Silvio Berlusconi constitue un phénomène original, et même un cas unique, puisqu'il est le seul chef d'entreprise du secteur des médias qui accède, à deux reprises, aux fonctions de Premier ministre dans une grande démocratie. L'arrivée au pouvoir du dirigeant de la grande entreprise de la communication répond à la crise de la représentation politique et inaugure dans l'Europe latine, une «néo-politique». Comme toute figure symbolique, l'image de Berlusconi est ambivalente et ne peut laisser indifférente. Si Berlusconi suscite tant de (...) réactions d'adhésion ou de rejet, c'est parce qu'il inscrit toute son activité publique dans l'espace de l'image, de la séduction et de l'émotion, plus que dans le champ rationnel et traditionnel de la représentation politique. Il sait être l'ordonnateur du débat public en le dramatisant autour de clivages simplistes, notamment pour ou contre l'État, pour ou contre l'impôt... Il promeut ainsi une politique faite de passions et de croyances, comme dans une fiction télévisuelle. Le phénomène ne relève pas pour autant du populisme, voire du « télépopulisme ».Silvio Berlusconi represents an original phenomenon, or even a unique case, in that he is the only company manager from the world of media who twice rose to the office of Prime Minister in a major democracy. The coming to power of the manager of this large media firm is an answer to the crisis of political representation; it ushers in a "neo-policy" in Latin Europe. Like any symbolical figure, Berlusconi's image is ambivalent and cannot leave indifferent. If Berlusconi gives rise to so many reactions of support or rejection, that is because he places his whole public activity in the field of image, seduction and emotion rather than in the rational and traditional field of political representation. He knows how to organize public debate by dramatizing it around simplistic divides, such as for or against State, for or against taxes... Thus he promotes politics built on passions ans beliefs, as in a television fiction. For all that, the phenomenon does not fall into populism, nor even into "telepopulism". (shrink)

Présentation d'une pensée qui synthétise les savoirs des Lumières et prépare les idéologies contemporaines, du socialisme au libéralisme industriel, et des disciplines comme la sociologie, le management ou la science politique. Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, surtout, peut être considéré comme le fondateur de la religion scientifique, industrielle et technologique contemporaine.

Our question is whether technicality can institute, and thus create a new power, or even legitimize and maintain institutions. It claims to do so, all haloed by sacredness or religiosity with the development of computers, networks and the Internet. But this would presuppose that technology could symbolize, i.e. embody an instance of Truth, an irrational core of beliefs or myths that would answer the question of 'why' we live in society. It claims to do so as an ‘applied science’ or (...) technoscience, science having become the authority of truth in Western societies. But technicity cannot symbolize and remains locked in the "how", in the order of rational action, utility and efficiency. (shrink)

This book is devoted to discussion of the views of Pierre Musso and starts with a central chapter written by Musso, entitled Network Ideology: from Saint-Simonianism to the Internet. Pierre Musso is a French philosopher and is one of the most original thinkers in the history of the network society. His thought develops a critique of information and communication technologies through their imaginary and social representations and of the information society, based on the network metaphor. (...) The main question on which Musso has focused his attention is how the network metaphor is one of the most powerful ways of understanding the complex societies in which we live. Showing characteristic attention to detail, and drawing on the history of ideas, political philosophy and sociology, Musso traces the genealogy of the network imaginary, and points out that it did not emerge with the Internet. He shows how its modern roots can be found in Henri de Saint-Simon and his disciples, engineers and entrepreneurs such as Michel de Chevalier, and Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, who developed channel networks, railroads, and the telegraphic network in France in the nineteenth century. In addition to the central piece written by Musso, the book includes a general introduction and six commentaries from experts on information technologies and networks. It displays a wide range of perspectives from a diverse set of authors in terms of nationalities and universities, as well as disciplinary backgrounds. (shrink)

Bien des difficultés que nous éprouvons à comprendre les oeuvres philosophiques des Anciens proviennent souvent du fait que nous commmettons en les interprétant un double anachronisme: nous croyons que, comme beaucoup d'oeuvres modernes, elles sont destinées à communiquer des informations concernant un contenu conceptuel donné et que nous pouvons aussi en tirer directement des renseignements clairs sur la pensée et la psychologie de leur auteur. Mais en fait, elles sont très souvent des exercices spirituels que l'auteur pratique lui-même et fait (...) pratiquer à son lecteur. Elles sont destinées à former les âmes. Elles ont une valeur psychagogique. (shrink)

La riflessione sulla cosmologia è uno degli aspetti meno noti del pensiero di Agazzi. Tuttavia, benché ne abbia scritto solo in poche occasioni e alcune considerazioni siano state superate dai grandi progressi scientifici nel frattempo intercorsi, altre sue intuizioni appaiono tuttora sorprendentemente attuali e feconde, forse ancor di più di quando furono formulate, come cercherò di mostrare in questo articolo. Su questa base tenterò inoltre di proporre una definizione precisa dell'oggetto proprio della cosmologia scientifica e di chiarire i suoi corretti (...) rapporti con la filosofia della natura e la metafisica. (shrink)

Organic crosstalk or intercommunication among different organs is an interesting medical concept based on the biosemiotic perspective which considers the organism as a process maintained by the vital information flow between structural plane and biosemiotic plane, both with their different layers of biological complexity. From this point of view the organ is not merely the structure which produces crosstalk but just as much its product. The crosstalk perspective seeks two main goals: to investigate the characteristic serum biosemiotic patterns of pathogenic (...) organic crosstalk in order to achieve early diseases diagnosis, and to learn how to correct it. These achievements could allow physicians to evolve from a medical practice that focuses on misbiosemiotic effects, diagnosing and treating damaged organs, to a medical practice that focuses on misbiosemiotic processes, in this way diagnosing and treating pathogenic organ crosstalk before it culminates in organ damage. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu is arguably one of the twentieth century’s greatest socio-philosophical thinkers and his writings have much to offer anyone interested in the ways that people value, consume and produce architecture. Bourdieu spent much of his life attempting to understand cultural consumption and production through detailed empirical research that included studies of dwellings, art, museums, photography and aesthetics. This book introduces the architectural reader to Bourdieu’s key writings on culture and outlines the ways in which they offer powerful practical (...) tools and novel conceptual frameworks for understanding architectural value, taste, and practice. (shrink)

Il 6 Aprile del 1922 alla Sorbona di Parigi ebbe luogo un famosissimo dibattito circa la natura del tempo tra Bergson, Einstein e altri filosofi e scienziati che rappresenta tuttora una pietra miliare in questo campo. Generalmente gli studiosi concordano sul fatto che, nonostante Bergson avesse sicuramente frainteso molti importanti punti della teoria di Einstein, le sue idee meritano di essere considerate molto piů attentamente di quanto i fisici siano soliti fare. Tuttavia, fino ad oggi nessuno ha ancora chiarito bene (...) quali precisamente delle idee di Bergson dovrebbero essere considerate corrette, e, soprattutto, perché. Il presente saggio č un tentativo di rispondere a queste domande. (shrink)

While many sociocultural, contextual, biological, behavioral, and psychological variables may contribute to the widespread under-representation of girls and women in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics field, this study focused on STEM-gender stereotypes, school experiences, and adolescence as critical factors in driving students' interest and motivation in STEM. Based on this, the study investigated differences by gender and national context in adolescents' STEM-gender stereotypes, school empowerment, and school engagement in a preliminary step, and simultaneously examined how adolescents' STEM-gender stereotypes were (...) related to school empowerment and school engagement as well as to socioeconomic status. These latter relations were considered within the context of the potential moderating role of gender and national context. Participants included 213 Italian adolescents and 214 Nigerian adolescents, who completed measures of school empowerment and engagement, STEM-gender stereotypes, and SES. A multivariate analysis of covariance showed that Nigerian girls and boys reported significantly higher levels of school empowerment, school engagement, and STEM-gender stereotypes than their Italian peers. Moreover, regardless of the national context, boys scored significantly higher on school empowerment and STEM-gender stereotypes than girls. Furthermore, a multiple-group path analysis revealed how higher school empowerment was related to lower STEM-gender stereotypes in both Italian and Nigerian girls' groups, while higher school engagement was associated with lower STEM-gender stereotypes only in the Nigerian groups. Regardless of gender and nationality, higher SES was linked to lower STEM-gender stereotypes. These findings particularly suggest that school empowerment and school engagement can be relevant dimensions to be studied and to develop strategies to counteract STEM-gender stereotypes in adolescence. Nonetheless, gender and national context are key factors to be considered. Limitations, strengths, future research, and educational implications are discussed. (shrink)

Synthesizing forty years' work by France's leading sociologist, this book exemplifies Bourdieu's unique ability to link sociological theory, historical information, and philosophical thought. It makes explicit the presuppositions of a state of 'scholasticism', a certain leisure liberated from the urgencies of the world. Philosophers have brought these presuppositions into the order of discourse, more to legitimate than analyze them, and this is the primary systematic, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic error that Bourdieu subjects to methodological critique. Pascalian because he, too, was (...) concerned with symbolic power, he refused the temptation of foundationalist thinking, attended to 'ordinary people', and was determined to seek the reason for seemingly illogical behavior rather than simply condemning it. Bourdieu charts a negative philosophy, whose intellectual debt to such other 'heretical' philosophers as Wittgenstein, Austin, Dewey, and Peirce, renews traditional questioning of concepts of violence, power, time, history, the universal, and the purpose and direction of existence. (shrink)

The authors develop an analysis of education. They show how education carries an essentially arbitrary cultural scheme which is actually based on power. More widely, the reproduction of culture through education is shown to play a key part in the reproduction of the whole social system.

Cambrai, Bibl. munic. 940, ff. 1-59 [integralement reproduit]--Bibl. Vatic. Reg. Lat. 689 A, ff. 334-353.--Bibl. Vatic. Reg. Lat. 1653, ff, 1v-2v (feuilles de garde), ff. 3r, 29r-35r.--Pièces justificatives.

In Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness, Pierre Keller examines Kant's theory of self-consciousness and argues that it succeeds in explaining how both subjective and objective experience are possible. Previous interpretations of Kant's theory have held that he treats all self-consciousness as knowledge of objective states of affairs, and also that self-consciousness can be interpreted as knowledge of personal identity. By developing this striking new interpretation Keller is able to argue that transcendental self-consciousness underwrites a general theory of objectivity (...) and subjectivity at the same time. (shrink)

We study one way in which stable phenomena can exist in an NIP theory. We start by defining a notion of ‘pure instability’ that we call ‘distality’ in which no such phenomenon occurs. O-minimal theories and the p-adics for example are distal. Next, we try to understand what happens when distality fails. Given a type p over a sufficiently saturated model, we extract, in some sense, the stable part of p and define a notion of stable independence which is implied (...) by non-forking and has bounded weight. (shrink)

" Faire d'Aristote un Aufklârer serait méconnaître ce qu'il y a en lui de religiosité authentique, cette intuition de la transcendance et du chorismos, qui sont la raison profonde de sa prudence spéculative. Faire d'Aristote un tragique serait méconnaître cette confiance en l'homme, en sa recherche et en son action, qui tranche sur les lamentations du chœur de la tragédie et sur une certaine résignation socratique et, avant la lettre, stoïcienne. Mais Aristote exalte l'homme sans le diviniser ; il en (...) fait le centre de son éthique, mais il sait que l'éthique n'est pas ce qu'il y a de plus haut, que Dieu est au-delà des catégories éthiques, ou plutôt que l'éthique se constitue dans la distance qui sépare l'homme de Dieu. Livré à ses seules forces par un Dieu trop lointain, qui est suffisamment visible pour être désiré, mais se tient trop à distance pour être possédé, l'homme est en butte, dans la région du monde qu'il habite, à un hasard qu'il ne peut entièrement dominer. Ou plutôt la vie de l'homme se meut entre deux hasards : le Hasard fondamental de la naissance, qui fait que la bonne nature n'est pas également partagée ; le hasard résiduel de l'action, qui fait que les résultats ne sont jamais tout à fait prévisibles. Mais le hasard de la naissance est le hasard résiduel de l'action divine, et la grandeur de l'homme consiste, en prolongeant par la prudence l'action d'une Providence défaillante, à reculer le plus possible les limites de l'imprévisible et de l'inhumain. " Pierre Aubenque. (shrink)

Recognized as a masterpiece of Nietzsche scholarship, NIETZSCHE AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE is available here for the first time in English. Author Pierre Klossowski suggests that Nietzsche's ideas and beliefs did not stem from his personal pathology, but rather were applied in a pathological manner. Thereby Nietzsche's beliefs resonated dynamically and intellectually with his alternating lucidity and delirium.

A presentation and discussion of Gottlob Frege's understanding of language, both natural and artificial, with close attention to his texts.

The French philosopher and intellectual historian Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) is known primarily for his conception of philosophy as spiritual exercise, which was an essential reference for the later Foucault. An aspect of his work that has received less attention is a set of methodological reflections on intellectual history and on the relationship between philosophy and history. Hadot was trained initially as a philosopher and was interested in existentialism as well as in the convergence between philosophy and poetry. Yet he (...) chose to become a historian of philosophy and produced extensive philological work on neo-Platonism and ancient philosophy in general. He found a philosophical rationale for this shift in his encounter with Wittgenstein's philosophy in the mid-1950s (Hadot was one of Wittgenstein's earliest French readers and interpreters). For Hadot, ancient philosophy must be understood as a series of language games, and each language game must be situated within the concrete conditions in which it happened. The reference to Wittgenstein therefore supports a strongly contextualist and historicist stance. It also supports its exact opposite: presentist appropriations of ancient texts are entirely legitimate, and they are the only way ancient philosophy can be existentially meaningful to us. Hadot addresses the contradiction by embracing it fully and claiming that his own practice aims at a coincidence of opposites (a concept borrowed from the Heraclitean tradition). For Hadot the fullest and truest way of doing philosophy is to be a philosopher and a historian at the same time. (shrink)

In this 1999 book Pierre Keller examines the distinctive contributions, and the respective limitations, of Husserl's and Heidegger's approach to fundamental elements of human experience. He shows how their accounts of time, meaning, and personal identity are embedded in important alternative conceptions of how experience may be significant for us, and discusses both how these conceptions are related to each other and how they fit into a wider philosophical context. His sophisticated and accessible account of the phenomenological philosophy of (...) Husserl and the existential phenomenology of Heidegger will be of wide interest to students and specialists in these areas, while analytic philosophers of mind will be interested by the detailed parallels which he draws with a number of concerns of the analytic philosophical tradition. (shrink)