Should we consider irony as a good thing for democratic life? As it is portrayed in the classical texts through which we know Socrates, eirōneia appears as a humble manifestation of self-consciousn...

Should we consider irony as a good thing for democratic life? As it is portrayed in the classical texts through which we know Socrates, eirōneia appears as a humble manifestation of self-consciousn...

A defence of the 'pragmatic' theory of anaphora (which stresses the analogy between anaphora and deixis) against an argument put forward by Gareth Evans.

A discussion of Frege's views concerning the meaning of 'I' and his distinction between the 'I' of soliloquy and the 'I' of conversation.

For many years, M. Jean d'Ormesson has been doing me the honor of asking me to write for Diogenes. More recently, he suggested that I should coordinate an issue of this review that would be devoted to my extended discipline, History, but history in the way in which I understand it. It was certainly not for lack of interest that I did not reply to the first request but, no doubt, because of the sense of a chronic lack of time (...) - almost a pleonasm - from which I, like everyone else, suffer. It was not because I was cured that I accepted the second invitation but probably because I allowed myself, with full knowledge of the facts, to entertain the idea that editing an issue would take up less time than simply contributing. … In fact, as everyone knows, the opposite is true, especially when the occasional editor also volunteers to be one of the contributors. This issue is now completed and I sincerely thank M. Jean d'Ormesson for having wished to entrust me with this task that I have enjoyed very much. (shrink)

In order to tell the story of Man and understand our emergence better, we can readily follow on from Heinz Tobien, though we do not need to go back so far in time - just a few million years.Clearly, our fundamental origin is animal. Thus it is easy to understand that in the great genealogy (known as phylogeny), there was one vital (geological) moment when our line was forever detached from the animal “kingdom.” The evidence of palaeontology, like that of (...) molecular biology, today locates this point - which is, by definition, the very point of origin of our family, the hominids - in Eastern Africa around 8 million years ago. In order to state this, palaeontology rests on two sets of results. All the most ancient hominids, without exception, are East African, and the oldest of all goes back more than 7 million years. Through the study of various characteristics of the cells of contemporary primates, having arranged them in an order of increasing complexity and having hypothesized that this contemporary complexity may be a reflection of that which developed through time, molecular biology has, on the basis of palaeontological dating, calibrated this transformation and its different stages and constructed what is called a molecular clock. In this way, it has arrived at two conclusions. The primates closest to Man are by far the great African apes (chimpanzees, gorillas), and the “distance” that separates us - in other words the degree of difference that exists between them and us - situates the divergence of our two branches at just over 7 million years. (shrink)

The issues addressed in philosophical papers on quotation generally concern only a particular type of quotation, which I call ‘closed quotation’. The other main type, ‘open quotation’, is ignored, and this neglect leads to bad theorizing. Not only is a general theory of quotation out of reach: the specific phenomenon of closed quotation itself cannot be properly understood if it is not appropriately situated within the kind to which it belongs. Once the distinction between open and closed quotation has been (...) drawn and properly appreciated, it is tempting to consider that only closed quotation is relevant to semantics. Open quotation is more a matter of pragmatics: it is a matter of what people do with words, rather than a matter of content and truth-conditions. In this way one can provide the beginning of a justification for the neglect of open quotation in current semantic theorizing. There is some truth in this view, yet the phenomenon of ‘mixed quotation’, investigated at length in this paper, is interesting precisely because it shows that things are not so simple. Important issues concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics will thus be raised. (shrink)

Review of Insensitive Semantics, by H. Cappelen and E. Lepore.

This article inquires whether and to which degree some fundamental traits of the World Wide Web may encourage us to revise traditional conceptions of what constitutes scientific information and knowledge. Turning to arguments for `open access' in scientific publishing and its derivatives (open content, open archives, etc.), contemporary tendencies in `social software' and knowledge sharing, the authors project a new look on knowledge, dissociated with linear notions of cumulation, progression, and hierarchy (e.g. of scientific argument), but related to circularity, heterarchy, (...) and evolution. Arguing from a medium theoretical perspective, they illustrate their ideas with developments in library science, current debates in epistemology and theories about information architecture, with a particular focus on `unsystematic' folksonomies. (shrink)

Hierdie boek is n inleiding tot moderne denkrigtings wat alle fasette van die staat betref. Dit verduidelik die verbintenis tussen die huidige proses van staatsvorming in Suid-Afrika en die tradisionele faktore wat dit elders in die w reld aangehelp het.

This study examined linguistic patterns in mothers’ reports about their toddlers’ involvement in everyday household work, as a way to understand the parental ethnotheories that may guide children’s prosocial helping and development. Mothers from two cultural groups – US Mexican-heritage families with backgrounds in indigenous American communities and middle-class European American families – were interviewed regarding how their 2- to 3-year-old toddler gets involved in help with everyday household work. The study’s analytic focus was mothers’ responses to interview questions asking (...) about the child’s efforts to help with a variety of everyday household work tasks. Results showed that mothers responded with linguistic patterns that were indicative of ethnotheoretical assumptions regarding children’s agency and children’s prosocial intentions, with notable contrasts between the two cultural groups. Nearly all US Mexican-heritage mothers reported children’s contributions and participation using linguistic forms that centered children’s agency and prosocial initiative, which corresponds with extensive evidence suggesting the centrality of both children’s autonomy and supportive prosocial expectations in how children’s helpfulness is supported in this and similar cultural communities. By contrast, middle-class European American mothers frequently responded to questions about their child’s efforts to help with linguistic forms that “pivoted” to either the mother as the focal agent in the child’s prosocial engagement or to reframing the child’s involvement to emphasize non-help activities. Correspondence between cultural differences in the linguistic findings and existing literature on socialization of children’s prosocial helping is discussed. Also discussed is the analytic approach of the study, uncommon in developmental psychology research, and the significance of the linguistic findings for understanding parental ethnotheories in each community. (shrink)

Being able to categorize objects as similar or different is an essential skill. An important aspect of learning to categorize is learning to attend to relevant features and ignore irrelevant features of the to-be-categorized objects. Feature variability across objects of different categories is informative, because it allows inferring the rules underlying category membership. In this study, participants learned to categorize fictitious creatures. We measured attention to the aliens during learning using eye-tracking and calculated the attentional focus as the ratio of (...) attention to relevant versus irrelevant features. As expected, participants’ categorization accuracy improved with practice; however, in contrast to our expectations, their attentional focus did not improve with practice. When computing the attentional focus, attention to the aliens’ eyes was disregarded, because while eyes attract a lot of attention, they did not vary across aliens. Yet, an explorative analysis of attention to eyes suggested that participants’ attentional focus did become somewhat more efficient in that over time they learned to ignore the eyes. Results are discussed in the context of the need for instructional methods to improve attentional focus in learning to categorize. (shrink)

La correspondance de Spinoza comprend six lettres remarquables sur le thème des spectres. On se demande s’ils existent et si on peut reconnaître à certains d’entre eux un sexe féminin. Cet échange qui s’est noué à l’instigation de Hugo Boxel est une curiosité dans cette correspondance mais pas dans son contexte historique, et cela même si, aux Pays-Bas, les procès en sorcellerie avaient moins de succès qu’ailleurs. C’est alors dans l’éclairage de la littérature qui s’est développée autour des choses superstitieuses (...) que ces lettres peuvent être placées. À cet égard, l’œuvre maîtresse de Balthasar Bekker De Betoverde Wereld (Le Monde enchanté), est une référence importante. Cet ouvrage qui cherche à purifier la foi en combattant la superstition avec des arguments cartésiens permet d’établir les deux points suivants. Boxel est plus du côté de la superstition que de la raison, malgré les nombreuses autorités qu’il cite. Spinoza, lui, a avec Bekker des positions communes, mais ceci ne peut faire oublier qu’il défend au sujet d’une question d’actualité une position unique qui peut l’en éloigner en raison de son identité de philosophe. (shrink)

La correspondance de Spinoza comprend six lettres remarquables sur le thème des spectres. On se demande s’ils existent et si on peut reconnaître à certains d’entre eux un sexe féminin. Cet échange qui s’est noué à l’instigation de Hugo Boxel est une curiosité dans cette correspondance mais pas dans son contexte historique, et cela même si, aux Pays-Bas, les procès en sorcellerie avaient moins de succès qu’ailleurs. C’est alors dans l’éclairage de la littérature qui s’est développée autour des choses superstitieuses (...) que ces lettres peuvent être placées. À cet égard, l’œuvre maîtresse de Balthasar Bekker De Betoverde Wereld (Le Monde enchanté), est une référence importante. Cet ouvrage qui cherche à purifier la foi en combattant la superstition avec des arguments cartésiens permet d’établir les deux points suivants. Boxel est plus du côté de la superstition que de la raison, malgré les nombreuses autorités qu’il cite. Spinoza, lui, a avec Bekker des positions communes, mais ceci ne peut faire oublier qu’il défend au sujet d’une question d’actualité une position unique qui peut l’en éloigner en raison de son identité de philosophe. (shrink)

What is it to share the same concept? The question is an important one since sharing the same concept explains our ability to non-accidentally coordinate on the same topic over time and between individuals. Moreover, concept identity grounds key logical relations among thought contents such as samesaying, contradiction, validity, and entailment. Finally, an account of concept identity is crucial to explaining and justifying epistemic efforts to better understand the precise contents of our thoughts. The key question, then, is what psychological (...) and social facts could play these roles? Elsewhere, we have argued for a specific relational model of concept identity, the connectedness model (e.g. Schroeter 2012, Schroeter and Schroeter 2014, 2015). Our aim in this chapter is to further explain the motivations behind that account, to address worries about transitivity and vagueness, and to contrast our approach with closely related accounts of concept identity developed by François Recanati and Simon Prosser. -/- What’s distinctive of our approach is that we seek to vindicate the first-person epistemic perspective of concept users. Concepts, on our account, play a crucial normative role in setting regulative ideals for the representational practices in which individual subjects participate. This focus on the normative role of concepts – as opposed to a purely causal explanatory role – motivates our approach to concept identity and our toleration of vagueness and borderline cases. (shrink)

Cette méditation en première personne tourne autour de l’antique et grande question : Que faire? et s’appuie sur le texte des Essais de Montaigne. La question du « faire » y est interrogée et relancée par-delà le « produire » et la production qui, aujourd’hui, plus que jamais, risquent de l’emporter et de l’engloutir tandis qu’est brossé un portrait chinois (taoïste!) de celui dont Nietzsche disait si bien : « c’est à lui que je m’attacherais si l’on me donnait pour (...) tâche de faire de cette terre une patrie ». (shrink)

Du temps du confinement et de la dévastation qui affectent si profondément notre sens de la temporalité, la philosophie aurait-elle quelque chose à dire? L’occasion en tout cas de relire quelques textes d’Aristote et d’Augustin et d’essayer de nous orienter dans Être et temps de Heidegger en nous interrogeant sur l’expression avoir le temps au moment où, pour chacun, s’amenuise le temps qui reste.

Comment écrire sur Bataille sans s’épargner et se mettre soi-même hors jeu sinon en entrant dans le jeu de ce qu’on appellera, en un sens majeur, la parodie ? Dans ce retour, dans cet éternel retour des pensées et des mots – dans cette déconstruction créatrice qu’est la réécriture – Bataille n’y entra-t-il pas lui même en écrivant sur Nietzsche ?

In this paper I compare my account of IEM to another one, the Simple View, according to which a judgment is IEM just in case its grounds do not include an identity. The Simple View does not say why no identity assumption is needed to ground the singular judgment in the IEM cases; my account is meant to complement it by providing an answer to that question. According to my account, the judgments that are IEM are based on a certain (...) experience, and what they are about is pre-determined by the mode of that experience, by the type of experience it is, in a way that leaves no room for an alternative. (shrink)

This enlarged edition of Mario Bunge's Dictionary of Philosophy is a superb reference work for both students and professional philosophers.

The prevalent view in animal ethics is that speciesism is wrong: we should weigh the interests of humans and non-humans equally. Shelly Kagan has recently questioned this claim, defending speciesism against Peter Singer’s seminal argument based on the principle of equal consideration of interests. This critique is most charitably construed as a dilemma. The principle of equal consideration can be interpreted in either of two ways. While it faces counterexamples on the first reading, it makes Singer’s argument question-begging on the (...) second. In response, Singer has grasped the first horn of this dilemma and tried to accommodate Kagan’s apparent counterexamples. In my opinion, this attempt is unpersuasive: the principle of equal consideration is inconsistent with common-sense intuitions on Kagan’s cases. Worse, Singer’s argument begs the question anyway. It therefore faces two serious objections. This is not to say that there is nothing wrong with speciesism, however. In the second half of the paper, I propose another, better argument against speciesism, which I argue is immune to both objections. According to this other argument, speciesism is wrong because it involves discriminating on the basis of a merely biological property. (shrink)

Animal ethicists have been debating the morality of speciesism for over forty years. Despite rather persuasive arguments against this form of discrimination, many philosophers continue to assign humans a higher moral status than nonhuman animals. The primary source of evidence for this position is our intuition that humans’ interests matter more than the similar interests of other animals. And it must be acknowledged that this intuition is both powerful and widespread. But should we trust it for all that? The present (...) paper defends a negative answer to that question, based on a debunking argument. The intuitive belief that humans matter more than other animals is unjustified because it results from an epistemically defective process. It is largely shaped by tribalism, our tendency to favor ingroup members as opposed to outgroup members. And this influence is distortive for two reasons. First, tribalism evolved for reasons unrelated to moral truths; hence, it would at best produce true moral beliefs accidentally. Second, tribalism generates a vast quantity of false moral beliefs, starting with racist beliefs. Once this intuition is discarded, little evidence remains that speciesism is morally acceptable. (shrink)

In May 1968, Gilles Deleuze was an established philosopher teaching at the innovative Vincennes University, just outside of Paris. Félix Guattari was a political militant and the director of an unusual psychiatric clinic at La Borde. Their meeting was quite unlikely, yet the two were introduced in an arranged encounter of epic consequence. From that moment on, Deleuze and Guattari engaged in a surprising, productive partnership, collaborating on several groundbreaking works, including _Anti-Oedipus_, _What Is Philosophy?_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_. François (...) Dosse, a prominent French intellectual known for his work on the Annales School, structuralism, and biographies of the pivotal intellectuals Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Chaunu, and Michel de Certeau, examines the prolific if improbable relationship between two men of distinct and differing sensibilities. Drawing on unpublished archives and hundreds of personal interviews, Dosse elucidates a collaboration that lasted more than two decades, underscoring the role that family and history—particularly the turbulent time of May 1968—play in their monumental work. He also takes the measure of Deleuze and Guattari's posthumous fortunes and the impact of their thought on intellectual, academic, and professional circles. (shrink)

SummaryIn this paper I discuss two influential views in the philosophy of mind: the two‐component picture draws a distinction between ‘narrow content’ and ‘broad content’, while radical externalism denies that there is such a thing as narrow content. I argue that ‘narrow content’ is ambiguous, and that the two views can be reconciled. Instead of considering that there is only one question and three possible answers corresponding to Cartesian internalism, the two‐component picture, and radical externalism respectively, I show that there (...) are two distinct questions: ‘Are mental contents internal to the individual?’ and, ‘Are mental contents analysable in two‐components?’ Both questions can be given a positive or a negative answer, in such a way that there are four, rather than three, possible views to be distinguished. The extra view whose possibility emerges in this framework is that which mixes radical externalism with the two‐component picture. It agrees with radical externalism that there cannot be ‘solipsistic’ contents: content is not an intrinsic property of the states of an individual organism, but a relational property. It also agrees with the two‐component picture, on a certain interpretation: the broad content of a psychological state depends upon what actually causes that state, but the narrow content depends only on what normally causes this type of state to occur. In the last section of the paper, I deal with internal representation which seem to be independent even of the normal environment. I show that such contents are themselves independent of the normal environment only in a relative sense: they are locally independent of the normal environment, yet still depend on it via the concepts to which they are connected in the concept system. (shrink)

SummaryIn this paper I discuss two influential views in the philosophy of mind: the two‐component picture draws a distinction between ‘narrow content’ and ‘broad content’, while radical externalism denies that there is such a thing as narrow content. I argue that ‘narrow content’ is ambiguous, and that the two views can be reconciled. Instead of considering that there is only one question and three possible answers corresponding to Cartesian internalism, the two‐component picture, and radical externalism respectively, I show that there (...) are two distinct questions: ‘Are mental contents internal to the individual?’ and, ‘Are mental contents analysable in two‐components?’ Both questions can be given a positive or a negative answer, in such a way that there are four, rather than three, possible views to be distinguished. The extra view whose possibility emerges in this framework is that which mixes radical externalism with the two‐component picture. It agrees with radical externalism that there cannot be ‘solipsistic’ contents: content is not an intrinsic property of the states of an individual organism, but a relational property. It also agrees with the two‐component picture, on a certain interpretation: the broad content of a psychological state depends upon what actually causes that state, but the narrow content depends only on what normally causes this type of state to occur. In the last section of the paper, I deal with internal representation which seem to be independent even of the normal environment. I show that such contents are themselves independent of the normal environment only in a relative sense: they are locally independent of the normal environment, yet still depend on it via the concepts to which they are connected in the concept system. (shrink)

Comment sommes-nous devenus humains? Quelle est la place de l'homme dans le vivant au XXIe siècle, vers quoi tend son devenir? Fort de son expérience de paléoanthropologue, mais aussi d'homme ancré dans son siècle et curieux de tout, le découvreur de Lucy interroge les grands enjeux de demain : l'écologie, la démographie, et bien sûr l'éthique. Etre humain et le rester est une aventure, une énigme, un défi qui nous concernent tous. Yves Coppens nous convie à un voyage dans (...) le temps et l'espace, à la découverte d'une matière en perpétuelle évolution : l'Homme. Chacun de ses invités, en livrant le récit de ses expériences et de ses recherches dans des domaines aussi variés que la philosophie, les sciences sociales ou la génétique, propose une vision singulière de l'humain en déroulant le fil lumineux de son devenir. (shrink)

-- t. 2. Origines médiévales de la science.

Moral error theorists face the so-called “now-what problem”: what should we do with our moral judgments from a prudential point of view if these judgments are uniformly false? On top of abolitionism and conservationism, which respectively advise us to get rid of our moral judgments and to keep them, three revisionary solutions have been proposed in the literature: expressivism, naturalism, and fictionalism. In this paper, I argue that expressivism and naturalism do not constitute genuine alternatives to abolitionism, of which they (...) are in the end mere variants—and, even less conveniently, variants that are conform to the very spirit of abolitionism as formulated by its proponents. The main version of fictionalism, by contrast, provides us with a recommendation to which abolitionists cannot consistently subscribe. This leaves us with only one revisionary solution to the now-what problem. (shrink)

In this highly insightful analysis of Western and Chinese concepts of efficacy, François Jullien subtly delves into the metaphysical preconceptions of the two civilizations to account for diverging patterns of action in warfare, politics, and diplomacy. He shows how Western and Chinese strategies work in several domains (the battlefield, for example) and analyzes two resulting acts of war. The Chinese strategist manipulates his own troops and the enemy to win a battle without waging war and to bring about victory effortlessly. (...) Efficacity in China is thus conceived of in terms of transformation (as opposed to action) and manipulation, making it closer to what is understood as efficacy in the West. Jullien’s brilliant interpretations of an array of recondite texts are key to understanding our own conceptions of action, time, and reality in this foray into the world of Chinese thought. In its clear and penetrating characterization of two contrasting views of reality from a heretofore unexplored perspective, A Treatise on Efficacy will be of central importance in the intellectual debate between East and West. (shrink)