Plusieurs aspects de la métaphysique, de la physique, de l'éthique et de la psychologie d’Aristote peuvent s'interpréter comme des affleurements d'un concept non-thématisé, celui d'être-dans-le-monde (l'in-der-welt-sein de heidegger). L’ensemble de la pensée grecque classique, même si elle était fascinée par l'ordre du cosmos, ne s'est guère demande ce que signifiait "être-dans-le-monde". L’expérience de la facticité, qui est un des traits fondamentaux de celle-ci, est ce qui permet à Aristote dans le protreptique, de justifier la vie philosophique ; mais (...) il conçoit celle-ci comme culminant dans la contemplation, c'est-à-dire l'accès a ce qui est au plus haut point (ch. 2). Aristote est toujours resté pris dans cette ambiguïté, qui provient de ladite transposition : son éthique révèle ses hésitations entre deux sujets de l'agir moral : le "je" à qui il incombe d'agir de par ce qu'il a d'unique, le cédé a l'homme, tel qu'il est défini par sa place parmi les autres parties de l'univers (ch. 3 & 4). Par suite, il lui faut définir l'homme comme le plus mondain des êtres sublunaires : l'homme imite l'univers grâce à son universalité, et parce qu'il est capable de saisir les réalités les plus élevées (ch. 5). Cependant, Aristote ne peut définir le topos - ce dans quoi sont les choses- sans renvoyer à notre façon particulière d'être-là, même s'il réintroduit ensuite l'idée d'univers grâce à sa théorie des dimensions du corps humain comme fondées dans la structure objective du cosmos (ch. 6). Les difficultés de la définition aristotélicienne de l'âme ainsi que celles de la doctrine de l'intellect agent proviennent de la tentative d'Aristote pour transposer ce qu'il pense implicitement comme l'ouverture même du monde à travers notre présence dans le registre de la réalité mondaine-ce qui l'oblige à réduire l'âme à la conscience de ce qui se produit parmi les choses du monde (ch. 7). Il conçoit celui-ci d'une manière telle qu'elle l'amène à exclure le mouvement spécifiquement humain au profit de la continuité absolue des corps célestes. Cependant, la contemplation de soi du premier moteur reflète l'ambiguïté non résolue de l'energeia humaine : le pur acte d'être-là et l'activité de contempler le plus haut de tous les êtres s'y fondent (ch. 8). Malgré tout, l'energeia comme concept ontologique fondamental ne peut pas se définir en dehors de l'expérience humaine de l'être-là (ch. 9). (shrink)

Le corps fait partie de manière significative de l'identité de tout être humain. Il s'agit d'une réalité familière, incontournable. Longtemps, le corps a été dévalorisé, voire méprisé, au profit de l'âme, de l'esprit. Aujourd'hui, on assiste à une dissociation corps/personne aussi regrettable que l'ancien dualisme corps/ âme. En effet, cette dissociation ne fait que provoquer des ravages dans la perception personnelle du corps, tout spécialement dans l'expérience de la maladie, du vieillissement, de la mort, et même de l'au-delà. Il (...) est alors nécessaire de s'interroger à nouveau sur la véritable signification du corps humain, sur les représentations plus ou moins adéquates dont il fait l'objet, pour dépasser les pièges rattachés à certaines visions du corps actuellement très à la mode. Repenser le corps humain avec un seul but : vivre pleinement son corps. Telle est la raison d'être de ce livre. (shrink)

L'Homme, cet être vivant doué de raison, fabricant d'objets élaborés, doté d'un langage articulé, chez lequel a émergé la pensée conceptuelle et symbolique, se caractérise par une aptitude à l'émerveillement, et une capacité d'espérance accompagnée d'un refus de l'absurde. Avec l'invention de l'outil manufacturé et les premiers témoignages d'une pensée symbolique, comment la fabuleuse aventure culturelle et spirituelle de l'Homme a-t-elle débuté? Pourquoi à travers les temps, même les plus anciens, et dans toutes les cultures, l'émergence du sens de (...) la transcendance n'a-t-il cessé de se manifester et de s'inscrire au coeur de notre humanité? Comment est-il devenu une caractéristique de l'Homme, une de ses aspirations profondes? Comment définir le sens du sacré? C'est de cette dimension intrinsèquement humaine, et des traces qu'elle a laissées, qu'il est ici question. Après L'Univers, la Vie et l'Homme : émergence du sens de la Conscience et Le Beau, l'Art et l'Homme : émergence du sens de l'Esthétique, voici le troisième et dernier opus dirigé par Henry de Lumley, issu d'un cycle de conférences au Collège des Bernardins. L'ambition de ces rencontres? Faire dialoguer physiciens, astrophysiciens, géologues, biologistes, paléoanthropologues, préhistoriens, historiens de l'art, philosophes et théologiens autour de questions qui ont trait à l'essence de l'humanité. (shrink)

Over the past fifty years the philosophy of language and mind has been dominated by a nondescriptivist approach to content and reference. This book attempts to recast and systematize that approach by offering an indexical model in terms of mental files. According to Recanati, we refer through mental files, the function of which is to store information derived through certain types of contextual relation the subject bears to objects in his or her environment. The reference of a file is determined (...) relationally, not satisfactionally, so a file is not to be equated to the body of (mis-)information it contains. Mental files are the mental equivalent of singular terms, and the reference of linguistic expressions is inherited from that of the files we associate with them. On this approach, mental files, the vehicles of singular thought, do all the work of so-called 'modes of presentation' in Fregean and neo-Russellian theories. (shrink)

"Recounts the story of Joseph Jacotot" -- vii.

Our thought and talk are situated. They do not take place in a vacuum but always in a context, and they always concern an external situation relative to which they are to be evaluated. Since that is so, François Recanati argues, our linguistic and mental representations alike must be assigned two layers of content: the explicit content, or lekton, is relative and perspectival, while the complete content, which is absolute, involves contextual factors in addition to what is explicitly represented. Far (...) from reducing to the context-independent meaning of the sentence-type or, in the psychological realm, to the 'narrow' content of mental representations, the lekton is a level intermediate between context-invariant meaning and full propositional content. Recognition of that intermediate level is the key to a proper understanding of context-dependence in language and thought. Going beyond the usual discussions of indexicality and unarticulated constituents in the philosophy of language, Recanati turns to the philosophy of mind for decisive arguments in favour of his approach. He shows, first, that the lekton is the notion of content we need if we are to properly understand the relations between perception, memory, and the imagination, and second, that the psychological 'mode' is what determines the situation the lekton is relative to. In this framework he provides a detailed account of de se thought and the first person point of view. In the last part of the book, Recanati discusses the special freedom we have, in discourse and thought, to shift the situation of evaluation. He traces that freedom to a special mode - the anaphoric mode - which enables us to go beyond the egocentric stage of pre-human thought. (shrink)

François Récanati has pioneered the 'mental file' framework for thinking about concepts and how we refer to the world in thought and language. He now explores what happens to mental files in a dynamic setting: Recanati argues that communication involves interpersonal dynamic files.

According to an influential and intuitively appealing argument, morality is usually continuous, namely, a gradual change in one morally significant factor triggers a gradual change in another; the law should usually track morality; therefore, the law should often be continuous. This argument is illustrated by cases such as the following example: since the moral difference between a defensive action that is reasonable and one that is just short of being reasonable is small, the law should not impose a severe punishment (...) when the action is almost reasonable and no punishment at all when the action is reasonable. In this Article, I consider two doubts regarding this argument. First, the premise that morality is continuous in such cases is incompatible with the common view that the moral status of actions is not continuous since there is an important difference between actions that are permissible and actions that are wrong— even if this difference is due to a difference that is very small, such as the one between an action whose consequences are the best and an action whose consequences are just slightly less good. This view extends also to the overall moral status of agents given the common assumption that it depends on the moral status of their actions. This is an important challenge that the Continuity Argument should confront. However, I argue that the best account of morality is more scalar than the common view in these respects. Therefore, I conclude that the first premise of the Continuity Argument is correct in this regard, although it is based on a minority view. The second doubt concerns the scope of the second premise: since there are reasons both in favor and against legal continuity, and the applicability and force of these reasons depend not only on various moral propositions but also on contingent non-moral facts, we often lack the evidence to determine the degree to which the law, at a certain place and time, should be continuous, and specifically that it should often be continuous. (shrink)

What has philosophy to do with the poor? If, as has often been supposed, the poor have no time for philosophy, then why have philosophers always made time for them? Why is the history of philosophy—from Plato to Karl Marx to Jean-Paul Sartre to Pierre Bourdieu—the history of so many figures of the poor: plebes, men of iron, the demos, artisans, common people, proletarians, the masses? Why have philosophers made the shoemaker, in particular, a remarkably ubiquitous presence in this history? (...) Does philosophy itself depend on this thinking about the poor? If so, can it ever refrain from thinking for them? Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and His Poor meditates on these questions in close readings of major texts of Western thought in which the poor have played a leading role—sometimes as the objects of philosophical analysis, sometimes as illustrations of philosophical argument. Published in France in 1983 and made available here for the first time in English, this consummate study assesses the consequences for Marx, Sartre, and Bourdieu of Plato’s admonition that workers should do “nothing else” than their own work. It offers innovative readings of these thinkers’ struggles to elaborate a philosophy of the poor. Presenting a left critique of Bourdieu, the terms of which are largely unknown to an English-language readership, The Philosopher and His Poor remains remarkably timely twenty years after its initial publication. (shrink)

Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise (...) of a new revolution. Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation. This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today's calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics. (shrink)

C'est à l'époque moderne que l'homme en est arrivé à se dire le créateur de sa propre humanité. Autrefois, il se croyait l'oeuvre de la nature ou l'enfant de Dieu. Désormais, il entend conquérir l'une et s'affranchir de l'autre. Il veut rompre avec le passé, se donner souverainement sa loi, définir ce qui doit être, dominer. Telle est l'ambition vertigineuse que raconte cet ouvrage. Descartes rêvait d'un homme maître et possesseur de la nature ; deux siècles plus tard, Nietzsche (...) allait décréter que l'homme doit être dépassé, n'étant plus à la hauteur des attentes que lui-même avait définies. Rémi Brague interroge les origines de ce projet et retrouve les traits qui vont progressivement dessiner la nouvelle humanité dont nous sommes les héritiers. Pour reconstituer la longue trajectoire de l'homme moderne, ce livre convoque aussi bien la philosophie que la littérature ; il y découvre les espoirs et l'enthousiasme qui portent ses débuts, mais aussi, à l'épreuve de cette expérience impossible, l'angoisse et les désillusions qui en marquent l'échec. Le Règne de l'homme clôt une longue enquête sur la manière dont l'homme, de l'Antiquité à nos jours, a pensé successivement son rapport d'abord au monde, ensuite à Dieu et, pour finir, à soi-même. (shrink)

This paper establishes a Kantian duty against screen overexposure. After defining screen exposure, I adopt a Kantian approach to its morality on the ground that Kant’s notion of duties to oneself easily captures wrongdoing in absence of harm or wrong to others. Then, I draw specifically on Kant’s ‘duties to oneself as an animal being’ to introduce a duty of self-government. This duty is based on the negative causal impact of the activities it regulates on a human being’s mental and (...) physical powers, and, ultimately, on the moral employment of these powers. After doing so, I argue that the duty against screen overexposure is an instance of the duty of self-government. Finally, I consider some objections. (shrink)

In recent years, some theorists have argued that the clogics are not only defined by their inferences, but also by their metainferences. In this sense, logics that coincide in their inferences, but not in their metainferences were considered to be different. In this vein, some metainferential logics have been developed, as logics with metainferences of any level, built as hierarchies over known logics, such as \, and \. What is distinctive of these metainferential logics is that they are mixed, i.e. (...) the standard for the premises and the conclusion is not necessarily the same. However, so far, all of these systems have been presented following a semantical standpoint, in terms of valuations based on the Strong Kleene truth-tables. In this article, we provide sound and complete sequent-calculi for the valid inferences and the invalid inferences of the logics \ and \, and introduce an algorithm that allows obtaining sound and complete sequent-calculi for the global validities and the global invalidities of any metainferential logic of any level. (shrink)

Professor Recanati's book is a major new contribution to the philosophy of language. Its point of departure is a refutation of two views central to the work of speech-act theorists such as Austin & Searle: that speech acts are essentially conventional, & that the force of an utterance can be made fully explicit at the level of sentence-meaning & is in principle a matter of linguistic decoding. The author argues that no utterance can be fully understood simply in terms of (...) its linguistic meaning, but that only a contextual inference can provide an adequate framework. In pursuit of this argument, he deals with the major issues of pragmatics & speech-act theory: conversational implicatives & indirect speech acts, the classification of illocutionary forces, the performative/constative distinction, delocutivity, locutionary meaning, non-literal uses of languages, the principle of expressibilty, & the difference between institutional & communicative illocutionary acts. (shrink)

Il faut être "modérément moderne", et non "résolument" ; comme le préconisait Rimbaud dans un slogan aussi galvaudé que creux. Et prendre ses distances d'avec cette maladie, la "modernite". De ces fameux "Temps Modernes", que peut dire un philosophe qui a décidé de ne pas avancer masqué? Complaisante modernité, qui se clame en "rupture" avec tout! Et d'abord avec le passé pour lequel elle a inventé le nom de "Moyen Age". Alors que la modernité en vit comme un parasite, (...) dans une dialectique autodestructrice. Car au fond, qu'a-t-elle inventé? Ni la révolution technique, ni l'urbanisation, ni la société civile, ni même la personne comme sujet de libertés... Les idées modernes ne sont que des idées prémodernes, maquillées comme une marchandise volée. Avec le recul et la capacité d'analyse que lui permet sa formidable culture, Rémi Brague nous offre une série de réflexions incisives sur les notions de Modernité, de Culture, d'Histoire, de Sécularisation, de Progrès... Chemin faisant, il met en avant des penseurs qui sortent des sentiers battus, des idées qu'on avait oubliées, des rapprochements qui font avancer. Peut-on guérir de la "modernite"? C'est l'ambition de cet essai revigorant, qui n'interdit pas d'être résolument optimiste. (shrink)

These comments raise two main points based on Walschots’s response to Kleingeld’s ‘volitional’ interpretation of the contradiction involved in Kant’s Formula of Universal Law. The first concerns Walschots’s claim that, contrary to Kleingeld’s own account, her interpretation must in fact assume at least one essential purpose of the will, namely happiness. While Walschots characterises happiness as a necessary end of all rational beings, I clarify on textual grounds that, for Kant, happiness can be safely assumed as an actual end of (...) all rational finite beings. The second point regards Walschots’s claim that Kleingeld’s interpretation should be clearer on the two ways in which a volitional self-contradiction can arise. Drawing on Walschots’s instructive discussion, and on Timmermann’s conservative defence of a more traditional interpretation of the Formula against Kleingeld’s innovative proposal, I cautiously suggest that Kleingeld might end up having to accommodate three contradictions: the traditional contradictions in conception and in the will, and her volitional self-contradiction. (shrink)

This book is a sequel to Recanati’s Mental Files (OUP 2012), and pursues the exploration of the mental file framework for thinking about concepts and singular reference. Mental files are based on 'epistemically rewarding' relations to objects in the environment. Standing in such relations to objects puts the subject in a position to gain information regarding them—information which goes into the file based on the relevant relation. Files do not merely store information about objects, however. They refer to them and (...) serve as singular terms in the language of thought, with a relational (nondescriptivist) semantics. Crucially, files also play the role of ‘modes of presentation’. They are used to account for cognitive significance phenomena illustrated by so-called ‘Frege cases’. This book considers what happens to mental files in a dynamic setting. Mental files are construed as both continuants (dynamic files) and as time-slices thereof (static files). Dynamic files are needed to account for confusion, recognition and tracking. The book considers what happens to the relation of coreference de jure, central to the functional characterization of files, when one adopts a dynamic perspective. Only a weak form of coreference de jure is said to hold between stages of the same dynamic file. The second part of the book argues that communication involves interpersonal dynamic files. Special attention is paid to the communication of indexical thoughts (de se contents), and to communication using proper names. (shrink)

According to influential view, using the criminal law against innocent actions or agents is wrong. In this paper, I consider four related arguments against this view: a debunking argument that suggests that the intuitive appeal of this view may be due to a conflation of different ideas; a counterexamples argument that points out that there are many cases in which using the criminal law against innocent actions ("non mala" actions that are not even "mala prohibita") or agents is justified; a (...) theoretical argument, according to which the force of the reasons for and against using the criminal law is a matter of degree and it is therefore implausible to hold that the latter always defeat the former; and an analogy argument, which holds that it is implausible to maintain that harming innocents is often justified in other contexts but (almost) never in the context of the criminal law. (shrink)

Mongolian philosophy in the post-communism period.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The aim of this article is to study the notion of derivability and its semantic counterpart in the context of non-transitive and non-reflexive substructural logics. For this purpose we focus on the study cases of the logics _S__T_ and _T__S_. In this respect, we show that this notion doesn’t coincide, in general, with a nowadays broadly used semantic approach towards metainferential validity: the notion of local validity. Following this, and building on some previous work by Humberstone, we prove that in (...) these systems derivability can be characterized in terms of a notion we call absolute global validity. However, arriving at these results doesn’t lead us to disregard local validity. First, because we discuss the conditions under which local, and also global validity, can be expected to coincide with derivability. Secondly, because we show how taking into account certain families of valuations can be useful to describe derivability for different calculi used to present _S__T_ and _T__S_. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology is the first collection to consider the full breadth of natural theology from both historical and contemporary perspectives and to bring together leading scholars to offer accessible high-level accounts of the major themes. The volume embodies and develops the recent revival of interest in natural theology as a topic of serious critical engagement. Frequently misunderstood or polemicized, natural theology is an under-studied yet persistent and pervasive presence throughout the history of thought about ultimate reality (...) - from the classical Greek theology of the philosophers to twenty-first century debates in science and religion. Thirty eight new essays trace the transformations of natural theology in different historical and religious contexts, the place of natural theology in different philosophical traditions and diverse scientific disciplines, and the various cultural and aesthetic approaches to natural theology to reveal a rich seam of multi-faceted theological reflection rooted in human nature and the environments within which we find ourselves. (shrink)

When the ancient Greeks looked up into the heavens, they saw not just sun and moon, stars and planets, but a complete, coherent universe, a model of the Good that could serve as a guide to a better life. How this view of the world came to be, and how we lost it (or turned away from it) on the way to becoming modern, make for a fascinating story, told in a highly accessible manner by Remi Brague in this wide-ranging (...) cultural history. Before the Greeks, people thought human action was required to maintain the order of the universe and so conducted rituals and sacrifices to renew and restore it. But beginning with the Hellenic Age, the universe came to be seen as existing quite apart from human action and possessing, therefore, a kind of wisdom that humanity did not. Wearing his remarkable erudition lightly, Brague traces the many ways this universal wisdom has been interpreted over the centuries, from the time of ancient Egypt to the modern era. Socratic and Muslim philosophers, Christian theologians and Jewish Kabbalists all believed that questions about the workings of the world and the meaning of life were closely intertwined and that an understanding of cosmology was crucial to making sense of human ethics. Exploring the fate of this concept in the modern day, Brague shows how modernity stripped the universe of its sacred and philosophical wisdom, transforming it into an ethically indifferent entity that no longer serves as a model for human morality. Encyclopedic and yet intimate, The Wisdom of the World offers the best sort of history: broad, learned, and completely compelling. Brague opens a window onto systems of thought radically different from our own. (shrink)

UNESCO pub. Monograph on the impact of science and technology on society and culture - presents a critical appraisal of the cultural significance of science and technology, notably with regard to ethics and aesthetics, and speculates on future prospects. List of participants. Conference held in Paris 1974 jul 9 to 14.

Imagine you suddenly find yourself in the control room of a vast technological apparatus, sometime in the future, where you are told that science has satisfied all the needs of all living humans. Furthermore, you learn, the next generation of the species will not be produced in the usual way, but instead by this machine, provided only that somebody push a little red button. The catch: you have to give a reason for pushing it. You hesitate: what do you say? (...) Our own world is more like this scenario than we at first may be inclined to admit, not least in the fact that, mutatis mutandis, we seem to be struggling to come up with a good answer. The problem, says Rémi Brague, is fundamentally a metaphysical one. Now, mention of 'metaphysics' in decent society these days is likely to elicit a smile or an unimpressed shrug. If there is a shelf with that label on it in your typical bookstore you are as likely to find guides to crystals, chakras, or hemp care there as you are treatises by Aristotle, Aquinas, or Kant. And, in spite of the ongoing revival of academic interest in metaphysics, it remains a rather specialist domain, a marginal sub-discipline in departments of philosophy, be they analytical or continental in cast. But if you should take it too seriously, you'll lose your bearings in the real world, and you'll go adrift in some ethereal sea of dreams. It is, in a word, irrelevant--right? (shrink)

The head and the stomach January 1996 -- Borges in Sarajevo March 1996 -- Fin de siècle and new millenarium May 1996 -- Cold racism July 1996 -- The last enemy November 1996 -- The grounded plane January 1997 -- Dialectic in the dialectic August 1997 -- Voyage to the country of the last sociologists November 1997 -- Justice in the past April 1998 -- The crisis of art or a crisis of thought July 1998 -- Is cinema to blame (...) March 1999? -- The nameless war May 1999 -- One image right can sweep away another October 1999 -- The syllogism of corruption October 2000 -- Voici/voila : the destiny of images January 2001 -- From facts to interpretations : the new quarrel over the holocaust April 2001 -- From one torture to another June 2001 -- The filmmaker, the people and the government August 2001 -- Time, words, war November 2001 -- Philosophy in the bathroom January 2002 -- Prisoners of the infinite march 2002 -- From one month of May to another June 2002 -- Victor Hugo : the ambiguities of a bicentenary August 2002 -- The machine and the foetus January 2003 -- Death of the author or all too living artist April 2003 -- Logic of amnesia June 2003 -- The principle of insecurity September 2003 -- The new fictions of evil November 2003 -- Criminal democracy March 2004 -- The difficult heritage of Michel Foucault June 2004 -- The new reasons for the lie A\august 2004 -- Beyond art October 2004 -- The politics of images February 2005 -- Democracy and its doctors May 2005. (shrink)

Does the moral status of an action provide in itself a non-instrumental, pro-tanto reason for a corresponding legal status – a reason that applies regardless of whether the law promotes a value that is independent of the law, such as preventing wrongdoing or promoting distributive or retributive justice? While the relation between morality and law is a familiar topic, this specific question is typically not considered explicitly. Yet it seems to be controversial and each of the contrasting answers to this (...) question has some appeal. The article highlights and considers this question. it concludes that the answer is negative: there is no necessary relation between morality and law in this respect. Rather, there is a reason in favor of incorporating morality into the law only when this incorporation promotes a moral value that is independent of the law. (shrink)

The paper considers a hierarchical theory that combines concern for two values: individual well-being – as a fundamental, first-order value – and (distributive) fairness – as a high-order value that its exclusive function is to complete the value of individual well-being by resolving internal clashes within it that occur in interpersonal conflicts. The argument for this unique conception of high-order fairness is that fairness is morally significant in itself only regarding what matters – individual well-being – and when it matters (...) – in interpersonal conflicts in which constitutive aspects of individual well-being clash. Consequently, the proposed theory is not exposed to claim that fairness comes at the expense of welfare. This theory is considered within a consequential framework, based on the standard version and, alternatively, on a novel interpretation of consequentialism. Thus, it refutes the claim that consequentialism does not take the distinction between persons seriously. (shrink)

On the Yin-yang, Chinese philosophy, and oral tradition in Mongolia.

Chenu, M.-D. Foi, certitude et recherche.--Gilson, É. Réponse à Louis-Marie Régis, On some difficulties of interpretation.--Dubarle, D. Logique et épistémologie du signe chez Aristote et chez les Stoïciens.--Geiger, L.-B. Ce qui est, se dit en plusiers sens.--Owens, J. "Diversificata in diversis."--Cauchy, V. Être et connaître, l'irréductibilité de l'aristotélisme au platonisme.--Joós, E. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, de l'intentio intellectus, à l'intentio rei.--Murin, C. Pour une démystification de la "mort-de-Dieu" nietzschéenne.--Joós, E. Post-scriptum, la nouvelle scolastique de Louis-Marie Régis.--Landry, A.-M. Louis-Marie Régis, O.P., quelques dates (...) et faits marquants de sa vie.--Lettre d'Henri-Irénée Marrou à Louis-Marie Régis. (shrink)

This article is concerned with an exploration of a family of systems—called immune logics—that arise from certain dualizations of the well-known family of infectious logics. The distinctive feature of the semantic of infectious logics is the presence of a certain “infectious” semantic value, by which two different though equivalent things are meant. On the one hand, it is meant that these values are zero elements for all the operations in the underlying algebraic structure. On the other hand, it is meant (...) that these values behave in a value-in-value-out fashion for all the operations in the underlying algebraic structure. Thus, in a rather informal manner, we will refer to immune logics as those systems whose underlying semantics count with a certain “immune” semantic value behaving in a way that is somewhat dual to that of the infectious values. In a more formal manner, carrying out this dualization will prove to be not as straightforward as one could imagine, since the two characterizations of infectiousness discussed above lead to two different outcomes when one tries to conduct them. We explore these alternatives and provide technical results regarding them, and the various logical systems defined using such semantics. (shrink)

Based on a general thesis regarding the proper resolution of interpersonal conflicts, this paper suggests a normative framework for the distribution of scarce health resources. The proposed thesis includes two basic ideas. First, individual well-being is the fundamental value. Second, interpersonal conflicts affecting well-being should be resolved in light of several conceptions of fairness, reflecting the independent value of persons and the moral significance of responsibility of individuals for the existence of interpersonal conflicts. These ideas are elaborated in several principles (...) that are applied with respect to the distribution of scarce health resources. (shrink)

This book discusses in dialogue form the basic principles of mathematics and its applications including the question: What is mathematics? What does its specific method consist of? What is its relation to the sciences and humanities? What can it offer to specialists in different fields? How can it be applied in practice and in discovering the laws of nature? Dramatized by the dialogue form and shown in the historical movements in which they originated, these questions are discussed in their full (...) complexity, yet are easily comprehended. The first dialogue, whose chief actor is Socrates, leads the reader to the source of modern mathematics in Athens in the 5th Century BC. The second dialogue, featuring Archimedes, takes place during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC and shows the birth of applied mathematics. The third dialogue occurs in the year 1633 in Rome, its chief character being Galileo Galilei who fully realized the central importance of the mathematical method in discovering the laws of nature. Intended as supplemental reading for philosophy of mathematics courses at the high school or college level it will be of interest to both specialists and non-specialists in mathematics. Alfréd Rényi was born in Budapest Hungary in 1921. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Budapest and received his Ph. D. from the University of Szaged in 1945. Since 1950 he has been Director of the Mathematical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and since 1952 a professor at the University of Budapest. Dr. Renyi was a visiting professor at Michigan State University in 1961, at the University of Michigan in 1964 and at Stanford University in 1966. His main fields of research are probability theory, mathematical statistics and information theory, and he has also worked in analytic number theory as well as in various branches of analysis, combinatorial analysis and geometry. (shrink)

Our main goal is to investigate whether the infinitary rules for the quantifiers endorsed by Elia Zardini in a recent paper are plausible. First, we will argue that they are problematic in several ways, especially due to their infinitary features. Secondly, we will show that even if these worries are somehow dealt with, there is another serious issue with them. They produce a truth-theoretic paradox that does not involve the structural rules of contraction.

Cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book, acclaimed philosopher Jacques Rancière looks at cinematic art in comparison to its corollary forms in literature and theatre. From literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing literature’s images and philosophy; and film rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre’s dream. Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one is moved by the (...) spectacle of shadows. Thus, for Rancière, film is the perpetually disappointed dream of a language of images. (shrink)

Dissenting Words is a lively and engaging collection of interviews that span the length of Jacques Rancière's trajectory, from the critique of Althusserian Marxism and the work on proletarian thinking in the nineteenth century to the more recent reflections on politics and aesthetics. Across these pages, Rancière discusses the figures, concepts and arguments he has introduced to the theoretical landscape over the past forty years, the themes and concerns that have animated his thinking, the positions he has defended and the (...) wide range of objects and discourses that have attracted his attention and through which his thought has unfolded: history, pedagogy, literature, art, cinema. But more than reflecting on the continuities, turns, ruptures and deviations in his thought, Rancière recasts his work in a different discursive register. And the pleasure we experience in reading these interviews – with their asides, displacements and reconstructions – stems from the way Rancière transforms the voice of the thinker commenting on his texts and elucidating his concepts into another, and equally rich, manifestation of his thought. (shrink)

_An ambitious new history of philosophy in English that broadens the canon to include many lesser-known figures__ “[This] lively chronicle of philosophy in English is a splendid accomplishment sufficient unto itself. Highly intelligent, always even-handed, quietly but consistently witty, _Witcraft _is an excellent guide along the twisted and tricky path of human thought.”—___Wall Street Journal__ Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that “philosophy should be written like poetry.” But philosophy has often been presented more prosaically as a long trudge through canonical authors (...) and great works. But what, Jonathan Rée asks, if we instead saw the history of philosophy as a haphazard series of unmapped forest paths, a mass of individual stories showing endurance, inventiveness, bewilderment, anxiety, impatience, and good humor? Here, Jonathan Rée brilliantly retells this history, covering such figures as Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Mill, James, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. But he also includes authors not usually associated with philosophy, such as William Hazlitt, George Eliot, Darwin, and W. H. Auden. Above all, he uncovers dozens of unremembered figures—puritans, revolutionaries, pantheists, feminists, nihilists, socialists, and scientists—who were passionate and active readers of philosophy, and often authors themselves. Breaking away from high-altitude narratives, he shows how philosophy finds its way into ordinary lives, enriching and transforming them in unexpected ways. (shrink)

The people's theatre : a long drawn-out affair -- The cultural historic compromise -- The philosopher's tale : intellectuals and the trajectory of Gauchisme -- Joan of Arc in the Gulag -- The inconceivable revolution -- Factory nostalgia (notes on an article and various books) -- The ethics of sociology.

Is there a reason to prevent deontological wrongdoing—an action that is wrong due to the violation of a decisive deontological constraint? This question is perplexing. On the one hand, the intuitive response seems to be positive, both when the question is considered in the abstract and when it is considered with regard to paradigmatic cases of deontological wrongdoing such as Bridge and Transplant. On the other hand, common theoretical accounts of deontological wrongdoing do not entail this answer, since not preventing (...) wrongdoing does not necessarily amount to doing harm or intending harm, for example. The puzzle is reinforced due to the fact that the intuitive response to other cases seems to be different, namely that there is no reason in favour of preventing deontological wrongdoing. This question is thus interesting in itself. It might also shed light on additional questions such as the “paradox of deontology” and the appropriate response to wrongful actions more generally. Yet, despite its importance, this question is typically overlooked. The paper explores this question. (shrink)