Suite de la réflexion sur les rapports entre violence, civilité et révolution dans les sociétés contemporaines, initiée par le philosophe Etienne Balibar dans son ouvrage Violence et civilité et prolongée par un colloque international en 2014.

On the 24th June 2015, Feminist Legal Studies and the London School of Economics Law Department hosted an afternoon event with Professor Wendy Brown, Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science, University of California. Professor Brown kindly agreed to discuss her scholarship on feminist theory, and its relationship to both the law and neoliberalism. The event included an interview by Dr Katie Cruz and a Q&A session, which are presented here in an edited version of the transcript. (...) Sumi Madhock, Professor of Gender Studies, LSE chaired the interview and discussion and introduced Professor Brown’s work. Katie Cruz asked Wendy Brown to reflect upon topics that span her scholarship and activism, including the state of critical, feminist, and Left approaches to rights, neoliberalism, despair and utopianism, and the future of feminist theory and practice in the context of neoliberalism and current debates about intersectionality. Participants in the discussion asked questions on a wide range of issues, including the limits of feminist engagement with law as a tool for social change, the dominance of neoliberalism, imperialist feminism, Islamophobia, secularism, and our attachment to the figure of homo politicus. (shrink)

George Spencer Brown, a polymath and author of Laws of Form, brought together mathematics, electronics, engineering and philosophy to form an unlikely bond. This book investigates Design with the NOR, the title of the yet unpublished 1961 typescript by Spencer Brown. The typescript formed through the author's experiences as technical engineer and developer of a new form of switching algebra for Mullard Equipment LTD., a British manufacturer of electronic components. Related essays contextualise the typescript drawing on a variety (...) of backgrounds from mathematics and engineering to philosophy and sociology. (shrink)

Summary: This book studies the life of Étienne de La Boétie and his role in the parliament of Bordeaux in the years 1556-1563, those of his friendship with Montaigne. He has already written the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, the contents, distribution and successive editions of which until now constitute the investigation of this book.--Classiques Garnier.

The title of this Festschrift to Stephen Brown points to the understanding of medieval philosophy and theology in the longue durée of their traditions and discourses.

Tools and technologies expand our capacities, including our cognitive capacities. Microscopes extend our perceptual capacities. Notebooks extend the natural limits of memory. These facts are important, for all that they are obvious. The extended cognition hypothesis wants more. Some external devices and processes are literal parts of cognitive processes themselves. When there is fast and reliable access to external data or processes, then the cognitive processes that occur uncontroversially inside the brain literally and controversially extend out into the world to (...) incorporate external structures or processes. Retrieval of an address from memory and retrieval of the same information from a notebook can both be fully cognitive processes involving fully cognitive representations. So say the proponents of extended cognition.It is an attractive metaphor. But is there any good reason to take it as literal truth? Adams and Aizawa argue that the debate on extended cognition implicates an …. (shrink)

In her recent book Anti-Individualism and Knowledge, Jessica Brown has presented a novel answer to the self-knowledge achievement problem facing the proponent of anti-individualism. She argues that her answer is to be preferred to the traditional answer (based on Burge, 1988a). Here I present three objections to the claim that her proposed answer is to be preferred. The significance of these objections lies in what they tell us about the nature of the sort of knowledge that is in dispute. (...) Perhaps the most important lesson I draw from this discussion is that, given the nature of knowledge of one's own thoughts, discriminability (from relevant alternatives) is not a condition on knowledge as such. (shrink)

Physical Relativity explores the nature of the distinction at the heart of Einstein's 1905 formulation of his special theory of relativity: that between kinematics and dynamics. Einstein himself became increasingly uncomfortable with this distinction, and with the limitations of what he called the 'principle theory' approach inspired by the logic of thermodynamics. A handful of physicists and philosophers have over the last century likewise expressed doubts about Einstein's treatment of the relativistic behaviour of rigid bodies and clocks in motion in (...) the kinematical part of his great paper, and suggested that the dynamical understanding of length contraction and time dilation intimated by the immediate precursors of Einstein is more fundamental. Harvey Brown both examines and extends these arguments, after giving a careful analysis of key features of the pre-history of relativity theory. He argues furthermore that the geometrization of the theory by Minkowski in 1908 brought illumination, but not a causal explanation of relativistic effects. Finally, Brown tries to show that the dynamical interpretation of special relativity defended in the book is consistent with the role this theory must play as a limiting case of Einstein's 1915 theory of gravity: the general theory of relativity.Appearing in the centennial year of Einstein's celebrated paper on special relativity, Physical Relativity is an unusual, critical examination of the way Einstein formulated his theory. It also examines in detail certain specific historical and conceptual issues that have long given rise to debate in both special and general relativity theory, such as the conventionality of simultaneity, the principle of general covariance, and the consistency or otherwise of the special theory with quantum mechanics. Harvey Brown' s new interpretation of relativity theory will interest anyone working on these central topics in modern physics. (shrink)

The question of where the knowledge comes from when we conduct thought experiments has been one of the most fundamental issues discussed in the epistemological position of thought experiments. In this regard, Pierre Duhem shows a skeptical attitude on the subject by stating that thought experiments cannot be evaluated as real experiments or cannot be accepted as an alternative to real experiments. James R. Brown, on the other hand, states that thought experiments, which are not based on new experimental (...) evidence or logically derived from old data, called the Platonic thought experiment, provide intuitive access to a priori knowledge. Unlike Brown, John D. Norton strictly criticizes the idea that thought experiments provide mysterious access to the knowledge of the physical world, and states that thought experiments cannot provide knowledge that transcends empiricism. In the context of the NortonBrown debate, in this article, Brown's stance on thought experiments is supported by critically analyzing the thoughts put forward on the subject. -/- Düşünce deneylerini gerçekleştirdiğimizde sonucunda elde edilen bilginin nereden geldiği sorusu düşünce deneylerinin epistemolojik konumuna ilişkin tartışılan en temel konulardan bir tanesidir. Bu doğrultuda, Pierre Duhem düşünce deneylerinin gerçek deneyler ile aynı statüde değerlendirilemeyeceğini ve hatta düşünce deneylerinin gerçek deneylerin bir alternatifi olarak bile kabul edilemeyeceğini belirterek konuya ilişkin şüpheci bir tavır sergilemektedir. James R. Brown ise yeni deneysel kanıtlara dayanmayan ya da eski verilerden mantıksal olarak türetilmeyen, Platoncu düşünce deneyi olarak adlandırılan düşünce deneylerinin a priori bilgiye sezgisel erişim sağladığını ifade etmektedir. Brown’ın aksine, John D. Norton düşünce deneylerinin fiziksel dünyanın bilgisine gizemli bir erişim sağladığı yönündeki düşünceyi kesin bir dille eleştirmekte ve düşünce deneylerinin ampirizmi aşan bir bilgi sağlamasının mümkün olamayacağını ifade etmektedir. Norton-Brown tartışması çerçevesinde bu makalede, Brown'un düşünce deneylerine ilişkin tutumu, konuyla ilgili düşüncelerin eleştirel olarak analiz edilmesiyle desteklenmektedir. (shrink)

Michelle Bella & Giovanni Maddalena – Many Peirce scholars wonder about what is going on with the publication of the Writings? André De Tienne – The answer is at once, almost nothing, but a lot! We are in a state of quasi-limbo, and so people do notice that we have not been publishing any volume for the last 10 years and the universal question is, what is happening to the Peirce Edition Project? It is a question that I keep asking (...) myself! But I am glad to share this more publicly, so that peo... (shrink)

In applied ethics, debates about responsibility have been relentlessly individualistic and synchronic, even as recognition has increased in both philosophy and psychology that agency is distributed across time and individuals. I therefore warmly welcome Brown and Savulescu’s analysis of the conditions under which responsibility can be shared and extended. By carefully delineating how diachronic and dyadic responsibility interact with the long-established control and epistemic conditions, they lay the groundwork needed for identifying how responsibility may be inter-individual and intra-individual. Unsurprisingly, (...) I don’t agree with every aspect of their rich account. I strongly suspect that the privileged place the individual continues to occupy in their taxonomy is a residue of the kind of internalist intuitions which dominate WEIRD thinking.1 2 However, I won’t pursue this line of thought here. Instead, I apply Brown and Savulescu’s analysis. Moving beyond the programmatic level at which they develop their account, I will show how it provides a basis for excusing many individuals, focusing not on the dyadic level but the diachronic. Most of the …. (shrink)

Decision theory and folk psychology both purport to represent the same phenomena: our belief-like and desire- and preference-like states. They also purport to do the same work with these representations: explain and predict our actions. But they do so with different sets of concepts. There's much at stake in whether one of these two sets of concepts can be accounted for with the other. Without such an account, we'd have two competing representations and systems of prediction and explanation, a dubious (...) dualism. Folk psychology structures our daily lives and has proven fruitful in the study of mind and ethics, while decision theory is pervasive in various disciplines, including the quantitative social sciences, especially economics, and philosophy. My interest is in accounting for folk psychology with decision theory -- in particular, for believe and wanting, which decision theory omits. Many have attempted this task for belief. (The Lockean Thesis says that there is such an account.) I take up the parallel task for wanting, which has received far less attention. I propose necessary and sufficient conditions, stated in terms of decision theory, for when you're truly said to want; I give an analogue of the Lockean Thesis for wanting. My account is an alternative to orthodox accounts that link wanting to preference (e.g. Stalnaker (1984), Lewis (1986)), which I argue are false. I argue further that want ascriptions are context-sensitive. My account explains this context-sensitivity, makes sense of conflicting desires, and accommodates phenomena that motivate traditional theses on which 'want' has multiple senses (e.g. all-things-considered vs. pro tanto). (shrink)

The case of Brown and Brownson can be thought of as an updated version of John Locke’s prince-cobbler example, one that replaces a soul transfer with a brain transplant. Briefly, Brown and Robinson are operated on for the removal of brain tumors by a procedure that involves the temporary removal of the brain from the skull, and by a surgical blunder Brown’s brain ends up in Robinson’s skull; the resulting person, Brownson, has Brown’s brain and Robinson’s (...) body, and his psychological states, including memories, are those one would expect Brown to have. (shrink)

L'humour en musique n'a pas bonne presse. Labile, déroutant, anecdotique, il a été vilipendé par certains philosophes et compositeurs de la modernité – Schopenhauer, Adorno, Varèse et Boulez en tête – tandis que d'autres – Bergson, Jankélévitch – y voyaient l'expression d'une légèreté sérieuse, l'essence même de l'art. Après une période de déni, consécutive à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, l'humour musical se manifeste depuis les années 1960 chez de multiples compositeurs comme Mauricio Kagel, Gyêrgy Ligeti, Luc Ferrari, Luciano Berio, Bruno (...) Maderna, Arvo Part, Krzysztof Penderecki, Régis Campo, etc. Les quatorze articles réunis dans ce volume tentent tout d'abord d'en éclaircir les principales nuances et de caractériser les cousinages avec le comique, la satire, la parodie, l'ironie. Un deuxième temps est consacré à l'étude du rire musical, ses techniques et sa sémantique. Sans être toujours attaché à l'humour, il engendre des significations secondaires : la peur, la folie, le désespoir. La dernière partie aborde l'esthétique de la satire, qui révèle de riches intertextualités, en particulier à travers le détournement de citations. Y sont également abordés les liens qu'entretiennent l'humour et ses dérivés avec les mutations postmodernes et hypermodernes des sociétés occidentales. (shrink)

La démocratie souffre d'un curieux paradoxe : contrairement à l'aristocratie ou à la monarchie dont les contours institutionnels et symboliques peuvent être tracés avec clarté, la démocratie ne se fige jamais dans une quelconque forme et se maintient plutôt suspendue à sa réinvention permanente. Balibar n'est pas le premier à poser la question du manque d'ambition de la démocratie, mais le seul à refuser de dissocier la question de l'extension démocratique de celle de son intensité. Pages de début Introduction. Le (...) refus de la démocratie finie Race et nation, les angles morts du marxisme Les multiples dimensions du concept de politique Une anthropologie de la citoyenneté Conclusion. La contradiction infinieBibliographie des ouvrages principaux de Balibar Pages de fin. (shrink)

Campbell Brown has recently argued that G.E. Moore's intrinsic value holism is superior to Jonathan Dancy's. I show that the advantage which Brown claims for Moore's view over Dancy's is illusory, and that Dancy's view may be superior.