Michel Surya revient, dans l’entretien qu’il a accordé aux Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg, sur sa lecture de Kafka : sur les différentes étapes qu’elle a traversées au fil des œuvres, sur les différentes hypothèses auxquelles elle a donné naissance. À partir de plusieurs thématiques (pourquoi la honte semble-t-elle revenir sans cesse chez Kafka? En quoi peut-on dire qu’il y a dans ses textes une pensée de l’histoire qui est à l’œuvre, et comment celle-ci s’inscrit-elle dans une histoire de (...) la taupe et du souterrain en littérature? Que donne à penser la métamorphose, comme texte et comme processus, de ce que devient l’homme au xxe siècle?, etc.), Michel Surya continue de lire Kafka – si c’est en philosophe ou non, cela fait problème, et c’est précisément l’un de ceux qu’aborde cet entretien. 291-303. (shrink)

Michel Surya publie cette année un nouveau livre sur Georges Bataille : Sainteté de Bataille . Dans cet entretien, nous revenons sur certains des points abordés dans cet ouvrage : le rapport de Bataille à la politique, à la religion ou encore à la philosophie.

Seul, saint, fou, idiot -- Des deux inanités : de dieu et de l'histoire -- Ou bien Dieu... ou bien l'histoire (Hegel, Dostoïevski, Chestov, Kojève & Bataille) -- Des trois religions des années trente (communisme, fascisme et surréalisme) et d'une quatrième (Acéphale) -- Penser le fascisme (Freud, Reich & Bataille) -- La folie Acéphale (Ou la religion antichrétienne, antifasciste, anticommuniste) -- In-signifiances d'Acéphale (Blanchot & Bataille) -- Le surréalisme au service de la religion (Artaud, Breton & Bataille) -- Felix Culpa (...) -- Éloge du péché (Sartre & Bataille, entre autres) -- Sainteté du mal (Charlotte d'Ingerville & Sainte) -- Vies & livres -- Correspondances coïncidences -- Une amitié intenable (Leiris & Bataille) -- Histoire d'un trompe-l'oeil -- L'idiotie de Bataille -- Une passion paradoxale de la raison. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bataille and Mysticism: A “Dazzling Dissolution”Amy Hollywood (bio)Within Georges Bataille’s texts of the late 1930s and 1940s, in particular those later brought together in the tripartite Atheological Summa, he repeatedly suggests that his primary models for writing and experience are the texts of the Christian and non-Western mystical traditions (often represented, in Bataille, by women’s writings) and those of Friedrich Nietzsche. 1 Inner Experience opens with evocations of Nietzsche, (...) and the final volume of the trilogy, On Nietzsche, is “devoted” to his work. References to mystical writings occur throughout Inner Experience and Guilty, and significant portions of both texts can be read as providing “guides” for inner experience analogous to the “itineraries” of Angela of Foligno (d. 1309) and Teresa of Avila (d. 1582) or as spiritual daybooks like those of Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. ca. 1275). These models are, I think, the key to understanding Bataille’s own writing strategies in the Atheological Summa. 2 Despite their apparent divergence, moreover, Bataille insists that mystical and Nietzschean texts reflect and are constitutive of the same experience and writing practice.Like both Nietzsche and the mystics, Bataille’s “antigeneric” writing mixes genres and styles within and between texts. 3 Throughout the course of his career, experience and writing are in a constant state of movement, flux, or chaos (to echo Bataille’s self-description in On Nietzsche). The Atheological Summa encapsulates within what purport to be three unified books the diversity of genres and styles that run throughout Bataille’s corpus as a whole. They contain ample quotation of Nietzsche’s texts and those of the mystics—undigested hunks and fragments of these allusive writings 4 —together with philosophical reflections, confessional meditations, diary fragments, letters, and, at the end of On Nietzsche, a set of six brief historical and theoretical appendices. Anything broaching traditional textual commentary is reserved for the margins of these nonbooks. Like many mystics, particularly women who were denied access to the traditional genres of sermon, biblical commentary, and philosophical or theological treatise, and like Nietzsche, who eschews and subverts traditional genre distinctions, Bataille comments and critiques through practice rather than exposition. Although Bataille acknowledges the oddity of his coupling the mystics and Nietzsche, he also rigorously defends it, arguing for a mystical and ecstatic experience in Nietzsche’s work. 5 As I hope to show, Bataille’s [End Page 74] experience of the failures of mysticism and of Nietzsche speak to each other and lead to Bataille’s necessary apostasy as his true discipleship.Repetition of the divergences between Bataille and the mystics, first stated by Bataille himself in Inner Experience, has become something of a commonplace, yet his claims have not been sufficiently explored or challenged. So, for example, Alain Arnauld and Giséle Excoffon-Lafarge unproblematically assert that despite all proximities between Bataille’s texts and those of the mystics, they differ in their aims or aimlessness. Michel Surya joins a host of other scholars whose primary concern is to demonstrate (against the insinuations of Sartre, made now almost fifty years ago) that Bataille was not a Christian. Whereas the mystics’ path ends with the divine encounter, Bataille renounces all objects, aims, or end for his quest and his desire. 6 Most importantly, he rejects all idealism and any hope for salvation. Bataille himself insists on his divergence from the Christian mystics in Inner Experience and Guilty. At the same time, his citations and mimings of central texts from the Christian mystical tradition show that what fascinates him within these writings is precisely the moment in which the soul desires “to live without a why,” embracing the suffering of hell—understood as the absence of/from the “object” of desire—as desire. 7 In a move later echoed by Jacques Lacan, Bataille claims that some medieval mystics attained that beyond of which he writes, but without knowing anything about it: “Exuberance is the point where we let go of Christianity. Angela of Foligno attained it and described it, but didn’t know it.” 8Commentators follow Bataille in resisting his identification with the mystics, then, whereas Nietzsche is a less troubling model for Bataille and his readers. In fact, Bataille... (shrink)

"On se prend à rêver la situation de Nietzsche faisant retour sur sa vie pour écrire lui-même l'origine de sa pensée dans un livre qui montre qu'il se crée lui-même en tant que dieu-philosophe de l'écriture dionysiaque." (Sarah Kofman) Jugnon le sait de longue date qui s'en est fait tôt une méthode, ou un moyen, ou une liberté supplémentaires, dont chacun des livres tient à la fois de l'installation, du montage, du collage. Il en a l'art. l'Ivre Nietzsche n'y déroge (...) pas. Installation, montage, collage, pas pour que joue ensemble ce qui n'aurait rien à voir, mais pour que fasse "ensemble" ce qu'on n'a jamais fait jouer. Nul mieux que lui ne lit sans doute ; nul mieux que lui ne lie, surtout, lisant, écrivant, qui lit pour lier, c'est-à-dire qui lit doublement, amenant au jour, montrant des formes (d'écriture, de pensée) inaperçues jusqu'alors, qu'il mélange dans un shaker, qu'il agite ensuite. Agitation iconoclaste : le cocktail est raide, fait pour l'ivresse, fait pour danser & penser, comme on danse & pense (denser/panser) sous un volcan, comme danse & pense l'ivre vice-consul d'Au-dessous du volcan — lui aussi pris dans l'effroi de son éternel retour propre. Michel Surya. (shrink)

Influential philosopher Michel Serres’s foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres’s arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue—creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought. Michel Serres is professor in history of science at the Sorbonne, professor of Romance languages at Stanford University, and author of several books, including _Genesis._ Lawrence R. Schehr is (...) professor of French at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. His books include _Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal _. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionCarolyn J. Dean (bio)... even since he [Nietzsche] became famous has he ever been anything but an occasion for misunderstanding?—Georges Bataille, The Accursed ShareAt the current juncture in the history of studies “on Bataille,” admiration and indebtedness have given way to admiration constrained by ambivalence and indebtedness complicated by a desire for accountability. This special issue provides an opportunity to work through these inevitable critical shifts, symptoms of an (...) immeasurable debt to a writer from whom we have necessarily taken distance. It is also an occasion to ask about our own investments in the renewed production of Bataille.During his lifetime (1897–1962), Georges Bataille was called many names, including a “pornographer” and a fascist, and when he died he became a cult figure among some intellectuals, for whom he represented an eclectic and unappreciated thinker. Since his untimely death, Bataille has become very famous. Now, according to Jürgen Habermas, this former librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, editor of Critique, author of covertly circulated erotic books and other works that did not sell well, stands first in a line of French intellectuals leading from “Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida” [Habermas 14]. 1 Bataille’s remains are located in the posthumanist pantheon: his work is joined to the giants of the French philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary heritage, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Blanchot; he has been the subject of countless literary exegeses and even of a prizewinning biography [see Surya]. Bataille no longer has the merit of being unknown.But who is the Bataille we pretend to know? He is the one with whom many critics identify, yet his work is necessarily misunderstood, sometimes (but not always) in the interests of preserving its insights. Critical work on Bataille naturally emphasizes his theory of dépense (expenditure), his mysticism, his attraction to the sacrificial, sadomasochistic erotics of fascist politics, and tends, viscerally if implicitly, to identify with Bataille’s refusal to be hard in the conventional sense—his repudiation of impermeable, phallic masculinity and its association with moral resolve. In 1945, Bataille wrote that he was the “contrary of him who tranquilly watches the dismasted vessels from the shore, because in fact... I cannot imagine anyone so cruel that he could notice the one who is dismasted with such carefree laughter. Sinking is something altogether different, one can have it to one’s heart’s content...” [OC 6:358]. In 1966, a sensitive critic wrote: “Bataille’s cogito, thus, reads: ‘I sink therefore I am’” [Hollier 138]. In other words, Bataille was no proponent of a sink-or-swim philosophy, but of “the hard desire to endure”—words he wrote to describe Vincent Van Gogh, whose self-mutilation was, from Bataille’s perspective, the necessary precondition of his art. This hard desire is paradoxically the hard labor of unbinding the self, a project that entails yet moves beyond empathizing with those caught in the storm: Bataille insisted that creation required symbolic castration rather than the phallic virtue of the moral man or the swollen pride of those who volunteer heroically for the rescue mission (“Heroism,” he said, “is an [End Page 3] attitude of flight” [OC 5: 347]). As countless critics have demonstrated, even Bataille’s most relentlessly hard-core texts use sexuality as an allegory for the self-shattering of the phallic body.The sacrificial constitution of the man who would sink—for this Bataille was giddily embraced after his death. By 1990, when Yale French Studies devoted a special issue to him, the embrace was equally enthusiastic, but giddiness had given way to some defensiveness. Those theorists who did not admire Bataille equated his repudiation of phallic virtue with the ego-dissolving sublimity of fascism. After all, some of his friends and intellectual heirs had been subjected to public scrutiny for their anti-Semitic, often fascist sympathies. Implicitly defending Bataille, the editor of that special issue insisted on Bataille’s “ethics” of sacrifice. He claimed that Bataille held “onto the possibility of an ethics” through a paradoxically “incessant repositing of the ethical” [Stoekl 2, 5]. This account of Bataille’s ethics avoids the problem that the ethics of sacrifice in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionCarolyn J. Dean (bio)... even since he [Nietzsche] became famous has he ever been anything but an occasion for misunderstanding?—Georges Bataille, The Accursed ShareAt the current juncture in the history of studies “on Bataille,” admiration and indebtedness have given way to admiration constrained by ambivalence and indebtedness complicated by a desire for accountability. This special issue provides an opportunity to work through these inevitable critical shifts, symptoms of an (...) immeasurable debt to a writer from whom we have necessarily taken distance. It is also an occasion to ask about our own investments in the renewed production of Bataille.During his lifetime (1897–1962), Georges Bataille was called many names, including a “pornographer” and a fascist, and when he died he became a cult figure among some intellectuals, for whom he represented an eclectic and unappreciated thinker. Since his untimely death, Bataille has become very famous. Now, according to Jürgen Habermas, this former librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, editor of Critique, author of covertly circulated erotic books and other works that did not sell well, stands first in a line of French intellectuals leading from “Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida” [Habermas 14]. 1 Bataille’s remains are located in the posthumanist pantheon: his work is joined to the giants of the French philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary heritage, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Blanchot; he has been the subject of countless literary exegeses and even of a prizewinning biography [see Surya]. Bataille no longer has the merit of being unknown.But who is the Bataille we pretend to know? He is the one with whom many critics identify, yet his work is necessarily misunderstood, sometimes (but not always) in the interests of preserving its insights. Critical work on Bataille naturally emphasizes his theory of dépense (expenditure), his mysticism, his attraction to the sacrificial, sadomasochistic erotics of fascist politics, and tends, viscerally if implicitly, to identify with Bataille’s refusal to be hard in the conventional sense—his repudiation of impermeable, phallic masculinity and its association with moral resolve. In 1945, Bataille wrote that he was the “contrary of him who tranquilly watches the dismasted vessels from the shore, because in fact... I cannot imagine anyone so cruel that he could notice the one who is dismasted with such carefree laughter. Sinking is something altogether different, one can have it to one’s heart’s content...” [OC 6:358]. In 1966, a sensitive critic wrote: “Bataille’s cogito, thus, reads: ‘I sink therefore I am’” [Hollier 138]. In other words, Bataille was no proponent of a sink-or-swim philosophy, but of “the hard desire to endure”—words he wrote to describe Vincent Van Gogh, whose self-mutilation was, from Bataille’s perspective, the necessary precondition of his art. This hard desire is paradoxically the hard labor of unbinding the self, a project that entails yet moves beyond empathizing with those caught in the storm: Bataille insisted that creation required symbolic castration rather than the phallic virtue of the moral man or the swollen pride of those who volunteer heroically for the rescue mission (“Heroism,” he said, “is an [End Page 3] attitude of flight” [OC 5: 347]). As countless critics have demonstrated, even Bataille’s most relentlessly hard-core texts use sexuality as an allegory for the self-shattering of the phallic body.The sacrificial constitution of the man who would sink—for this Bataille was giddily embraced after his death. By 1990, when Yale French Studies devoted a special issue to him, the embrace was equally enthusiastic, but giddiness had given way to some defensiveness. Those theorists who did not admire Bataille equated his repudiation of phallic virtue with the ego-dissolving sublimity of fascism. After all, some of his friends and intellectual heirs had been subjected to public scrutiny for their anti-Semitic, often fascist sympathies. Implicitly defending Bataille, the editor of that special issue insisted on Bataille’s “ethics” of sacrifice. He claimed that Bataille held “onto the possibility of an ethics” through a paradoxically “incessant repositing of the ethical” [Stoekl 2, 5]. This account of Bataille’s ethics avoids the problem that the ethics of sacrifice in... (shrink)

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in (...) ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the \u201ccriminal\u201d was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice. Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.  . (shrink)

The second volume in an unprecedented publishing event: the complete College de France lectures of one of the most influential thinkers of the last century Michel Foucault remains among the towering intellectual figures of postmodern philosophy. His works on sexuality, madness, the prison, and medicine are classics his example continues to challenge and inspire. From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous College de France. These lectures were seminal events. Attended by thousands, they (...) created benchmarks for contemporary critical inquiry. The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it." Building on the themes of societal self-defense in the first volume of this series, Foucault shows how and why defining "abnormality" and "normality" were prerogatives of power in the nineteenth century, shaping the institutions--from the prison system to the family--meant to deal in particular with “monstrosity,” whether sexual, phsyical, or spiritual. The College de France lectures add immeasurably to our appreciation of Foucault's thought, and offer a unique window on his singular worldview. (shrink)

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique , few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization , Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all (...) prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them. (shrink)

“What characterizes the act of justice is not resort to a court and to judges; it is not the intervention of magistrates. What characterizes the juridical act, the process or the procedure in the broad sense, is the regulated development of a dispute. And the intervention of judges, their opinion or decision, is only ever an episode in this development. What defines the juridical order is the way in which one confronts one another, the way in which one struggles. The (...) rule and the struggle, the rule in the struggle, this is the juridical.” - Michel Foucault Penal Theories and Institutions is the title Michel Foucault gave to the lectures he delivered at the Collège de France from November 1971 to March 1972. In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first time his approach to the question of power that will be the focus of his research up to the writing of Discipline and Punish and beyond. His analysis starts with a detailed account of Richelieu’s repression of the Nu-pieds revolt and then goes on to show how the apparatus of power developed by the monarchy on this occasion breaks with the system of juridical and judicial institutions of the Middle Ages and opens out onto a “judicial State apparatus”, a “repressive system”, whose function is focused on the confinement of those who challenge its order. Michel Foucault systemizes the approach of a history of truth on the basis of the study of “juridico-political matrices” that he had begun in the previous year’s lectures and which is at the heart of the notion of “knowledge-power”. In these lectures Foucault develops his theory of justice and penal law. The appearance of this volume marks the end of the publication of the series Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France. (shrink)

Veils -- Boxes -- Tables -- Visit -- Joy.

The relationship between Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity and Hendrik A. Lorentz’s ether theory is best understood in terms of competing interpretations of Lorentz invariance. In the 1890s, Lorentz proved and exploited the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell’s equations, the laws governing electromagnetic fields in the ether, with what he called the theorem of corresponding states. To account for the negative results of attempts to detect the earth’s motion through the ether, Lorentz, in effect, had to assume that the laws (...) governing the matter interacting with the fields are Lorentz invariant as well. This additional assumption can be seen as a generalization of the well-known contraction hypothesis. In Lorentz’s theory, it remained an unexplained coincidence that both the laws governing fields and the laws governing matter should be Lorentz invariant. In special relativity, by contrast, the Lorentz invariance of all physical laws directly reflects the Minkowski space-time structure posited by the theory. One can use this observation to produce a common-cause argument to show that the relativistic interpretation of Lorentz invariance is preferable to Lorentz’s interpretation. (shrink)

Readers of this volume will notice that it contains only a few papers on general relativity. This is because most papers documenting the genesis and early development of general relativity were not published in Annalen der Physik . After Einstein took up his new prestigious position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1914, the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin academy almost by default became the main outlet for his scientific production. Two of the more important papers on (...) general relativity, however, did find their way into the pages of the Annalen [35,41]. Although I shall discuss both papers in this essay, the main focus will be on [35], the first systematic exposition of general relativity, submitted in March 1916 and published in May of that year. (shrink)

Biogea is a mixture of poetry, philosophy, science, and biography exemplary of the style that has made Michel Serres one of the most extraordinary thinkers of his age. His philosophical and poetic inquiry sings in praise of earth and life, what he names singularly as Biogea. In these times when species are disappearing, when catastrophic events such as earthquakes and tsunamis impale the earth, Serres wonders if anyone “worries about the death pangs of the rivers.” And for Serres, one (...) can ask the same question of philosophy as the humanities increasingly find themselves in need of defenders. Today, all living organisms discover themselves part of this Biogea. “Today we have other neighbors, constituents of the Biogea: the sea, my lover; our mother, the Earth, becomes our daughter; this beautiful breeze which inspires the spirit, a spiritual mistress; our light friends, the fresh and flowing waters.”. (shrink)

This book is an English-language translation of a bestselling book in France that explores the relationship between humans and new technologies.

In publications in 1914 and 1918, Einstein claimed that his new theory of gravity in some sense relativizes the rotation of a body with respect to the distant stars and the acceleration of the traveler with respect to the stay-at-home in the twin paradox. What he showed was that phenomena seen as inertial effects in a space-time coordinate system in which the non-accelerating body is at rest can be seen as a combination of inertial and gravitational effects in a space-time (...) coordinate system in which the accelerating body is at rest. Two different relativity principles play a role in these accounts: the relativity of non-uniform motion, in the weak sense that the laws of physics are the same in the two space-time coordinate systems involved; what Einstein in 1920 called the relativity of the gravitational field, the notion that there is a unified inertio-gravitational field that splits differently into inertial and gravitational components in different coordinate systems. I provide a detailed reconstruction of Einstein's rather sketchy accounts of the twins and the bucket and examine the role of these two relativity principles. I argue that we can hold on to but that is either false or trivial. (shrink)

An interview with Michel Foucault in 1979 that was never published during his lifetime and was recently rediscovered in the archives. The interview, appearing for the first time in English and in its complete form, marks one of Foucault’s final public discussions of the contentious topic of the Iranian Revolution. In particular, Foucault clarifies what he means by “political spirituality” and addresses the respective relations between religion, revolution, and self-transformation.

In this reflection on the relation between nature and culture, Michel Serres relates the present environmental catastrophe to pollution generated by humanity's efforts to appropriate.

BackgroundMoral distress is a phenomenon that can lead to an imbalance of the mind and body. There are many coping strategies to overcome the obstacles that lead the subject to this condition. Some coping strategies are capable of being achieved through the cultivation of moral resilience.AimThe aim is to identify the strategies of moral resilience in the nursing management of University Hospitals in Brazil.Research designThe research design is the qualitative study with discursive textual analysis.Participants and research context: 44 nurse managers (...) and nurses in leadership positions participated in a total of 30 University Hospitals in Brazil. Data were collected online, using a questionnaire with open questions.Ethical considerationsThe Ethics Committee approved the study. Participants received information about the research, agreed to respond to the questionnaire, and were guaranteed anonymity.FindingsPersonal adaptive strategies (intrapersonal and interpersonal) and organizational collaborative strategies (intrinsic and transformational management) emerged from this process. The intrapersonal strategies involved elements of rationality, flexibility, rebalancing practices, moral courage, and detachment. The interpersonal strategies addressed support networks, team involvement, and dialog. Organizational strategies dealt with actions which reorient ethical infrastructure, ethical education, and psychological protection, as well as fostering dialogical relationships, empowerment, and cooperation.ConclusionFrom the perspective of social historical construction, it is understood that developing personal and organizational strategies is essential to cultivating moral resilience. (shrink)

World-renowned philosopher, Michel Serres writes a text in praise of the body and movement, in praise of teachers of physical education, coaches, mountain guides, athletes, dancers, mimes, clowns, artisans, and artists. This work describes the variations, the admirable metamorphoses that the body can accomplish. While animals lack such a variety of gestures, postures, and movements, the fluidity of the human body mimics the leisure of living beings and things; what's more, it creates signs. Already here, within its movements and (...) metamorphoses, the mind is born. The five senses are not the only source of knowledge: it emerges, in large part, from the imitations the plasticity of the body allows. In it, with it, by it knowledge begins. (shrink)

In publications in 1914 and 1918, Einstein claimed that his new theory of gravity somehow relativizes the rotation of a body with respect to the distant stars and the acceleration of the traveler with respect to the stay-at-home in the twin paradox. What he showed was that phenomena seen as inertial effects in a space-time coordinate system in which the non-accelerating body is at rest can be seen as a combination of inertial and gravitational effects in a space-time coordinate system (...) in which the accelerating body is at rest. Two different relativity principles play a role in these accounts: the relativity of non-uniform motion, in the weak sense that the laws of physics are the same in the two space-time coordinate systems involved; what Einstein in 1920 called the relativity of the gravitational field, the notion that there is a unified inertio-gravitational field that splits differently into inertial and gravitational components in different coordinate systems. I provide a detailed reconstruction of Einstein's rather sketchy accounts of the twins and the bucket and examine the role of these two relativity principles. I argue that we can hold on to but that is either false or trivial. (shrink)

“Special relativity killed the classical dream of using the energy-momentumvelocity relations as a means of probing the dynamical origins of [the mass of the electron]. The relations are purely kinematical” (Pais, 1982, 159). This perceptive comment comes from a section on the pre-relativistic notion of electromagnetic mass in ‘Subtle is the Lord . . . ’, Abraham Pais’ highly acclaimed biography of Albert Einstein. ‘Kinematical’ in this context means ‘independent of the details of the dynamics’. In this paper we examine (...) the classical dream referred to by Pais from the vantage point of relativistic continuum mechanics. (shrink)

There is a striking difference between the methodology of the young Einstein and that of the old. I argue that Einstein’s switch in the late 1910s from a moderate empiricism to an extreme rationalism should at least in part be understood against the background of his crushing personal and political experiences during the war years in Berlin. As a result of these experiences, Einstein started to put into practice what, drawing on Schopenhauer, he had preached for years, namely to use (...) science as his means of escaping from “the merely personal.” Whatever the exact sources of Einstein’s about-face, the older man has left us with a highly misleading picture of how the younger man achieved the successes that we still celebrate today. This has had a harmful influence on theoretical physics. If the young Einstein’s successes are any guide as to how successful theoretical physics is done, close adherence to general features of the empirical data is much more and mathematical elegance is much less important than the old Einstein wanted us to believe. (shrink)

In this critical notice we argue against William Craig’s recent attempt to reconcile presentism (roughly, the view that only the present is real) with relativity theory. Craig’s defense of his position boils down to endorsing a ‘neo-Lorentzian interpretation’ of special relativity. We contend that his reconstruction of Lorentz’s theory and its historical development is fatally flawed and that his arguments for reviving this theory fail on many counts.

Foucault's previously unpublished doctoral dissertation on Kant offers the definitive statement of his relationship to Kant and to the critical tradition of philosophy. This introduction and commentary to Kant's least discussed work, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, is the dissertation that Michel Foucault presented in 1961 as his doctoral thesis. It has remained unpublished, in any language, until now. In his exegesis and critical interpretation of Kant's Anthropology, Foucault raises the question of the relation between psychology and (...) anthropology, and how they are affected by time. Though a Kantian “critique of the anthropological slumber,” Foucault warns against the dangers of treating psychology as a new metaphysics, explores the possibilities of studying man empirically, and reflects on the nature of time, art and technique, self-perception, and language. Extending Kant's suggestion that any empirical knowledge of man is inextricably tied up with language, Foucault asserts that man is a world citizen insofar as he speaks. For both Kant and Foucault, anthropology concerns not the human animal or self-consciousness but, rather, involves the questioning of the limits of human knowledge and concrete existence. This long-unknown text is a valuable contribution not only to a scholarly appreciation of Kant's work but as the first outline of what would later become Foucault's own frame of reference within the history of philosophy. It is thus a definitive statement of Foucault's relation to Kant as well as Foucault's relation to the critical tradition of philosophy. By going to the heart of the debate on structuralist anthropology and the status of the human sciences in relation to finitude, Foucault also creates something of a prologue to his foundational The Order of Things. Michel Foucault is widely considered to be one of the most important academic voices of the twentieth century and has proven influential across disciplines. (shrink)

This volume is the first systematic presentation of the work of Albert Einstein, comprising fourteen essays by leading historians and philosophers of science that introduce readers to his work. Following an introduction that places Einstein's work in the context of his life and times, the book opens with essays on the papers of Einstein's 'miracle year', 1905, covering Brownian motion, light quanta, and special relativity, as well as his contributions to early quantum theory and the opposition to his light quantum (...) hypothesis. Further essays relate Einstein's path to the general theory of relativity and the beginnings of two fields it spawned, relativistic cosmology and gravitational waves. Essays on Einstein's later years examine his unified field theory program and his critique of quantum mechanics. The closing essays explore the relation between Einstein's work and twentieth-century philosophy, as well as his political writings. (shrink)

« D’où jaillit la Musique? Des bruits du monde? Des clameurs issues des assemblées? De nos émotions? Et comment la définir? Rien de plus difficile que de répondre à ces questions. J’ai préféré dire ce qu’elle est en trois contes. Légendaire, le premier suit la vie d’Orphée, son initiation auprès des Bacchantes et des Muses, puis sa plongée dans les Enfers à la recherche d’Eurydice, son amante. Comment aimer en Musique? Autobiographique, le second envahit le Grand Récit de la connaissance (...) qui devient ici une Grande Symphonie. Peut-on penser en Musique? Biblique enfin, le dernier psalmodie, de la Genèse à la Nativité. Doit-on prier en Musique? » Michel Serres. (shrink)

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is the founder of positivism, a philosophical and political movement which enjoyed a very wide diffusion in the second half of the nineteenth century. It sank into an almost complete oblivion during the twentieth, when it was eclipsed by neopositivism. However, Comte's decision to develop successively a philosophy of mathematics, a philosophy of physics, a philosophy of chemistry and a philosophy of biology, makes him the first philosopher of science in the modern sense, and his constant attention (...) to the social dimension of science resonates in many respects with current points of view. His political philosophy, on the other hand, is even less known, because it differs substantially from the classical political philosophy we have inherited. -/- Comte's most important works are (1) the Course on Positive Philosophy (1830-1842, six volumes, translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte); (2) the System of Positive Polity, or Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of Humanity, (1851-1854, four volumes); and (3) the Early Writings (1820-1829), where one can see the influence of Saint-Simon, for whom Comte served as secretary from 1817 to 1824. The Early Writings are still the best introduction to Comte's thought. In the Course, Comte said, science was transformed into philosophy; in the System, philosophy was transformed into religion. The second transformation met with strong opposition; as a result, it has become customary to distinguish, with Mill, between a “good Comte” (the author of the Course) and a “bad Comte” (the author of the System). Today's common conception of positivism corresponds mainly to what can be found in the Course. (shrink)

In The Contemplation of the World, eminent French theorist Michel Maffesoli pursues and extends his project of decoding contemporary societies.

English summary: This commentary of Plato's Euthydemus demonstrates its place as the clearest text for understanding the relationship between Platonism and Sophism. French description: De tous les dialogues de Platon, l'Euthydeme est peut-etre le plus exclusivement consacre a l'elucidation de la relation du platonisme avec la sophistique. Ce qu'on a pris pour indigence de son contenu, c'est l'acuite avec laquelle la forme y est consideree. Formalisme moral de Socrate, formalisme eristique des sophistes: dans la lecon d'eristique donnee a Socrate apparait, (...) plus clairement peut-etre que dans aucun texte antique, la logique propre au discours sophistique, celle-la meme a laquelle a affaire dans sa totalite le texte platonicien. La sophistique, et Platon avec elle, relevent d'un regime de discours pre-aristotelicien, et c'est dans la pratique de ce discours que demande a etre reinscrite la tant galvaudee ironie socratique. (shrink)

BackgroundClinical ethics case consultations (CECCs) provide a structured approach in situations of ethical uncertainty or conflicts. There have been increasing calls in recent years to assess the quality of CECCs by means of empirical research. This study provides detailed data of a descriptive quantitative and qualitative evaluation of a CECC service in a department of cardiology and intensive care at a German university hospital.MethodsSemi-structured document analysis of CECCs was conducted in the period of November 1, 2018, to May 31, 2020. (...) All documents were analysed by two researchers independently.ResultsTwenty-four CECCs were requested within the study period, of which most (n = 22; 92%) had been initiated by physicians of the department. The patients were an average of 79 years old (R: 43–96), and 14 (58%) patients were female. The median length of stay prior to request was 12.5 days (R: 1–65 days). The most frequent diagnoses (several diagnoses possible) were cardiology-related (n = 29), followed by sepsis (n = 11) and cancer (n = 6). Twenty patients lacked decisional capacity. The main reason for a CECC request was uncertainty about the balancing of potential benefit and harm related to the medically indicated treatment (n = 18). Further reasons included differing views regarding the best individual treatment option between health professionals and patients (n = 3) or between different team members (n = 3). Consensus between participants could be reached in 18 (75%) consultations. The implementation of a disease specific treatment intervention was recommended in five cases. Palliative care and limitation of further disease specific interventions was recommended in 12 cases.ConclusionsTo the best of our knowledge, this is the first in-depth evaluation of a CECC service set up for an academic department of cardiology and intensive medical care. Patient characteristics and the issues deliberated during CECC provide a starting point for the development and testing of more tailored clinical ethics support services and research on CECC outcomes. (shrink)

Ce recueil se veut un instrument de travail à l'intention de ceux qui s'interrogent sur les idéologies, ce qu'elles sont, d'où elles viennent et à quoi elles servent. Michel Simon y a réuni un certain nombre de textes qui ont marqué l'histoire et la réflexion sur l'idéologie et les idéologies et qui sont proposés comme autant de points de repères : Marx, Engels, Lénine, Lukacs, Mannheim, Korsch, Gramsci, Althusser chez les marxistes, mais aussi Jean Baechler et Pierre Ansart. Un (...) commentaire d'accompagnement situe ces textes dans leur contexte et fournit les explications nécessaires tandis que des tableaux récapitulatifs donnent une vue d'ensemble de chaque auteur. (shrink)

In 1980, Michel Foucault began a vast project of research on the relationship between subjectivity and truth, an examination of conscience, confession, and truth-telling that would become a crucial feature of his life-long work on the relationship between knowledge, power, and the self. The lectures published here offer one of the clearest pathways into this project, contrasting Greco-Roman techniques of the self with those of early Christian monastic culture in order to uncover, in the latter, the historical origin of (...) many of the features that still characterize the modern subject. They are accompanied by a public discussion and debate as well as by an interview with Michael Bess, all of which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, where Foucault delivered an earlier and slightly different version of these lectures. Foucault analyzes the practices of self-examination and confession in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the first centuries of Christianity in order to highlight a radical transformation from the ancient Delphic principle of “know thyself” to the monastic precept of “confess all of your thoughts to your spiritual guide.” His aim in doing so is to retrace the genealogy of the modern subject, which is inextricably tied to the emergence of the “hermeneutics of the self”—the necessity to explore one’s own thoughts and feelings and to confess them to a spiritual director—in early Christianity. According to Foucault, since some features of this Christian hermeneutics of the subject still determine our contemporary “gnoseologic” self, then the genealogy of the modern subject is both an ethical and a political enterprise, aiming to show that the “self” is nothing but the historical correlate of a series of technologies built into our history. Thus, from Foucault’s perspective, our main problem today is not to discover what “the self” is, but to try to analyze and change these technologies in order to change its form. (shrink)

An assessment of decision-making capacity is the accepted procedure for determining when a person is not competent. An inferential gap exists between the criteria for capacity specific abilities and the legal requirements to understand relevant information and appreciate the consequences of a decision. This gap extends to causal influences on a person'scapacity to decide. Using a published case of depression, we illustrate that assessors' uses of diagnostic information is frequently not up to the task of bridging this inferential gap in (...) a justifiable way. We then describe cases of faulty judgement which challenge the understanding of diagnostic causal influences. These cases help to clarify the nature of the expertise required for capacity assessments. In practice, the requirements of decision-making capacity are often abandoned to other considerations due to a lack of requisite expertise. The legal policy supporting decision-making capacity as a means to protective intervention is justified only if the requisite expertise is developed. We propose the requisite expertise to be developed in the long term as a distinct multidisciplinary endeavour. (shrink)

Most states are multination states, and most peoples are stateless peoples. Just as collectives can behave as sovereign states only if they are recognized by the international community, liberal multination states must recognize stateless peoples in order to determine their political status within that state. There is, however, no agreement on the kind of principles that should be considered, especially under classical liberalism, which gives individuals preeminence over groups. Liberal theories that attempt to accommodate collective rights are often based on (...) a comprehensive version of liberalism that subscribes to moral individualism. Within such a framework, they develop a watered-down concept of collective rights. In A Liberal Theory of Collective Rights Michel Seymour explores the theoretical resources of John Rawls’s political liberalism and shows that this particular approach can accommodate genuine collective rights. By Rawls’s account, Seymour explains, peoples are moral agents and sources of valid moral claims and are therefore entitled to collective rights. These kinds of rights translate, in the constitution of the multination state, to a true political recognition for stateless peoples. Ultimately, A Liberal Theory of Collective Rights answers three important questions: Who is the subject of collective rights? What is the object of collective rights? And can they be institutionalized in real politics? (shrink)