A global transformation of modes of religious authority has been taking place at an increasing pace in recent years. The social and political implications of the growing dominance of neo-scripturalist discourses on Islam have been particularly noticeable after 11 September 2001. This evolution of religiosity, which is mediated by mass media and new media technology, creates the conditions of existence of a post-Weberian and post-Durkheimian order. In this new social context, legitimacy can be more easily disconnected from the institutionalized framework (...) of religious and political authority. Both in Muslim countries and in Western democracies, the attempt by Islamic activists to make the Shari’a relevant in contemporary settings creates new opportunities and challenges for legal pluralism. At the same time, the multiplication of Muslim voices claiming to be able to interpret the sacred texts, particularly in virtual communities, creates an increasingly inchoate ‘noise’ about Islamic orthodoxy. In the context of an exponential increase in the global possibilities for religious identification and expression, the growth of neo-scripturalist interpretations of Islam reflects a quest for parsimony and stability. (shrink)

This paper calls into question Richard Rorty's recasting of the traditional justifications of liberal political philosophy in an anti-foundationalist ironic mould. Rorty suggests not only that his irony is compatible with the liberal commitments to human flourishing but also that it can clear up many of the conceptual difficulties that liberal reformers face today. Two objections are raised against the Rortian approach to politics, one conceptual, the other practical. Conceptually, because Rorty does not wish to burden political irony and imagination (...) with a constraining political theory, his proposal increases the likelihood that two liberal commitments that he judges essential, the separation of the public and the private, and the aversion of wilful cruelty, will clash with one another. Practically, the success of his anti-foundationalist irony among sophisticated liberal reformers is jeopardized by its potentially negative impact upon the non-ironic, metaphysically minded political actors who most need to be brought into the liberal debate. Key Words: irony • liberal imagination • political theory • pragmatism • social change • Third World. (shrink)

The unlivable is the most extreme point of human suffering and injustice. But what is it exactly? How do we define the unlivable? And what can we do to prevent and repair it? These are the intriguing questions Judith Butler and Frédéric Worms discuss in a captivating dialogue situated at the crossroads of contemporary life and politics. Here, Judith Butler criticizes the norms that make life precarious and unlivable, while Frédéric Worms appeals to a "critical vitalism" as a way of (...) allowing the hardship of the unlivable to reveal what is vital for us. For both Butler and Worms, the difference between the livable and the unlivable forms the critical foundation for a contemporary practice of care. Care and support, in all their aspects, make human life livable, that is, "more than living." To understand it, we must draw on the concrete practices of humans who are confronted with the unlivable: the refugees of today and the witnesses and survivors of past violations and genocide. They teach us what is intolerable but also undeniable about the unlivable, and what we can do to resist it. Crafted with critical rigor, mutual respect, and lively humor, the compelling dialogue transcribed and translated in this book took place at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) on April 11, 2018, at a time when close to two thousand migrants were living in nearby makeshift camps in northern Paris. The Livable and the Unlivable showcases this 2018 dialogue in the context of Butler's and Worms's ongoing work and the evolution of their thought, as presented by Laure Barillas and Arto Charpentier in their equally engaging introduction. It concludes with a new afterword that addresses the crises unfolding in our world and the ways a philosophically rigorous account of life must confront them. While this book will be of keen interest to readers of philosophy and cultural criticism, and those interested in vitalism, new materialism, and critical theory, it is a far from merely academic text. In the conversation between Butler and Worms, we encounter questions we all grapple with in confronting the distress and precarity of our times, marked as it is by types of survival that are unlivable, from concentration camps to prisons to environmental toxicity, to forcible displacement, to the Covid pandemic. The Livable and the Unlivable at once considers longstanding philosophical questions around why and how we live, while working to retrieve a philosophy of life for today's Left. (shrink)

Age‐related and cancer‐related epigenomic modifications have been associated with enhanced cell‐to‐cell gene expression variability that characterizes increased cellular stochasticity. Since gene expression variability appears to be highly reduced by—and epigenetic and phenotypic stability acquired through—direct or long‐range cellular interactions during cell differentiation, we propose a common origin for aging and cancer in the failure to control cellular stochasticity by cell–cell interactions. Tissue‐disruption‐induced cellular stochasticity associated with epigenetic drift would be at the origin of organ dysfunction because of an increase in (...) phenotypic variation among cells, ultimately leading to cell death and organ failure through a loss of coordination in cellular functions, and eventually to cancerization. We propose mechanistic research perspectives to corroborate this hypothesis and explore its evolutionary consequences, highlighting a positive correlation between the median age of mass loss onset (a proxy for the onset of organ aging) and the median age at cancer diagnosis. (shrink)

Émile Meyerson (1859–1933) is an epistemologist, in the French meaning of the term: he himself introduced the word in French as a synonymous for “philo- sophy of science” in his major book of 1908 Identity and Reality. First educated as a chemist, Meyerson discovered philosophy while reading Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive. However, he strongly rejected Comte’s positivism: metaphysics, he said, penetrates science and even common sense; men, whether they are scien- tists or not, are interested in finding a (...) cause behind the stream of phenomena. This anti-positivism is justified in so far as Meyerson used the same method and pursued the same goal as Comte: the philosopher must practice an “a posteriori analysis of the products of thought”, so as to determine the laws of human mind. Consequently, Meyerson’s work is not a mere philosophy of science, it is more than an “épistémolo- gie” in the French sense. Its ambition is to reach the intellectual basis of all thought. The philosopher can resort to the resources of metaphysics to reach the psychologi- cal foundations of humanity, when he reflects on the historical products of thought. He establishes the transcendent or metaphysical logic involved in the process of thought. Meyerson’s work consequently deserves the name its author eventually gave to it in his posthumous Essais: a “philosophy of intellect”. But is such a philoso- phy wide enough to embrace the meaning of all the products of human thought? It seems that Meyerson was embarrassed and limited by his very starting point, namely Comte’s system. I argue that scientific or common conceptions may need more than the anti-positivist claim of the preservation of one substance behind phenomena. Truth to tell, men generally tend to identify a large and rich configuration of causes or substances. Only such architectonics can give an idea of what people mean by invoking their “vision of the world”. (shrink)

Clinical trials aim to minimise participant risk and generate new clinical knowledge for the wider population. Many military agencies are now investing efforts in pushing towards developing new treatments involving Brain-Computer Interfaces, Gene Therapy and Stem Cells interventions. These trials are targeting smaller disease groups, as such they give rise to novel participant risks of harms that are largely not accommodated by existing practice. This is of most concern with irreversible harms at early trial stages, where participants may forfeit any (...) future therapy, and in personalised medicine, where the individual participant assumes all of the trial risk. Given these new experimental interventions involve high risk of irreversible harms, how much risk should patients be exposed to when participating in experimental testing of innovative technologies? Designing clinical trials which better balance risk/benefit ratios for participants is crucial. The aim of this book chapter is to suggest a new stratified risk framework aimed at minimising the risk-benefit ratio to participants in clinical trials associated with high risk of irrevocable harms. We will argue it demands a higher-level of clinical data capture at earlier trial stages than predicated by current trial doctrine; it also requires publication of all trial data to minimise risk to participants of any future trial. (shrink)

Notre article se propose d’articuler au domaine de l’esthétique notre expérience en tant qu’organisateur d’expositions présentant des artistes internationaux dans un centre d’art indépendant au Japon. En nous basant sur une théorie de la réception des œuvres, nous proposerons une lecture des appréhensions habituelles des modalités courantes au Japon par le renvoi aux formules de Nishida concernant l’acte artistique. Dès lors se croisent deux notions de marginalité. La première renvoie à l’opposition entre philosophie analytique et philosophie existentielle, la seconde consiste (...) à minorer les formes d’art qui ne renvoient pas au bien de la communauté. (shrink)

Michel Tournier had a Sartrean youth. But his radicalization of existentialism pushed him to return to a Cartesian cogito. He thus compromised the transparency of our relation to things that phenomenology intended to guarantee. In this respect, the consciousness without thickness put forward by his friend Gilles Deleuze seems more satisfactory. However, the latter was particularly interested in the movements of subjectivation, belatedly following the path that Tournier had opened before him.

Recent years have featured the existence of a variety of structuralisms, with an important partition between methodological versus philosophical structuralism. Inside philosophical structuralism, many trends can be identified, corresponding to various ontological stances. We argue here that another main partition has contributed to organize structuralism in the twentieth century, rooted in different technical and theoretical interests. This partition is largely transversal to the ones classically identified. Concretely, the paper will focus on possible differences between an arithmetical and logical notion of (...) structure that can be traced back to the writings of Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, and a mathematical notion of structure, exemplified in the works by Bourbaki. This coexistence gives rise to a fundamental ambiguity that affects contemporary structuralism. Philosophically, in one case the attention is rather centered on a foundational and reductionist perspective, as featured by the Whitehead-Russell Principia and the Carnapian project of the Aufbau: the scientific construction of the world around the idea of structure. In the other, the focus is on epistemological and dynamical issues, as exemplified by two key issues in Bourbaki’s treatise: understanding the architecture of mathematics, offering a tool-kit to mathematicians. These two distinct meanings still coexist inside contemporary scientific practices and lead to different theoretical interests, as we will show thanks to various recent examples. (shrink)

Many experimental brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are currently being medically tested in paralyzed patients. While the new generations of implantable BCIs move rapidly ahead at trying to increase the patients’ well-being, ethical concerns about their potential effects on patients’ psychological dimensions (e.g. sense of agency and control) are growing. An important ethical concern to explore is how BCIs may introduce unprecedented vulnerabilities to implanted individuals.Our chapter shows that, on the one hand, BCIs can empower the sense of self and control, which (...) contribute to well-being. On the other hand, they can introduce unprecedented vulnerabilities, for example, by inducing radical distress, feelings of loss of control, and a rupture of patient identity, which decrease one’s well-being. To investigate a possible solution to this problem we propose to understand the implementation of a BCI system in one’s body through the capability approach. This calls for a careful ethical examination of new morally salient issues prior to seeing an increase in BCI-related psychological effects in an open market. (shrink)

Participants in cognitive psychology experiments on reasoning and problem solving are commonly sequestered: Efforts are made to impoverish the physical context in which the problem is presented, decoupling people from the richer and modifiable environment that naturally instantiates it outside the lab. Sense-making activities are constrained, but this conforms to the strong internalist and individualist commitments implicit to these research efforts: Cognition reflects internal computations and the scientists’ toils must focus on the individual and what she is thinking, decoupled from (...) the world. We contrast this position with one that identifies cognition as the product of a cognitive system that is configured and enacted by, minimally, an agent and the world in which she is embedded. We review work on the psychology of hypothesis testing and problem solving and argue that refocusing research efforts on the dynamic agent-environment couplings that generate cognitive products — such as a problem representation, a hypothesis or a problem solution — offers a much richer set of methodological opportunities to unveil how people actually think outside the cognitive psychologist’s laboratory. We conclude by exploring the ontological implications of a systemic perspective on cognition. (shrink)

The Russian philosopher Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky adhered to an evolutionary metaphysics of reincarnation according to which the world is constituted of immortal souls or monads, which he calls ‘substantival agents.’ These substantival agents can evolve or devolve depending on the goodness or badness of their behavior. Such evolution requires the possibility for monads to reincarnate into the bodies of creatures of a higher or of a lower level on the scala perfectionis. According to this theory, a substantival agent can evolve (...) by being gradually reincarnated multiple times through a sort of process of metamorphosis from the level of the most elementary particles all the way up to the level of human beings or even higher. In ‘Ученiе Лейбница о перевоплощенiи какъ метаморфозѣ’, Lossky argues that the works of Leibniz contain scattered elements of such a systematic evolutionary doctrine of reincarnation as metamorphosis and he attempts to reconstitute this doctrine. The present article is intended as an historical introduction to the translation of Lossky’s ‘Leibniz’s Doctrine of Reincarnation as Metamorphosis.’. (shrink)

Affirmer « à chacun sa vérité », ce n’est pas s’enfermer dans le règne de l’opinion. Car la Vérité naît moins du dépassement de la diversité des points de vue que de leur compréhension intime et de leur articulation complexe. Plus que les philosophes, les écrivains semblent à même de rendre raison de cette vérité des vérités. En restituant le point de vue d’une foule de personnages, ils dévoilent la grande variété des perspectives sur le monde et permettent à leurs (...) lecteurs d’accéder à l’épaisseur cognitive feuilletée du sens commun. L’art du roman de Virginia Woolf est à cet égard exemplaire, comme le montrait dès 1951 le psychologue Maxime Chastaing dans La philosophie de Virginia Woolf. (shrink)

In this piece, I argue that Hume wrote his Essays to continue writing on political issues after he rather abruptly ended his Treatise, Book 3. Initially he wrote some essays in the vein of Addison and Steele, but he rejected these essays as “frivolous.” In writing on political issues, he became a master essayist and his essays withstood the test of time. “Political” should here be taken in the wider sense as topical issues which readers could immediately recognize as being (...) relevant. (shrink)

When translated into concrete policy, any allocation of emissions leads to the attribution of emissions rights based on distributive justice. Consequently, the distributive justice approach legitimizes the corresponding amount of emissions. If a certain level of emissions can receive emissions rights, provided they are compatible with a certain emissions budget, to allocate emissions rights when the dangerous concentration level has been overshot could understate the need to preserve the functioning of a “balanced” climate system. From the perspective of Foucault’s archaeology (...) of knowledge, and with the purpose of assessing the epistemology of climate justice, it will be possible to question the possible importation of the mode of production of norms of social law into climate mitigation justice. Additionally, it will be questioned whether the amount of anthropogenic emissions rights can be provided by “the laws of nature” and whether and how the no‑harm principle can contribute to the epistemological relevance of the narrative of climate justice. (shrink)

Utilisant de nouveaux outils d'analyse, les études platoniciennes contemporaines cherchent dans tout ce qui accompagne le contenu explicite d'une œuvre - tout ce qui est suggéré de façon oblique, les situations, l'atmosphère, les digressions, les réticences... - des indications sur ce que l'auteur, soit veut communiquer, soit communique réellement. Ce fait si simple et en même temps énigmatique, connu de tout temps, à savoir que la philosophie de Platon ne nous est accessible que par ses dialogues, constitue l'un de ces (...) traits par lesquels tout énoncé philosophique émis par Platon se trouve inévitablement modalisé. L'attention à la forme dialogue, telle qu'elle est thématisée ici, c'est donc la prise en compte, pour mieux entendre Platon, de tous les aspects " para-énonciatifs " de ses dialogues ; de tout ce qui fait le sens, non seulement des énoncés théoriques prêtés à tel ou tel personnage, mais de leur ensemble, de l'échange en tant que tel (entre les personnages, entre l'auteur et le lecteur), et de la stratégie platonicienne pour faire de la réception de son œuvre une expérience (y compris émotive) pour son lecteur. (shrink)

Los trabajos que componen este libro se adentran en eso que ha llegado a verse como un campo de estudio asegurado, pero que más bien parece un arco en problemática tensión: el que se forma al pretender conjuntar la fenomenología “y” la hermenéutica. La particularidad de Heidegger consiste tanto en haber tensado ese arco como en haber abandonado después su propio intento, tan fructífero para otros. Por ello, Heidegger es −junto a Gadamer− el interlocutor principal de estos escritos. El libro (...) tiene como objetivo homenajear a Franco Volpi por todo lo que nos dio como pensador y persona. Da a conocer uno de los últimos trabajos del propio Volpi, así como ensayos de Jean Grondin, Arturo Leyte, Ramón Rodríguez, Alejandro Vigo y Ángel Xolocotzi, entre otros. (shrink)

En esta entrevista, el profesor Volpi reflexiona primero sobre la estrecha relación que existe entre la filosofía aristotélica, el nihilismo y la técnica. Sostiene que el mundo actual está modelado por la tecnociencia y requiere una recuperación del sentido de la acción y de la vida. Dado que estos fueron temas importantes en los escritos tardíos de Heidegger, Volpi valora después la actualidad de sus tesis. Finalmente, expone su visión de la relación entre la literatura y la filosofía, (...) así como el papel de ésta en nuestro mundo. (shrink)

Background: Informed consent for genetic tests is a well-established practice. It should be based on good quality information and in keeping with the patient’s values. Existing informed consent assessment tools assess knowledge and values. Nevertheless, there is no consensus on what specific elements need to be discussed or considered in the consent process for genetic tests.Methods: We performed a systematic review to identify all factors involved in the decision-making and consent process about genetic testing, from the perspective of patients. Through (...) public databases, we identified studies reporting factors that influence the decision to accept or decline genetic testing. Studies were included if they reported the perspective of patients or at-risk individuals. All articles were thematically coded.Results: 1989 articles were reviewed: 70 met inclusion criteria and 12 additional articles were identified through the references of included studies. Coding of the 82 articles led to the identification of 45 factors involved in decision-making and consent, which were initially divided into three domains: in favor of, against or with an undetermined influence on genetic testing. Each factor was also divided into three subdomains relating to the informed choice concept: knowledge, values or other. The factors in the “other” subdomain were all related to the context of testing (e.g. timing, cost, influence of family members, etc), and were present in all three domains.Conclusions: We describe the network of factors contributing to decision-making and consent process and identify the context of genetic testing as a third component to influence this process. Future studies should consider the evaluation of contextual factors as an important and relevant component of the consent and decision-making process about genetic tests. Based on these results, we plan to develop and test a more comprehensive tool to assess informed consent for genetic testing. (shrink)