La nature, l'environnement sont au centre des préoccupations de tous, mais peinent à entrer dans le discours politique sous une forme cohérente. Mouvement contestataire et libertaire - particulièrement en France - l'écologie politique manque de bases théoriques, préfère les déclarations d'éthique au travail législatif, met en doute l'efficience des institutions et dénonce parfois de manière irréaliste la technique, les sciences, l'industrie. Ce livre intègre la dimension écologique à la philosophie politique moderne et particulièrement à un républicanisme rénové. La protection de (...) la nature comme "Bien commun" y est considérée comme le nouveau visage du " Bien public". En annexe, l'auteur propose quelques idées concrètes. (shrink)

Réponses à Juliette Grange sur ses remises en cause peu argumentées d'une partie de la philosophie en France.

Despite the 300 years of philosophy separating them. Spinoza and Heidegger are committed to a unifying vision of the human and the natural. Such a perspective encourages a renewed understanding of the place of feelings in environmental studies. Neither untrustworthy reactions nor neutral readings of environmental stimuli, human feelings are the basic way in which we encounter the world. The primordial character of emotions in both Spinoza and Heidegger follows from their commitment to the unity of reality. An understanding of (...) both thinkers opens up being. feeling. and environnlent as the proper subject matter of ecology. Environmental studies will begin to advance again when it dedicates itself to the potential riches of such a unitive vision. (shrink)

The National Health Service (NHS) has, for over four decades, been beset with numerous ‘scandals’ relating to poor patient care across several diverse clinical contexts. Ensuing inquiries proceed as though each scandal is unique, with recommendations highlighting the need for more staff training, a change of culture within the NHS based upon a ‘duty of candour’, and proposed criminal sanctions for employees believed to breach good patient care. However, mistakes reoccur and failings in patient safety continue. While inquiries describe _what_ (...) went awry in each case, questions of _how_ and _why_ such failures came to be remain unanswered. Psychology has a role in answering these questions. Applying psychological theory can guide an understanding of the _causes_ that lead to catastrophic failures in healthcare settings. Indeed, what is often neglected in inquiries is the role of human behaviour in contributing to these failures. Drawing upon behavioural, social and cognitive theories, a psychological analysis of key factors, typically present in clinical contexts where serious failures of care occur, is presented. Applying theory and models from the field of psychology can guide further understanding of the precipitants to poor care. (shrink)

The erosion of the three interlocking dimensions of nature, society and self is the consequence of what Felix Guattari referred to as integrated world capitalism (IWC). In South Africa the erosion of nature, society and self is also the consequence of centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid. In this paper I wish to explore how the African philosophy of ubuntu (humanness), which appears to be anthropocentric, might be invoked to contribute to the healing of the three ecologies—how healing of (...) the social might transversally effect healing of nature and the self. My theoretical exploration has relevance to education in South Africa, given that a mandate of national curriculum policy is that indigenous knowledge systems form part of the discursive terrains of all school learning areas/subjects. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans Anabases. Traditions et réceptions de l'Antiquité, n° 20, 2014. Nous remercions Pascal Payen, la revue Anabases et Juliette Lormier de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Résumé : Cet article propose d'analyser deux entreprises de traduction en hexamètres français : celle des Travaux et des Jours d'Hésiode par Jean-Antoine de Baïf dans ses Étrénes de poézie fransoeze an vers mezurés, et celle de l'Iliade d'Homère par Philippe Brunet. Il s'agit de resituer ces (...) - Poétique et Études littéraires – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Compassionate care is a foundation of the National Health Service. However, several high-profile inquiries into healthcare failures in the NHS suggest compassion is often absent in our hospitals. Ensuing policies mandate healthcare professionals to ‘show more compassion’ but, as the psychological evidence-base indicates, this instruction neglects the complexity of this social emotion. This paper applies the psychological research on compassion to modern healthcare settings with the aim of creating a better understanding of the pathways leading to uncompassionate care. A review (...) of the empirical evidence suggests a range of psychological factors modulate compassion. In particular, the psychological literature indicates the human compassion system is adaptive, highly attuned to its environment. As such, a healthcare professional’s ability to experience and display compassionate behaviour will be, in part, determined by the environment in which they practise; that is, aspects of the organisational environment will either facilitate or inhibit compassion. This paper argues that the typical organisational set-up of a modern healthcare setting seriously undermines compassionate care. Organisational features frequently associated with uncompassionate care include the understaffing of hospital wards, excessive working shift patterns and the dogged focus on achieving service efficiencies—each has been identified as contributing to the alarming breakdown of compassionate care at the centre of several healthcare failings. Policies focusing on culture change in the NHS neglect the growing psychological evidence base on compassion, but by applying a psychological understanding of compassion to healthcare settings, we can begin to adequately understand and address the real causes of uncompassionate care. (shrink)

This article explores the influence of Spinozism on the deep ecology movement and on new materialism. It questions the stance of supporters of the DEM because their ecosophies unwittingly anthropomorphise the more-than-human-world. It suggests that instead of humanising the ‘natural’ world, morality should be naturalised, that is, that the object of human expression of ethics should be the more-than-human world. Moreover, the article discusses Deleuze’s Spinozism that informs new materialism and argues that stripping the human of its ontological privilege does (...) not deprive the human animal from its ethico-normative distinctiveness. Implications of the discussion for an education aimed at cultivating human sensibilities are explored. (shrink)

Thomas Nagel argues that Aristotle identifies rationality as the ergon idion of the human being. Against Nagel, I defend a reading of Aristotle which depicts a complex human ergon. This complex identity involves desire. It is in Book X of the Nichomachean Ethics that my understanding of Aristotle's position is clinched.

Emotions might contribute to our being rational cognitive agents. Anxiety – and more specifically epistemic anxiety – provides an especially interesting case study into the role of emotion for adaptive cognition. In this paper, I aim at clarifying the epistemic contribution of anxiety, and the role that ill-calibrated anxiety might play in maladaptive epistemic activities which can be observed in psychopathology. In particular, I argue that this emotion contributes to our ability to adapt our cognitive efforts to how we represent (...) the practical factors relevant to the task at hand, by sig- naling the need for increased cognitive processing and evidence gathering in high- stakes situations. I hypothesize that dysfunctional or ill-calibrated epistemic anxiety might play an important role in the motivation driving persons with obsessive- compulsive disorder (OCD) to invest high amounts of cognitive resources into the resolution of apparently simple and innocuous questions. As I argue, OCD might be conceived as a case in which epistemic anxiety is inappropriately elicited, represent- ing these as high-stakes questions, and inadequately signaling a need for cognition. In this paper, I thus make use of the concept of (epistemic) anxiety as developed in the philosophy of emotion and in epistemology, to propose an account of the role of anxiety in the pathological doubt that is central to obsessive-compulsive disorder. (shrink)

L’analyse en termes de politique criminelle de la responsabilité pénale contemporaine permet d’observer les mouvements qui la travaillent de l’intérieur, en particulier son éclatement qui l’expose aux incohérences, mais aussi de l’extérieur, spécialement son expansion qui la confronte à ses propres limites.

Rousseau avait tout lieu, dans la controverse qui oppose au xviii e siècle partisans et pourfendeurs des voyages d’éducation, de prendre position contre ces voyages, suivant en cela les déclarations de Béat de Muralt, qu’il approuvait dans une large mesure. Nous constatons pourtant qu’en abordant « la question des voyages », l’auteur de l’Émile se voit obligé, tout en condamnant cette « mode », à la manière de Muralt, d’opérer un glissement théorique et de conférer à l’expérience du voyage, comme (...) expérience critique de la pluralité et de la liberté, une place essentielle dans son système, place rendue nécessaire par sa théorie des affects politiques. (shrink)

This article analyses a recent discourse of responsibility that accompanies states’ foreign aid provision. States adopt this discourse of National Social Responsibility to show their complian...

Feeling confused can sometimes lead us to give up on the task, frustrated. What is less emphasized is that confusion may also promote happy (epistemic) endings to our inquiries. It has recently been argued that confusion motivates effortful investigative behaviors which can help us acquire hard-to-get epistemic goods (DiLeo et al., 2019; D’Mello & Graesser, 2012). While the motivational power of confusion and its benefits for learning has been uncovered in recent years, the exact nature of the phenomenon remains obscure. (...) In this paper we attempt to shed light on the nature and epistemic value of an experience we are all familiar with: the experience of being confused at an object, a statement, etc. We first review the psychological literature on confusion, where it is most often considered to be an epistemic emotion. We then propose a refined account of confusion, by drawing on the literature on metacognitive or noetic feelings, both in psychology and in the philosophy of mind. In particular, we claim that confusion centrally involves the experience of the limits of one’s cognitive capacities, because it results from a monitoring of our cognitive activities as we encounter a cognitive obstacle while processing a given content. Finally we show how our account may explain findings about the role of the experience of confusion in motivating deeper inquiry into complex problems and bringing about epistemic success in these cases. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a good thinker? Which virtues work together in someone who possesses good intellectual character? Although recent research on virtues has highlighted the benefits of individual intellectual virtues, being an excellent thinker is likely a function of possessing multiple intellectual virtues. Specifically, a good thinker would both recognize one’s intellectual shortcomings and possess an eagerness to learn driven by virtues such as love of knowledge, curiosity, and open-mindedness. Good intellectual character may only successfully manifest when (...) individuals possess not just one or a few intellectual virtues, but a larger set of such virtues to different degrees. However, little is currently known about what combination of virtues are necessary for good thinking. We argue that it is important to identify and clarify the nature of the good thinker and outline a profile methodology for achieving this goal. This approach characterizes the good thinker in terms of a profile of multiple intellectual virtues. Understanding this profile can allow greater insight into the extent to which people possess such a profile, and the potential for societal benefits of educating for these qualities. (shrink)

How epigenetic mechanisms regulate genome output and response to stimuli is a fundamental question in development and disease. Past decades have made tremendous progress in deciphering the regulatory relationships involved by correlating aggregated (epi)genomics profiles with global perturbations. However, the recent development of epigenetic editing technologies now enables researchers to move beyond inferred conclusions, towards explicit causal reasoning, through 'programing’ precise chromatin perturbations in single cells. Here, we first discuss the major unresolved questions in the epigenetics field that can be (...) addressed by programable epigenome editing, including the context‐dependent function and memory of chromatin states. We then describe the epigenetic editing toolkit focusing on CRISPR‐based technologies, and highlight its achievements, drawbacks and promise. Finally, we consider the potential future application of epigenetic editing to the study and treatment of specific disease conditions. (shrink)

We work in set theory ZF without axiom of choice. Though the Hahn-Banach theorem cannot be proved in ZF, we prove that every Gateaux-differentiable uniformly convex Banach space E satisfies the following continuous Hahn-Banach property: if p is a continuous sublinear functional on E, if F is a subspace of E, and if f: F → ℝ is a linear functional such that f ≤ p|F then there exists a linear functional g : E → ℝ such that g extends (...) f and g ≤ p. We also prove that the continuous Hahn-Banach property on a topological vector space E is equivalent to the classical geometrical forms of the Hahn-Banach theorem on E. We then prove that the axiom of Dependent choices DC is equivalent to Ekeland's variational principle, and that it implies the continuous Hahn-Banach property on Gateaux-differentiable Banach spaces. Finally, we prove that, though separable normed spaces satisfy the continuous Hahn-Banach property, they do not satisfy the whole Hahn-Banach property in ZF+DC. (shrink)

Cet article analyse le risque de corruption que les arrêts Citizens United de 2010 et l’apparition des Super-PACs font peser sur le système électoral états-unien. Lors de la dernière campagne présidentielle, plus de 730 millions de dollars ont été investis dans des publicités électorales par de riches contributeurs et des entreprises privées regroupés en Super-PACs. Nous montrons que cet afflux d’argent consacré à des publicités politiques expose la démocratie américaine à trois formes de « corruption grise », en favorisant la (...) banalisation de pratiques contestables et en troublant la frontière entre ce qui est licite et ce qui ne l’est pas. (1) Déplafonné, le soutien financier aux candidats risque de s’apparenter à de la subornation; (2) certaines des techniques publicitaires employées semblent réduire l’exercice de conviction démocratique à une tentative de corruption de l’électeur; (3) enfin les immenses inégalités d’influence politique que ce système de financement induit participent de la corruption des affaires démocratiques en favorisant leur captation par un petit nombre d’individus fortunés. Nous mettons en évidence que le refus systématique de la Cour Suprême d’envisager ces phénomènes comme des vecteurs de corruption se fonde sur une conception discutable de la démocratie comme système de libre concurrence pour le pouvoir politique. Comprendre la démocratie à partir de son impératif d’égalité permet à l’inverse de rendre visible la corruption à laquelle son système de financement électoral expose la démocratie américaine. (shrink)

Entre avril et mai 1994, au couvent de Sovu au Rwanda, plusieurs milliers de Tutsi sont assassinés par des miliciens avec la complicité de la mère supérieure des lieux, sœur Gertrude. En 2001 à Bruxelles, la cour d’assises la juge et la condamne pour son implication dans les massacres. À partir des archives des transcriptions du procès, l’article revient sur la façon dont s’exerçait son autorité au sein du couvent au moment du génocide. Sa défense adopte une stratégie genrée et (...) cherche à éloigner la sœur de la possibilité même de l’engagement dans la violence. Mais les témoignages des victimes attestent l’intégration de la religieuse aux réseaux politiques locaux et la manière dont elle a mobilisé les ressources à sa disposition pour exclure de la sphère de protection du couvent les Tutsis s’y étant réfugiés. (shrink)