La 4e de couv. indique : "La destinée d'Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi est unique. Cette philosophe, psychanalyste et intellectuelle juive a longtemps fait figure d'héroïne occultée d'une époque qu'elle a pourtant marquée de ses batailles avec ténacité, générosité et constance. Le cours de sa vie et ses engagements audacieux ont conditionné son œuvre et accompagné les soubresauts d'un XXe siècle fécond entre désespoir et espérances. Née en Provence au lendemain du Premier Conflit mondial dans une famille de Juifs séfarades (...) assimilés, elle subit la Shoah de plein fouet avant de céder au chant des sirènes du jeune Israël. Cet essai rend justice à la mémoire d'une femme libre et engagée, philosophe et psychanalyste, dont l'œuvre pluridisciplinaire mérite admiration et reconnaissance.". (shrink)

Paris is firing all its ammunition into the August night. Against a vast backdrop of water and stone, on both sides of a river awash with history, freedom's barricades are once again being erected. Once again justice must be redeemed with men's blood.Albert Camus wrote these words in August 1944, as Paris was being liberated from German occupation. Although best known for his novels including The Stranger and The Plague, it was his vivid descriptions of the horrors of the occupation (...) and his passionate defense of freedom that in fact launched his public fame. Now, for the first time in English, Camus at 'Combat' presents all of Camus' World War II resistance and early postwar writings published in Combat, the resistance newspaper where he served as editor-in-chief and editorial writer between 1944 and 1947. These 165 articles and editorials show how Camus' thinking evolved from support of a revolutionary transformation of postwar society to a wariness of the radical left alongside his longstanding strident opposition to the reactionary right. These are poignant depictions of issues ranging from the liberation, deportation, justice for collaborators, the return of POWs, and food and housing shortages, to the postwar role of international institutions, colonial injustices, and the situation of a free press in democracies. The ideas that shaped the vision of this Nobel-prize winning novelist and essayist are on abundant display. More than fifty years after the publication of these writings, they have lost none of their force. They still speak to us about freedom, justice, truth, and democracy. (shrink)

This book offers even more than its title promises. Embarrassed with my translation of échec, I emphasize that its authors not only reflect on "Man and Failure," but design a vast anthropological fresco by approaching their topic from psychological, economical, medical, religious and philosophical points of view. Jean Lacroix published a book on Failure some years ago; in 1968 he asked thirteen outstanding French writing personalities for contributions to an interdisciplinary study on the same issue. The result is a remarkable (...) collection of insights into this basic experience in human life. Joseph Nuttin, professor in experimental psychology, presents his most recent researches on the transformation of a person's needs and energies into a "project" of life. Failure, the unsuccess of such a project, gives cognitive information useful for subsequent conduct. Raymond Carpentier sees failure in the area of communication: it reveals the ambiguity of any information. On the level of consciousness, he writes, reality only exists in so far as its own failure is contained in its very structure. "Ambiguous like life itself, communication is what has reality only when it does not succeed in its materializations." François Perroux, economist, both calmly and alarmingly sketches the perhaps imminent failure of our economic system. Three other articles deal with ethnological and medical problems. The philosopher and psychoanalyst Mrs. Eliane Amado Lévy-Valenski, author of L'humanisme psychanalytique, le mythe grec et la phénoménologie biblique, pursues her threefold investigation: "Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology or Ontology of Failure?" To fail in one's efforts is both a trial and a temptation, but it also points toward the emergence of infinity within finitude. The three religious contributions give the most personal penetration of the subject. They are the center of the book. The last section deals with three philosophies: the failing thought of Being, the critique of humanism, the restoration of motivations in action. The first of them is due to Rouven Gilead, professor at the University of Tel-Aviv and author of one of the best books on Heidegger. His paper suggests what radical Failure would mean: not of man, nor of given historical situations, nor even of metaphysics, although these three approaches are true. But the "truth of Being" in modern subjectivity, in sciences and in philosophy remains hidden. Our horizon of thought is the nihilism of Being. The fundamental Failure, then, is the history of Being itself.--R. S. (shrink)

Natalie Z. Davis est une historienne bien connue pour ses recherches sur la France moderne (Les Cultures du peuple, rituels, savoirs et résistances au XVIe siècle, Aubier, 1979 ; Le Retour de Martin Guerre, Laffont, 1982 ; Pour sauver sa vie, Seuil, 1988) et son intérêt pour les femmes de cette époque (elle a notamment co-dirigé le volume 3 de l'Histoire des femmes, Plon, 1991). Quittant ici la Renaissance française sur laquelle ont porté l'essentiel de ses travaux, elle entre plus (...) ava... (shrink)

Natalie Z. Davis est une historienne bien connue pour ses recherches sur la France moderne (Les Cultures du peuple, rituels, savoirs et résistances au XVIe siècle, Aubier, 1979 ; Le Retour de Martin Guerre, Laffont, 1982 ; Pour sauver sa vie, Seuil, 1988) et son intérêt pour les femmes de cette époque (elle a notamment co-dirigé le volume 3 de l'Histoire des femmes, Plon, 1991). Quittant ici la Renaissance française sur laquelle ont porté l'essentiel de ses travaux, elle entre plus (...) ava... (shrink)

Neuroscience has dramatically increased understanding of how mental states and processes are realized by the brain, thus opening doors for treating the multitude of ways in which minds become dysfunctional. This book explores questions such as when is it permissible to alter a person's memories, influence personality traits or read minds? What can neuroscience tell us about free will, self-control, self-deception and the foundations of morality? The view of neuroethics offered here argues that many of our new powers to read (...) ,alter and control minds are not entirely unparalleled with older ones. They have, however, expanded to include almost all our social, political and ethical decisions. Written primarily for graduate students, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the more philosophical and ethical aspects of the neurosciences. (shrink)

Consciousness, or its lack, is often invoked in debates in applied and normative ethics. Conscious beings are typically held to be significantly more morally valuable than non-consious, so that establishing whether a being is conscious becomes of critical importance. In this paper, I argue that the supposition that phenomenal consciousness explains the value of our experiences or our lives, and the moral value of beings who are conscious, is less well-grounded than is commonly thought. A great deal of what matters (...) to us and about us can be explained by functional and representational properties that may not be sufficient for phenomenal consciousness. I conclude with some reflections on how these claims might affect debates in ethics. (shrink)

Following the evolution of Soviet social psychology is rewarding not only in itself but also for the light it throws on current events and trends in contemporary Soviet philosophy in general.

A number of philosophers have recently argued that agents need not be conscious of the reasons for which they act or the moral significance of their actions in order to be morally responsible for them. In this paper, I identify a kind of awareness that, I claim, agents must have in order to be responsible for their actions. I argue that conscious information processing differs from unconscious in a manner that makes the following two claims true: (1) an agent’s values (...) ought to be identified with attitudes of which she is conscious, because having a value entails having a set of dispositions produced by conscious attitudes alone, and (2) that only actions settled upon by conscious deliberation are deeply attributable to agents, because only such actions express the agent’s evaluative stance. (shrink)

De quelqu'un qui supporte la douleur avec courage, on dit qu'il fait preuve de stoïcisme. Un bon vivant est souvent qualifié d'épicurien, et notre époque se voit parfois reprocher son scepticisme. Le langage courant conserve ainsi comme un écho lointain et déformé des doctrines philosophiques hellénistiques, celles apparues après qu'Alexandre eut imposé son pouvoir à une grande partie du monde. Longtemps ces systèmes, dont l'influence sur la pensée philosophique et religieuse de l'Occident fut en réalité immense, ont été considérés comme (...) le parent pauvre de la philosophie ancienne, parce que l'injustice de la transmission des œuvres du passé a fait que nous ne possédons que des témoignages lacunaires ou tardifs. Mais dans ces dernières décennies le scepticisme, l'épicurisme et le stoïcisme ont suscité un vif intérêt, qui s'est traduit par la publication d'un grand nombre d'éditions et de recherches. Il n'est pas excessif de dire que l'image de la philosophie hellénistique en a été ainsi considérablement renouvelée. Cet ouvrage a pour finalité de présenter le plus clairement possible des doctrines que l'on aurait pu croire réservées à quelques spécialistes et qui, au fur et à mesure que nous les connaissons mieux, apparaissent de plus en plus proches des inquiétudes et des espoirs des hommes de notre temps. (shrink)

This brief paper sketches the main theses of my recent book Bad Beliefs. The book defends the view that human cognition is more evidence responsive than most psychologists and naturalistic philosophers think. In particular, we are responsive to the abundant higher-order evidence that we encounter in experiments and in everyday life.

The claim that addiction is a brain disease is almost universally accepted among scientists who work on addiction. The claim’s attraction rests on two grounds: the fact that addiction seems to be characterized by dysfunction in specific neural pathways and the fact that the claim seems to the compassionate response to people who are suffering. I argue that neural dysfunction is not sufficient for disease: something is a brain disease only when neural dysfunction is sufficient for impairment. I claim that (...) the neural dysfunction that is characteristic of addiction is not sufficient for impairment, because people who suffer from that dysfunction are impaired, sufficiently to count as diseased, only given certain features of their context. Hence addiction is not a brain disease (though it is often a disease, and it may always involve brain dysfunction). I argue that accepting that addiction is not a brain disease does not entail a moralizing attitude toward people who suffer as a result of addiction; if anything, it allows for a more compassionate, and more effective, response to addiction. (shrink)

Most people believe that we have a duty to gather evidence on both sides of central moral and political controversies, in order to fulfil our epistemic responsibilities and come to hold justified cognitive attitudes on these matters. I argue, on the contrary, that to the extent to which these controversies require special expertise, we have no such duty. We are far more likely to worsen than to improve our epistemic situation by becoming better informed on these questions. I suggest we (...) do better to embrace the views of experts who are also morally wise. I argue that this is likely to lead to more accurate beliefs about these political and moral controversies; in any case, it will avoid the incoherence and irrationality which are the likely consequence of open-minded evidence gathering. (shrink)

Theories of self-deception divide into those that hold that the state is characterized by some kind of synchronic tension or conflict between propositional attitudes and those that deny this. Proponents of the latter like Al Mele claim that their theories are more parsimonious, because they do not require us to postulate any psychological mechanisms beyond those which have been independently verified. But if we can show that there are real cases of motivated believing which are characterized by conflicting propositional attitudes, (...) however, the parsimony argument against incongruent mental state accounts is undermined. I argue that anosognosia presents us with a real-life example of motivated belief together with (sub)-doxastic conflict. (shrink)

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

This book offers an original account of the history of liberal thought, one grounded in an institutional history of medieval pluralism and the early modern rationalizing state, and explores the deep tensions that liberal political thought rests upon.

This chapter contributes to the ongoing debate over how to understand attention. It spells out and defends a novel account according to which attending is the most general type of mental act, that which one performs on some object if one performs any mental act on it at all. On this view, all mental acts are (to a first, rough approximation) species of attending. The view is novel in going against the grain of virtually all extant accounts, which work by (...) identifying the purported unique functional role of attention. It is inspired by Timothy Williamson’s account of knowledge as the most general factive mental state (Williamson, 2001: ch. 1). -/- Beyond the Williamsonian thin explanation of knowledge, the account of attention as the most general mental act is animated by two striking pre-theoretical features of attention, dubbed ubiquity and heterogeneity. The hope of accommodating these twin features seems to drive at least two other extant accounts of attention, very different from the one proposed here, offered by Mole and Wu, respectively. However, as the chapter explains, both Mole’s and Wu’s accounts fall short, leaving room for the novel account defended here, which does adequately capture both features. (shrink)

Analogies to machines are commonplace in the life sciences, especially in cellular and molecular biology — they shape conceptions of phenomena and expectations about how they are to be explained. This paper offers a framework for thinking about such analogies. The guiding idea is that machine-like systems are especially amenable to decompositional explanation, i.e., to analyses that tease apart underlying components and attend to their structural features and interrelations. I argue that for decomposition to succeed a system must exhibit causal (...) orderliness, which I explicate in terms of differentiation among parts and the significance of local relations. I also discuss what makes a model depict its target as machine-like, suggesting that a key issue is the degree of detail with respect to the target’s parts and their interrelations. (shrink)

Moral judgments entail or consist in claims that certain ways of behaving are called for. These actions have expectable consequences. I will argue that these consequences are suspiciously benign: on controversial issues, each side assesses these consequences, measured in dispute-independent goods, as significantly better than the consequences of behaving in the ways their opponents recommend. This remains the case even when we have not formed our moral judgment by assessing consequences. I will suggest that the evidence indicates that our perception (...) of the consequences of acting as recommended by our moral judgments is motivated, such that the warrant of such assessments is lower than we might have thought. The suspicion correlation between our moral judgments and our assessments of the implicated facts provides higher-order evidence that should lead us to reduce our confidence in these assessments. (shrink)

Imagery is one of the new, exciting frontiers in cognitive therapy. From the outset of cognitive therapy, its founder Dr. Aaron T. Beck recognised the importance of imagery in the understanding and treatment of patient's problems. However, despite Beck's prescience, clinical research on imagery, and the integration of imagery interventions into clinical practice, developed slowly. It is only in the past 10 years that most writing and research on imagery in cognitive therapy has been conducted. The Oxford Guide to Imagery (...) in Cognitive Therapy is a landmark book, which will play an important role in the next phase of cognitive therapy's development. Clinicians and researchers are starting to recognise the centrality of imagery in the development, maintenance and treatment of psychological disorders - for example, in social phobia, agoraphobia, depression, PTSD, eating disorders, childhood trauma, and personality disorder. In the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, researchers are identifying the key role that imagery plays in emotion, cognition and psychopathology.The Oxford Guide to Imagery in Cognitive Therapy has been written both for clinicians and researchers. For clinicians, it is a user-friendly, practical guide to imagery, which will enable therapists to understand imagery phenomenology, and to integrate imagery-based interventions into their cognitive therapy practice. For researchers, it provides a state-of-the-art summary of imagery research, and points the way to future studies. Written by three well-respected CBT researcher-clinicians, it is essential reading for all cognitive therapists, who have recognised the limitations of purely 'verbal' CBT techniques, and want to find new ways to work with clients with psychological disorders. Readership: CBT therapists. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the role of temporal scarcity and language in reform. These are linked because language lies at the foundation of Smith’s account of a society in which the scarcity of time prevents us from being friends with more than a small number of people. When friendship-linked benevolence fails, we persuade and exchange. The scarcity of one’s life is, we argue, foundational for Smith. He brings this consideration to bear at the centre of his thoughts on reforming the (...) state when he argues that we have time to develop affection for our systems of thought but not for the people described by these systems. Smith’s account, in which habitual sympathy motivates, allows him to describe an affection for systems built in language. Affection gives motivational power to a system but it also presents a great danger. We may care about a system far more than the people described in the system. The central challenge for Smith is that of combining the motivational power of system without succumbing to the temptation to use a system to justify breaking our fellow humans. The exceptions he allows to his own system of natural liberal offer evidence that he did not exempt his own system of reform from the constraint of individual happiness. (shrink)

Recent discourses about the legitimacy of homeopathy have focused on its scientific plausibility, mechanism of action, and evidence base. These, frequently, conclude not only that homeopathy is scientifically baseless, but that it is “unethical.” They have also diminished patients’ perspectives, values, and preferences. We contend that these critics confuse epistemic questions with questions of ethics, misconstrue the moral status of homeopaths, and have an impoverished idea of ethics—one that fails to account either for the moral worth of care and of (...) relationships or for the perspectives, values, and preferences of patients. Utilitarian critics, in particular, endeavour to present an objective evaluation—a type of moral calculus—quantifying the utilities and disutilities of homeopathy as a justification for the exclusion of homeopathy from research and health care. But these critiques are built upon a narrow formulation of evidence and care and a diminished episteme that excludes the values and preferences of researchers, homeopaths, and patients engaged in the practice of homeopathy. We suggest that homeopathy is ethical as it fulfils the needs and expectations of many patients; may be practiced safely and prudentially; values care and the virtues of the therapeutic relationship; and provides important benefits for patients. (shrink)