Die in diesem Band versammelten Arbeiten des französischen Phänomenologen Maurice Merleau-Ponty führen nicht nur auf vorzügliche Weise in dessen Philosophieren ein, sie dokumentieren darüber hinaus auch die Entwicklung neu einsetzender Reflexionen in den Jahren nach der Publikation der Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung.
The article addresses the old question of vitalism, starting with a very concrete and recent example: the successful laboratory production of the polio virus. Following this, the author recalls two types of arguments on the nature of living being: those of Leibniz and those of Claude Bernard. If, according to the biologists who produced the virus themselves, life’s unique trait is self-replication, what should one make of the dominant position in philosophy of biology today, which denies any argument based on (...) the substantial attribution of properties to living being? The essay concludes by suggesting a new way of acknowledging the specificity of life without turning it into a metaphysical property; a way which emphasizes the import of the philosophy of biology itself. (shrink)
We briefly examine the context of Helmholtz’s famous speech on human vision of 1855 and provide a French translation of this text. The latter reveals itself to be both a tribute to Immanuel Kant and the outline of a new physiological optics based on some neo-Kantian principles.RésuméNotre préface présente le contexte du fameux discours de Helmholtz sur le voir humain, dont nous donnons ensuite la traduction. Le texte helm-holtzien s’avère être à la fois un hommage soutenu à Immanuel Kant et (...) l’esquisse d’une nouvelle optique physiologique basée sur quelques principes du néo-kantisme. (shrink)
It is one thing to deal with any aspect of Lev Vygotsky’s work from a purely scholarly standpoint. It is something quite different to deal with Vygotsky’s work from both an academic standpoint and also that of someone who is involved in East–West editorial and commercial projects. This article sheds light upon what it meant to work on Vygotsky’s theories for someone who was formally affiliated to West European academia and who also became involved more or less at the same (...) time in various East–West publishing projects related to Vygotsky and his circle. (shrink)
Au terme allemand d’Experiment correspond en français le terme d’expérience. Or, en sens opposé, expérience peut devenir soit Versuch, soit Erfahrung. Ainsi, le mot expérience véhiculé à plusieurs reprises par Lavoisier dans le discours préliminaire de son Traité a été traduit en allemand par Erfahrung, et en anglais par experiment, ce qui démontre que le terme français prête à des interprétations divergentes, mais également possibles. L’article explicite l’emploi du mot expériment, néologisme mort-né du début de xixe siècle, comme équivalent de (...) Versuch., Experiment et experiment dans le but de réduire l’ambiguïté sémantique propre au terme d’expérience. (shrink)
Au terme allemand d’Experiment correspond en français le terme d’expérience. Or, en sens opposé, expérience peut devenir soit Versuch, soit Erfahrung. Ainsi, le mot expérience véhiculé à plusieurs reprises par Lavoisier dans le discours préliminaire de son Traité a été traduit en allemand par Erfahrung, et en anglais par experiment, ce qui démontre que le terme français prête à des interprétations divergentes, mais également possibles. L’article explicite l’emploi du mot expériment, néologisme mort-né du début de xixe siècle, comme équivalent de (...) Versuch., Experiment et experiment dans le but de réduire l’ambiguïté sémantique propre au terme d’expérience. (shrink)
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a prolific writer, a multifaceted naturalist, and a zoologist by second profession. Throughout his adult life he lived up to his passion of politely contributing to the advancement of natural philosophy by publishing more than 30,000 pages, probably too much for even the most scrupulous historians of science who seek to reconstruct his theories and to shed some light on the role he played in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century biology.
The article examines epistemological and ontological underpinnings of reasearch performed by means of magnetic resonance imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging. It takes as its guiding line the important distinction between instruments and apparatuses drawn by Rom Harré. According to Harré, instruments such as barometers or thermometers do not cause the states they measure into existence. Apparatuses, in contradistinction, cause material states into existence to begin with, whereby theses states are subsequently processed according to suitable methods. Thus, when the objects (...) of examination are subjected to 2 or more Tesla in fMRI, a strength of magnetic field never occuring in earthly nature, technical means literally create the states to be examined. Close examination of the functioning of MRI and fMRI indicates that brain states, e.g., are not simply read, or perceived as degrees of temperature are read on scale. Hence, one does not see any mental funtion when looking at fMRI outputs, for the visible output has been semantically processed on the basis of invisible quantum mechanical processes that have undergone translations into digital data caused by the fMRI device itself. (shrink)
Preliminary remark:The following conversation began as a series of written email exchanges. Due to technical reasons, this exchange had to be interrupted at some point. Rather than rewriting the text that had obtained from scratch, I continued the conversation, turning the real “other” of the dialogue into an imagined one. Heartfelt thanks to Oren Harman, the guest editor of this topical issue, for continuing support and for having taken the risk of designing this unusual topical issue ofScience in Contextwith me. (...) AM. (shrink)
