One way of explaining Rudolf Carnap’s mature philosophical view is by drawing an analogy between his technical projects—like his work on inductive logic—with a certain kind of conceptual engineering. After all, there are many mathematical similarities between Carnap’s work in inductive logic and a number of results from contemporary confirmation theory, statistics and mathematical probability theory. However, in stressing these similarities, the conceptual dependence of Carnap’s inductive logic on his work on semantics is downplayed. Yet it is precisely the conceptual (...) resources made available to Carnap from his work on semantics which allows him to understand his work on inductive logic as a kind of conceptual engineering project. The aim of this paper is to elucidate this engineering analogy in light of Carnap’s mature views through the lens of both inductive logic and semantics. (shrink)

Reports of anomalous experiences are to be found in all known societies, both historically and geographically. If these reports were accurate, they would constitute powerful evidence for the existence of paranormal forces. However, research into the fallibility of human memory suggests that we should be cautious in accepting such reports at face value. Experimental research has shown that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, including eyewitness testimony for anomalous events. The present paper also reviews recent research into susceptibility to false memories and (...) considers the relevance of such work for assessing reports of anomalous events. It is noted that a number of psychological variables that have been shown to correlate with susceptibility to false memories also correlate with the tendency to report paranormal and related anomalous experiences. Although attempts to show a direct link between tendency to report anomalous experiences and susceptibility to false memories have had only limited success to date, this may reflect the use of inappropriate measures. (shrink)

My dissertation explores the ways in which Rudolf Carnap sought to make philosophy scientific by further developing recent interpretive efforts to explain Carnap’s mature philosophical work as a form of engineering. It does this by looking in detail at his philosophical practice in his most sustained mature project, his work on pure and applied inductive logic. I, first, specify the sort of engineering Carnap is engaged in as involving an engineering design problem and then draw out the complications of design (...) problems from current work in history of engineering and technology studies. I then model Carnap’s practice based on those lessons and uncover ways in which Carnap’s technical work in inductive logic takes some of these lessons on board. This shows ways in which Carnap’s philosophical project subtly changes right through his late work on induction, providing an important corrective to interpretations that ignore the work on inductive logic. Specifically, I show that paying attention to the historical details of Carnap’s attempt to apply his work in inductive logic to decision theory and theoretical statistics in the 1950s and 1960s helps us understand how Carnap develops and rearticulates the philosophical point of the practical/theoretical distinction in his late work, offering thus a new interpretation of Carnap’s technical work within the broader context of philosophy of science and analytical philosophy in general. (shrink)

Virtually all experimental psychologists now accept that our behaviour can be affected by stimuli of which we have no conscious awareness. Such effects are typically not very dramatic even though they are reasonably reliable. However, such results do not on the surface appear to offer much support to claims of profound and lasting behavioural changes brought about by subliminal advertising or subliminal self-help tapes.

Virtually all experimental psychologists now accept that our behaviour can be affected by stimuli of which we have no conscious awareness. Such effects are typically not very dramatic even though they are reasonably reliable. However, such results do not on the surface appear to offer much support to claims of profound and lasting behavioural changes brought about by subliminal advertising or subliminal self-help tapes.

This book is a collection from the articles of 'The Skeptic' and brings together the best from the magazine's archive in one myth-busting volume. It includes mystery articles on the weeping statue at a Dublin suburban home, Turin Shroud, Britain's Roswell, Nostradamus's predictions and UFOs.

Difficult Atheism shows how contemporary French philosophy is rethinking the legacy of the death of God in ways that take the debate beyond the narrow confines of atheism into the much broader domain of post-theological thinking. Christopher Watkin argues that Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux each elaborate a distinctive approach to the post-theological, but that each approach still struggles to do justice to the death of God.

Contemporary French philosophy is laying fresh claim to the human. Through a series of independent, simultaneous initiatives, arising in the writing of diverse current French thinkers, the figured of the human is being transformed and reworked. -/- Christopher Watkin draws out both the promises and perils inherent in these attempts to rethink humanity’s relation to ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, to the objects that surround us, to the possibility of social and political change, to ecology and even to our (...) own brains. This comparative assessment makes visible for the first time one of the most important trends in French thought today. (shrink)

In this sweeping volume, Christopher Norris challenges the view that there is no room for productive engagement between mainstream analytic philosophers and thinkers in the post-Kantian continental line of descent. On the contrary, he argues, this view is simply the product of a limiting perspective that accompanied the rise of logical positivism. Norris reveals the various shared concerns that have often been obscured by parochial interests or the desire to stake out separate philosophical territory. He examines the problems that (...) emerged within the analytic tradition as a result of its turn against Husserlian phenomenology and its outright rejection of what came to be seen as a merely "psychologistic" approach to issues of meaning, knowledge, and truth. Norris shows how these problems have resurfaced in various forms from the heyday of logical empiricism to the present. He provides critical readings of such philosophers as Willard Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Michael Dummett, Thomas Nagel, and John McDowell. He also offers a running discussion of Wittgenstein's influence and its harmful effect in promoting a placidly consensus-based theory of knowledge. On the continental side, Norris argues for a reassessment of Husserl's phenomenological project and its potential contribution to present-day Anglo-American debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. He discusses Bachelard, Canguilhem, and the French tradition of rationalisme applique as an alternative to Kuhnian conceptions of scientific paradigm change. This leads him to suggest a non-Wittgensteinian way around the problems that have dogged more traditional theories of knowledge andtruth. In two chapters on the work of Jacques Derrida, Norris explores the "supplementary" logic of deconstruction and compares it with other recent proposals for a nonstandard logic. Here again he stresses the community of interests between the two philosophical cultures and the extent to which continental thinking has engaged certain issues with a rigor largely ignored by Anglophone writers. By bringing a fresh perspective to questions that have often been considered the exclusive preserve of analytic philosophy, Norris offers an overview of current debates that is at once refreshingly open-minded and sure of its own argumentative bearings. (shrink)

Recanati takes for granted the conveyance conception of linguistic communica- tion, although it is not very clear exactly where he lies on the spectrum of possible variations. Even if we disavow all such conceptions of linguistic communication, there will be a place for semantic theory in articulating normative concepts such as logical consistency and logical validity. An approach to semantics focused on such normative concepts is illustrated using the example of ““It’’s raining””. It is argued that Recanati’’s conception of semantics (...) as involving the pragmatics of saturation and modulation cannot account for the logical properties of ““It’’s raining”. (shrink)

The partial structures program of da Costa, French and others offers a unified framework within which to handle a wide range of issues central to contemporary philosophy of science. I argue that the program is inadequately equipped to account for simple cases where idealizations are used to construct abstract, mathematical models of physical systems. These problems show that da Costa and French have not overcome the objections raised by Cartwright and Suárez to using model‐theoretic techniques in the philosophy (...) of science. However, my concerns arise independently of the more controversial assumptions that Cartwright and Suárez have employed. (shrink)

The article examines the French philosopher Jean Brun’s perception of the contemporary world, by analyzing the three pivotal components of Brun’s work, i.e., technology, language and sacredness. Modern people’s desperate attempts to escape their tragic destiny by trying to conceal the sacred lull human beings into an illusion of becoming creators of a technology-ruled space. In an attempt to escape the web of metaphysical anxiety associated with regrets, ontological Absence and separation, modern people hope to shelter behind the shield (...) of materialism, horizontality and relativism. The article shows that, according to Jean Brun, technology and science are nothing but a veil, a painted veil with a sophisticated image of human deification. In an attempt at self-transformation, human beings, enslaved by technology, become the measure of all things. In their pursuit of absolute and ultimate knowledge, people focus their self-transformation on being rather than on cognition. Technology nurtured by excessive knowledge inevitably provokes alienation and robs humankind of humanistic, philosophical and religious sense. Finding themselves in an artificial, virtual reality where consumption and greed prevail, people easily reject objective reality. The instrumentalization of language enables standards and programs to plan all human activity. However, asking the question “Who am I?” instead of “What am I?”, human beings can cease seeing themselves in the center of the universe, can stop the process of alienation, can assess the world’s reality and the appeal of Everything Else. (shrink)

L’article présente le projet ORFEO (outils pour l’étude du Français écrit et oral). Ce projet a consisté à rassembler 4M de mots de Français oral et 6M de mots d’écrit à partir de ressources existantes. Les ressources orales ont été unifiées dans un format trs et alignées avec les fichiers sons au phonème. Les corpus sont présentés avec des métadonnées qui permettent de constituer des sous-corpus d’étude. Les données orales ont été segmentées et annotées en POS et relations de dépendance (...) semi automatiquement. La précision des annotations a fait l’objet d’une évaluation. L’ensemble est interrogeable à partir d’une plateforme adaptée du logiciel libre ANNIS. La ressource sera mise à disposition en open source courant 2017. (shrink)

Michel Serres's relation to ecocriticism is complex. On the one hand, he is a pioneer in the area, anticipating the current fashion for ecological thought by over a decade. On the other hand, 'ecology' and 'eco-criticism' are singularly infelicitous terms to describe Serres's thinking if they are taken to indicate that attention should be paid to particular 'environmental' concerns. For Serres, such local, circumscribed ideas as 'ecology' or 'eco-philosophy' are one of the causes of our ecological crisis, and no progress (...) can be made while such narrow concerns govern our thinking. This chapter intervenes in the ongoing discussion about the relation of Serres to ecology by drawing on some of Serres's more recent texts on pollution and dwelling, and this fresh material leads us to modulate existing treatments of Serres and ecology. I insist on the inextricability of two senses of ecology in Serres's approach: a broader meaning that refers to the interconnectedness and inextricability of all entities (natural and cultural, material and ideal), and a narrower sense that evokes classically 'environmental' concerns. Serres's recent work leads us to challenge some of the vectors and assumptions of the debate by radicalising the continuity between 'natural' and 'cultural' phenomena, questioning some of the commonplaces that structure almost all ecological thinking, and arguing that the entire paradigm of ecology as 'conservation' and 'protection' is bankrupt and self-undermining. After outlining the shape of Serres's 'general ecology' and its opposition to ecology as conservation, this chapter asks what sorts of practices and values a Serresian general ecology can engender when it considers birdsong, advertising, industrial pollution and money to be manifestations of the same drive for appropriation through pollution. A response is given in terms of three key Serresian motifs: the world as fetish, parasitic symbiosis, and global cosmocracy. (shrink)

Much French philosophy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been marked by the positive valorization of alterity, an ethical position that has recently received a vigorous assault from Alain Badiou’s privilege of sameness. This article argues that Badiou shares a great deal in common with the philosophies of alterity from which he seeks to distance himself, and that Michel Serres’s little-known account of alterity offers a much more radical alternative to the ethics of difference. Drawing on (...) both translated and as yet untranslated works, I argue that the Serresian ontology of inclination, along with his conceptual personae of the hermaphrodite and the parasite, informs ethical and political positions that offer a distinctive ethics and politics that present fresh insights about the relation between the singular and the universal, the contingency of market exchange, and the nature of violence. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to circumscribe Georges Didi-Huberman’s inimitable practice of theory. It argues that Didi-Huberman’s ethics of looking represents a decided shift away from the traditional position of the critic as a dispassionate, objective observer. A Copernican revolution looms, which inverts the Kantian one: no longer are things adapting to their conceptual scheme, no longer is it the adaequatio rei ad intellectum, but its opposite. Didi-Huberman’s “discourse on method” is to be found in the book Phasmes, where such (...) an “inverted intentionality” is described in terms of the mimicry of the phasmid insects: instead of assimilating the environment to himself, the subject assimilates himself to the environment. Phasmid thinking is the thought of disparateness, i.e., of dis-paring. This means to un-learn or, as it were, to un-prepare oneself in order to see what we believed we were seeing and which we in fact saw precisely because we knew. In drawing comparisons to similar methodological considerations in Adorno’s “snuggling up to the object,” the article attempts to locate Didi-Huberman’s critical epistemology at the intersection of French and German intellectual traditions. (shrink)

_A Companion to Foucault_ comprises a collection of essays from established and emerging scholars that represent the most extensive treatment of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s works currently available. Comprises a comprehensive collection of authors and topics, with both established and emerging scholars represented Includes chapters that survey Foucault’s major works and others that approach his work from a range of thematic angles Engages extensively with Foucault's recently published lecture courses from the Collège de France Contains the first translation of (...) the extensive ‘Chronology’ of Foucault’s life and works written by Foucault’s life-partner Daniel Defert Includes a bibliography of Foucault’s shorter works in English, cross-referenced to the standard French edition _Dits et Ecrits_. (shrink)

The 18th-century French political theorist the Baron de Montesquieu described honour as the ‘principle’ – or animating force – of a well-functioning monarchy, which he thought the appropriate regime type for an economically unequal society extended over a broad territory. Existing literature often presents this honour in terms of lofty ambition, the desire for preference and distinction, a spring for political agency or a spur to the most admirable kind of conduct in public life and the performance of great (...) deeds. Perhaps so. But it also seems to involve quite a bit of what the contemporary philosopher Aaron James calls ‘being an asshole’, and the article will explore what happens to Montesquieu’s political theory of monarchy – which is foundational for an understanding of modern politics – when we reverse the usual perspective and consider it through the lens of the arsehole aristocracy. (shrink)

A searching study of Eliphas Lévi and the French occult revival.

The growing field of neuro-philosophy throws up important issues for our society about how we understand the persistence of personal identity over time: if my brain is damaged or otherwise altered, do I become a different person? This chapter explores some of the work of the French neuro-philosopher Catherine Malabou as she asks, and tries to answer, this fundamental question about who we think we are, giving a non-reductive materialist account of self-identity. I argue that Malabou has implicit within (...) her writing the seeds of a more adequate account which would not understand identity and personhood to be immanent to the material brain but would embrace a broader notion of identity distributed across relationships, institutions, and shared common narratives. (shrink)

Recent work on Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière has rightly identified equality both as a central theme in their own thinking and as the key notion in contemporary radical political thought more broadly, but a focus on the differences between their respective accounts of equality has failed to clarify a major problem that they share. The problem is that human equality is said to rest on a particular human capacity, leaving Badiou's axiomatic equality and Rancière's assumed equality vulnerable to the (...) charge of having a blind spot for some of society's most vulnerable. This article introduces an alternative understanding of equality drawn from the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, an equality that does not rely on a human capacity to guarantee or verify it but rests on Nancy's notion of sense. The article explores the advantages of Nancy's account of equality in relation to sense over and against an alternative reading that focuses on Nancy's evocation of the suffering human body, before addressing, in conclusion, the problems with which Nancy's idea of equality will have to grapple, and why, despite these problems, it is still preferable to the Badiouian and Rancièrian approaches. (shrink)

Michel de Montaigne Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth century French essayist, is one of the most renowned literary and philosophical figures of the late Renaissance. The one book he wrote, Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, is not a traditional work of philosophy. Having begun work on it around 1572, he published the first … Continue reading Montaigne, Michel de →.

Nous examinons ici les schémas lexico-grammaticaux (LG) associés à trois verbes supports (« effectuer », « réaliser », « procéder ») dans deux corpus juridiques comparables (un corpus de directives européennes rédigées en français et leur transposition en France dans les textes de lois). A cette fin, nous utilisons Le Trameur, un logiciel de textométrie qui permet une comparaison systématique des données textuelles en mobilisant plusieurs méthodes statistiques exploratoires : analyse des fréquences par partie, spécificités, segments répétés, co-occurrences, poly-cooccurrences, etc. (...) Le recours à ce type d’outils permet au linguiste d’élaborer des unités de base de son système analytique en suivant un protocole de recherche précis, qui tient compte des indices quantitatifs. Finalement, des distinctions lexico-grammaticales fines entre des lexèmes dont le sémantisme serait trop proche pour une comparaison hors contexte, sont visualisées de façon synthétique au fil du texte, tout en permettant de différentier certaines constructions spécifiques du français « eurolectal » et les éléments du discours technocratique « national ». (shrink)

There are ten studies in the collection, three (1-3) previously unpublished, six either in press or already published (4-8, 10) either in French or in English ; the ninth was published in Portuguese, but now appears in French. One of the latter seven items (no.8) has evidently been revised ; otherwise only 1-3 appear to be genuinely new. 4-10 also seem by and large to retain their original formatting ; there are no cross-references – none, at any rate, (...) that I have observed – between the piece... (shrink)

Kant’s theory of taste supports his political theory by providing the judgment of beauty as a symbol of the good and example of teleological experience, allowing us to imagine the otherwise obscure movement of nature and history toward the ideal human community. If interpreters are correct in believing that Kant should make room for pure judgments of ugliness in his theory of taste, we will have to consider the implications of such judgments for Kant’s political theory. It is here proposed (...) that pure, formal ugliness symbolizes regressive, counter-teleological trends in nature and history. Kant’s paradoxical stance on the right to rebellion, both condemning and supporting the French Revolution, is interpreted as failing to take into account negative social forces signified by ugliness, and therefore neglecting the role of moral agency in social change. (shrink)

The so‐called “Kierkegaard Renaissance,” which took place in Germany during the interwar period, was not merely the province of figures such as Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger. A number of Catholic thinkers were involved as well. Indeed, after the well‐known Kierkegaard scholar Theodor Haecker converted to Catholicism in 1921, Kierkegaard's thought became a popular topic among the group of Catholic intellectuals known as the Hochland Circle, which included the priest and author Romano Guardini. Such interest, in turn, prompted French (...) theologian Yves Congar to explore the use of Kierkegaard for the renewal of the modern church. Moreover, a trio of notable Jesuit thinkers also entered the discussion: Erich Przywara, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. In short, as this chapter will demonstrate, Kierkegaard inspired and provoked Catholic thinkers in a variety of areas, from theological anthropology and Christology to ecclesiology and the question of modernity. (shrink)

Literary criticism at the present moment seems ready to open its doors once again to the outside world, even if that world is only a series of other academic disciplines, each cloistered in its own way. For the reader of black African literature in French, the opening comes none too soon. The program for reading Camara Laye, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Yambo Ouologuem should never have been the program prescribed for Rousseau, Wordsworth, or Blanchot. If one is willing to read (...) a literature that might not be a rewriting of Hegel , and if the negative knowledge of recent theoretical criticism is questioned in the universality of its applications, then what is really open to a Western reader of non-Western literature? Claiming a break with his/her own culture and critical upbringing, can he/she the Other, the African, as if from an authentically African point of view, interpreting Africa in African terms, perceiving rather than projecting?The goal of breaking through the nets of Western criticism, of reading African literature in a nonethnocentric, nonprojective fashion, will remain both indisputably desirable and ultimately unattainable. No matter how many languages I learn or ethnologies I study, I cannot make myself into an African. The Western scholar’s claim to mastery of things African, albeit motivated by xenophilia rather than xenophobia, risks subjugation of the object to a new set of Western models. J. P. Makouta-M’Boukou rightly scolds Western critics who refuse to take into account the distance between themselves and African culture, and who read African literature only in function of their own cultural context.1 Wole Soyinka, more forbiddingly, complains: “We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonisation—this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems.”2 1. See J. P. Makouta-M’Boukou, Introduction à l’étude du roman négro-africain de langue française , p. 9.2. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World , p. x. Christopher L. Miller, Charles B. G. Murphy Assistant Professor of French and of African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University, is author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French . He is working at present on a study of francophone black African literature, for which he will have a Fulbright Africa Research grant. (shrink)