This article explores the relationships between crime, collective responses to it, and the social production of so-called great criminals. It argues that crime, especially sexual and violent crime, produces significant imbalances in individuals habitually subject to instrumental actions, identitarian thinking and positive law. These imbalances are emotional as well as cognitive and, under certain conditions of communication, can generate states of multitude, that is, collective states linked to an intense affectivity and to the prevalence of mythic or symbolic thinking. These (...) states reach their limits and become condensed in the mytho-historical figure of the great criminal. In this sense, great criminals are a function of such multitudinous states: points of imputation that concentrate and catalyze the affective imagination unleashed by collective effervescence. (shrink)

Qu'entend-on par enchantement et désenchantement du monde? Quelles seraient les voies à suivre pour susciter un réenchantement du monde qui sera le fait de l’humain lui-même? La raison et la rationalité sont-elles les causes des maux de nos errements ou des outils pour les contrer? Suffira-t-il d’avoir « foi en la raison » pour surmonter les défis que l’humanité s’est elle-même imposés par négligence et irresponsabilité.

I. Science, myth, magic: three components of knowledge, in other words three types of activity in man who, in interaction with his surrounding environment seeks to accomodate himself to the constraints which this environment imposes on him while at the same time seeing to his own immediate or far-reaching needs.

an exemplar of an approach that takes the human mind to be largely the product of social and cultural factors with negligible contributions from biology. The author argues that on the contrary, his sociological theory of the categories is compatible with the possibility of innate cognitive capacities, taking causal cognition as his example. Whether and to what extent there are such innate capacities is a question for research in the cognitive neurosciences. The extent to which these innate capacities can then (...) be explained by natural selection remains an open question for empirical investigation. Key Words: categories • causality • cognition • Durkheim • evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

The lexicon of religion has been widely used in the context of the social and cultural transformations associated with the ‘digital revolution’, whether in metaphoric or in realistic terms. The study of digital magic/magic in digital times, the other side of the coin of the Sacred 2.0, is still in its infancy. Yet, references to magic are made frequently in reflections about the rapid development of the digitalisation of society and culture, and they deserve more in-depth study. This paper tackles (...) the issue of magic in and of new technologies, including artificial intelligence devices. After a broad outline of the presence of magic in the digital ecosystem, this paper will focus on the lexical surface and semantic references to ‘magical thinking’, explore the underlying reasons for such references and unveil the regimes of existence for magic. Finally, the paper questions the role of language in the construction of a ‘digital magic’ and the transformations of the semantic category of magic as seen through the prism of a cultural revolution, that of the digitalisation of societies. (shrink)

Our knowledge of the evolution of human thought is limited not only by the nature of the evidence, but also by the values we bring to the authoritative scientific study of our ancestors. The tendency to see human thought as linear progress in rational capacities has been popular since the Enlightenment, and in the wake of Darwinism has been extended to other species as well. Human communication can be used to transmit useful information, but is rooted in symbolic processes that (...) are nonrational—that is, they involve choosing among functionally equivalent alternatives, any of which is as good an option as any other. The evolution of human thought cannot be realistically isolated from the evolution of human society or human communication, neither of which is rooted in obvious rationality. (shrink)

The “origins” of (geometric) space is examined from the perspective of the so-called “conceptual space” or “semantic space”. Semantic space is characterized by its fundamental “locality” that generates an “implicit” mode of geometrizing. This view is examined from within three perspectives. First, the role that various diagrammatic entities play in the everyday life and pragmatic activities of selected ethnic groups is illustrated. Secondly, it is shown how conceptual spaces are fundamentally linked to the meaning effects of particular natural languages and (...) these are very different from the global and universal aspects of Euclidean spaces. Thirdly, it is contended that these modes of creating body and culture-based spatial frameworks and related cosmogonies and cosmologies can be described as forms of “latent geometry” that initially appear unexplainable in any rational way. Nonetheless, and thanks to the deep mathematical reflections provided by René Thom, it is illustrated how the various ways of generating space can be further analyzed as distortions of mainstream spatialization furnished by Euclidean geometry that established the dominant universality of the ideas of space (and time). (shrink)

Este artículo muestra los paralelismos y las divergencias del giro ontológico y de la antropología fenomenológica. Ambas corrientes, en fidelidad al dato etnográfico, comparten el rechazo al régimen de representación y ambas corrientes cuestionan los compromisos epistémicos del investigador. Sin embargo, el giro ontológico presenta una orientación conceptual, que deriva a menudo en tipología, mientras que la antropología fenomenológica atiende a las relaciones perceptivas del mundo de la vida desde una apertura hermenéutica.

This comparison between Boudon and Mises focuses on the main tenets of their respective conceptions of social science. It covers action theory, the theory of belief, the epistemology of social science, and also addresses the topic of liberalism.

In this article I assess Georges Canguilhem's historical epistemology with both theoretical and historical questions in mind. From a theoretical point of view, I am concerned with the relation between history and philosophy, and in particular with the philosophical assumptions and external norms that are involved in history writing. Moreover, I am concerned with the role that history can play in the understanding and evaluation of philosophical concepts. From a historical point of view, I regard historical epistemology, as developed by (...) Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, as a conception and practice which came out of the project, elaborated in France from the 1920s to the 1940s, of combining history of science and philosophy. I analyse in particular Canguilhem's epistemology in his theory and practice of history of science. What he called 'normative history' is the focus of my analysis. I evaluate the question of the nature and provenience of the norm employed in normative history, and I compare it with the norm as discussed by Canguilhem in Le normal et le pathologique. While I am critical of Canguilhem's treatment of history, I conclude that his philosophical suggestion to analyse the formation of scientific concepts 'from below' represents a useful model for history and philosophy of science, and that it can be very profitably extended to philosophical concepts. (shrink)

This article deals with some aspects of the study of the mind between the 1920s and 1940s at the University of Paris. Traditionally the domain of philosophy, the study of the mind was encroached upon by other disciplines such as history of science, ethnology, sociology and psychology. These disciplines all had weak institutional status and were struggling to constitute themselves as autonomous. History of science did not as a rule reject its relationship with philosophy, whereas ethnology, sociology and psychology were (...) constructing their identities by breaking away from philosophy. A discussion about Lévy-Bruhl’s La mentalité primitive, hosted by the Société Française de Philosophie in 1923, showed that the positions of philosophers, sociologists and psychologists about the questions posed by the book, namely the fixity and universality of the mind, were strictly linked with their views about the ‘scientificity’ of ethnology. A compromise between fixity and historical transformation of the mind was put forward by Gaston Bachelard, who institutionally represented the discipline of history and philosophy of science. This discipline was institutionally linked to ethnology, psychology and sociology, but, unlike them, had no claim to ‘scientificity’. Bachelard realized this compromise by breaking the unity of the mind and by employing an extra-institutional discipline: psychoanalysis. His freedom of choice corresponded with an increasingly weak institutional position for the discipline of history and philosophy of science. (shrink)

In inter-war France, history of philosophy was a very important academic discipline, but nevertheless its practitioners thought it necessary to defend its identity, which was threatened by its vicinity to many other disciplines, and especially by the emergent social sciences and history of science. I shall focus on two particular issues that divided traditional historians of philosophy from historians of science, ethnologists and sociologists, and that became crucial in the definition of the identity of their disciplines: the conception of history (...) and the interpretation of texts. By analysing representative discussions and positions, I shall show that traditional historians of philosophy needed to reassert their own approach to history, which, borrowing the term from Bergson, I define as ‘snapshot’. This approach is focused on a particular idea or text rather than a narrative. I shall also show that history of philosophy, in its traditional form, would have been undermined both intellectually and institutionally by the opposite ‘narrative’ approach of history of science and of the social sciences. Social scientists openly attacked history of philosophy’s methods and, in the eyes of traditional philosophers, its existence as an academic discipline. The same opposition is to be found in evaluation of past texts, which for traditional historians of philosophy were to be read as timeless documents, while for historians of science, ethnologists and sociologists were to be considered as documents exhibiting a particular mentality. However, between these alternatives there were intermediate positions. I shall in particular consider that of Léon Brunschvicg: he embraced a narrative approach and considered texts as documents of different ways of thinking, but at the same time carried on employing philosophical methods and defending the institutional position of philosophy. I shall argue that this was possible partly because of the considerable amount of power he enjoyed at the Sorbonne. (shrink)

A communitarian perspective, which is characteristic of African normative thought, accords some kind of primacy to society or a group, whereas human rights are by definition duties that others have to treat individuals in certain ways, even when not doing so would be better for others. Is there any place for human rights in an Afro-communitarian political and legal philosophy, and, if so, what is it? I seek to answer these questions, in part by critically exploring one of the most (...) influential theoretical works on human rights in a sub-Saharan setting, namely, Claude Ake’s ‘The African Context of Human Rights’. Ake famously maintains that a typically Western approach to rights is inappropriate in the sub-Saharan region, in two major respects. First, Ake contends that although a human rights legal framework might be suitable for an ‘individualistic’ society, it is not for one of the sort common among traditional black peoples, for whom group rights are alone apt. Second, Ake maintains that, insofar as rights are relevant, rights to socio-economic goods are of much more importance in an African context than rights to civil liberties, due process and the like. Using Ake’s article as a foil, I draw on values salient in sub-Saharan moral worldviews to construct a unified philosophy of rights that not only provides reason to doubt his two claims, but also offers a promising way to reconcile a communitarian framework with a robust prizing of human rights alongside ones that are more collectively oriented. In short, I aim to provide a principled foundation for the core elements of the African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights. (shrink)

In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings (...) of explanatory pluralism both within philosophy of science and psychiatry – namely moderate/temporary pluralism, anything goes pluralism, isolationist pluralism, integrative pluralism and interactive pluralism. Next, I discuss the pros and cons of these different understandings of explanatory pluralism. Finally, I raise the question of how to implement or operationalize explanatory pluralism in scientific practice; how to structure the “genuine dialogue” or shape “the pluralistic attitude” Campaner is referring to. As tentative answers, I explore a question-based framework for explanatory pluralism as well as social-epistemological procedures for interaction among competing approaches and explanations. (shrink)