Dans cet ouvrage de 430 pages – dont neuf consacrées à un index des auteurs anciens et modernes – Geneviève Clerico, Bernard Colombat et Jean Soubiran ont réuni 22 textes écrits par Françoise Desbordes de 1981 à 2000 et généralement publiés antérieurement dans des revues scientifiques ou actes de colloques. Ces études ne concernent pas la rhétorique, domaine privilégié de l’activité scientifique de F.D., ni les analyses textuelles, les contributions de F.D. à ces disciplines ayant fait l’obje..

Unquestioning obedience - in politics, religion, and gender roles - leads to disaster. But how are we to overcome these pernicious traditions without hurtling toward anarchy and antinomianism? In this updated edition of a classic text, theologian Dorothee Solle examines historical patterns of obedience and oppression and suggests a model of timeless "creative disobedience" that leads to liberation for all. Appealing to the figure of Jesus, whose earthly ministry was marked by submission to the will of God, not to oppressive (...) institutions. Solle reminds us that this kind of revolutionary response is required of all of us. She also offers a revealing account of her own evolution as a female scholar searching for the meaning of God - a search that led not to a rejection of her faith, but to the theological justification of faithful and creative disobedience. (shrink)

Resumen: Este trabajo se propone examinar algunos límites de la célebre descripción merleau-pontiana del cuerpo vivido en términos de “esquema corporal” y “cuerpo habitual”, teniendo en cuenta referencias alternativas del corpus textual del filósofo a ciertas dimensiones de la experiencia corporal que desbordan tal marco. Tras analizar en primer término estas primeras definiciones que esbozan el perfil de un cuerpo hábil y competente correlativo de un entorno pragmático, consideramos seguidamente instancias de comportamientos no teleológicos ni funcionales y espacialidades no objetivas (...) ni instrumentales para concluir mostrando la relación de estos análisis con la tematización merleau-pontiana más amplia de los horizontes naturales de la experiencia. En un segundo plano evaluamos las críticas de exégetas tales como A. Lingis y J. Butler a ciertos déficits de las tesis merleau-pontianas, y relacionamos estas últimas con desarrollos filosóficos que manifiestan ciertas afinidades específicas, tales como los de E. Levinas y R. Caillois.: This paper intends to examine some of the limitations of the well-known MerleauPontian account of the lived body in terms of "body schema" and "habitual body", by taking into account some alternative references of the philosopher’s textual corpus to certain dimensions of corporeal experience that exceed such frames. After analyzing these former definitions that outline the profile of a skillful and competent body correlative of a pragmatic environment, we consider cases of non-teleological and non-functional behaviors and non-objective and non-instrumental spatialities to end up by showing the relationship between these analyses and the wider Merleau-Pontian account of the natural horizons of experience. Secondarily, we evaluate critiques such as A. Lingis’ and J. Butler’s aiming to certain deficits of Merleau-Pontian theses, and we identify certain relations that these theses hold with philosophical developments showing certain specific affinities, such as E. Levinas’ and R. Caillois’. (shrink)

Wolfgang Pauli referred to him as 'my discovery,' Robert Oppenheimer described him as 'one of the most gifted theorists' and Niels Bohr found him enormously stimulating. Who was the man in question, Gunnar Källén (1926-1968)? His appearance in the physics sky was like a shooting star. His contributions to the scientific debate caused excitement among young and old. Similar to his friend and mentor, Wolfgang Pauli, he demanded honesty and rigor in physics - a distinct dividing line between fact and (...) speculation. In his obituary, Arthur S. Wightman would write: 'Gunnar Källén was a proud continuer of the tradition in quantum field theory established by Wolfgang Pauli. His papers on quantum electrodynamics in the period 1950-1954 carried the non-perturbative approach to quantum electrodynamics forward to a point beyond which very little essential progress has been made up to the present day. At the time I was trying to puzzle out the grammar of the language of quantum field theory, and here was Källén already writing poetry in the language!'. In addition to being a remarkable scientist, Källén had a very interesting personality, well worth exploring. In her book, physicist Cecilia Jarlskog traces both the personal and scientific trajectory of this unsung hero of the early days of high-energy physics and quantum field theory. A number of invited contributions by members of the Källén family and distinguished researchers from the field, all of them personally acquainted with Källén, combine to form an authentic portrait of the researcher and the man. Last but not least, the reader will become acquainted with some aspects of the history of particle physics in those days, as related by Källén and those who corresponded with him. A commented selection of his most important and not easily accessible papers is included as an added bonus for specialists. (shrink)

Entrée comme officier dans la Marine en 1970, affectée en 1983 à la Direction du personnel, Chantal Desbordes participe à la politique de féminisation des effectifs. Première femme brevetée de l’Ecole supérieure de Guerre navale elle est nommée contre-amiral en conseil des ministres du 19 décembre 2001. Elle est ainsi le premier officier général féminin dans la Marine française. Actuellement adjointe au directeur du personnel militaire de la Marine, elle est chargée de la gestion des compétences des marins. L’entretien (...) de deux heures, réalisé le 24 octobre 2003 au ministère de la Défense (Paris), portait sur sa trajectoire personnelle et sur le développement du recrutement féminin au sein de la Marine. Nous en publions ici quelques extraits. (shrink)

Political philosopher Noelle McAfee proposes a powerful new political theory for our post-9/11 world, in which an old pathology-the repetition compulsion-has manifested itself in a seemingly endless war on terror. McAfee argues that the quintessentially human desire to participate in a world with others is the key to understanding the public sphere and to creating a more democratic society, a world that all members can have a hand in shaping. But when some are effectively denied this participation, whether through trauma (...) or terror, instead of democratic politics, there arises a political unconscious, an effect of desires unarticulated, failures to sublimate, voices kept silent, and repression reenacted. Not only is this condition undemocratic and unjust, it may lead to further trauma. Unless its troubles are worked through, a political community risks continual repetition and even self-destruction. McAfee deftly weaves together her experience as an observer of democratic life with an array of intellectual schemas, from poststructural psychoanalysis to Rawlsian and Habermasian democratic theories, as well as semiotics, civic republicanism, and American pragmatism. She begins with an analysis of the traumatic effects of silencing members of a political community. Then she explores the potential of deliberative dialogue and other "talking cures" and public testimonies, such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to help societies work through, rather than continually act out, their conflicts. _Democracy and the Political Unconscious_ is rich in theoretical insights, but it is also grounded in the practical problems of those who are trying to process the traumas of oppression, terror, and brutality and create more decent and democratic societies. Drawing on a breathtaking range of theoretical frameworks and empirical observations, _Democracy and the Political Unconscious_ charts a course for democratic transformation in a world sorely lacking in democratic practice. (shrink)

Modernist Objects is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of modernist objects. Contributors explore the many tensions surrounding the modernist relationship to objects, things, products and artIfacts through the prism of poetry, prose, visual arts, culture and crafts.

In this article I scrutinise a crucial tension in understanding the debate over shale gas production in Europe. On the one hand, analyses predominantly grasp the debate in terms of pro-and-con dialectics, as if the pro-shale gas camp faced the anti-shale gas camp in a dyadic clash of opposing voices. On the other hand, it is commonly recognised that this debate is driven by multi-party and multi-position argumentative dynamics. In this broader context, I focus on one pivotal contribution to the (...) debate – Gazprom’s press release from October 2013 outlining Russia’s energy giant’s strategy of dealing with unconventional gas production. I employ concepts and methods of argumentative discourse analysis to contend that an arguer to a multi-party debate – argumentative polylogue – faces a number of constraints and opportunities that cannot be adequately grasped in terms of dyadic pro-and-con dialectics. The analysis reveals how Gazprom needs to simultaneously design its discourse to address a number of other parties who might also disagree among themselves: from Greenpeace to European Union governments to shale gas companies. I show why and how a stakeholder analysis used in organisational communication might lead to a better understanding of this form of multi-party public argumentation. (shrink)

This article tells the story of the oil and gas origins of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the Earth is a homeostatic system. It shows how Gaia’s key assumption—that the climate is a fundamentally stable system, able to withstand perturbations—emerged as a result of a collaboration between the theory’s progenitor, James Lovelock, and Royal Dutch Shell in response to Shell’s concerns about the effects of its products on the climate. The article explains how Lovelock elaborated the Gaia hypothesis and (...) gave it evidential depth through a series of Royal Dutch Shell-funded research projects meant to identify organisms whose biological activities might double as climate-regulating mechanisms. The article goes on to show how this research subsequently laid the foundation for a distinct genre of climate change denialism, in which corporations sowed doubt not by denying the phenomenon of global warming but by naturalizing it. (shrink)

In this paper, we perform theoretical analysis and experiments on the Simplex Crossover (SPX), which we have proposed. Real-coded GAs are expected to be a powerful function optimization technique for real-world applications where it is often hard to formulate the objective function. However, we believe there are two problems which will make such applications difficult; 1) performance of real-coded GAs depends on the coordinate system used to express the objective function, and 2) it costs much labor to adjust parameters so (...) that the GAs always find an optimum point efficiently. The result of our theoretical analysis and experiments shows that a performance of SPX is independent of linear coordinate transformation and that SPX always optimizes various test function efficiently when theoretical value for expansion rate, which is a parameter of SPX, is applied. We also show that BLX-α is equivalent to degenerate form of SPX. Experiments show that we have something misunderstood effect of epistasis on performance degradation of real-coded GAs. (shrink)

Why is a red face not really red? How do we decide that this book is a textbook or not? Conceptual spaces provide the medium on which these computations are performed, but an additional operation is needed: Contrast. By contrasting a reddish face with a prototypical face, one gets a prototypical ‘red’. By contrasting this book with a prototypical textbook, the lack of exercises may pop out. Dynamic contrasting is an essential operation for converting perceptions into predicates. The existence of (...) dynamic contrasting may contribute to explaining why lexical meanings correspond to convex regions of conceptual spaces. But it also explains why predication is most of the time opportunistic, depending on context. While off-line conceptual similarity is a holistic operation, the contrast operation provides a context-dependent distance that creates ephemeral predicative judgments that are essential for interfacing conceptual spaces with natural language and with reasoning. (shrink)

Series: Studies in Theology and Religion, Am 15. April 1799 beendete Friedrich Schleiermacher seine "Reden über die Religion". Die rhetorisch und stilistisch sehr geschickt verfasste Erstlingsschrift des später berühmten Predigers, Universitätsprofessors und Schriftstellers hat bis heute ihre Anziehungkraft behalten. Aus Anlass der Zweihundertjahrfeier hat die Niederländische Forschungsgesellschaft für Theologie und Religionswissenschaften zusammen mit der Theologischen Fakultät Tilburg einen Studientag veranstaltet. Zwei Ziele wurden dabei verfolgt: erstens die Situierung der "Reden" in ihrer Entstehungszeit und in der heutigen Zeit sowie zweitens die (...) systematisch-theologische Vertiefung zentraler Themen der "Reden", Schleiermachers Verständnis der Religion in der 2. Rede und seine Christologie in der 5. Rede. Dieser Band enthält die Beiträge zu dieser Tagung und ein Protokoll der spannungsreichen Diskussion, verfasst von Nico Schreurs, das auf viele Forschungsergebnisse und Forschungsdesiderate hinweist. Die Beiträge stammen von Günter Meckenstock, Herausgeber der Kritischen Schleiermacherausgabe und renommierter Kenner der historischen Lage um 1800, Ad Willems, Übersetzer der "Reden" ins Niederländische, Christian Albrecht und Claus-Dieter Osthövener. Inhalt Die Aufnahme der "Reden" in Schleiermachers Zeitgenossenschaft Günter Meckenstock Zur Aktualität von Schleiermachers "Reden" aus dem Jahre 1799: Ein kontextueller Deutungsversuch Ad Willems Die Ermöglichung von Korrelativität: Religion als "Anschauung und Gefühl" in Schleiermachers zweiter Rede Christian Albrecht Die Christologie der "Reden" Claus-Dieter Osthövener Religion als Ausdruck des gestimmten Gefühls: Schleiermachers. Sicht der religiösen Erfahrung in den "Reden" Wessel Stoker "... etwas ausser und über der Menschheit... " Schleiermachers Religionsbegriff in den "Reden". Postmodernismus avant la lettre? Dick Boer Die Präsenz Spinozas in Schleiermachers "Reden" Rinse Reeling Brouwer Von einer romantischen hin zu einer transzendental-philosophischen Bewusstseinstheorie Jacques Laurent Das Tilburger Symposium über Schleiermachers "Reden" Protokoll der Diskussion Nico Schreurs NAMENREGISTER. (shrink)

Si les figures continuent à faire l'objet de l'attention des linguistes, c'est dans le cadre toujours restreint de l'élocution, en dépit d'ouvertures vers la pragmatique, qui minimisent le détail du fait grammatical. Cette étude les aborde dans une perspective non seulement de rhétorique générale mais aussi de linguistique et de philosophie du langage, ce qui conduit à soulever la question même de leur définition. Elle s'appuie sur une conception souple du langage, considéré non comme un code, mais comme un processus (...) qui admet le flou et l'approximation. Les figures ne constituent pas un écart repérable par rapport à une norme, au demeurant introuvable, mais des agencements de faits grammaticaux qui prennent leur sens dans le contexte où ils se trouvent. On passe ainsi de la notion de figure à celle de configuration, ce qui est loin d'être une simple question de terminologie. Il ne s'agit donc pas de proposer une énième liste de figures aux noms savants, mais de mettre en évidence le jeu de mécanismes inscrits dans le logos, qui, en liaison avec l'ethos du locuteur et le pathos de l'interlocuteur, contribuent à la négociation de la distance entre individus à propos d'une question, où Michel Meyer voit l'essentiel de la rhétorique. C'est une nouvelle théorie des figures qui est proposée : loin d'en faire des écarts, elle les inscrit dans le fonctionnement ordinaire du langage. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur, dans «Soi-même comme un autre», porte une attention particulière à l'éthique de l'amitié chez Aristote. Gaëlle Fiasse expose dans son livre quels sont les enjeux éthiques et métaphysiques d'une telle lecture du philosophie grec. Elle montre comment Ricoeur s'approprie et se sépare des différents sens de l'être, puisque il rejette la substance au bénéfice de l'être selon la puissance et l'acte. Elle revient ensuite aux textes d'Aristote pour répondre aux objections de Paul Ricoeur tout en dialoguant avec lui. (...) Ce livre offre donc à la fois une nouvelle lecture d'Aristote et de Paul Ricoeur et une analyse du statut éthique et ontologique de l'autre à la lumière de l'amitié. (shrink)

This essay examines the risks of racialized science as revealed in the American mustard gas experiments of World War II. In a climate of contested beliefs over the existence and meanings of racial differences, medical researchers examined the bodies of Japanese American, African American, and Puerto Rican soldiers for evidence of how they differed from whites.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) handles policy search problems: searching a mapping from state space to action space. However RL is based on gradient methods and as such, cannot deal with problems with multimodal landscape. In contrast, though Genetic Algorithm (GA) is promising to deal with them, it seems to be unsuitable for policy search problems from the viewpoint of the cost of evaluation. Minimal Generation Gap (MGG), used as a generation-alternation model in GA, generates many offspring from two or more parents (...) selected from a population. Therefore, evaluating policies of generated offspring requires much trial and error (i.e. interaction between an agent and an environment). In this paper, we incorporate importance sampling into the framework of MGG in order to reduce the cost of evaluation on policy search. The proposed techniques are applied to Markov Decision Process (MDP) with multimodal landscape. The experimental results show that these techniques can reduce the number of interaction between an agent and an environment, and also mean that MGG and importance sampling are good for each other. (shrink)

For genetic algorithms, it is important to maintain the population diversity. Some genetic algorithms have been proposed, which have an ability to control the diversity. But these algorithms use the distance between two individuals to control the diversity. Therefore, these performances become worse on ill-scaled functions. In this paper, we propose a new genetic algorithm, DIDC(a genetic algorithm with Distance Independent Diversity Control), that does not use a distance to control the population diversity. For controlling the diversity, DIDC uses two (...) GAs that have different natures. For realizing different natures, one GA uses a crossover operator as a search operator, and the other GA uses a mutation operator in DIDC. By applying DIDC to several benchmark problems, we show that DIDC has a good performance on high dimensional, multimodal, non-separable and ill-scaled problems. Finally, we show that the control parameter of DIDC has the same effect on the search with the number of generating children n c. (shrink)

_A Conversation with Cardiologist and Professor Dr. Jens Flensted Lassen._ The essay is a conversation with cardiologist Jens Flensted Lassen about the cultural history of the heart, the connections between the humanities and the hard sciences.

In his historical novel from 1835, Prince Otto of Denmark and his Time, the poet Bernhard Severin Ingemann (1789-1862) established the unknown, yet historical character, Prince Otto of Denmark (1310-1346) as the hero of the novel. This choice has puzzled critics ever since, due to the fact that Prince Otto seems less a potential king than his brother Valdemar IV (1320-1372) who actually became a king of Denmark. Georg Brandes (1842-1927) claimed that Otto mirrored Ingemann’s persona as weak and feminine, (...) a “monk” not suited for kingship. In his ridicule of Prince Otto and Ingemann, Brandes reveals his ideas about gender, masculinity and femininity, but as this article seeks to show, such ideas are tied to time and place. Read from the distance of 2019, Ingemann’s feminine medieval hero might seem more modern and progressive than Brandes would have him. In this sense, the article is a piece of “queer medievalism”. (shrink)

This is an expansion of the author's 1991 work which investigates the implications of Gödel's writings on Einstein's theory of relativity as they relate to the fundamental questions of the nature of time and the possibilities for time travel.

What are the common denominators for success when we consider increasing gas efficiency and enhancing creativity in organizations? As an analogy, the principles of increasing gas efficiency are applicable to enhancing creativity in organizations: Plan activities in advance, allocate sufficient time, resources, and set a SMART goal with clear priority and focus. Identify talent in ourselves and others and do not fall into the temptation of following others. Big ideas take time. Maintain momentum, avoid interruptions, incorporate new technologies, information, and (...) feedback, and modify action to achieve goals. We have 100% control of our thoughts and action. Stop idling, take action, and do it now. If everyone contributes just a little, the cumulative effect over time can be huge. If we have the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) for doing the right things that will benefit humanity and the whole world, but fail to do them, is this ethical? We, the managers, need to focus on what we have done and what we have failed to do, change our thinking, change our behavior, and accomplish our goals. (shrink)

In this paper two models for movement of respiratory gases in the insect trachea are presented. One model considers the tracheal system as a single flexible compartment while the other model considers the trachea as a single flexible compartment with gas exchange. This work represents an extension of Ben-Tal’s work on compartmental gas exchange in human lungs and is applied to the insect tracheal system. The purpose of the work is to study nonlinear phenomena seen in the insect respiratory system. (...) It is assumed that the flow inside the trachea is laminar, and that the air inside the chamber behaves as an ideal gas. Further, with the isothermal assumption, the expressions for the tracheal partial pressures of oxygen and carbon dioxide, rate of volume change, and the rates of change of oxygen concentration and carbon dioxide concentration are derived. The effects of some flow parameters such as diffusion capacities, reaction rates and air concentrations on net flow are studied. Numerical simulations of the tracheal flow characteristics are performed. The models developed provide a mathematical framework to further investigate gas exchange in insects. (shrink)

The rapid uptake of digital technologies is constantly transforming the modern culture of sports spectating; however, relatively little is known about the impact of digitalization on the changing face of global sports-consuming audiences, particularly from a qualitative perspective. In this article, the relationship between modern mass digital technologies and audiences of sports spectators is described and explained by taking a customer-centric approach to grounded theory using a literature review and in-depth qualitative semi-structured interviews with sports marketing, management, and technology professionals. (...) The qualitative approach permits the gathering of in-depth insights into a problem, generates new concepts through data synthesis and analysis, and captures changing attitudes within the sports industry. Moreover, the qualitative approach to research is not bound by the limitations of quantitative methods and focuses on the primary questions of “how” and “why” digital technology’s mass deployment and diffusion have transformed content consumption in the sports industry. The analysis first systematizes and codes the collected data. Second, all the materials are iteratively read and the key points are outlined. Using the iterative analysis, the theoretical and empirical insights and findings are synthesized in order to achieve the results. Finally, dimensions of the transformation of sports spectators’ consumption are identified and explained. The research implications highlight “how” and “why” modern digital technologies have changed the sports-consuming audience by making it more inclusive in terms of age, gender, demographics, social and health status. These findings are useful for sport managers to better understand their audiences and processes in an ever-changing global society. (shrink)

Comparative study on Hindu philosophical thoughts of Nāgārjuna, 1911-1998, Hindi and Maithili poet and Śaṅkarācārya, Hindu philosopher.