A large body of experience and expertise on the implementation of sustainable public school food procurement policies has developed in recent years. However, there has been little investigation of the values and motivations of the public officials implementing the policies. To address this gap, we examine how the city of Avignon took a step toward transition to local fresh food procurement for public schools, under French government calls for sustainable food products in public canteens. Our analysis combines the Multi-Level Perspective (...) on sustainable transitions with the Public Service Motivation construct. Unlike other studies addressing the MLP at a macro level, we focus on individual motivations behind public action. We demonstrate that staff motivations have a major impact on how policies supporting transition to local fresh food procurement for public schools are implemented. These public officials’ approach to food shows concern for the public interest regardless of financial return. It is not the rational choice that primarily drives the implementation of urban food policies, but normative conformity and affective bonding. Interestingly, we conclude that the success of Avignon’s politically-driven school food procurement policy is essentially due to the catering and procurement staff who overcame the barriers to its implementation. (shrink)

The years immediately after the final downfall of Napoleon Bonaparte could easily have been years of anti-climax in French science. In 1815, after two decades of undoubted greatness, the time, I feel, was ripe for decline. And decline might well have occurred if the traditions and the style of science as practised in France in the period of Napoleon's rule had been carried on unchanged by the disciples of the two great men who had dominated work in the physical sciences (...) for so many years. These men, of course, were the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet and the mathematician and physicist Pierre Simon Laplace. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay argues for the emergence of a cultural and epistemological divide between amateur savants and members of the Royal Academy of the Sciences in late Old Regime and revolutionary France and suggests that the amateur ideal rose in significance even as intellectual activity came to be increasingly centralized in the postrevolutionary era. At the crux of the tensions between the amateur ideal and the professionalizing reality in the immediate postrevolutionary period stood Aubin-Louis Millin and his journal, the Magasin (...) Encyclopédique. The essay examines, in particular, the revival in the pages of the Magasin Encyclopédique of interest in Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the seventeenth-century icon of an amateur ideal in which investigations in the natural sciences and scholarship were private, decentralized, often provincial activities. Although the sciences in the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras were often perceived as forward looking and dismissive of the past, this essay finds that a sentimental and nostalgic attachment to the past—to a myth of Peiresc—continued to play an important role in the identity of postrevolutionary men of letters. (shrink)

Peut-on interpréter le Cratyle sans recourir aux développements du Théétète et du Sophiste sur la proposition verbale ? L'exigence analytique, présentée pour la première fois par G. Ryle, autorise à examiner la prétention soit des noms, soit de leurs éléments phonétiques à jouer le rôle de « signifiants » authentiques. Could we give an interpretation of Cratylus without looking at the later dialogues (Theaetetus and Sophist) which carry Plato on to the concept of verbal proposition ? The requirements of analytical (...) philosophers (first, G. Ryle) lead us to examine the claim of the word or of its phonetic elements as genuine « significantes ». (shrink)

Taking the problem of perception and illusion as a leading clue, this article presents a new phenomenological approach to perception and the world: holism of experience. It challenges not only Husserl’s transcendentalism, but also what remains of it in Heidegger’s early thought, on the grounds that it is committed to the skeptical inference: Since we can always doubt any perception, we can always doubt perception as a whole. The rejection of such an implicit inference leads to a relational paradigm of (...) Being-in-the-World that differs from Heidegger’s on many points. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy, from Kant through Bergson and Husserl to Heidegger, has assumed that time must be conceived as a fundamental determination of the subject: Time is not first in things but arises from actions, attitudes, or comportments through which a subject temporalizes mtime, expecting or remembering, anticipating the future or making a decision. Event and Time traces the genesis of this thesis through detailed, rigorous analyses of the philosophy of time in Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, ultimately showing that, in the (...) development of metaphysics, the understanding of the temporal phenomenon as an inner-temporal phenomenon has made possible time's subjectivization. The book goes on to argue that time is in fact not thinkable according to metaphysical subjectivity. Instead, the guiding thread for the analysis of time must shift to the eventual hermeneutics of the human being, first developed in Event and World, and now deepened and completed in Event and Time. Romano's diptych makes a compelling, rigorous, and original philosophical contribution to the thinking of the event. (shrink)

In many species of reptiles, sex is determined at fertilization by zygotic sex chromosome composition. In other species, including all crocodilians, most turtles and some lizards, sex is determined by temperature during the earlier stages of gonadal differentiation. The effects of exogenous estrogens, antiestrogens and aromatase inhibitors at different temperatures have unambiguously demonstrated the involvement of estrogens in sexual differentiation of the gonads. Aromatase is the enzyme that converts androgens to estrogens. Gonadal aromatase activity is well correlated with gonadal structure. (...) It increases exponentially in differentiating ovaries, whereas it remains low in differentiating testes. Moreover, there is a high correlation between the thermosensitive periods for both ovary differentiation and increase in aromatase activity. We suggest that a thermosensitive factor intervenes, directly or indirectly, in the transcriptional regulation of the aromatase gene in reptiles with temperature‐dependent sex determination. (shrink)

Samotność i tajemnica. Prolegomena do fenomenologii ludzkiej więzi (tłum. Marek Drwięga).

Il n’y a pas de question plus urgente, pour la phénoménologie, que la question du « corps propre », comme il est convenu de l’appeler depuis Husserl. Mais il n’y a pas non plus de question qui ait été davantage négligée par les phénoménologues contemporains. À première vue, cette affirmation se heurte à l’évidence d’une production littéraire quasi exponentielle autour de cette notion depuis plus d’une trentaine d’années, aussi bien en histoire de la philosophie que dans des travaux qui se (...) sont efforcés de croiser la perspective phénoménologique avec les apports des sciences du cerveau et de la cognition. L’ennui est que cette ample littérature ne pose aucune des questions préjudicielles à l’adoption du concept de corps propre ou de chair ( Leib ) en phénoménologie ; pour l’essentiel, elle fait comme si ce concept allait de soi et se borne à se demander de quelle manière il pourrait « féconder » des approches scientifiques plus positives. La légitimité du concept même de Leib et de ses prolongements à l’intérieur du courant phénoménologique n’y est jamais questionnée en tant que telle. Non seulement on ne se demande pas si les descriptions de cette « chair » au fil conducteur de l’expérience du toucher redoublé est tenable, mais on ne soulève même pas la question de savoir si l’adoption de ce concept chez Husserl et ses successeurs n’est pas conditionnée par des présupposés discutables et, en vérité, par tout un cadre théorique, de sorte que la mise en question de certains aspects centraux de ce cadre devrait conduire inévitablement à une révision en profondeur de ce concept. C’est cette question que nous voudrions aborder dans ces pages. Compte-tenu de l’ampleur du sujet, notre but sera uniquement d’indiquer un certain nombre de directions que pourrait – ou devrait – emprunter la réflexion. (shrink)

Le moins que l’on puisse dire est que la question de la surprise (Überraschung) ne paraît pas revêtir un statut central dans le chef d’œuvre philosophique de Heidegger, puisque ce mot même y est absent et qu’on n’y découvre, en tout et pour tout, que deux uniques occurrences de deux de ses dérivés : Überraschtwerden [être surpris] et Überraschende [surprenant], présents dans deux phrases de la page 355. Le passage où ils interviennent est le suivant : Umgekehrt gründet die Möglichkeit (...) des Übe... (shrink)

»Als dies geschrieben wurde, war das Verständnis für Fichtes Bedeutung noch geringer als heute. Ganz allmählich bricht sich die Einsicht Bahn, wieviel von diesem großen Denker gerade für die Transzendentalphilosophie zu lernen ist., S. 95.«.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that aesthetics had its place in Fichte’s early system of the WL, and that due to contingent circumstances he did not have the chance to expound it. But we can reconstruct the main lines of what his aesthetics would have looked like if we pay attention to the article sent to Schiller in 1795 on the “spirit” and the “letter” in philosophy, completing it with the courses he gave in the preceding months (...) on that topic and with other sources. We discover not only that aesthetics is an important part of the philosophical system but that art stands close the act of philosophising itself. In fact, both the philosopher and the artist draw from the same original source: “spirit” as defined in Kant’s third Critique. For the philosopher as well as for the artist the central faculty is then “imagination”, an imagination that relies on “feeling”. In the end Fichte sketches an aesthetics based on the creative genius of the artist, leaving little room for the faculty of judgment and for taste, that is: the receptive attitude toward beauty, that play a prominent role in Kant’s aesthetics. (shrink)