These sixty contributions from researchers in ethology, ecology, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, and related fields delve into the behaviors and underlying mechanisms that allow animals and, potentially, robots to adapt and survive in uncertain environments. They focus in particular on simulation models in order to help characterize and compare various organizational principles or architectures capable of inducing adaptive behavior in real or artificial animals. Jean-Arcady Meyer is Director of Research at CNRS, Paris. Stewart W. Wilson is a (...) Scientist at The Rowland Institute for Science, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (shrink)

The essays are tied together by the idea that our understanding of cognition is likely to be enhanced by consideration of mechanisms and processes at its ...

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 560-561, July 2012.

A leading authority in contemporary and digital photography places images of the transitions of American cities in the 1980s and 1990s beside Sartre's meditative essays based on an extended visit to America in 1945, in a volume originally published as part of The Aftermath of War.

The project of this book is to establish that Aristotle, contrary to what some have thought, did have a theory of distinctively "moral" responsibility, and one that is consistent with determinism. It is stipulated early on that having a theory of moral responsibility is a matter of first identifying the proper objects of peculiarly moral evaluation and thus specifying the range of responsible agents, and then identifying the actions for which those responsible agents are responsible. Aristotle’s account of moral character (...) is supposed to do the former. The latter is accomplished with his account of voluntariness. I will begin with that. (shrink)

« Rythmes et Croyances au Moyen-Âge » Journée d'études organisée par Marie Formarier et Jean-Claude Schmitt 23 juin 2012 – Paris Présentation : Cette journée d'études a eu pour objectif de faire dialoguer les diverses disciplines concernées par le rapport entre rythmes et croyances au Moyen-Âge. Elle a accueilli des historiens, des anthropologues, des sociologues, des philologues et des linguistes. Présents dans la langue latine et les langues vernaculaires, dans la rhétorique du sermon, la prière et (...) - Histoire (...) – NOUVELLE JOURNÉE d'ÉTUDES. (shrink)

Lane et al.'s proposal that psychotherapeutic change comes about through memory reconsolidation is compelling; however, the model would be strengthened by the inclusion of predictions regarding additional factors that might influence treatment response, predictions for improving outcomes for non-responsive patients, and a discussion of how the proposed model might explain individual differences in vulnerability for mental health problems.

Les diasporas d'intellectuels expatriés qui émergent aujourd'hui en réponse à l'exode de compétences du sud vers le nord constituent une option nouvelle, prometteuse mais exigeante. Le monde francophone, espace de circulation de savoirs et de leurs détenteurs, constitue un milieu propice à ces dynamiques originales. Pour les réaliser, une politique éclairée et une gestion stratégique fine sont requises. La première a débuté avec succès; la seconde est maintenant indispensable.Expatriate diasporas of intellectuals that are emerging today as an answer to the (...) brain drain from the South to the North are shaping a new and promising though demanding policy option. The French speaking world, an area of in which knowledge and intellectuals circulate, is thus a favourable milieu for these original dynamics. To develop these dynamics an enlightened policy and good strategic management are required , The former has already started successfully but the latter remains essential. (shrink)

Hauser, H. La response de Jean Bodin à M. de Malestroit.--Levron, J. Jean Bodin et sa famille.--Kamp, M. E. Die Staatswirtschaftslehre Jean Bodins.--Mesnard, P. La pensée religieuse de Bodin.--Bezold, F. von, Jean Bodin als Occultist und seine Démonomanie.--Bezold, F. von. Jean Bodins Colloquium Heptaplomeres und der Altheismus des 16.--Feist, E. Weltbild und Staatsidee bei Jean Bodin.--Mayer, J. P. Jefferson as reader of Bodin.

Society as the ethical starting point for political inquiry -- The moral relevance of dependence -- Nature and the moral frame of society -- Morality in the order of the will.

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

In French schools, La Fontaine is presented as “the height of French culture,” but he was only marginally inspired by French poets. His main sources were Spanish and Italian authors, as well as classics of both the Occident and Orient. In this way La Fontaine exemplifies, for Serres, a general pattern in which “cultures grow at the crossroads of other cultures.” One's identity develops out of numerous contacts with others, by learning from them and assimilating some of their qualities—by being (...) open to, not isolated from, the rest of the world. The non-French genealogy of the fables puts in doubt the entrenched concept of identity as involving separation and isolation.Their genealogy also sets a limit on political and moralistic interpretations of La Fontaine's stories. At school, pupils are taught that the Lion stands for the King, the Fox for the Nobles, the Lamb for the Poor. But is it possible, Serres asks, that so many poets from diverse times and places have been describing “the same society with the same hierarchies submitted to the same laws”? As for moralistic readings, Serres shows that for each fable there is a counterfable in which the winner becomes the loser. The Wolf that eats the Lamb in one fable is killed by the Hunter in another. In “The Two Mules,” the animal loading the salt is murdered by bandits, whereas in “The Ass with a Load of Sponges and the Ass with a Load of Salt,” it is the latter that survives. In other words, the fables illustrate how beings metamorphose into one another: the Wolf (the attacker) can appreciate and play the role of the Lamb (the victim) when chased by the Hunter; salt can lead to death or to freedom, depending on the circumstances. The fables, taken together, offer a collection of behaviors that we, humans and animals, are capable of: our “so-called moralities,” Serres explains, “don't speak about ethics, but about ethology.”The fables offer as well a “palimpsest [that] lies silently in our bodies and our practices.” Serres speculates that the oldest forms of the fables were not spoken, but gesticulated; they mimed animal behaviors. By imitating them, we humans not only learned about the animals we were observing and living with but also about the potentialities of our own bodies. If La Fontaine became the epitome of French culture by assimilating elements of other cultures, then it was by embodying animal behaviors that we became human. (The omnipresence of prepositions in the fables—next to, in front of, under, above—suggests that the body underpins the stories. Those little words, which Serres analyzes minutely in a long chapter, locate each body in relation to those of other beings.)Serres was planning to write a book about La Fontaine as early as 1997. In his notebooks, he scribbled possible titles, all of which are evocative: “Archaeology of Miming,” “Anthropology of Simulation,” “The Fabulous Bodies of Animals,” “The Scale and the Net.” Sadly, he died in 2019 when his work on the manuscript was progressing. He had not yet settled on a definitive title, nor had he decided the order of the chapters and sections. Jean-Charles Darmon, who was allowed to edit the work, faced chapters that were almost completed but others consisting of a single line suggesting a main idea. (The blanks are often about a type of fable never defined or described: “fables of representation.”) In spite of its incompleteness, this book intermingles systematic analysis, textual and historical contextualization, and philosophical speculation—in it, we find the conceptual inventiveness, the lexical and etymological alertness, and above all the joyfulness that characterize the whole of Serres's extraordinary oeuvre. (shrink)

While care ethics has frequently been criticized for lacking an account of autonomy, this paper argues that care ethics' relational model of moral agency provides the basis for criticizing the philosophical tradition's model of autonomy and for rethinking autonomy in relational terms. Using Diana Meyers's account of autonomy competency as a basis, a dialogical model of autonomy is developed that can respond to internal and external critiques of care ethics.

Society as the ethical starting point for political inquiry -- The moral relevance of dependence -- Nature and the moral frame of society -- Morality in the order of the will.

In this extraordinary work, Peter Alexander Meyers shows how the centerpiece of the Enlightenment—society as the symbol of collective human life and as the fundamental domain of human practice—was primarily composed and animated by its most ambivalent figure: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Displaying this new society as an evolving field of interdependence, Abandoned to Ourselves traces the emergence and moral significance of dependence itself within Rousseau’s encounters with a variety of discourses of order, including theology, natural philosophy, and music. Underpinning this (...) whole scene we discover a modernizing conception of the human Will, one that runs far deeper than Rousseau’s most famous trope, the “general Will.” As Abandoned to Ourselves weaves together historical acuity with theoretical insight, readers will find here elements for a reconstructed sociology inclusive of things and persons and, as a consequence, a new foundation for contemporary political theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Adventures of Telemachus [1699] by François de Salignac de la Mothe-FénelonJean–Michel RacaultFrançois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon. The Adventures of Telemachus [1699]. Translated with an introduction and notes by A. J. B. Cremer. London, Anastasis Books, 2022, 419 pp. Hardbound £24.50. Paperback £15. ISBN: 9781739798314.Fénelon’s 1699 novel The Adventures of Telemachus—or more precisely, the epic poem in prose—was one of the major bestsellers in many European countries (...) for nearly two centuries. The book inspired paintings, operas, fashions, and even wallpaper motifs. It gave birth to a literary subgenre, the “archeological novel,” such as Terrasson’s Sethos (1731) or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s L’Arcadie (1788), in which the action is located in an antique setting. Still part of French schools’ syllabi a century ago, this book mainly owes its survival today to highly specialized academic research, stimulated from time to time when an “Agrégation” program generates new publications, papers, and conferences, as happened in 2009–10. The situation is similar in English-speaking countries, if perhaps just a bit worse: new editions are scarce and generally based more or less on revised versions of eighteenth-century translations, such as those editions by John Hawkesworth’s (1768) or Tobias Smollett’s (1776).The publication by A. J. B. Cremer of an entirely new translation, featuring a close rendering of the French text into modern English and preserving the original’s formal dignity without resorting to a pastiche of the classical language, is therefore a landmark in the history of Fénelon’s reception, and in the valuation of Telemachus particularly. This edition, while intended for the general reader, includes most of what is expected of a scholarly edition. In a comparatively short introduction, the editor recalls the essential facts about the author’s background (as a descendent of high nobility) and about his ecclesiastic career, which was compromised by both his involvement in mystical spirituality (the quarrel over Quietism) and his critical attitude toward the absolutism of Louis XIV’s régime. [End Page 140]In fact, Fénelon’s appointment as Archbishop of Cambrai (1695) was a kind of exile. In 1689, however, he was appointed tutor to Louis XIV’s seven-year-old grandson, the young Duke of Burgundy, second in the line of succession to the throne after his father (though both died prematurely). Fénelon wrote for this boy The Adventures of Telemachus as an educative fiction in the tradition of the “mirrors of Princes.” Of course, such a book was not intended for publication, and when it appeared in 1699—strangely enough, in a fully legal manner and with a printing privilege—it was against Fénelon’s will and in a very faulty form, which was corrected in later editions. An editor today therefore faces solving some highly complex textual problems, and choosing between the manuscript traditions. Cremer’s translation is based upon Jacques Le Brun’s authoritative text, published in Fénelon’s Œuvres, tome II (Paris: Gallimard, “Pléiade,” 1997).1After surveying the critical reception of Telemachus, particularly in England, starting at the text’s first publication and reaching the present time, the introduction discreetly hints at an apparent trend, among some interpretations, toward Christian allegory. If the figure of Mentor obviously “represents Fénelon” in his tutorial role, Cremer notes, this character, also an incarnation of Minerva, embodies humanity and divinity simultaneously, and thus may be seen as a “Christ-figure,” with Telemachus as his disciple and Ulysses, with his pursuit of a never-ending quest, as the symbolic form of the Divine. These observations are not entirely new; they have been formulated before by various critics. The editor himself concurs with a well-known article by André Blanc that describes Fénelon’s neo-platonician turn of mind: for Fénelon there is no contradiction between Christian revelation and the pagan fables of classical mythology, which he considers prefigurations or allegories of Christianity.This interpretation is abundantly and convincingly confirmed in the editor’s annotations. While as expected the commentaries point frequently to Greco-Latin mythology or classical literary sources... (shrink)

"Ενας ενεπίγραφος λίθος πού βρέθηκε άπό τόν Θ. Σπυρόπουλο ('Αρχαιολογική Υπηρεσία) φέρει μία συμφωνία συμπολιτείας μεταξύ τών κατοίκων τής Έλισσώνας καί τής Μαντινείας. Τό κείμενο, σέ αρκαδική διάλεκτο, περιέχει γιά πρώτη φορά τό εθνικό τών κατοίκων τής Έλισ- σώνας, ΈλιαΡάσιοι, τον τίτλο των « νομοφυλάκων », θεσμοτόαροι, καί πολλούς ενδιαφέροντες διαλεκτικούς τύπους (π.χ. σφέσιν) * δίνει ενδείξεις γιά τή νομοθεσία καί τίς διαδικασίες καταγραφής. στίς όποιες πρέπει νά υποβληθούν οι Έλισσώνιοι πού έγιναν Μαντίνειοι. Οι υπόλοιποι άρχοντες πού αναφέρονται είναι οι (...) έπιμεληταί (στην Έλισσώνα), οι δαμιοργοί, οι θεαροί. Το κείμενο φαίνεται οτι χρονολογείται στίς αρχές του 4ου αϊ. π.Χ. Σέ δύο παραρτήματα, 6 F. M. J. Waanders δίνει γλωσσολογικές ερμηνείες των μορφών θεσμοτόαροι καί σφέσιν. (shrink)

In this extraordinary work, Peter Alexander Meyers shows how the centerpiece of the Enlightenment—_society _as the symbol of collective human life and as the fundamental domain of human practice—was primarily composed and animated by its most ambivalent figure: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Displaying this new _society_ as an evolving field of interdependence, _Abandoned to Ourselves_ traces the emergence and moral significance of dependence itself within Rousseau’s encounters with a variety of discourses of order, including theology, natural philosophy, and music. Underpinning this (...) whole scene we discover a modernizing conception of the human Will, one that runs far deeper than Rousseau’s most famous trope, the “general Will.” As _Abandoned to Ourselves_ weaves together historical acuity with theoretical insight, readers will find here elements for a reconstructed sociology inclusive of things and persons and, as a consequence, a new foundation for contemporary political theory. (shrink)

It is often said that human rights are the rights that people possess simply in virtue of being human – that is, in virtue of their intrinsic, dignity-defining common humanity. Yet, on closer inspection the human rights landscape doesn’t look so even. Once we bring perpetrators of human rights abuse and their victims into the picture, attributions of humanity to persons become unstable. In this essay, I trace the ways in which rights discourse ascribes variable humanity to certain categories of (...) people. I set the stage for my discussion of the human in relation to human rights by examining John Locke’s account of the justification for punishment. For Locke, in committing a crime one abrogates one’s humanity and forfeits one’s rights. Likewise, I argue, human rights discourse takes a scalar view of humanity. I consider victims of genocide who are dehumanized as helpless and passive, victims of state persecution who are super-humanized as righteously agentic, and perpetrators of genocide who are dehumanized as out-of-control beasts. In each case I use relevant testimony to argue that the scalar view of humanity is factually incorrect and morally deplorable. For genocide victims, I discuss testimony that Selma Leydesdorff gathered from women who survived the Srebrenica massacre. For a victim of persecution, I discuss Liao Yiwu’s memoire of his detention and imprisonment in China because of his artwork protesting the Tiananmen Square massacre. For perpetrators of genocide, I discuss testimony Jean Hatzfeld gathered from Hutu men who systematically murdered Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide. Finally, I apply my critique of dehumanized and super-humanized victims and dehumanized perpetrators to the problem of transnational trafficking in persons and argue that the view I advocate necessitates reforming immigration policy with respect to persons trafficked into forced labor. (shrink)

To maximize brain plasticity after stroke, several rehabilitation strategies have been explored, including the use of intensive motor training, motor imagery, and action observation. Growing evidence of the positive impact of virtual reality (VR) techniques on recovery following stroke has been shown. However, most VR tools are designed to exploit active movement, and hence patients with low level of motor control cannot fully benefit from them. Consequently, the idea of directly training the central nervous system has been promoted by utilizing (...) motor-imagery (MI) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). To date, detailed information on which VR strategies lead to successful functional recovery is still largely missing, and very little is known about how to optimally integrate BCI and VR paradigms for stroke rehabilitation. The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of a BCI-VR system using a MI paradigm for post-stroke upper limb rehabilitation on functional assessments, and related changes in MI ability and brain imaging. To achieve this, a 60 years old male chronic stroke patient was recruited. The patient underwent a 3-week intervention in a clinical environment, resulting in 10 BCI-VR training sessions. The patient was assessed before and after intervention, as well as on a one-month follow-up, in terms of clinical scales and brain imaging using functional MRI (fMRI). Consistent with prior research, we found important improvements in upper extremity scores (Fugl-Meyer) and identified increases in brain activation measured by fMRI that suggest neuroplastic changes in brain motor networks. This study expands on the current body of evidence as more data are needed on the effect of this type of interventions not only on functional improvement but also through brain imaging to study the effect of the intervention on plasticity. (shrink)

La présente étude constitue une publication préliminaire des monnaies trouvées dans les fouilles de Pallantion. Dans le cadre du projet de « Construction du réservoir du lac Taka d’Arcadie » ont été localisés et exhumés, en 2008‑2009, dans la ville basse de Pallantion, à l’Est de la colline de Saint‑Jean, sur un plateau de 500 m de long, les restes du tissu urbain de la ville, du mur d’enceinte antique et d’une route dallée. Les monnaies provenant des sondages d’urgence (...) de la ville fortifiée d’époques classique et hellénistique enrichissent les données recueillies jadis par les recherches de l’École italienne, avec des monnaies provenant de villes puissantes à l’époque classique, comme Corinthe, Sicyone, Phlionte, Sparte ou Élis. Pour l’époque romaine, des frappes au nom de Licinius, de Constantin le Grand, de Valens et de Valentinien II, confirment la poursuite de l’occupation de cette importante ville d’Arcadie à l’époque romaine. Un ensemble de petits bronzes de l’époque de Justinien I et Justin II peut être mis en rapport avec l’invasion et l’occupation du pays par les tribus slaves à la fin du vie s. apr. J.‑C. Pour finir, on propose de considérer le trident qui apparaît sur les monnaies émises par cette ville d’Arcadie à l’époque classique comme un symbole parlant qui relie le nom de Pallantion au verbe πάλλω qui signifie « brandir » ou « agiter vigoureusement ». L’hypothèse s’appuie également sur le fait que le trident apparaît aussi sur des timbres de tuile provenant d’édifices sacrés ou profanes avec l’inscription ΔΑΜΟ[ΣΙΟΣ]. (shrink)

Bereby‐Meyer, Hayakawa, Shalvi, Corey, Costa and Keysar investigate lying for self‐serving reasons. Participants in their experiments had to report the outcome of rolling a die only known to them. They inflated their outcomes less, and thus lied less, when using a foreign language than when using their native language. The authors suggest that lying for self‐serving reasons is an automatic tendency that can be overcome by speaking in a foreign language. [71].

Bathos - remarque -- Pt. 1. Le champ de bataille -- Pt. 2. Kant et ses juges -- Pt. 3. Traité de bathologie.

This book provides a systematic introduction to the debate on historical emissions and climate change, for students, researchers and policymakers.