La notion de lieu occupe dans le système cartésien une place stratégique : elle en manifeste la singularité tant dans le domaine de la physique que dans celui de la métaphysique. En physique, les difficultés sont nombreuses : comment Descartes parvient-il à édifier une philosophie naturelle qui produit, notamment, les lois du choc et celle de la chute des graves, dans un cadre conceptuel qui nie l'existence du vide ainsi que celle de lieux différents? Jusqu'à quel point peut-on parler d'une (...) mathématisation du réel pour un corps de doctrine aussi peu algébrique que possible? Le spectre du roman cartésien doit être chassé afin de saisir la science cartésienne dans sa nouveauté radicale. Mais dès lors que l'on s'interroge sur les motifs conceptuels qui empêchent Descartes d'élaborer une mathématisation du réel, dont la Géométrie semble lui donner les moyens et les Regulae la méthode, on est conduit à préciser la nature des procédures résolutoires de la pensée, leur portée et leurs limites et, ainsi, à entrer de plain-pied dans le champ de la mathématique, tout d'abord, puis dans celui de la métaphysique. Dire ce qu'est et ce que peut un corps s'énonce à partir du savoir de ce qu'est et de ce que peut l'esprit. En effet, Descartes attribue à l'esprit la force et la puissance, non seulement d'inventer et de produire du nouveau, mais également celle, très concrète, d'imprimer une nouvelle détermination aux mouvements des esprits animaux. On peut considérer que la force chez Descartes est indexée au spirituel plutôt qu'au corporel et qu'en dehors de la question singulière de l'Eucharistie, elle n'est efficace qu'à la condition de ne pas être localisée stricto sensu en termes de lieu : Dieu agit dans le monde pour autant qu'il n'en fait pas partie et la glande pinéale est le siège principal de l'âme, sedes et non pas locus. Cette lecture de l'œuvre cartésienne trouve ainsi dans la notion de lieu un thème d'étude particulièrement fécond, dans la mesure où elle est mobilisée à la fois dans la physique et les mathématiques cartésiennes, mais également dans la question de la localisation de Dieu dans le monde, dans celle du Christ sous les espèces consacrées, et dans celle de l'âme dans le corps. Ainsi d'un lieu à un autre, nous sommes conduits au cœur du système cartésien, par un mouvement d'approfondissement réciproque des perspectives. (shrink)

Will democracy figure prominently in China's future? If so, what kind of democracy? In this insightful and thought-provoking book, David Hall and Roger Ames explore such questions and, in the course of answering them, look to the ideas of John Dewey and Confucius.

The contributors, not identified except by name, are mostly westerners. No bibliography. Paperback edition ($12.95) not seen. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Examines the issues of self (including gender), truth, and transcendence in classical Chinese and Western philosophy.

本书讲述了一群试图解释中国哲学及其艺术词语问题的比较哲学家之长达20年之久的事情。包括“孟子人性理论的背景”、“孟子的人性论”等。.

With a mass digitisation programme underway and the addition of non-print legal deposit and web archive collections, the National Library of Scotland is now both producing and collecting data at an unprecedented rate, with over 5PB of storage in the Library’s data centres. As well as the opportunities to support large scale analysis of the collections, this also presents new challenges around data management, storage, rights, formats, skills and access. Furthermore, by assuming the role of both creators and collectors, libraries (...) face broader questions about the concepts of ‘collections' and ‘heritage', and the ethical implications of collecting practices. While the ‘collections as data’ movement has encouraged cultural heritage organisations to present collections in machine-readable formats, new services, processes and tools also need to be established to enable these emerging forms of research, and new modes of working need to be established to take into account an increasing need for transparency around the creation and presentation of digital collections. This commentary explores the National Library of Scotland's new digital scholarship service, the implications of this new activity and the obstacles that libraries encounter when navigating a world of Big Data. (shrink)

People tend to confuse winning freedom with conversion to capitalism. It is doubtful that the joys of capitalism are enough to free peoples.... The American "revolution" failed long ago, long before the Soviet one. Revolutionary situations and attempts are born of capitalism itself and will not soon disappear, alas. Philosophy remains tied to a revolutionary becoming that is not to be confused with the history of revolutions.--from Two Regimes of MadnessCovering the last twenty years of Gilles Deleuze's life, the texts (...) and interviews gathered in this volume complete those collected in Desert Islands and Other Texts. This period saw the publication of his major works: A Thousand Plateaus, Cinema I: Image-Movement, Cinema II: Image-Time, all leading through language, concept and art to What is Philosophy?. Two Regimes of Madness also documents Deleuze's increasing involvement with politics. Both volumes were conceived by the author himself and will be his last. Michel Foucault famously wrote: "One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian." This book provides a prodigious entry into the work of the most important philosopher of our time. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze never stopped digging further into the same furrow. Concepts for him came from life. He was a vitalist and remained one to the last. This volume restores the full text of the original French edition.The philosopher Gilles Deleuze published twenty-five books, including five in collaboration with Félix Guattari. (shrink)

This article presents evidence supporting the claim that ethical reasoning is a skill that can be taught and assessed. We propose a working definition of ethical reasoning as 1) the ability to identify, analyze, and weigh moral aspects of a particular situation, and 2) to make decisions that are informed and warranted by the moral investigation. The evidence consists of a description of an ethical reasoning education program—Ethical Reasoning in Action —designed to increase ethical reasoning skills in a variety of (...) situations and areas of life. ERiA is housed at a public, major comprehensive U.S. university—James Madison University—and assessment of the program focuses on interventions delivered prior to and during orientation for incoming first-year students. Findings indicate that the interventions measurably enhance the ability of undergraduate students to reason ethically. ERiA’s competency-targeted program and positive student learning outcomes offers a promising model for higher education ethics programs seeking to connect classroom learning in ethics to decision-making in everyday life. (shrink)

There is a need to increase the number of practicing medical doctors in South Africa. We examine the ethical implications of patients’ rights being affected in medical education in a South African context.The South African legal framework advocates public healthcare access. Yet, the State’s ethical obligations when it comes to guaranteeing public healthcare access, conflict with its utilitarian policy, that allows for medical education to help achieve the State’s public healthcare commitments, at the cost of eroding patients’ rights, and accepts (...) that certain actions are imperative, in line with Ubuntu, which is tenable yet nuanced. A patient treated by a licenced doctor today, benefits because other patients have allowed themselves to be used as hands-on learning material for medical students yesterday.Healthcare institutions need to take cognisance of the numbers of medical students that patients can reasonably be expected to endure. There is a need for the Health Professions Council of South Africa and medical schools to adopt guidelines on reasonable levels of medical student-patient interaction, and medical student-to-patient ratios in healthcare delivery. (shrink)

Informed consent for anesthesia is an ethical and legal requirement. A patient must have adequate decision-making capacity (DMC) as a prerequisite to informed consent. In determining whether a patient has sufficient DMC, anesthesiologists must draw on their knowledge of DMC. Knowledge gaps regarding DMC may result in incorrect assessments of patients’ capacity. This could translate to an informed consent process that is ethically and legally unsound. This study examined the DMC-related knowledge of anesthesiologists in a group of four university-affiliated hospitals. (...) The findings suggest that anesthesiologists have several areas of knowledge deficiency regarding DMC and DMC assessment. These findings could inform the development of undergraduate and postgraduate curricula. (shrink)

ponencia pronunciada por el prof. Dr. Juan A. García González en el I Simposio Jóvenes Filósofos de Málaga celebrado el 17 de abril de 2009 en el Ayto. de Alhaurín de la Torre. En este trabajo se analiza la actual crisis económica desde una perspectiva antropológica que presta atención a la persona, las relaciones interpersonales, la libertad, el futuro y otras dimensiones humanas.

Agues that Confucianism and other East Asian philosophical traditions can be resources for understanding and addressing current global challenges such as climate change and hunger.

Humanity takes up space. Human beings, like many other species, also transform spaces. What is perhaps uniquely human is the disposition to qualitatively transform spaces into places that are charged with distinctive kinds of intergenerational significance. There is a profound, felt difference between a house as domestic space and a home as familial place or between the summit of a mountain one has climbed for the first time and the “same” rock pinnacle celebrated in ancestral narratives. Contemporary philosophical uses of (...) the word “place” often pivot on the distinction between “space” and “place” formalized by geographer-philosopher Yi-fu Tuan, who suggested that places incorporate the experiences and aspirations of a people over the course of their moral and aesthetic engagement with sites and locations. While spaces afford possibilities for different kinds of presence—physical, emotional, cognitive, dramatic, spiritual—places emerge as different ways of being present, fuse over time, and saturate a locale with distinctively collaborative patterns of significance. This approach to issues of place, however, is emblematic of what Edward S. Casey has argued are convictions about the primacy of absolute space and time that evolved along with the progressive dominance of the scientific imagination and modern imaginations of the universal. The recent reappearance of place in Western philosophy represents a turn away from abstract and a priori reasoning and back toward phenomenal experience and the primacy of embodied and emplaced intelligence. Places are enacted through the sustainably shared practices of mutually-responsive and mutually-vulnerable agents and are as numerous in kind as we are divergent in the patterns of values and intentions. The contributors to this volume draw on resources from Asian, European, and North American traditions of thought to engage in intercultural reflection on the significance of place in philosophy and of the place of philosophy itself in the cultural, social, economic, and political domains of contemporary life. The conversation of place that results explores the meaning of intercultural philosophy, the critical interplay of place and personal identity, the meaning of appropriate emplacement, the shared place of politics and religion, and the nature of the emotionally emplaced body. (shrink)

Humanity takes up space. Human beings, like many other species, also transform spaces. What is perhaps uniquely human is the disposition to qualitatively transform spaces into places that are charged with distinctive kinds of intergenerational significance. There is a profound, felt difference between a house as domestic space and a home as familial place or between the summit of a mountain one has climbed for the first time and the “same” rock pinnacle celebrated in ancestral narratives. Contemporary philosophical uses of (...) the word “place” often pivot on the distinction between “space” and “place” formalized by geographer-philosopher Yi-fu Tuan, who suggested that places incorporate the experiences and aspirations of a people over the course of their moral and aesthetic engagement with sites and locations. While spaces afford possibilities for different kinds of presence—physical, emotional, cognitive, dramatic, spiritual—places emerge as different ways of being present, fuse over time, and saturate a locale with distinctively collaborative patterns of significance. This approach to issues of place, however, is emblematic of what Edward S. Casey has argued are convictions about the primacy of absolute space and time that evolved along with the progressive dominance of the scientific imagination and modern imaginations of the universal. The recent reappearance of place in Western philosophy represents a turn away from abstract and a priori reasoning and back toward phenomenal experience and the primacy of embodied and emplaced intelligence. Places are enacted through the sustainably shared practices of mutually-responsive and mutually-vulnerable agents and are as numerous in kind as we are divergent in the patterns of values and intentions. The contributors to this volume draw on resources from Asian, European, and North American traditions of thought to engage in intercultural reflection on the significance of place in philosophy and of the place of philosophy itself in the cultural, social, economic, and political domains of contemporary life. The conversation of place that results explores the meaning of intercultural philosophy, the critical interplay of place and personal identity, the meaning of appropriate emplacement, the shared place of politics and religion, and the nature of the emotionally emplaced body. (shrink)

In this manuscript, “Intersectional Structural Stigma, Community Priorities, and Opportunities for Transgender Health Equity,” Poteat and Simmons outline the legal and policy barriers that impede efforts to end the HIV epidemic among transgender people in the South. They present qualitative and quantitative data from a community engaged research study conducted with transgender adults and other key stakeholders as well as finding from an analysis of policies impacting transgender people in both states. Violence prevention and decriminalization are highlighted as key policy (...) initiatives that would advance health equity for transgender people. (shrink)

Two thousand five hundred years ago, in 507–506 B.C.E., the institutions of Athen were rocked by the reforms of Cleisthenes. Although the word did not yet exist, here was the foundation of democracy. First published in French in 1964, Cleisthenes the Athenian has become the classic study of the philosophical, political, and aesthetic background and significance of these reforms. The book has influenced a generation of scholars in anthropology, sociology, urban planning, political science, philosophy, and classical studies. This English translation (...) contains the complete text of the original essay and is supplemented by a discussion among Vidal-Naquet, Leveque, and the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis on the invention of democracy, as well as a new authors' introduction. (shrink)

The increase in cases of political corruption, the loss of politicians' credibility, the development of social and political forms of pathology, and the role of the State have been at the center of political debates. In one way or another, these problems raise the question of the legitimacy of the established powers. The result is that legitimacy, a key notion of political thought in general, has today become a burning issue. Coicaud examines all these issues and proffers insightful answers to (...) questions such as the connections between morality and politics, how rulers acquire or lose the right to govern, and how one can become the advocate of a theory of political justice that, while establishing limits, respects and even ensures the promotion of plurality within societies. (shrink)

This posthumous book represents the first publication of one of the seminars of Cornelius Castoriadis, a renowned and influential figure in twentieth-century thought. A close reading of Plato's _Statesman_, it is an exemplary instance of Castoriadis's pragmatic, pertinent, and discriminating approach to thinking and reading a great work: "I mean really reading it, by respecting it without respecting it, by going into the recesses and details without having decided in advance that everything it contains is coherent, homogeneous, makes sense, and (...) is true." Castoriadis brings out what he calls _The Statesman_'s "quirky structure," with its three digressions, its eight incidental points, and its two definitions, neither of which is deemed good. He does not hesitate to differ with the text, to show that what is, in appearance, secondary is really essential, and that the denunciation of the Sophists accommodates itself quite well to the use of sophistical procedures. Castoriadis shows how _The Statesman_ takes us into the heart of what is distinctive in the late Plato: blending, acceptance of the mixed, of the intermediate. These transcriptions of Cornelius's afford the reader an opportunity to discover his trenchant, convincing, energetic, provocative, and often droll voice. Here is a hitherto unknown Castoriadis, who reflects as he speaks, collects himself, corrects himself, and doesn't hesitate to revisit key points. In short, this is Castoriadis's thinking in action. (shrink)

Writing involves risks—the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of inadvertently supporting a reader’s prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must “clear a passage within the agitated world of passions,” an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their own speech. In _Writing: (...) The Political Test, _France’s leading political philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the ideological and contextual traps that would doom their attempts to articulate a new vision. Lefort examines writers whose works provide special insights into this problem of risk, both literary artists and political philosophers. Among them are Salman Rushdie, Sade, Tocqueville,m Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Orwell, Kant, Robespierre, Guizot, and Pierre Clastres. In Tocqueville, for example, Lefort finds that the author’s improvisatory and open-ended expression represents the character of the democratic experience. Orwell’s work on totalitarianism shows up the totalitarian subject’s complicity in this political regime. And Rushdie is remarkable for his solid attack on relativism. With the character and fate of the political forms of modernity, democracy, and totalitarianism a central theme, Lefort concludes with some reflections on the collapse of the Soviet Union. This intriguing and accessible exploration of literature’s political aspects and political philosophy’s literary ones will be welcomed by those who have been stymied by current efforts to bridge these two fields. Taken together, the essays in this volume also stand as an intellectual autobiography of Lefort, making it an excellent introduction to his work for less experience students of political theory or philosophy. (shrink)

Given the accelerating robotic AI revolution and China’s perceived central role in it, how will this grand transformation in the human experience be received and responded to within a distinctively Confucian cultural context?

In his new book, Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times, Joseph Chan observes that Confucianism from its inception has suffered from a gap between its lofty aspirations and its historical reality—that is, there has been a severe discrepancy between its strong and resilient regulative ideals and a persistent pattern of traditionally weak social and governmental institutions and their practices. To overcome this historical disparity, Chan argues that contemporary Confucians should draw upon Western liberal institutions to the extent that (...) they can provide effective measures of governance. At the same time, these modern democratic resources should be modified in such a way... (shrink)

At the end of 2013, China introduced what it calls the ‘One Belt, One Road Initiative’. From a Chinese perspective, this initiative is nothing less than a strategy...