Tribute to Jean-Yves Jaffray by the French Group of Decision Theory.

We argue, in the spirit of some of Jean-Yves Jaffray’s work, that explicitly incorporating the information, however imprecise, available to the decision maker is relevant, feasible, and fruitful. In particular, we show that it can lead us to know whether the decision maker has wrong beliefs and whether it matters or not, that it makes it possible to better model and analyze how the decision maker takes into account new information, even when this information is not an event and finally (...) that it is crucial when attempting to identify and measure the decision maker’s attitude toward imprecise information. (shrink)

A fast growing family of ATPases has recently been highlighted. It was named the AAA family, for ATPases Associated to a variety of cellular Activities. The key feature of the family is a highly conserved module of 230 amino acids present in one or two copies in each protein. Despite extensive sequence conservation, the members of the family fulfil a large diversity of cellular functions: cell cycle regulation, gene expression in yeast and HIV, vesicle‐mediated transport, peroxisome assembly, 26S protease function (...) etc. In addition, several members of this family can be found in the same organism (up to 17 in S. cerevisiae). The contrast between functional diversity and structural conservation of the module, from archaebacteria to mammals, suggests that it plays an essential, but as yet unknown, role at key points of the cellular machinery. Two (non‐exclusive) such possibilities are: (1) ATP‐dependent proteasome function and (2) ATP‐dependent anchorage of proteins. Finally, the basic biochemical activity of the AAA module is still a matter of speculation, and we propose that it acts as an ATP‐dependent protein clamp. (shrink)

Neuroethics is an interdisciplinary field that arose in response to novel ethical challenges posed by advances in neuroscience. Historically, neuroethics has provided an opportunity to synergize different disciplines, notably proposing a two-way dialogue between an ‘ethics of neuroscience’ and a ‘neuroscience of ethics’. However, questions surface as to whether a ‘neuroscience of ethics’ is a useful and unified branch of research and whether it can actually inform or lead to theoretical insights and transferable practical knowledge to help resolve ethical questions. (...) In this article, we examine why the neuroscience of ethics is a promising area of research and summarize what we have learned so far regarding its most promising goals and contributions. We then review some of the key methodological challenges which may have hindered the use of results generated thus far by the neuroscience of ethics. Strategies are suggested to address these challenges and improve the quality of research and increase neuroscience's usefulness for applied ethics and society at large. Finally, we reflect on potential outcomes of a neuroscience of ethics and discuss the different strategies that could be used to support knowledge transfer to help different stakeholders integrate knowledge from the neuroscience of ethics. (shrink)

The punishment of social misconduct is a powerful mechanism for stabilizing high levels of cooperation among unrelated individuals. It is regularly assumed that humans have a universal disposition to punish social norm violators, which is sometimes labelled “universal structure of human morality” or “pure aversion to social betrayal”. Here we present evidence that, contrary to this hypothesis, the propensity to punish a moral norm violator varies among participants with different career trajectories. In anonymous real-life conditions, future teachers punished a talented (...) but immoral young violinist: they voted against her in an important music competition when they had been informed of her previous blatant misconduct toward fellow violin students. In contrast, future police officers and high school students did not punish. This variation among socio-professional categories indicates that the punishment of norm violators is not entirely explained by an aversion to social betrayal. We suggest that context specificity plays an important role in normative behaviour; people seem inclined to enforce social norms only in situations that are familiar, relevant for their social category, and possibly strategically advantageous. (shrink)

French end-of-life law aims at protecting patients from unreasonable treatments, but has been used to force caregivers to prolong treatments deemed unreasonable. We describe six cases (five intensi...

I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, t consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, (...) and find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies.[…]Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions. What, therefore, would be proper to a relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions. That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted "above" society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in a society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible-- and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the instransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence.[…]In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric, and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings which make visible those fundamental phenomena of "domination" which are present in a large number of human societies.Michel Foucault has been teaching at the Collège de France since 1970. His works include Madness and Civilization , The Birth of the Clinic , Discipline and Punish , and History of Sexuality , the first volume of a projected five-volume study. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gender Ideology and the “Artistic” Fabrication of Human Sex: Nature as Norm or the Remaking of the Human?Michele M. SchumacherUntil quite recently,” the famous English novelist C. S. Lewis remarked in 1959, “it was taken for granted that the business of the artist was to delight and instruct his public”: that is to say, to address simultaneously their passions and their intellects. “There were, of course, different publics.... And (...) an artist might lead his public on to appreciate finer things than they had wanted at first; but he could do this only by being; from the first, if not merely entertaining, yet entertaining, and if not completely intelligible, yet very largely intelligible.” This constraint—let us call it intelligent (or purposeful) design, in keeping with a basic analogy that we will draw upon in these pages—had however been lost, Lewis observed. Hence, even “in the highest aesthetic circles one now hears nothing about the artist’s duty to us. It is all about our duty to him. He owes us nothing; we owe him ‘recognition,’ even though he has never paid the slightest attention to our tastes, interests, or habits.”1 In short, the artist of modernity need not pay the slightest attention to an intention, not even his own. Modern art need not be an expression of intelligence or [End Page 363] understanding; it is expression as such (tout court): personal and autonomous.2Lewis’s remarks do not point merely to the increasingly relativist tendencies of art in the Western world, to the lack of objective criteria or norms governing the artistic disciplines. They also point to the growing disregard among artists for the sociocultural expectations of their publicum. Mediating between the two is, without a doubt, the basis upon which both artistic and social norms were traditionally founded: nature, which served as a classic analogy for both art (understood in the broad sense, so as to include not only the fine arts, but also technology and practical sciences) and ethics in virtue of nature’s intrinsic inclination towards its defining end and perfection.With regard to the first of these analogies (that of art and nature), Mark Schiefsky explains that although art does bring about “results that nature itself cannot,” it does so in the classic understanding “by acting in a natural way—the way nature would act if it could generate the products of art.”3 As for the difference between the two, nature is moved to its specifying end by way of intrinsic inclinations that are implicit to it, whereas a work of art is moved to its end extrinsically, and thus with more or less violence.4 A sculptor, for example, who introduces a form into a piece of marble, does so by chiseling [End Page 364] and hammering away at the fine stone.5 “Art is,” Aristotle explains, “the principle and form of the thing that comes to be [let us say, a sculpture]; but it is located elsewhere [in, for example, the artist’s mind or in a sketch that he has made] than in that thing, whereas the movement of nature is located in the thing itself that comes to be [a tree, for example, or a baby], and is derived from another natural organism [a tree or human parents] which possessed the form in actuality.”6This classic distinction between art and nature parallels the distinction between art and ethics. Ethics “does not affect human action in the same way as do art and technique,” Servais Pinckaers explains. Unlike art and technique, which are concerned with “the external work produced by human action”—this painting or that machine, for example—ethics is concerned with an immanent principle, qualifying the actor as such: the stable dispositions (or habitus: virtues or vices) at the origin of “the active willing that is the principle source of the action.”7 This immanent principle at the source of ethical action is—to complete our analogy—creative in only a limited sense. The human person is indeed free to choose, but he or she is not free to decide “what is good or evil” as such, nor what is “good or bad for... (shrink)

Partant d’une expérience d’élu local, je présente dans ce texte quelques exemples de communs qui ont émergé dans une politique publique du numérique s’appuyant sur une dynamique contributive. Ces communs locaux permettent d’éclairer des facteurs facilitant du mouvement des communs immatériels. Avec le souci d’une attention particulière portée aux individus, du « faire avec », du « pouvoir d’agir », ces communs immatériels rejoignent d’autres dynamiques locales tels les jardins partagés, la fabrication libre. Je tenterai d’expliquer le lien étroit entre (...) coopération et communs et l’apport de la formation aux pratiques collaboratives dans le développement de communs portés par des réseaux locaux coopératifs. À un moment où nos sociétés en crise doivent trouver les chemins des transitions écologique, numérique, du travail et citoyenne, les communs locaux sont-ils un sens partagé susceptible de favoriser une transformation vers une société plus solidaire qui ouvre une place à chacun et chacune? (shrink)

Le livre de Cyril Olivier est issu de sa thèse soutenue à l’université de Poitiers en 2002. Certes, les ouvrages sur la période de Vichy sont nombreux. Plusieurs ont, ces dernières années, abordé la question de la politique familiale, du contrôle des corps par Vichy (Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Michèle Bordeaux et Marc Boninchi en France, Miranda Pollard aux États Unis, Insa Meinen en Allemagne). Mais le travail de Cyril Olivier est incontestablement novateur. Il s’inscrit, comme il le souligne en...

The essay aims at reading in the works of Daniel Bell the path of neoconservatism since its very beginning against the background of the Great Society and the rise of the black movement, the crisis of the Welfare State and the renewed centrality of the market in the global scenario of the 1970s. The objective is to show that neoconservatism is basically a politics of the limits of liberalism in front of the «continuity» of the «cultural tradition» of society: an (...) effort in many ways shared by rising neoliberalism to reestablish the order embedded in the “history” of the social fabric and in its power relations. (shrink)

Le point de départ de cet article est la question de savoir quel con­tenu donner à la prohairesis tou biou qui distingue, selon Aristote (Metaph. Γ, 2, 1004b24-25), la philosophie de la sophistique. Après avoir montré qu’il s’agit du stéréotype conjuguant la définition platonicienne du sophiste comme fabricant de simulacres et la pratique censée être propre aux sophistes, de faire payer leurs leçons, on se demande si, pourquoi et à quelles conditions la pratique et l’ensei­gnement de la philosophie par Socrate (...) et ses successeurs échappaient à cette double caractérisation. (shrink)

L’ouvrage fait partie de la collection « L’ethnographie et la culture matérielle de la Sardaigne » publiée par la maison d’édition Illisso de Nuoro. Il s’agit d’un magnifique catalogue/album illustré de photographies sur la fabrication et l’usage de ces divers « tressés » (intrecci) par des femmes et quelques hommes, accompagné de textes explicatifs avec notes et bibliographie. Les tressés de taille et de formes diverses sont considérés dans ce livre comme des œuvres d’art et présentés avec f...

The French botanist Michel Adanson spent five years in precolonial Senegal in the 1750s, under the auspices of the Compagnie des Indes. This essay follows the archival traces of Adanson’s engagement with African indigo, including experiments conducted in an ad hoc “laboratory” near the French fort of Saint Louis. A reconstruction of these experiments exposes the multifarious connections to and from the island garden-laboratory, mediated by materials and different kinds of indigo knowledge, including that of local Wolof informants. A (...) microhistory of encounters in and around a tiny island off the West African coast merges with a transatlantic story connecting Senegal to Paris and to French colonies in the Caribbean (Saint-Domingue and Guyana). The essay explores geographies of knowledge and French imperial ambitions through close attention to the material properties of indigo, the practices associated with its cultivation and transformation from plant to dye, and the material remnants of Adanson’s engagement with it in Africa. These remnants—herbarium sheets, experimental notes, color samples on paper strips, dyed fabric swatches, sketched maps, correspondence, collection catalogues, and plant taxonomies—put various kinds of African knowledge and Caribbean plantation experience into dialogue with European botany and dye chemistry. (shrink)

SUMMARYThe essay argues that Jeremy Bentham played a major role in the transitional process between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries leading to the ‘discovery' or ‘invention of society' as an order, i.e., as an autonomous object of knowledge. By comparing Bentham's discourse with those developed by select protagonists of that transition, particularly Ferguson, Sieyès, and Mirabeau, it is shown how society emerges as the logical and historical space of a set of relationships that affects both the rationalisation and the (...) practice of government. In contrast with Michel Foucault's interpretation of Bentham's role in the genealogy of neoliberalism, recently developed by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, this paper suggests that ‘the new governmental reason’ rose from within the discourse of law. Consequently, the problem of ‘constitution’ was not left behind by the epistemological change of the eighteenth century, as they argue. Rather, the scientific and political understanding of society as a code became the base for an innovative conception of both law and politics. (shrink)

Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze are regarded as French “Nietzscheans” par excellence. By drawing attention to the articulation of “difference” in contemporary thought, this paper attempts to go beyond the label ‘Nietzschean’ in an effort to discern two distinct philosophical trajectories inspired by Nietzsche. I suggest that Deleuze reads Nietzsche as an empiricist whose philosophy of nature critically undermines representational modes of thought from Plato to Hegel and beyond. Difference is therefore given in itself. Foucault, on the other hand, (...) reads Nietzsche primarily as a historian of culture, whose radical reflection on language pushes philosophy into new interpretative forms of analysis that seriously confronts the role of political power in the production of truth. Difference is thus invented and only known within the contours of these fabrications. While no judgement is made about the accuracy or otherwise of their respective interpretations of Nietzsche, this paper implicitly asks whether a Nietzschean genealogical ethos can inform those political struggles today for which the meaning of difference is contested. (shrink)

Souvent, la science est associée à l'idée de progrès et d'émancipation des peuples. Il en fut ainsi au temps des Lumières, puis sous la Révolution française. Elle est parfois aussi contestée en raison même du progrès et de ses conséquences: destruction de la nature, productivisme à outrance... Les scientifiques sont alors considérés comme indifférents aux valeurs humanistes, acteurs d'une " science sans conscience " au service des pires projets, totalitaires, racistes, brutalement colonisateurs. A quelles conditions la science peut-elle aujourd'hui avancer (...) et faire avancer l'homme? Faut-il généraliser le principe de précaution? Dans un monde où la science est financée, organisée ou stimulée d'une part par la puissance publique et d'autre part par le marché, qui décide in fine? Comment faire vivre le lien entre liberté des scientifiques et progrès social? Quels sont les rapports entre démocratie et science? Et, si la science a encore un avenir, quel est-il? (shrink)

It is commonly thought that authors can make anything whatsoever true in their fictions by artistic fiat. Harry Deutsch originally called this position the Principle of Poetic License. If true, PPL sets an important constraint on accounts of fictional truth: they must be such as to allow that, for any x, one can write a story in which it is true that x. I argue that PPL is far too strong: it requires us to abandon the law of non-contradiction and (...) entails a radical revision of otherwise ordinary commitments about truth in fiction. (shrink)

Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and theories in different domains of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology and the social sciences.

Johnny Hallyday was France's first rock and roll star and was honored as a national hero at his funeral, which was attended by nearly a million people. The funeral of Pierre Boulez, on the other hand received little fanfare. This book attempts to resolve this discrepancy.

In this remarkable book Michel Foucault, one of the most influential thinkers of recent times, calls us to look critically at specific historical events in order to uncover new layers of significance.

Why think that emotions are kinds of evaluations? This chapter puts forward an original account of emotions as evaluations apt to circumvent some of the chief difficulties with which alternative approaches find themselves confronted. We shall proceed by first introducing the idea that emotions are evaluations (sec. I). Next, two well-known approaches attempting to account for this idea in terms of attitudes that are in and of themselves unemotional but are alleged to become emotional when directed towards evaluative contents are (...) explored. According to the first approach, emotions are nothing but evaluative judgments. Sec. II reminds the reader of the problems associated with this idea: one of its consequences is to deprive creatures with limited cognitive capacities of any sort of partaking of emotional life. According to the second approach, which is often praised for its capacity to avoid the pitfalls facing an appeal to evaluative judgments, emotions are perception-like experiences of evaluative properties and are as such within the reach of creatures bereft of conceptual capacities. This perceptual theory is taken up in sect. III, in which we explain why it remains unsatisfactory insofar as it shares with the evaluative judgement theory the idea that what makes emotions evaluations is the specific contents that they have. On this basis, we proceed by outlining in sect. IV an alternative—the attitudinal theory of emotions. Its main point of departure from current theorizing about the emotions consists in elucidating the fact that emotions are evaluations not in terms of what they represent, but rather in terms of the sort of attitude subjects take towards what they represent. We explore here what sorts of attitudes emotions are and defend the idea that they are felt bodily attitudes. (shrink)

Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness, which affects sense of identity. While the ability to have a coherent vision of the self relies partly on its reciprocal relationships with autobiographical memories, little is known about how memories ground “self-images” in schizophrenia. Twenty-five patients with schizophrenia and 25 controls were asked to give six autobiographical memories related to four self-statements they considered essential for defining their identity. Results showed that patients’ self-images were more passive than those of controls. Autobiographical memories underlying (...) self-images were less thematically linked to these self-images in patients. We also found evidence of a weakened sense of self and a deficient organization of autobiographical memories grounding the self in schizophrenia. These abnormalities may account for the poor cohesiveness of the self in schizophrenia. (shrink)

The study of eye movements is a common way to non-invasively understand and analyze human behavior. However, eye-tracking techniques are very hard to scale, and require expensive equipment and extensive expertise. In the context of web browsing, these issues could be overcome by studying the link between the eye and the computer mouse. Here, we propose new analysis methods, and a more advanced characterization of this link. To this end, we recorded the eye, mouse, and scroll movements of 151 participants (...) exploring 18 dynamic web pages while performing free viewing and visual search tasks for 20 s. The data revealed significant differences of eye, mouse, and scroll parameters over time which stabilize at the end of exploration. This suggests the existence of a task-independent relationship between eye, mouse, and scroll parameters, which are characterized by two distinct patterns: one common pattern for movement parameters and a second for dwelling/fixation parameters. Within these patterns, mouse and eye movements remained consistent with each other, while the scrolling behaved the opposite way. (shrink)

The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in the collection of Michel Foucault's lectures at the College de France, one of the world's most prestigious institutions. Faculty at the college give public lectures, in which they can present works-in-progress on any subject of their choosing. Foucault's were more speculative and free-ranging than the arguments of such groundbreaking works as The History of Sexuality or Madness and Civilization . In the lectures comprising this volume, Foucault focuses upon the (...) ways the "self" and consequently "self-study" have been conceived since the days of antiquity, starting with Socrates. Definitions and conceptions of "self-study" in Greek and Roman literature, Foucault argues, remain in force today, and underlie modern interpretations of the self. Engaging, engrossing, and provocative, The Hermeneutics of the Subject reveals Foucault at the height of his powers. (shrink)

If feeling a genuine emotion requires believing that its object actually exists, and if this is a belief we are unlikely to have about fictional entities, then how could we feel genuine emotions towards these entities? This question lies at the core of the paradox of fiction. Since its original formulation, this paradox has generated a substantial literature. Until recently, the dominant strategy had consisted in trying to solve it. Yet, it is more and more frequent for scholars to try (...) to dismiss it using data and theories coming from psychology. In opposition to this trend, the present paper argues that the paradox of fiction cannot be dissolved in the ways recommended by the recent literature. We start by showing how contemporary attempts at dissolving the paradox assume that it emerges from theoretical commitments regarding the nature of emotions. Next, we argue that the paradox of fiction rather emerges from everyday observations, the validity of which is independent from any such commitment. This is why we then go on to claim that a mere appeal to psychology in order to discredit these theoretical commitments cannot dissolve the paradox. We bring our discussion to a close on a more positive note, by exploring how the paradox could in fact be solved by an adequate theory of the emotions. (shrink)

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique , few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization , Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all (...) prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them. (shrink)

This article examines the potential implications of the implementation of artificial intelligence in health care for both its delivery and the medical profession. To this end, the first section explores the basic features of AI and the yet theoretical concept of autonomous AI followed by an overview of current and developing AI applications. Against this background, the second section discusses the transforming roles of physicians and changes in the patient–physician relationship that could be a consequence of gradual expansion of AI (...) in health care. Subsequently, an examination of the responsibilities physicians should assume in this process is explored. The third section describes conceivable practical and ethical challenges that implementation of a single all-encompassing AI healthcare system would pose. The fourth section presents arguments for regulation of AI in health care to ensure that these applications do not violate basic ethical principles and that human control of AI will be preserved in the future. In the final section, fundamental components of a moral framework from which such regulation may be derived are brought forward, and some possible strategies for building a moral framework are discussed. (shrink)

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in (...) ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the \u201ccriminal\u201d was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice. Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.  . (shrink)

Cet article vise à décrire et comprendre un processus en cours, qui associe la formation d’espaces de mise à l’écart – des hors-lieux – et une nouvelle figure de l’étranger, défini selon une altérité non pas d’abord culturelle ou ethnique mais biopolitique, celle de l’étranger absolu. On cherche aussi à comprendre ce qui s’invente comme mondes à venir dans ces lieux-frontières et ces situations-limites.This article attempts to describe and understand an ongoing process that links the creation of places for keeping (...) things out – “outplaces” – with a new sense of the foreigner, whose otherness, no longer defined primarily as cultural or ethnic but bio-political, is absolute foreign-ness. We also attempt to understand what kinds of future worlds are being invented in these areas and situations where existence is “on the edge”. (shrink)

In his book, Physical Relativity, Harvey Brown challenges the orthodox view that special relativity is preferable to those parts of Lorentz's classical ether theory it replaced because it revealed various phenomena that were given a dynamical explanation in Lorentz's theory to be purely kinematical. I want to defend this orthodoxy. The phenomena most commonly discussed in this context in the philosophical literature are length contraction and time dilation. I consider three other phenomena of this kind that played a role in (...) the early reception of special relativity in the physics literature: the Fresnel drag effect in the Fizeau experiment, the velocity dependence of electron mass in beta-ray deflection experiments by Kaufmann and others, and the delicately balanced torques on a moving charged capacitor in the Trouton-Noble experiment. I offer historical sketches of how Lorentz's dynamical explanations of these phenomena came to be replaced by their now standard kinematical explanations. I then take up the philosophical challenge posed by the work of Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley and clarify how those kinematical explanations work. (shrink)

Translator's preface -- Introduction: The question of phenomenology -- Hyletic phenomenology and material phenomenology -- The phenomenological method -- Pathos-with reflections on Husserl's Fifth cartesian meditation -- For a phenomenology of community.

Volume 3 in the ESSENTIAL WORKS OF FOUCAULT series, a collection of articles, interviews and seminars on the subject of Western political culture, written by the twentieth century French philosopher, Michel Foucault and translated into English. It includes issues such as sexuality, psychiatry, discrimination and exclusion in human society.