age-related increase in the efficiency of the three cognitive abilities. Remote AMs varied only slightly with age , reflecting improvements in semantic abilities. Thus, EAM development in school-age children is essentially bound up with the increasing efficiency of cognitive abilities. Results are discussed in the light of models of childhood amnesia. (shrink)

Despite severe amnesia, some studies showed that Alzheimer Disease patients with moderate to severe dementia keep a consistent, but impoverished representation of themselves, showing preservation of the sense of identity even at severe stages of the illness. Some studies suggest that listening to music can facilitate the reminiscence of autobiographical memories and that stimulating autobiographical memory would be relevant to support the self of these patients. Consequently, we hypothesized that repeated participation to reminiscence workshops, using excerpts of familiar songs as (...) prompts would participate to the enrichment of autobiographical memories, self-representation and sense of identity. We included a group of 20 AD patients with severe dementia residing in nursing homes. Their performances were compared to a control group of 20 matched healthy residents living in the same institutions. The experiment was conducted in three phases over a 2-week period. On phase 1, an individual assessment of sense of identity was proposed to each participant. On phase 2, participants joined musical reminiscence workshops. During the third phase, individual evaluation of autobiographical memory and a second assessment of sense of identity were proposed. Our results showed that, despite their massive amnesia syndrome, autobiographical memories of AD reached at the end of the 2 weeks the number and quality of those of matched controls. Moreover, we confirmed a continuity of self-representation in AD patients with a stable profile of the answers between the first and second individual assessments of sense of identity. However, the increase in number and episodic quality of autobiographical memories was not accompanied by an enrichment of the sense of identity. In a complementary study, new patients participated in the same paradigm, but using movie extracts as prompts, and showed very similar effects. We discuss all of these results with regard to the literature showing the significant impact of repetition on the reactivation of memory traces even in very amnestic AD patients at severe stages of the disease. (shrink)

The effects of aging on the cognitive and affective dimensions of theory of mind , and on the latter’s links with other cognitive processes, such as information processing speed, executive functions and episodic memory, are still unclear. We therefore investigated these effects in young , middle-aged and older adults , using separate subjective and objective assessment tasks. Furthermore, a novel composite task probed participants’ abilities to infer both cognitive and affective mental states in an interpersonal context. Although age affected the (...) objective ToM tests, results revealed a direct aging effect on the second-order ToM, but an indirect one on the first-order cognitive ToM, mediated mainly by age-related declines in executive functions. This study supports the notion of an age-related distinction between subjective and objective assessments of ToM, and confirms that ToM is a complex mental ability with several characteristics reliant to some extent on executive processes. (shrink)

Whether or not conscious recollection in autobiographical memory is affected in schizophrenia is unknown. The aim of this study was to address this issue using an experiential approach. An autobiographical memory enquiry was used in combination with the Remember/Know procedure. Twenty-two patients with schizophrenia and 22 normal subjects were asked to recall specific autobiographical memories from four lifetime periods and to indicate the subjective states of awareness associated with the recall of what happened, when and where. They gave Remember, Know (...) or Guess responses according to whether they recalled these aspects of the event on the basis of conscious recollection, simply knowing, or guessing. Results showed that the frequency and consistency of Remember responses was significantly lower in patients than in comparison subjects. In contrast, the frequency of Know responses was not significantly different, whereas the frequency of patients’ Guess responses was significantly enhanced. It is concluded that the frequency and consistency of conscious recollection in autobiographical memory is reduced in patients with schizophrenia. (shrink)

Autobiographical memory (AM) is closely linked to the self-concept, and fulfills directive, identity, social, and adaptive functions. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are now known to have atypical AM, which may be closely associated with social communication difficulties. This may result in qualitatively different autobiographical narratives, notably regarding social identity. In the present study, we sought to investigate this concept and develop a cognitive intervention targeting individuals with ASD. First, 13 adolescents with ASD and 13 typically developing adolescents underwent (...) an AM interview featuring an original coding system designed to analyze the social self. We observed that the narratives produced by the ASD group focused more on the family than on extended social spheres, compared with those of the comparison group. Moreover, participants with ASD did not include themselves in the social groups they mentioned, and produced more references to others, compared with typically developing participants. Second, we designed a cognitive intervention program consisting of individual and group sessions that targeted AM. We conducted a pilot study among three adolescents with ASD aged 12, 16, and 17 years. Preliminary results showed that the program increased extra-family narrative references by the two youngest adolescents, who produced more social integration markers. Our study of autobiographical narratives yielded interesting findings about social positioning in ASD and showed how AM can be targeted in rehabilitation programs as a vector of social interaction. (shrink)

ABSTRACTObjective: This study was designed to improve our understanding of prospective memory changes in ageing, and to identify the cognitive correlates of PM decline, using a virtual environment, to provide a more realistic assessment than traditional laboratory tasks.Design: Thirty-five young and 29 older individuals exposed to a virtual town were asked to recall three event-based intentions with a strong link between prospective and retrospective components, three event-based intentions with a weak link, and three time-based intentions. They also underwent retrospective episodic (...) memory, executive functions, binding in working memory, processing speed, and time estimation assessments.Results: Older individuals recalled fewer intentions than young adults. While age-related PM decline affected the recall of both prospective and retrospective components, the recall of the latter seemed more challenging for older individuals when the link was weak. This PM decline was linked to an age-related decline... (shrink)

Autism spectrum disorder is characterized by atypical perception, including processing that is biased toward local details rather than global configurations. This bias may impact on memory. The present study examined the effect of this perception on both implicit and explicit memory in conditions that promote either local or global processing. The first experiment consisted of an object identification priming task using two distinct encoding conditions: one favoring local processing and the other favoring global processing of drawings. The second experiment focused (...) on episodic memory with two different cartoon recognition tasks that favored either local or a global processing. In addition, all the participants underwent a general clinical cognitive assessment aimed at documenting their cognitive profile and enabling correlational analyses with experimental memory tasks. Seventeen participants with ASD and 17 typically developing controls aged from 10 to 16 years participated to the first experiment and 13 ASD matched with 13 TD participants were included for the second experiment. Experiment 1 confirmed the preservation of priming effects in ASD but, unlike the Comparison group, the ASD group did not increase his performance as controls after a globally oriented processing. Experiment 2 revealed that local processing led to difficulties in discriminating lures from targets in a recognition task when both lures and targets shared common details. The correlation analysis revealed that these difficulties were associated with processing speed and inhibition. These preliminary results suggest that natural perceptual processes oriented toward local information in ASD may impact upon their implicit memory by preventing globally oriented processing in time-limited conditions and induce confusion between explicit memories that share common details. (shrink)

Résumé éditeur : "Nous avons perdu les deux repères qui permettaient autrefois de nous définir entre les dieux et les bêtes. Nous ne savons plus qui nous sommes, nous autres humains. De nouvelles utopies en naissent. D'un côté, le post-humanisme prétend nier notre animalité et faire de nous des dieux promis à l'immortalité par les vertus de la technique. D'un autre côté, l'animalisme veut faire de nous des animaux comme les autres et inviter les autres animaux à faire partie de (...) notre communauté morale. Alors forgeons une nouvelle utopie à notre mesure. Ne cherchons plus à nier les frontières naturelles - celles qui nous séparent des dieux ou des animaux - et défendons un humanisme conséquent, c'est-à-dire un cosmopolitisme sans frontières.". (shrink)

The Resistible Commodification of Labour The article argues that the renewed commodification of labour – the primary aim of neo-liberal policies aimed at the destruction of long-established and hard-won social rights – has played a major role in the commodification of a growing number of social practices. The process of commodification is examined by way of a number of concepts drawn from the Marxist tradition, which are then reappropriated within the current phase of the neo-liberal counter-reform. The article concludes by (...) way of an examination of this process in relation to the issues raised by the anti-globalisation movement and, more specifically, from the standpoint of the critique of commodity put forward by Naomi Klein. (shrink)

L'idée de rassembler en un seul volume des textes sur Sartre, Lukacs et Althusser aurait relevé, il n'y a pas si longtemps, de la gageure. Aujourd'hui même, elle n'a rien d'une évidence, tant sont encore présentes dans les esprits les querelles et polémiques qui ont vu s'opposer les trois penseurs ici choisis. Histoire passée? Sans doute, à condition toutefois de la penser. Sartre, Lukacs ou Althusser représentent pourtant des moments majeurs du travail que quelque chose qui s'est nommé " le (...) " marxisme a pu mener en philosophie au cours du siècle. A ceux qui voudraient l'oublier, et tenter de nous entraîner dans ce refoulement, il convient également de rappeler qu'ils en incarnent autant de versions résolument hérétiques. Et c'est dans le sens de cette entreprise, communément partagée et diversement menée, d'une critique radicale de l'orthodoxie se réclamant de Marx, que la discussion sur leur apport respectif peut véritablement commencer. S'il en est ainsi, alors Sartre, Lukacs et Althusser représentent autant de tentatives de réaction à la transformation du marxisme en grand récit métaphysique au service des appareils politiques issus de la révolution fondatrice du " court XXe siècle " mais aussi de son involution, qui conduisit finalement à l'implosion et à la défaite. Nous pensons que les études regroupées dans ce volume, par la diversité de leurs approches et de leurs problématiques, vont contribuer à engager précisément ce débat. (shrink)

L'anthropologie scientifique est plurielle. L'identification des gênes par le généticien grâce au séquençage du génome ne problématise pas l'humain de la même façon que l'ethnologue qui cherche à penser ensemble la mondialisation de la culture et le respect des différences. Comme ses principes explicatifs reposent sur la réduction du complexe au simple, une première alternative se fait jour : faut-il disjoindre la nature et l'homme qui deviennent étrangers. Ou bien réduire l'humain au biologique et de là au physique? Dans les (...) deux cas, il devient impossible de poser la question du sens sauf à dire que cette question, qui n'est pas un problème, relève de l'arriération ou de la débilité mentale. Qu'est-ce que l'homme comme objet de science? Cette formulation est dénoncée par l'anthropologie philosophique comme l'amnésie à combattre, celle qui fait toujours oublier qu'il y a un sujet de toute objectivation : " si l'on suppose un air de flûte, dit Socrate, il faut également supposer un musicien " Mais encore, demande l'anthropologie théologique, qu'est-ce que l'homme en tant que créé, eu égard à son origine divine, haute puissance de primitivité? Seconde alternative : la division entre anthropologies est-elle une survivance historique en passe de résorption ou une diffraction productive? Penser l'homme, à quelle instance cela revient-il? Cette question préalable est à la clef de ces Écrits. C'est la différence de leur modalité interrogative qui fait le sérieux du pluriel des anthropologies. Une philosophie de la nature fait retour aujourd'hui, qui rétablit la légitimité de l'analyse causale des processus naturels. Elle suppose que l'on peut interroger la nature même, y compris sur les opérations de l'esprit en restituant ce qu'il en est. Mais l'homme est tel qu'il est dans son être question de son être. Troisième alternative. Va-t-on reconnaître ou effacer la spécificité anthropologique au sein des grandes régions de la réalité? Ces trois alternatives sous-tendent le questionnement sur l'homme aujourd'hui. La vie et la mort de l'homme ne sont pas que des problèmes, car leur phénomène premier est de nous trouver sans réponse à leur question. Pour l'heure il appelle des reprises critiques et des reformulations consenties. Ainsi la recherche de la personne - ce que l'humain a à être - est à la jonction de trois anthropologies. L'enjeu de ces Écrits d'allure dialogique apparaît : un rapport multiple à la vérité, dont on ne peut ni affirmer (ni souhaiter) qu'il s'uniformise... (shrink)

Most recent texts in moral philosophy have either concentrated on practical moral issues or else, if theoretical, have tended toward one-sided presentations of recent, fashionable views. Discussions of applied ethics cannot go very far without revealing underlying philosophical assumptions about how deeper, more general issues are treated. Similarly, recent approaches to ethics are difficult to understand without a knowledge of the context of the historical views against which these approaches are reacting. The Nature of Moral Thinking will satisfy the intellectually (...) curious student, providing a solid and fair discussion of the classical philosophical questions about our moral thinking, surveying the main types of meta-ethical and normative ethical theories, while not excluding the more recent discussions of moral realism, of anti-realism, and of virtue morality. Francis Snare demonstrates that glib intellectualistic thinking about morality, especially in regard to relativism andsubjectivism, is seriously flawed. He also focuses attention on the question of whether particular theories of the origins of morality (for example, those of Nietzsche and Marx) undermine morality. All students and teachers of ethics and philosophy will find this book one of the most complete and detailed introductory-level surveys of the foundations of ethics with emphasis on the problems of the subjectivity, the relativity, and the origins of morality. (shrink)

" Constater que chaque génération fait sa propre réécriture de Marx est sans doute un truisme ; ce qu'il convient toutefois d'ajouter c'est que chaque époque apporte à ce procès son propre mode, historiquement spécifique, de réécriture. La nôtre, par exemple, est caractérisée par une combinaison paradoxale de méfiance vis-à-vis de la téléologie, et même du récit historique en tant que tel, et d'une extraordinaire renaissance du genre biographique [...]. La remarquable nouvelle histoire de la formation de la pensée de (...) Marx proposée par Eustache Kouvélakis - peut-être la première nouvelle version véritablement originale de cette formation depuis la monumentale histoire écrite dans l'après-guerre par Auguste Cornu - ne doit pas être considérée comme un simple récit des contingences et des rencontres, des accidents de la découverte intellectuelle et de l'exposition imprévisible aux vents du Zeitgeist, mais aussi comme une nouvelle théorie de ce qui est structurellement central et original dans l'exploit de Marx, à savoir la nature politique unique et la puissance du prolétariat. [...] À un moment où de nouvelles pensées politiques semblent particulièrement rares du côté de la gauche (si ce n'est en réalité partout), un tel Marx pourrait s'avérer pour nous d'un intérêt et d'une valeur des plus élevés. " Fredric Jameson (extrait de la préface). (shrink)

SECTION I. OP MORAL LAW. Ethics, or Moral Philosophy, is the Science of Moral Law. The first question which presents itself is, What is moral law ? ...

On déplore le manque d'éducation du cœur. Qu'attend-on pour en préciser la logique et la rhétorique? Notre éducation est trop informative, pas assez transformative. Trop centrée sur l'acquisition et l'échange des informations, pas assez sur les valeurs de tendresse et de fraternité. On n'admire les marques de la présence du Christ que par les yeux du cœur. Mais faut-il vraiment en appeler au tiers d'un véritable Ordre du cœur, comme ordre de vérité? Pourquoi un ordre de vérité? Il y a (...) trois ordres de choses : la chair, l'esprit, la volonté ; et trois ordres de discours : philosophique (qui s'adresse à l'intelligence), théologique (à l'intelligence éclairée par la foi), mystique (adressé au cœur).0Le réalisme biblique veut qu'il existe dans le réel une autre dimension entée sur les questions qui engagent l'homme dans l'existence et peuvent la transformer. Au lieu de s'installer sur le terrain métaphysique de l?Être, adoptons une théorie du being dont les éléments ne s'écarteront pas de leur mode d'interroger et de catégoriser. Une philosophie néo-critique de l'interrogation en prend acte. (shrink)

Concerning beauty, order, harmony, design.--Concerning moral good and evil.

Scholars and experts focus on the larger moral context around the controversies over scientific research and technological innovations with accessible essays, original to this volume, which emphasize ethical deliberation rather than adversarial debate.

An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728), jointly with Francis Hutcheson’s earlier work Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), presents one of the most original and wide-ranging moral philosophies of the eighteenth century. These two works, each comprising two semi-autonomous treatises, were widely translated and vastly influential throughout the eighteenth century in England, continental Europe, and America. -/- The two works had (...) their greatest impact in Scotland and influenced many well-known Scottish philosophers, particularly those writing after the last Jacobite upheaval, in 1745. This can be seen in the concern of the post-1745 generation with analyzing human nature as the foundation of moral theory, with the “moral sense” and moral epistemology more generally, with the impartial spectator and the calm passions, and with the independence of benevolence from self-interest. In addition to the influence of his writings, Hutcheson was also a famed teacher whose Glasgow students, notably Adam Smith, held sway over generations of Scottish moral philosophers. -/- Despite their impact on Scottish letters, the four treatises were in fact written in Dublin, and the philosophers to whom Hutcheson responded and with whom he debated were in the main not Scottish but English, Irish, French, Roman, and Greek. Consequently, part of Hutcheson’s legacy was a cosmopolitan outlook among enlightened Scots, who learned to turn their eyes far from home. (shrink)