English summary: Abdication may be the renouncement of power, but it is also an ultimate act of personal power, one that can only be made by an individual imposing his own choice to abandon the body politic. This collection of articles follows up on Jacques Le Bruns 2009 study of abdication, with analyses of abdications by Christine of Sweden, Celestine V, Charles de Gaulle, as well as abdication as treated in the films Habemus Papam and King Lear. French description: Au (...) debut de 2013, deux abdications souveraines se sont produites: celle de Beatrix, reine des Pays-Bas, annoncee le 28 janvier et celle du pape Benoit XVI, proclamee le 11 fevrier. L'actualite prenait en echarpe les huit siecles que nous parcourons ici. L'abdication, ce renoncement au pouvoir, constitue l'etat pur d'un acte de volonte dans la sphere politique ou religieuse. Une instance souveraine, qui ne depend de rien d'autre que de soi-meme, decide de s'abolir. L'abdication apparait alors non comme le simple abandon du pouvoir, mais comme un acte de pouvoir - celui de l'individu imposant son choix, se repliant sur son corps et abandonnant le corps politique - ou, du moins, comme une autre facon de le manipuler et de s'en saisir. Ce livre entend donner un echo et un prolongement au texte fondateur et magistral de Jacques Le Brun, Le Pouvoir d'abdiquer. Essai sur la decheance volontaire, paru en 2009. Notre entreprise a etendu ces variations aux cas mentionnes par Jacques Le Brun sans qu'il en traite, soit dans l'arc temporel premier, pour l'abdication de Christine de Suede, soit dans les temps anterieurs pour la renonciation du pape Celestin V, placee dans la perspective globale du XIIIe siecle, ou posterieurs, quant aux departs de De Gaulle. Pierre-Antoine Fabre, pour sa part, a ajoute au dossier le cas doctrinal de l'abdication du superieur jesuite en faveur de son collateral dans les Constitutions de l'ordre. Et Jacques Le Brun s'est attache a reperer les echos contemporains de l'abdication dans le film Habemus Papam de Nanni Moretti et dans Le Roi Lear. (shrink)

Do we have the right to deny others access to our body? What if this would harm those who need personal services or body parts from us? Ccile Fabre examines the impact that arguments for distributive justice have on the rights we have over ourselves, and on such contentious issues as organ sales, prostitution, and surrogate motherhood.

According to the doxastic wrongs thesis, holding certain beliefs about others can be morally wrongful. Beliefs which take the form of stereotypes based on race and gender and which turn out to be false and are negatively valenced are prime candidates for the charge of doxastic wronging: it is no coincidence that most of the cases discussed in the literature involve false beliefs. My aim in this paper is to show that the thesis of doxastic wrongs does not turn on (...) the truth-value or valence of beliefs. (shrink)

In this book, Benoît Dubreuil explores the creation and destruction of hierarchies in human evolution. Combining the methods of archaeology, anthropology, cognitive neuroscience and primatology, he offers a natural history of hierarchies from the point of view of both cultural and biological evolution. This volume explains why dominance hierarchies typical of primate societies disappeared in the human lineage and why the emergence of large-scale societies during the Neolithic period implied increased social differentiation, the creation of status hierarchies, and, eventually, political (...) centralisation. (shrink)

O artigo argumenta em favor da atualidade da ética husserliana a partir de três eixos temáticos, que se complementam: a relaçáo entre razáo teórica e razáo prática no interior da fenomenologia, o conceito de humanidade autêntica e, finalmente, a reflexáo fenomenológica sobre a esfera do estrangeiro. Parte-se do pressuposto segundo o qual o pensamento de Husserl abre caminho para uma superaçáo de duas atitudes éticas radicais: o ceticismo de caráter biológico e o universalismo abstrato.

La 4e de couverture indique : "Les textes de droit envahissent, aujourd'hui plus que jamais, notre vie quotidienne : des constitutions aux lois, des codes aux règlements, ils prennent une autorité si forte que, dans leur extrême diversité, ils forment une sorte de canevas régulateur tel qu'il existe bien peu de situations ou d'actions humaines qui lui échappent. Devant ce constat, il n'est pas possible de rester indifférent : si la textualité du droit se présente d'abord comme un objet graphique (...) qu'explore la sémiotique, elle s'offre aussi et surtout comme un objet philosophique dont la sémantique a charge, parmi les termes usités, les symboles, les structures, les accentuations, les constructions syntaxiques, les relations et les opérateurs logiques, de saisir le sens profond. La recherche philosophique doit être plus exigeante encore : en effet, par leur manifestation, leur organisation, leur signification, les textes font parler le droit. Aussi bien, par-delà l'analytique formelle qui en scrute l'écriture, l'interrogation qui les soumet à une critique transcendantale livre la fondation première et la fin ultime de la juridicité. A la lumière de cette enquête transcendantale, il apparaît que, dans le domaine immense de la production des oeuvres de l'esprit, la textualité du droit ne procède pas, à l'instar du problème scientifique, de l'énigme littéraropoétique ou du mystère théologique, de l'irréductibilité d'un type sui generis d'écriture ; elle n'est possible et valide que si elle plonge ses racines dans le terreau de la philosophie première qui lui apporte ses présuppositions et ses exigences fondamentales. Voilà qui permet de comprendre enfin que le conflit séculaire entre le droit et la philosophie n'a pas lieu d'être.". (shrink)

Just war theorists who argue that war is morally justified under certain circumstances infer implicitly that establishing the military institutions needed to wage war is also morally justified. In this paper, I mount a case in favor of a standing military establishment: to the extent that going to war is a way to discharge duties to protect fellow citizens and distant strangers from grievous harms, we have a duty to set up the institutions that enable us to discharge that duty. (...) I then respond to four objections drawn from Ned Dobos's recent book Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine. (shrink)

One of the first frameworks developed for understanding the relation of science and technology to the economy has been the linear model of innovation. The model postulated that innovation starts with basic research, is followed by applied research and development, and ends with production and diffusion. The precise source of the model remains nebulous, having never been documented. Several authors who have used, improved, or criticized the model in the past fifty years rarely acknowledged or cited any original source. The (...) model usually was taken for granted. According to others, however, it comes directly from V. Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier. This article traces the history of the linear model, suggesting that it developed in three steps corresponding to three scientific communities looking at science analytically. The article argues that statistics is a main reason the model is still alive despite criticisms, alternatives, and having been proclaimed dead. (shrink)

Many believe that agent-centred considerations, unlike agent-neutral reasons, cannot show that victims have the right to kill their attackers in self-defence, let alone establish that rescuers have the right to come to their help. In this paper, I argue that the right to kill in self- or other-defence is best supported by a hybrid set of reasons. In particular, agent-centred considerations account for the plausible intuition that victims have a special stake, which other parties lack, in being to thwart the (...) attackers. That special stake plays an important part justifying victims' right to obtain help, and rescuers' right to give it. (shrink)

La présente étude rassemble les passages de l’Ab Vrbe condita de Tite-Live où un terme lié au rire est associé à un discours ou à une parole rapportée, afin de les confronter aux vues exprimées par Cicéron et Quintilien sur le rire en contexte rhétorique. Si tous les passages étudiés s’insèrent très bien dans la conception rhétorique du rire, l’historien latin s’appuie sur celle-ci pour offrir une répartition originale entre usages acceptables et formes abusives du rire qui participe à la (...) construction des portraits personnages et de l’œuvre. (shrink)

At least since Athenian trade sanctions helped to spark the Peloponnesian War, economic coercion has been a prominent tool of foreign policy. In the modern era, sovereign states and multilateral institutions have imposed economic sanctions on dictatorial regimes or would-be nuclear powers as an alternative to waging war. They have conditioned offers of aid, loans, and debt relief on recipients’ willingness to implement market and governance reforms. Such methods interfere in freedom of trade and the internal affairs of sovereign states, (...) yet are widely used as a means to advance human rights. But are they morally justifiable? -/- Drawing on human rights theories, theories of justifiable harm, and examples such as IMF lending practices and international sanctions on Russia and North Korea, Fabre offers a defense of economic statecraft in some of its guises. An empirically attuned work of philosophy, Economic Statecraft lays out a normative framework for an important tool of diplomacy. (shrink)

Introduction: the Study of Argumentation Although our overall organization of the readings suggests one way of dividing our selected literature, ...

The progressive dominance of historical-critical methods in the reading of ancient Chinese classics has led scholars to privilege micro levels of textual analysis. Consequently, the question as to whether laws of composition could be identified in this corpus has often been ignored, or considered irrelevant. Working on Chinese number symbolism as well as on rules governing “ring composition” in other cultural contexts, this article aims at fashioning anew the question of the possibility of an ancient Chinese “structural rhetoric” and at (...) envisioning the patterns that might have governed it. It specifically applies the approach it propounds to Huainanzi 淮南子, showing how numerology frames its structure and argument, the text being built after the image of the “roundness” of the Way and of the Ruler. It then endeavors to apply these results to the unearthing of “inter-structural” patterns that would help us to locate Huainanzi, Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋, the versions at hand of Zhuangzi 莊子, Lunyu 論語, or yet Laozi 老子 into a textual universe that shares correlated rhetorical features. (shrink)

In his recent Rescuing Justice and Equality, G. A. Cohen mounts a sustained critique of coerced labour, against the background of a radical egalitarian conception of distributive justice. In this article, I argue that Cohenian egalitarians are committed to holding the talented under a moral duty to choose socially useful work for the sake of the less fortunate. As I also show, Cohen's arguments against coerced labour fail, particularly in the light of his commitment to coercive taxation. In the course (...) of defending those claims, I claim that Cohen's remarks on freedom of occupational choice and taxation exhibit partiality towards the interests of the better-off to the detriment of the less fortunate – a partiality which is in tension with his commitment to equality. (shrink)

International law and conventional morality grant that states may stand ready to defend their borders with lethal force. But what grounds the permission to kill for the sake of political sovereignty and territorial integrity? In this book leading theorists address this vexed issue, and set the terms of future debate over national defence.

Given the fact that the history of our brain is a long history of interfaces, connections and exchanges, this text aims to reveal the collective nature of the process involved by and within learning. In fact, the person who learns can only cross-learn: irrespective of the field of learning, he learns across, between and beyond.2 The cross-disciplinary approach suggested in the present study focuses on learning a foreign language.

It is a central tenet of most contemporary theories of justice that the badly-off have a right to some of the resources of the well-off. In this paper, I take as my starting point two principles of justice, to wit, the principle of sufficiency, whereby individuals have a right to the material resources they need in order to lead a decent life, and the principle of autonomy, whereby once everybody has such a life, individuals should be allowed to pursue their (...) conception of the good, and to enjoy the fruits of their labour in pursuit of such conception. I also endorse the value of fairness, whereby the right person or institution makes the decision as to whether to bring about justice.I show that justice and fairness can be satisfied only if we all enjoy a combination of private and collective rights over the world. In making that case, I shall argue that the set of ownership rights I advocate differs from readily available conceptions of restricted private ownership in two important respects. First, it is such that in some circumstances, two individuals or more can have control rights over the same property at the same time, not, as is standardly the case in legal systems, by contracting with one another (through gifts and joint purchase), but simply on grounds of justice. Second, it allows that, if necessary, property-owners be expropriated from their property without compensation. (shrink)

This paper argues that, if one thinks that the needy have a right to the material resources they need in order to lead decent lives, one must be committed, in some cases, to conferring on the sick a right that the healthy give them some of the body parts they need to lead such a life. I then assess two objections against that view, to wit: to confer on the sick a right to the live body parts of the healthy (...) violates the bodily integrity of the latter; and constitutes too much of an interference in their life. I conclude that although the sick sometimes have a right to some of the body parts of the healthy, the latter still retain a considerable degree of autonomy. (shrink)

Suppose that state A attacks state D without warrant. The ensuing military conflict threatens international peace and security. State D (I assume) has a justification for defending itself by means of military force. Do third parties have a justification for intervening in that conflict by such means? To international public lawyers, the well-rehearsed and obvious answer is “yes.” Threats to international peace and security provide one of two exceptions to the legal and moral prohibition (as set out in Article 2[4] (...) of the UN Charter) on using force as a means for resolving interstate disputes. Just war theorists are not as verdictive. Compared to the ethics of humanitarian intervention and the ethics of national self-defense, the ethics of third-party military involvement in interstate conflicts remains underdeveloped in contemporary just war theory. This essay begins to fill that gap. I argue that to defend such interventions is tantamount to defending preventive military force, deterrent military force, and the resort to force in more cases than standardly thought. I then provide an account and limited defense of the deterrence argument. I show that deterrence is morally justified in relatively few cases and examine two problems with the argument: deterrence failures and the level of uncertainty under which leaders who use deterrent force operate. I conclude that we should take seriously the possibility that nonintervention, construed as the rejection of the direct use of military force, is the morally correct response to the most serious threats to international peace and security. (shrink)

Jean-Claude SCHMITT, Les rythmes au Moyen Âge, Paris, Gallimard, 2016, 718 p. Le livre de Jean-Claude Schmitt sur les rythmes au Moyen Âge est une somme, qu'il importe de lire et de discuter. Fruit d'un travail de longue haleine, il résume à certains égards une vie entière de recherche, placée sous le signe d'une lecture anthropologique du monde médiéval, à la croisée de la réflexion sur le texte et sur l'image, laquelle abonde ici, faisant de ce volume un manuel d'interprétation (...) de l'iconographie - Recensions. (shrink)

Nous vivons dans un monde problématique, sans certitudes fixes. Désormais l’expérience est celle d’un flux héraclitéen. Nous sommes devenus des marins. Les intégristes voudraient jeter l’ancre en pleine tempête et les relativistes se laisser aller au fil du courant. La seule issue est d’apprivoiser le devenir dans un processus de problématisation, dont la démarche scientifique fournit le paradigme, processus qui articule doutes et certitudes sans remettre tout en question à chaque fois et qui permet des résultats provisoires certes mais suffisamment (...) assurés pour progresser. Il faut donc concevoir l’éducation comme problématisation. Ce qui implique de doter les jeunes de nouveaux types de repères : boussole et cartes avec lesquels ils pourront s’orienter eux-mêmes sur le fond d’un héritage, d’une expérience transmise. Une philosophie de l’éducation inspirée de la problématologie de John Dewey et de Michel Meyer, permet un autre regard sur l’évolution des normes éducatives, sur les schèmes qui les sous-tendent, sur le savoir et la culture scolaire, sur l’émancipation. (shrink)

In his recent book Killing in War, McMahan develops a powerful argument for the view that soldiers on opposite sides of a conflict are not morally on a par once the war has started: whether they have the right to kill depends on the justness of their war. In line with just war theory in general, McMahan scrutinizes the ethics of killing the enemy. In this article, I accept McMahan's account, but bring it to bear on the entirely neglected, but (...) nevertheless interesting, issue of what the military call killings or, as I refer to such acts here, internecine war killings. I focus on the case of the soldier who is ordered by his officer, at gunpoint, to go into action or to kill innocent civilians, and who kills his officer in self-defence. I argue that, at the bar of McMahan's account of the right to kill in self-defence, the officer lacks a justification for attacking the soldier as a means of enforcing his order, and the soldier thus sometimes (but not always) has the right to kill his officer should the latter so act. (shrink)

The literature on reparative justice focuses for the most part on the grounds and limits of wrongdoers' duties to their victims. An interesting but relatively neglected question is that of what - if anything - victims owe to wrongdoers. In this paper, I argue that victims are under a duty to accept wrongdoers' apologies. To accept an apology is to form the belief that the wrongdoer's apologetic utterance or gesture has the requisite verdictive, commissive and expressive dimensions; to communicate as (...) much to him; and to recognise that his apology changes one's normative status in relation to him, and to comport oneself accordingly. I then offer a Kantian argument for the duty to accept and qualify that argument in the light of some hard cases. I end the paper by addressing the objection that victims do not owe it to wrongdoers to engage in any form of reparative encounter. (shrink)

My main intention in this article is to settle the question whether having the ability to \ is, as Ryleans think, necessary for knowing how to \, and to determine the kind of role played by procedural knowledge in knowing how to \ and in acquiring and possessing the ability to \. I shall argue, in a seemingly anti-Rylean fashion, that when it comes to know-hows that are ordinarily categorised as physical skills, or—to be, for the moment, philosophically neutral—as enabling (...) one to possess such skills, it is necessary to have procedural knowledge of how to \ in order to possess those know-hows. However, I shall contend that this knowledge cannot be acquired without acquiring the kind of ability to \ in which having the skill to \ consists. And that having acquired the ability to \ is not only necessary but also sufficient for having acquired procedural knowledge of how to succeed in \-ing. (shrink)

A good deal of political theory over the last fifteen years or so has been shaped by the realization that one cannot, and ought not, consider the distribution of resources within a country in isolation from the distribution of resources between countries. Thus, thinkers such as Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge advocate extensive global distributive policies; others, such as Charles Jones and David Miller, explicitly reject the view that egalitarian principles of justice should apply globally and claim that national communities (...) have only duties to help other countries be viable economically and meet the basic needs of their members. In the global justice debate, pretty much all parties acknowledge that we have obligations of distributive justice to for-eigners. The question is how strong those obligations are, and in particular whether national boundaries can make any difference to the distribution of resources between members of different countries. (shrink)

Il n'y a plus d'évidence aujourd'hui dans le fait de vivre sur Terre. Effondrement général de la biodiversité, accélération du réchauffement climatique, catastrophes sanitaires et sociales, les faits sont innombrables et bien d'autres cataclysmes sont à venir. Il ne suffit - pas d'en avoir conscience. Il faut aussi savoir comment vivre si chacun de nos gestes compte et si nous n'avons presque plus de temps. L'Anthropocène réclame un souci infini de la terre et des vivants, qui risque à chaque instant (...) de se retourner en ressentiment contre la vie. L'écologie menace de nous rendre fous ou malades. C'est pourquoi, du fond de notre détresse, nous avons besoin qu'elle puisse devenir un "gai savoir". Peut-on concevoir ainsi une pensée écologique qui soit aussi une philosophie de la puissance, ne se résumant ni à sa célébration prométhéenne, ni à son déni ascétique? Si la vie est volonté de puissance, alors il s'agit de chercher à dégager les conditions auxquelles l'accroissement de la puissance peut aussi prendre la forme d'un retour vers la terre. En quête d'une telle philosophie, ce livre chemine en compagnie de Nietzsche. Car il est peut-être encore temps de répondre à ce mystérieux appel de Zarathoustra : "Que le surhumain soit le sens de la terre!""--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

« Rythmes et Croyances au Moyen-Âge » Journée d'études organisée par Marie Formarier et Jean-Claude Schmitt 23 juin 2012 – Paris Présentation : Cette journée d'études a eu pour objectif de faire dialoguer les diverses disciplines concernées par le rapport entre rythmes et croyances au Moyen-Âge. Elle a accueilli des historiens, des anthropologues, des sociologues, des philologues et des linguistes. Présents dans la langue latine et les langues vernaculaires, dans la rhétorique du sermon, la prière et (...) - Histoire – (...) NOUVELLE JOURNÉE d'ÉTUDES. (shrink)

L'authenticité du maigre dossier de correspondance documentant les relations entre l'empereur Frédéric II Hohenstaufen et la cour impériale de Nicée est un sujet de débats constants, tant pour les pièces grecques que latines. L'édition récente d'un nouveau témoin de l'une de ces dernières, en permettant d'en préciser le contexte de rédaction - probablement privé - incite à désattribuer définitivement une lettre qui ne fut sans doute jamais envoyée par Frédéric II à Jean III Vatatzès, et dont le sens véritable n'est (...) même pas celui d'un pastiche. Cette désattribution met sur la piste d'une réflexion sur les contextes de transmission et de rédaction des dictamina politiques latins du XIIIe siècle. Elle incite à réfléchir sur la nécessité de développer des critères méthodologiques tenant compte de ceux-ci pour contourner les apories de la critique interne dans l'examen de dossiers de traitement particulièrement délicat, tels que des correspondances diplomatiques uniquement transmises dans des recueils épistolaires. (shrink)

t. 1. Introduction générale. Critique existentielle.--t. 2. Analytique existentielle.

We regularly intentionally expose ourselves to fictions we take to be likely to elicit in us emotions we generally find unpleasant when prompted by actual states of affairs. This is the so-called “paradox of tragedy”. We contribute to solving the paradox of tragedy by denying that, when fiction-directed, most of these emotions are in themselves unpleasant. We first provide strong evidence that these emotions, such as fear, sadness, or pity, are often enjoyed when fiction-directed. We then advance an explanation of (...) what makes these fiction-directed emotions often not unpleasant, while their reality-directed counterparts are generally so. In the last section, we advance an explanation of what makes fiction-directed emotions often enjoyable, and argue that a complete solution to the paradox of tragedy should be pluralist. (shrink)

My main aim in this paper is to contribute to the elucidation of the nature of non-religious faith. I start by summarising several well-known arguments that belief is neither necessary nor sufficient for faith. I then try to identify the nature of the positive cognitive attitude towards p that is involved in having faith that p. After dismissing some candidates for the role, I explore the idea that faith and hope are similar attitudes. On this basis, I then advance a (...) new characterisation of faith. Finally, I turn to the question of the rationality of faith. I argue that faith is intrinsically irrational because it is an intrinsically incoherent propositional attitude, but that there is nonetheless a sense in which faith is neither intrinsically epistemically irrational nor intrinsically practically irrational. (shrink)

Posthumous homage to Professor José Cavalcante de Souza.

The following article is the result of a collaboration between a painter and a woman philosopher. They worked previously on an experimental documentary film about objects and art objects, which was realized at Palais de Tokyo. The painter had illustrated in black and white fictions of philosophy, written during a festival on lost films organized by UNdocumenta in South Korea, and then he made photographs of oil paintings of the English translation. This article about painting and philosophical ethics is their (...) first common text. It aims to show that there is no interdiscipline or passage known between the philosophical work and the painting. The philosopher can not imitate the recognition of the painter nor the painter to repair the philosophical non-encounter. The question then is: What can ethics in this non-symmetrical space? Rather than being a product of philosophy, it is what organizes this space between recognition and non-encounter. It is an ethics for philosophy, rather than the other way around. Ethics force to greet the other philosophers without the grudge of the loss necessary to the invention and allows the painter to know the distances that make him feel the recognition. This ethical space is unknown and can not be covered by the artist's philosophy of access or pre-nomination by indexes. Ethics is this unknown, i.e. it is a sense-without-sign, it is without rules-said but process of indexation and acceptance of the loss. (shrink)