This article features a comprehensive interview with Vincent Blok, renowned author of “The Critique of Management: Towards a Philosophy and Ethics of Business Management”, published in 2022. The interview is structured around four core themes: (1) Philosophical Context, (2) Methodology, (3) Theory and Application, and (4) Future of Management. Firstly, we explore the contextual significance and urgency for a philosophical investigation on the essence of management. Secondly, we delve into Blok’s distinctive philosophical method. Thirdly, we examine the theoretical foundations and (...) practical applications of his work. Finally, we engage in a broader discussion on how Blok’s insights resonate with the future landscape of management, addressing topics ranging from business education to the rise of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Bible, "Creation," and Mimetic TheoryLucien Scubla (bio)I would like to propose and defend three theses that are related to the main theme of creation.First thesis. Although the idea of creation ex nihilo seems to have been suggested by the Bible to some philosophers, it is not a religious theory but a philosophical one. In the book of Genesis, there is no creation in the proper sense of the (...) word.For biblical thought, as for the savage mind, the world is not created, but only put in order by gods or spirits; and, for both of them, this ordering action consists in dividing or separating1 from each other things that already existed (or were potentially present) but were mixed and confused in a primitive chaos, or linked to each other as the organs of an original sacrificial victim: the Purusha (in Vedic religion), the goddess Sedna (among the Inuit people), the larvae (in Aboriginal Australian religion), and so on.In the light of Girardian theory, this means that there are two kinds of cosmic myths: those that describe (in mythical or ritual terms, of course) the founding events starting from the apex of the undifferentiation crisis, and those starting from the killing of the surrogate victim. However, groups of people generally have both kinds of myth. The first book of Genesis belongs to the first; the creation of Eve from the body of Adam, in the second book of Genesis, belongs to the second. Ancient Greek mythology begins with Chaos, and the act of Prometheus sharing an ox with Zeus can be seen, according to Jean-Pierre Vernant, as making a permanent separation between men and gods by means of a sacrificial victim.The second kind of myths are often violent. They show, for example in Australia, the mythical ancestors, the Numbakulla, dividing the larvae with knives. The first kind of myth can take a more academic turn, as we see in 1 Genesis, which is much more civilized than Hesiodic mythology. But both follow the same pattern, going from an undifferentiated world to a more and more differentiated world. [End Page 13]If we try to distinguish the biblical myth from other myths of creation, we might be tempted to focus our attention on an obvious feature. In 1 Genesis, Yahweh appears as the principal agent, the only father of all the things and beings that he produces successively, while in Hesiodic theogony the earth and the sky, who are gods, can generate other gods, and so on. This feature may suggest that the Jewish God is properly creating the world, while Hesiodic cosmogony describes a kind of process of self-organization that, in this regard, resembles our scientific cosmology.But in fact, Yahweh is no more a creator than other gods or spirits who produce all things by dividing a victim whose organs become the various beings existing in the universe. What makes a real difference between the biblical cosmology and the others is rather the fact that, in 1 Genesis, the creating god is a transcendent god, the one true God. In Greek mythology, for example, the earth, the sky, and so on are also gods, whereas in biblical cosmology they are only natural phenomena. Here, the creator and his creatures are not at all of the same kind.In other words, biblical creation rests on an implicit, first and founding separation of God and the world, which is a model for the subsequent separations in which creation consists. By its nature, God is holy, sacred, kadosh, which means separated. And the creation is the image of its creator as soon as it is made of separated things. Here, I think, we are reaching the feature that really makes Genesis distinct from other cosmogonies. Although the biblical text does not take the idea of separation as its explicit topic, because it is not a philosophical treatise but a religious explanation of the world, this idea constitutes its main object, of which it displays the various aspects.I. SeparationAs Leo Strauss has shown, in a lecture delivered in 1957 at University College (Chicago) and published by Nicolas Ruwet in the French journal of... (shrink)

Résumé Ce n’est pas seulement la théorie de la Décision qui permet de définir ce qu’on entend aujourd’hui par « évaluation », c’est aussi la théorie de l’Institution, chère à Maurice Hauriou, qui permet d’éclairer le concept d’« évaluer » ainsi que d’enrichir celui de « tiers partagé » de Nicolas Dodier.

This article offers a novel account of a key concept in Hannah Arendt’s political thought: amor mundi. In political theory’s ethical turn, theorists have increasingly turned to amor mundi as a source of ethical guidance and inspiration for politics. However, in doing so, they have elided Arendt’s distinct understanding of care. This article recovers Arendt’s understanding of amor mundi as care for the world by reconstructing the central concerns of her dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and tracing them to the (...) “Crisis” essays of Between Past and Future. It shows that amor mundi emerges in the dissertation as part of a question: if love is our fundamental orientation toward the world, how can we love the world without instrumentalizing it? The two “Crisis” essays provide the following answer: if love is to avoid—and perhaps militate against—the instrumentalization of the world, it must take the form of care. Following this analysis, this article contends that the contribution of amor mundi to the ethical turn is best understood, not as the ethos needed to guide action in the political realm, but as a key pre- or nonpolitical ethos needed to conserve the world where politics takes place—and thus the very possibility of politics. (shrink)

En proposant une étude de la méthode en sciences humaines, l'auteur met en lumière le problème des idéologies, problème au centre de toute étude sociologique qui s'efforce de saisir les aspects essentiels de la vie. Le second écrit offre une brève analyse sur l'oeuvre littéraire située à la jonction du structuralisme et de l'idéologie marxiste.

The history of mathematics can be read in two ways. On the one hand, unlike the history of physics, it does not proceed by conjectures and refutations. New theories rarely refute old theories, but give them new foundations, generalize them, and reinterpret them through new concepts. This reading is unifying, highlighting the unity of the history of mathematics from its origins, through the permanence of its truths. On the other hand, many contemporary historians of mathematics have insisted on the diversity (...) of methods, objects, and practices throughout history. They have shown that the objects of the past mathematics are not the same as those of today. That second reading shatters the illusion of unity. It disjoins what the first reading unifies.Rather than deciding between these two readings, this chapter examines what makes them both possible and legitimate, based on an analysis of the acts of reading that we have to perform when confronted with the pages of a mathematical text, its signs, diagrams and images, and the different language modalities it employs. Starting with a discussion of Husserl's theses in The Origin of Geometry on the role of writing in the history of mathematics, and using a number of historical examples, the chapter shows that any reading of a mathematical text involves at least three divisions, three delimitations made by the reader’s gaze: divisions between the true and the false, between language and image, and between what is inside mathematics and what is outside. For the same text, these divisions are traced by the gaze in different ways throughout history.The chapter develops an example in greater detail, concerning the status of the equation in Descartes’ Geometry. It discusses the contrasting recent readings of the equation by two historians of science, Henk Bos and Enrico Giusti. It shows the concepts of The Geometry and the ideas the philosopher develops on reading and the nature of the sign. It shows how these ideas can be used to reconstruct how Descartes might have read a mathematical text, and it explains how successive readings of The Geometry can at the same time insert it into the mathematics of later centuries. (shrink)

In this landmark work of economic sociology, Lucien Karpik introduces the theory and practical tools needed to analyze markets for singularities. Singularities are goods and services that cannot be studied by standard methods because they are multidimensional, incommensurable, and of uncertain quality. Examples include movies, novels, music, artwork, fine wine, lawyers, and doctors. Valuing the Unique provides a theoretical framework to explain this important class of products and markets that for so long have eluded neoclassical economics. With this innovative (...) theory--called the economics of singularities--Karpik shows that, because of the uncertainty and the highly subjective valuation of singularities, these markets are necessarily equipped with what he calls "judgment devices"--such as labels, brands, guides, critics, and rankings--which provide consumers with the credible knowledge needed to make reasonable choices. He explains why these markets are characterized by the primacy of competition by qualities over competition by prices, and he identifies the conditions under which singularities are constructed or are in danger of losing their uniqueness. After demonstrating how combinations of the numerous and multiform judgment devices can be used to identify different market models, Karpik applies his analytical tools to the functioning of a large number of actual markets, including fine wines, movies, luxury goods, pop music, and legal services. (shrink)

The concept of ‘world visions’, first elaborated in the early work of Georg Lukàcs, is used here as a tool whereby the similarities between Pascal’s Pensées and Kant’s critical philosophy are contrasted with the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume. For Lucien Goldmann, a leading exponent of the most fruitful method of applying Marxist ideas to literary and philosophical problems, the ‘tragic vision’ marked an important phase in the development of European thought from rationalism and empiricism to (...) the dialectical philosophy of Hegel, Marx and Lukàcs. The book is not a collection of isolated essays on Kant, Pascal, Racine, the status of the legal nobility in seventeenth-century France and the exact nature of the religious movement known as Jansenism, but an attempt to formulate, by an examination of these different topics, a general approach to the problems of philosophy, of literary criticism, and of the relationship between thought and action in human society. (shrink)

Praised as a panacea for resolving all societal issues, and self-evidently presupposed as technological innovation, the concept of innovation has become the emblem of our age. This is especially reflected in the context of the European Union, where it is considered to play a central role in both strengthening the economy and confronting the current environmental crisis. The pressing question is how technological innovation can be steered into the right direction. To this end, recent frameworks of Responsible Innovation (RI) focus (...) on how to enable outcomes of innovation processes to become societally desirable and ethically acceptable. However, questions with regard to the technological nature of these innovation processes are rarely raised. For this reason, this paper raises the following research question: To what extent is RI possible in the current age, where the concept of innovation is predominantly presupposed as technological innovation? On the one hand, we depart from a post-phenomenological perspective to evaluate the possibility of RI in relation to the particular technological innovations discussed in the RI literature. On the other hand, we emphasize the central role innovation plays in the current age, and suggest that the presupposed concept of innovation projects a techno-economic paradigm. In doing so, we ultimately argue that in the attempt to steer innovation, frameworks of RI are in fact steered by the techno-economic paradigm inherent in the presupposed concept of innovation. Finally, we account for what implications this has for the societal purpose of RI. (shrink)

The novel gives us access to fictional universes in a fundamentally unfinished mode, which allows the reader to give free rein to his or her imagination, in a freedom that is nevertheless monitored and controlled by rules. This article tries to understand the nature of this incompleteness, by discussing some classical readings. How does this specific dimension of fiction relate to Umberto Eco’s concept of the “open work” or to the idea, developed by the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, that literary works (...) are “schemas” destined to be “concretized” in the consciousness of the reader? How does Hans Robert Jauss’s aesthetics of reception help us to think about the incompleteness of the work in the proper time of its different readings? Through the fruitful dialogue of these different theories, it is a question of highlighting two important points. First, these theories, while discussing the respective roles of the author and the reader, neglect a a third character who is nevertheless essential to the fictional narrative, the narrator. However, taking into account the latter sheds light on the problems encountered. Secondly, this relationship between the incompleteness of the narrative and the narrator’s position is not in itself specific to fiction. It is not absent from scientific texts, when they are thought of as narratives about reality susceptible of different readings in their history. (shrink)

Lucien Sève (1926–2020) was one of the foremost Marxist theoreticians of the Parti Communiste Français. An indomitable opponent of both structural and humanist Marxism, his 1973 article reprinted below represents the core of his conception of alienation. For Sève, whilst the mature Marxism of Das Kapital is fundamentally distinct from the speculative humanism of the 1844 Manuscripts in placing capital, not abstract labour, at the heart of alienation, this reinforces, rather than replaces, the role of alienation at the centre (...) of Marx’s mature thought, and hence of Marxism itself. (shrink)

Recent research on thick terms like “rude” and “friendly” has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like “friendly” and “courageous” can be more easily canceled than the evaluative content of negative terms like “rude” and “selfish”. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick (...) terms but also for thin terms such as “good” or “bad” (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect indicates a pervasive asymmetry between positive and negative evaluative terms. (shrink)

Lucien Pelletier | Résumé : Cet article montre comment la philosophie du jeune Ernst Bloch, sous l’inspiration de Nietzsche, de Simmel et des mouvements de libre pensée du début du 20e siècle en Allemagne, s’est constituée comme une refonte de la conception eckhartienne de la naissance de Dieu dans l’âme. Diverses psychologies descriptives qui s’élaboraient alors, et la logique de l’origine de Hermann Cohen telle que relue par Oswald Weidenbach, ont procuré à Bloch des moyens conceptuels pour repenser la (...) mystique de Maître Eckhart sous une forme non théiste. |: This article describes how the young Ernst Bloch, under the inspiration of Nietzsche, Simmel and the free thought movements in early 20th-C. Germany, elaborated his philosophy as a recasting of the Eckhartian conception of the birth of God in the soul. Various descriptive psychologies that were then arising, and Hermann Cohen’s logic of the origin such as re-read by Oswald Weidenbach, gave Bloch conceptual means to re-think Meister Eckhart’s mysticism in a non-theistic form. (shrink)

" Au gre des rangements a perte de vue de ma bibliotheque, j'ai fini par mettre ensemble Heraclite, Zhuangzi, Goethe, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Bachelard et Rimbaud. Leur point commun, c'est la comprehension (" prendre avec ") de la nature, qui leur donne l'image la plus sensee de l'existence : pour mesurer notre place dans l'univers, il faut d'abord entendre la place de l'univers en nous. Or cette imbrication semble oubliee voire gommee par la plupart des systemes philosophiques. Faut-il voir la quelque (...) rapport avec la destruction acceleree de la planete ou, parallelement, avec le manque d'enthousiasme general qui nous gagne? La nature, il en reste encore assez pour s'en meler. Alors, decouvrons le secret des vieilles cosmogonies et sollicitons nos auteurs un par un, les litterateurs et les visionnaires, la poignee de philosophes interesses, puis les erudits de l'ecologie si pleins de verdeur - afin de moissonner les recettes d'une attitude plus confortable. Elles risquent de surprendre. Car, a force de cerner l'intelligence du monde, on va voir que c'est un mystere a double tranchant. ". (shrink)

Land Tenure, Fiscal Policy, and Imperial Power in Medieval Syro-Egypt. By Daisuke Igarashi. Chicago Studies on the Middle East, vol 10. Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, University of Chicago, 2015. Pp. vi + 264. $79.

The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that (...) ‘reasonable’ is predicted to be an evaluative term in the majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and challenges descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term—at least given the way we operationalize the latter. Interestingly, other expressions often used interchangeably in jury instructions (e.g. ‘careful,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘prudent,’ etc), however, are predicted to be descriptive. This indicates a discrepancy between the intended use of the term ‘reasonable’ and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the court room. (shrink)

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, (...) which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)

In this reissue, originally published in English in 1973, French philosopher Lucien Goldmann turns his attention to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the great age of liberalism and individualism and analyses the ‘mental structures’ of the outlook of the philosophes, who showed that the ancien regime and the privileges of the Church were irrational anachronisms. In assessing the strengths and limitations of individualism, Goldmann considers the achievements and limitations of the Enlightenment. He discusses the views of Hegel and (...) Marx and examines the relation between liberal scepticism and traditional Christianity to point the way to the possible reconciliation of the two seemingly incompatible ‘world visions’ of East and West today. (shrink)

What makes a democratic school democratic? This question is answered using the example of the Swiss education system; the focus, however, is not on the usual pedagogic perspective of teaching democracy, but on the democratic organization of the education system. The discussion concentrates on two basic requirements for a democratic education organization: on the one hand, education for all under the equal rights premise calls for the definition of an educational minimum for all students. At the same time, defining this (...) minimum presupposes selection among the students. For part of the students are -- through the use of public funds -- being educated beyond the minimum; a situation which needs to be democratically legitimized. The selection is based on academic performance; as yet, a valuable alternative to this type of selection does not exist. On the other hand, it is essential in a democratic education organization that the authorities put in charge of certain responsibilities are democratically legitimized and controlled. The same applies to newly created authorities, such as principalships or autonomous schools, the introduction of which has been demanded repeatedly for some time now. (shrink)

Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated manner to refer to actions in the zone of moral indifference, (...) whereas negative terms cannot be so interpreted. (shrink)