'Post this letter!' does not entail 'Post this letter or drink up my wine!' (the Ross Paradox) because one can be in a state with the content of the former without being in a state with the content of the latter; in turn, because the latter can rationalize drinking up my wine but the former cannot; in turn, because practical rationalization flows toward one's present situation, in contrast with the flow of theoretical rationalization from one's present situation. Formally, this is (...) implemented with a semantics for imperatives involving a partition to set up an issue of significance and a proposition to establish how to settle it. I characterize a series of languages and language-games to implement all this, and appeal to an 'endorsement-theoretic' conception of modals as quantifiers over mental states to explain why 'You must post this letter' does not entail 'You must either post this letter or drink up my wine'. (shrink)

Semantic gaps between physical and mental discourse include the 'explanatory', 'epistemic' (Black-and-White Mary), and 'suppositional' (zombies) gaps; protosemantics is concerned with what is fundamental to meaning. Our tradition presupposes a truth-based protosemantics, with disastrous consequences for interpreting the semantic gaps: nonphysicalism, epiphenomenalism, separatism. Fortunately, an endorsement-based protosemantics, recentering meaning from the world to the mind, is technically viable, intuitively more plausible, and empirically more adequate. But, of present significance, it makes room for interpreting mental discourse as expressing simulations: this blocks (...) the disastrous consequences; and, as a bonus, accommodates hitherto anomalous asymmetries among the various semantic gaps. (shrink)

Les recompositions familiales touchent l’ensemble des liens familiaux et des liens intergénérationnels. Or, si l’on observe, tant sur le plan juridique que dans les pratiques des familles conjugales, une acception plus complexe et plus riche de la parentalité, les grands-parents restent souvent méconnus. Comment construisent-ils leurs rapports à leurs « beaux-petits-enfants »? Nous avons examiné la littérature et interrogé des « belles-grands-mères » pour tenter d’y voir plus clair. Quelles représentations le champ social offre-t-il des beaux-grands-parents? Et quelles sont concrètement (...) les conditions et les étapes qui rendent possible une identité « beau-grand-parentale »? (shrink)

Mise en rapport de trois écrivains français qu'apparemment tout sépare mais dont les questions récurrentes - Dieu, le néant, le livre, l'histoire- se retrouvent en chacun d'eux.

Si la philosophie du droit a une très longue histoire, le bouleversement des conditions techniques, économiques, sociales et politiques nous impose aujourd'hui de renouveler en profondeur le traitement des questions qu'elle pose traditionnellement ainsi que les réponses qui y sont données. La définition de la justice, le partage des biens et des charges de la vie en société, les rôles respectifs de l'État, du marché et de la société civile, la mission des juges et l'application des lois, ou encore le (...) contenu et l'importance des droits de l'homme, doivent être réexaminés dans une perspective instruite par l'éclairage historique, mais résolument tournée vers les problèmes du présent et les choix qui engagent l'avenir. C'est dans une telle optique qu'a été conçu cet ouvrage. (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)

The reception of René Girard’s work in France deserves book-length treatment to fully describe the heated debates, conflicting expectations, and controversy that it inspired before its lasting importance was eventually recognized. We must keep in mind that, although he lived in the US and became a citizen in 1956, he always kept his sights on his native land. He watched the transformations of French thought from the other side of the ocean; he forged his own writing strategies in response to (...) French thought; and it was within the context of French debates that he chose to formulate, through the conjoined hypotheses concerning mimetic desire, the scapegoat, and Judeo-Christian writing, the founding event of his... (shrink)

Benoit Delbecq reflects upon the conditions under which his creative activity, as a pianist, a composer and an improviser, has to take place within the French context. Status of the copyrights, contribution of public funding, new modes of distribution, ambiguous irruptions of the show business mega-machine, fictions of freedom generated within the creative moment, polymorphous collective structures: this concrete work of knitting a new autonomous artistic network sheds light, beyond the microcosm of jazz, on the production of sociality in today’s (...) France. (shrink)

This article argues for the need to recover the concept of political myth in order to understand the crucial phenomena of our epoch. By drawing on Blumenberg’s philosophical reflections on myth, it proposes to understand political myth as the continual process of work on a common narrative by which the members of a social group can provide significance to their political conditions and experience. In order to show how this understanding of political myth can throw light on important aspects of (...) contemporary politics, the article analyses the work on one of the most conspicuous political myths of our time: the clash of civilizations. By reconstructing the mechanisms through which this myth works, the article shows how a paradigm that has been strongly criticized as too simplistic and scientifically inadequate could have turned into a successful political myth, i.e. into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (shrink)

Considérée comme le seul pays « émergent » de son continent, l' Afrique du Sud est le produit d'une histoire tourmentée, sortie du système de l'apartheid pour devenir un État démocratique et multiracial au début des années 1990. Si la constitution prône une diversité culturelle et linguistique, reflet de sa population, l'Afrique du Sud s'intéresse plus à l'institution de la Francophonie, pour les avantages que son commerce et sa diplomatie en Afrique francophone peuvent en tirer, que pour l'usage de la (...) langue française surtout pratiquée par une communauté africaine francophone récemment implantée.South Africa is considered as the sole emerging country on its continent and has undergone a very difficult history. Following the end of the apartheid system, South Africa was transformed into a multiracial and democratic state in the nineties. The South African constitution now endorses linguistic and cultural diversity which mirrors its population. Francophony as an institution is of major interest for South Africa more to support its proactive trade and diplomacy in the Francophone area than to help develop the French language which is mainly spoken by a recently settled Francophone African community. (shrink)

For this special issue dedicated to Jonathan Glover, Peter Singer was asked to reflect on the influence that the book Causing Death and Saving Lives had on him, as well as the Glover seminar in Oxford that Peter Singer attended in the late 1960s. One of Peter Singer's recurring arguments is the criticism of the traditional distinction between acts and omissions. But Glover is no stranger to this questioning, even if the two thinkers do not seem to want to draw (...) exactly the same conclusions. What is at stake is this: what are we really responsible for and how demanding should our morality be? (shrink)

La médiation familiale existe en France depuis un peu moins de vingt ans et elle a obtenu, en 2002, une reconnaissance officielle sous la forme de la création d’un diplôme décerné par l’État. Cet article analyse le succès de la médiation et la place qu’elle occupe aujourd’hui dans la régulation des affaires privées. Pour ce faire, il considère différents niveaux de changement: l’évolution de la famille, celle de l’intervention sociale, ainsi que les stratégies développées par les médiateurs. En ce qui (...) concerne la famille et les ruptures d’union, la médiation familiale s’inscrit dans le droit fil des conceptions qui dominent actuellement. Elle se fait le promoteur de séparations négociées, permettant le maintien des relations entre l’enfant et le parent avec lequel il ne vit pas. S’agissant des transformations de l’action sociale, la médiation apparaît également comme l’expression d’un mouvement plus large : la diffusion d’une forme « douce » d’encadrement des comportements privés. En médiation, les parties sont conduites à écouter l’autre et à faire des concessions. Le dispositif lui-même est porteur d’une normativité forte. Le succès de la médiation ne s’explique cependant que si l’on prend en considération le troisième niveau, l’action des médiateurs : renforcement de la formation, obtention de soutiens sans faille dans la société civile et l’État, et détermination dans la volonté de créer une profession. L’auteur s’interroge sur les raisons qui sont à la base de cette détermination et évoque les questions qui se posent aujourd’hui aux médiateurs. (shrink)

La réception de la théologie politique de Johann Baptist Metz est un fait d’interprétation. Cette contribution présente tout d’abord la périodisation, apparue dans les années 1980, de l’oeuvre de Metz en trois phases: la période de la théologie transcendantale; la première phase de la théologie politique ainsi que sa deuxième phase. Décrire deux phases de la théologie politique délimitées par la formulation de la thèse centrale de l’oeuvre de Metz, selon laquelle la foi est mémoire de la souffrance de l’humanité, (...) permet de mettre en lumière la signification et les enjeux de la théologie politique. La deuxième partie de l’article s’intéresse à un aspect encore sujet à discussions de la réception de l’oeuvre de Metz: en réponse au refus postmoderne des grands récits, Metz et ses disciples présentent la théologie politique comme une théologie négative. Cependant, une telle réponse peut-elle être séparée d’autres affirmations déterminantes pour la théologie politique, en particulier celle selon laquelle le temps a une fin? (shrink)

The current SARS-CoV-2 crisis raises questions about the challenges faced by nation states and international organisations in offering a coordinated international response to the pandemic, and reveals the great vulnerability of European countries, which are implementing lockdown measures and imposing restrictions on international travel, for the most part on a unilateral basis. Such measures run counter to the prevailing approach of the previous two centuries that developed an international public health space. This article examines the measures adopted by European states (...) in order to contain 19th-century cholera pandemics, which took shape through the development of an international maritime quarantine system, based primarily on the implementation of national regulations and local decision-making. This regime was quickly viewed as ineffective and out of step with liberal ideas that urged a “laissez-faire” approach to public health matters. In its stead, a long-term trend developed towards easing quarantine measures. Nation states supported the internationalisation of the fight against pandemics, which chiefly consisted of externalising quarantine measures to the East in order to eliminate them in Europe. This process was based on a subtle dialectical relationship between the construction of an international public health space and the affirmation of state sovereignty, and continued into the 20th century with the progressive creation of international institutions responsible for advancing global health. (shrink)

The current SARS-CoV-2 crisis raises questions about the challenges faced by nation states and international organisations in offering a coordinated international response to the pandemic, and reveals the great vulnerability of European countries, which are implementing lockdown measures and imposing restrictions on international travel, for the most part on a unilateral basis. Such measures run counter to the prevailing approach of the previous two centuries that developed an international public health space. This article examines the measures adopted by European states (...) in order to contain 19th-century cholera pandemics, which took shape through the development of an international maritime quarantine system, based primarily on the implementation of national regulations and local decision-making. This regime was quickly viewed as ineffective and out of step with liberal ideas that urged a “laissez-faire” approach to public health matters. In its stead, a long-term trend developed towards easing quarantine measures. Nation states supported the internationalisation of the fight against pandemics, which chiefly consisted of externalising quarantine measures to the East in order to eliminate them in Europe. This process was based on a subtle dialectical relationship between the construction of an international public health space and the affirmation of state sovereignty, and continued into the 20th century with the progressive creation of international institutions responsible for advancing global health. (shrink)

Perception represents colours inexactly. This inexactness results from phenomenally manifest noise, and results in apparent violations of the transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability. Whether these violations are genuine depends on what is meant by 'transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability'.

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)

La théologie de Karl Rahner mérite-t-elle le label de «classique»? Pour instruire le débat, l’article présente quatre dissertations doctorales récentes , ainsi qu’un ouvrage collectif, consacrés à l’oeuvre de Rahner. Nature et grâce, christologie et triadologie, théologie et anthropologie, athéisme et sciences naturelles, expérience et subjectivité, épistémologie et apologétique: les thèmes abordés par ces études témoignent de la diversité des questions traitées par le corpus rahnérien. De cet examen, trois lignes de force caractéristiques du style de cette théologie peuvent être (...) dégagées: modestie du langage théologique, rigueur des critères de validation, audace spéculative et systématique. En contrepoint critique, trois questions peuvent légitimement être avancées concernant l’universalité du langage employé et de l’expérience décrite, la fidélité au mystère et les points aveugles du système. Il y a fort à parier que l’avenir confirme le diagnostic qui s’impose à l’issue de cette étude, à savoir qu’il convient de considérer Rahner comme un classique de la discipline théologique pour avoir proposé, en un moment critique de son histoire, une voie de renouvellement tout à la fois grandiose et contestable. (shrink)

This paper expands on the discussion in the first section of 'Beyond phenomenal naivete'. Let Phenomenal Naivete be understood as the doctrine that some phenomenal characters of veridical experiences are factive properties concerning the external world. Here I present in detail a phenomenological case for Phenomenal Naivete and an argument from hallucination against it. I believe that these arguments show the concept of phenomenal character to be defective, overdetermined by its metaphysical and epistemological commitments together with the world. This does (...) not establish a gappish eliminativism, but a gluttish pluralism, on which there are many imperfect deservers of the name 'phenomenal character'. Different projects in the philosophy of mind -- phenomenology, philosophy of conscious, metaphysics and epistemology of perception -- are concerned with different deservers of the name. (shrink)

‘Egalitarian' views of consciousness treat my stream of consciousness and yours as on a par ontologically. A range of worries about Chalmers's philosophical system are traced to a background presupposition of egalitarianism: Chalmers is apparently committed to ‘soul pellets'; the ‘phenomenal properties' at the core of the system are obscure; a ‘vertiginous question' about my identity is raised but not adequately answered; the theory of phenomenal concepts conflicts with the ‘transparency of experience'; the epistemology of other minds verges very close (...) to a priori physicalism; the system predicts that dualism is alluring, when it is not. (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)

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)

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)

Direct realists think that we can't get a clear view the nature of /hallucinating a white picket fence/: is it /representing a white picket fence/? is it /sensing white-picket-fencily/? is it /being acquainted with a white' picketed' sense-datum/? These are all epistemic possibilities for a single experience; hence they are all metaphysical possibilities for various experiences. Hallucination itself is a disjunctive or "multidisjunctive" category. I rebut MGF Martin's argument from statistical explanation for his "epistemic" conception of hallucination, but his view (...) embeds in my view as a "reference-fixer". (shrink)

A direct realist theory of perceptual justification. I take a ground-up approach, beginning with a theory of subjective rationality understood in terms of first-person rational explicability of the stream of consciousness. I mathematize this picture via a Tractarian spin on a semantical framework developed by Rayo. Perceptual states justify by being 'receptive': rationally inexplicable intentional states encoded in sentences that are analytic. Direct realists working within this framework should say that when one is taken in by hallucination one's overall picture (...) of the world is incoherent; in this sense, a belief based on delusive hallucination can be provided with exculpation but not with justification. (shrink)

The infinite pigeonhole principle for 2-partitions asserts the existence, for every set A, of an infinite subset of A or of its complement. In this paper, we study the infinite pigeonhole pr...

This paper analyses the threat of Jihadism to modern democracies through the lens of René Girard’s mimetic theory. The study’s main contention is that terrorism is caused not only by resentment and nihilism but is also symptomatic of the contemporary malfunction of Religion when deprived of its sacrificial safeguards. Eventually, this paper aims to deduce the requisites for safeguarding democracy and the foundation of a new interfaith dialogue.

I argue on linguistic grounds that when Mary comes to know what it's like to see a red thing, she comes to know a certain inexpressible truth about the character of her own experience. This affords a "no concept" reply to the knowledge argument. The reason the Knowledge Argument has proven so intractable may be that we believe that an inexpressible concept and an expressible concept cannot have the same referent.

I argue against such "Relation Intentionalist" theories of consciousness as the higher-order thought and inner sense views on the grounds that they understand a subject's awareness of his or her phenomenal characters to be intentional, like seeming-seeing, rather than "direct", like seeing. The trouble with such views is that they reverse the order of explanation between phenomenal character and intentional awareness. A superior theory of consciousness, based on views expressed by Russell and Price, takes the relation of awareness to be (...) a nonintentional "acquaintance". (shrink)

Dans une note de son ouvrage consacré à Henry, P. Audi affirme qu’« il n’y a pas de philosophie de l’histoire à proprement parler chez Henry ». Nous ambitionnons de rappeler ici que Henry a néanmoins donné un contenu au concept d’histoire et posé les conditions épistémologiques pour construire une phénoménologie radicale de l’histoire. Cette thématique, il est vrai, est généralement ignorée de la littérature secondaire. À son corps défendant, on est obligé de reconnaître que la question de l’...

I discuss the meaning of 'There's something e is like', in the context of a reply to Eric Lormand's 'The explanatory stopgap'. I argue that Lormand is wrong to think it has a specially perceptual meaning. Rather, it has one of at least four candidate meanings: e is some way as regards its subject; e is some way and e's being that way is in the possession of its subject; e is some way in the awareness of its subject; e's (...) subject is the "experiencer" of e. I provide additional argumentation for the view in this paper that in the context, 'like this' functions as a predicate variable. (shrink)

This article shows how, starting from Schelling and Henry, one can build a radical critique of objectification and subjectification within humanities. This critique opens the way for the construction of a point of view of immanence, which is characterized by the experimentation of a constitution of affects in a process from which proceeds the subjectivity. This point of view of immanence questions the accepted attitudes in the production of social relationships and the norms that govern them, so as to increase (...) the attention to the vulnerability of these processes and their power to transform the affects. (shrink)