The maze and the masses -- Democracy as the rule of the dumb many? -- A selective genealogy of the epistemic argument for democracy -- First mechanism of democratic reason: inclusive deliberation -- Epistemic failures of deliberation -- Second mechanism of democratic reason: majority rule.

This paper takes stock of a recent but growing movement within the field of deliberative democracy, which normatively argues for the epistemic dimension of democratic authority and positively defends the truth-tracking properties of democratic procedures. Authors within that movement call themselves epistemic democrats, hence the recognition by many of an ‘epistemic turn’ in democratic theory. The paper argues that this turn is a desirable direction in which the field ought to evolve, taking it beyond the ‘fact of disagreement’ that had (...) previously blocked the conceptual road to acknowledging more than intrinsic properties to democratic decision procedures. The paper shows how two authors in particular – Joshua Cohen and David Estlund – have successfully lifted the Rawlsian requirement of epistemic abstinence and defends epistemic democrats and the implications of the epistemic turn in democratic theory against various misconceptions. (shrink)

This paper argues in favor of the epistemic properties of inclusiveness in the context of democratic deliberative assemblies and derives the implications of this argument in terms of the epistemically superior mode of selection of representatives. The paper makes the general case that, all other things being equal and under some reasonable assumptions, more is smarter. When applied to deliberative assemblies of representatives, where there is an upper limit to the number of people that can be included in the group, (...) the argument translates into a defense of a specific selection mode of participants: random selection. (shrink)

Consensus plays an ambiguous role in deliberative democracy. While it formed the horizon of early deliberative theories, many now denounce it as an empirically unachievable outcome, a logically impossible stopping rule, and a normatively undesirable ideal. Deliberative disagreement, by contrast, is celebrated not just as an empirically unavoidable outcome but also as a democratically sound and normatively desirable goal of deliberation. Majority rule has generally displaced unanimity as the ideal way of bringing deliberation to a close. This article offers an (...) epistemic perspective on this question of consensus versus disagreement. For ensuring the production of better decisions, we argue, the normative appeal of consensus varies depending on the deliberative task – whether it entails problem solving or prediction. We argue that in pure problem-solving contexts, consensus retains a strong normative appeal and forms the ideal deliberative outcome of deliberation. In contrast, on predictive tasks, consensus should generally not be used as a stopping rule noris it likely to be epistemically desirable as an outcome. Instead deliberators may be better served by ending the deliberation with a form of deliberative disagreement we call ‘positive dissensus’, which paves the way for more accurate aggregate predictions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe idea that the crowd could ever be intelligent is a counterintuitive one. Our modern, Western faith in experts and bureaucracies is rooted in the notion that political competence is the purview of the select few. Here, as in my book Democratic Reason, I defend the opposite view: that the diverse many are often smarter than a group of select elites because of the different cognitive tools, perspectives, heuristics, and knowledge they bring to political problem solving and prediction. In this (...) essay I defend my epistemic argument against proceduralist democrats; the value of model thinking against empiricists; the bracketing of fundamental value diversity against critics who see such diversity as an essential feature of politics; the intelligence of the masses in the face of voter ignorance and systematic biases; and the normative priority of democracy over market mechanisms. I also consider challenges to my use of Hong and Page's formal results, the epistemically proper selection method for representatives, and the role of deliberation in problem solving. I finally chart three avenues for further research. (shrink)

On the basis of Anton Marty’s 1867 Preisschrift, this article offers a reconstruction of the semiotic and linguistic investigations the Swiss philosopher develops just before becoming a student of Brentano. The paper then compares this account with the view on signs that will be given in Marty’s later work, as well as within the Austro-German tradition.

This article furnishes a philosophical background for the current debate about responsibility and culpability for war crimes by referring to ideas from three important just war thinkers: Augustine, Francisco de Vitoria, and Michael Walzer. It combines lessons from these three thinkers with perspectives on current problems in the ethics of war, distinguishes between legal culpability, moral culpability, and moral responsibility, and stresses that even lower-ranking soldiers must in many cases assume moral responsibility for their acts, even though they are part (...) of a military hierarchy and act under orders. The questions addressed in this article are arguably among the hardest and most muddled in military ethics and deserve close philosophical analysis and scrutiny. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to Ibn Sinn's text deals with two distinct, though closely related, subjects. First he considers the classification of problems, founded on the logical criteria which are the number and degree of indetermination of the solutions and the number of hypotheses and their possible independence. This classification does not replace the Hellenistic one, which remains relevant insofar as it purports to solve geometrical problems, but complements it and has a different frame of reference, applying principally to algebra, (...) that new born science. Ibn Sinn to bestow more importance on the role played by analysis in the course of the proof, the only role left to synthesis being to check that all implications involved in the course of analysis are in fact equivalences. This method will prove to be productive in algebra too, so much so that some algebraists will explicitly identify algebra with analysis. (shrink)

Tout en accordant à Roland Barthes sa critique de la tautologie, n’est-il pas possible de trouver dans ses textes des formes non stériles de tautologie?

Comment se vivent et s’expérimentent actuellement les relations de parenté dans le Pacifique? Voici le fil conducteur qui relie les onze contributions de ce bel ouvrage dirigé par Christina Toren et Simonne Pauwels. Il actualise l’anthropologie de la parenté des îles du Pacifique, de la Nouvelle-Zélande à la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée, en passant par Fidji, Tonga, Samoa et Taïwan. En introduction, C. Toren et S. Pauwels questionnent la manière dont la parenté constitue dans le Pacifique une t...

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to a similarity between an ancient and a modern theory of living nature. There is no need to present the Aristotelian doctrine in full detail. I must rather apologize for repeating much that is well known. My endeavour is to offer it for comparison, and, incidentally, to clear it from misrepresentation. Uexküll's theory, on the other hand, is little known, and what is given here is an insufficient outline of it. I (...) do not maintain that either doctrine is right. I am fully aware that the problem of the essence of living nature by no means admits of an éasy solution. In offering for consideration the comparison contained in this paper I would go no farther than owning my belief that the two authors here discussed, both thinkers who combine an intensely philosophical outlook with a wide biological experience, are worth the attention not only of the historian of science and philosophy, but also of the student of philosophical biology. (shrink)

The longing for aerial flight has been one of mankind's most consuming preoccupations. A burning desire for lightness, verticality, and flight is opposed to the fatality of universal gravity. Jules Michelet, in his study of the subject, entitled L'Oiseau (The Bird), which he wrote toward the end of his life, deems this aspiration for upward motion to be characteristic of all nature. He writes: “It is the cry of all the earth, of the world and of all life… : ‘Wings! (...) We want wings, we want flight and movement.’” From ancient times, this basic element of physical experience has nourished human imagination and been a source of motivation for the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Mesopotamian civilization had its winged divinities and spirits; indeed the Western tradition of depicting winged persons has been linked to the influence of Mesopotamian art. As Jules Duhem has pointed out, four centuries before Jesus Christ, Aristotle himself was already exploring certain notions that have become part of the history of ideas of aeronautics and astronomy. Among these are the ideas of void, weight, the resistance of air, and the movement of birds and other flying creatures. Duhem has also demonstrated that Aristotle proposed an explanation, as imperfect as it was, for what causes projectiles to fall from the sky. Throughout the ages, humanity has continually expressed its desire to fly: “Man is proud of being free and of leaning on nothing,” Elias Canetti has written in regard to man's upright position. Striking examples of the impulse to fly are to be found not only in scientific discourse but in myths, literature, and works of art. (shrink)

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) framework assumes an efference copy based on the interlocutor's intentions. Yet, elaborate attribution of intentions may not always be necessary for online prediction. Instead, contextual cues such as speaker gaze can provide similar information with a lower demand on processing resources.

Intellectual historians have rarely attended to the genre of fighting manuals, but these provide a new window on long-debated questions such as the relationship between Scholasticism and Humanism. This article offers a close comparison of the first known fencing manual, the 14-th century Liber de Arte Dimicatoria (Leeds, Royal Armouries FECHT 1, previously and better known as MS I.33), and the corpus of fighting manuals which underwent a remarkable expansion during the 15th and 16th centuries. While the former clearly shows (...) its origins in a scholastic background, the latter is mainly viewed as reflecting its humanist context. To this historiographical division corresponds a linguistic one: MS I.33 is a Latin text, while the rest of the corpus is mainly written in German and Italian. However, exceptions arise, amongst which, Heinrich von Gunterrodt’s Sciomachia et Hoplomachia: sive de Veris Principiis Artis Dimicatoriae (1579), the first text which explicitly refers to I.33. This article will compare these two texts, in order to interrogate their common relation to Scholasticism, namely the traditional frame of the knowledge within the medieval and early modern universities. The intent is to show that (at least some) Renaissance fight books include references to Scholasticism and to provide a better qualification of the nature of such references. The general hypothesis is that a large part of the texts―and products of culture―of the Renaissance that have been read, until recently, exclusively in relation to a humanist intellectual background can valuably be interpreted in the context of a Scholasticism that is still vivid during the period in question. (shrink)

_Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_ is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: _The School of the Dead_--the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; _The School of Dreams_--the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and _The School of Roots_--the importance of (...) depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing. Cixous's love of language and passion for the written word is evident on every page. Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky and, most of all, Kafka. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show how schizophrenia, understood as a distortion of the most intimate structures of subjectivity, illustrates the nature of subjectivity as such, while at the same time how philosophical considerations may help to understand schizophrenia. More precisely, schizophrenic experiences of self-alienation seem to reflect a congealing or concretization of a form of differentiation or potential alterity implicit in the dynamic nature of subjectivity. In other words, we propose that the structure of subjectivity includes potential (...) divisions and fissures that condition the experiences of radical self-alienation seen in schizophrenia. In order to elucidate how this alterity emerges within the self in schizophrenia and in order to consider its conditions of possibility we examine the disorders of the self as described in phenomenological psychopathology. We especially use the work of the Japanese psychiatrists Mari Nagai, her teacher Bin Kimura, and the French psychiatrist Henry Ey, supplemented with clinical material from our own research. Finally, we shed light on the development of the psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, which are understood as the expressions of a radical alterization of the self. (shrink)

NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) refers to an oppositional attitude from local residents against some risk generating facility that they have been chosen to host either by government or industry. The attitude is claimed to be characteristic of someone who is positive to a facility but who wants someone else to be its host. Since siting cannot be provided if everyone has this attitude, society ends up in a worse situation. The attitude is claimed to be egoistic and irrational. Here (...) it is argued that the NIMBY critique rests on questionable assumptions about the rightness of weighing total benefit against total cost. This weighing-principle will sometimes have to yield so that the rights of individuals can be acknowledged. (shrink)

Disclosure is a common response to conflicts of interest; it is intended to expose the conflict to scrutiny and enable it to be appropriately managed. For disclosure to be effective the receiver of the disclosure needs to be able to use the information to assess how the conflict may impact on their interests and then implement a suitable response. The act of disclosure also creates an expectation of self-regulation, as the person with the conflicting interests will be mindful of their (...) own potential biases and aware that their decisions may be monitored. This article discusses some of the problems of relying on disclosure as a solution to address conflicts of interest in research, including the added complexities around institutional conflicts of interest. The case of Dan Markingson illustrates these issues and highlights the vulnerable position relying on disclosure as a solution leaves research participants in. (shrink)

_Hyperdream_ is a major new novel by celebrated French author Hélène Cixous. It is a literary tour de force, returning anew to challenge necessity itself, the most implacable of human certainties: you die in the end – and that’s the end. For you, for me. But what if? What if death did not inevitably spell the end of life? _Hyperdream_ invests this fragile, tentative suspension of disbelief with the sheer force of its poetic audacity, inventing a sort of magic telephone: (...) a wireless lifeline against all the odds to the dearly departed. It is a book about time, age, love and the greatest loss. A book which turns on death: on the question or the moment of death, depending on it, expecting it, living off it, taking place at once before and after, but at the same time turning against it, contesting it, outwriting it hopefully, desperately, performatively, as an interruptible interruption. _Hyperdream_ is a book of mourning, but also of morning, a tragedy-with-comedy and a universal family romance in which it transpires that the narrator is the veritable offspring of a “treasure of literature” in the form of a bed, purchased by her mother from a certain W. Benjamin in 1934, slept on for 40 years by her brother and dreamt of by her friend “J.D.”. (shrink)

Ideomotor actions are behaviours that are unconsciously initiated and express a thought rather than a response to a sensory stimulus. The question examined here is whether ideomotor actions can also express nonconscious knowledge. We investigated this via the use of implicit long-term semantic memory, which is not available to conscious recall. We compared accuracy of answers to yes/no questions using both volitional report and ideomotor response . Results show that when participants believed they knew the answer, responses in the two (...) modalities were similar. But when they believed they were guessing, accuracy was at chance for volitional report , but significantly higher for Ouija response . These results indicate that implicit semantic memory can be expressed through ideomotor actions. They also suggest that this approach can provide an interesting new methodology for studying implicit processes in cognition. (shrink)

This book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," by Hélène Cixous is an account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia; Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" muses on a host of motifs, including his varied responses to "Savoir.".

Les deux auteures présentent une réflexion à plusieurs dimensions, composée d’analyses et de pratiques poétiques, sur la vocation et le travail de l’avocate pénaliste confrontée ici, d’une part, aux individuations extrêmes engendrées et révélées par les crimes sexuels et leurs sanctions, y compris capitales, et, d’autre part, aux déterminants globaux d’une culture collective du viol qui résiste et tend à perdurer, malgré les dénonciations et les démonstrations.

The pigment melanin is found in all living kingdoms and in many different structures and forms. When its various functions are examined separately, its behaviors seem disparate and conflicting. It has a clear role in camouflage and sexual display. Other major roles are examined critically. It can act as a sun screen but is not a very effective one. It can also scavenge active chemical species, but this, too, is not done very effectively. It produces active radicals that can damage (...) DNA. It binds to drugs in ways that are either beneficial or deleterious. Aside from camouflage, its other roles can be brought together by a unifying hypothesis as first proposed by Proctor and McGinness nearly 20 years ago. Melanin is envisaged as an energy transducer with the properties of an amorphous semiconductor. It can absorb many different types of energy and dissipate them in the form of heat. However, if the energy input is too great, the output can be expressed in the form of activated chemical species that can damage cellular macromolecules resulting in cell death, mutations and cancer. The protective aspect of melanin in dark skin is seen as resulting from its high concentration and its confinement to ellipsoidal and densely packed organelles that can effectively shield the nucleus. In light skin, its radical nature is seen as potentially participating in the carcinogenic process, particularly when overwhelmed by intense episodes of sunburn. (shrink)