« Héros et héroïnes sont le produit de discours historiques », écrivent Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet et Mathilde Dubesset dans le numéro 30 de Clio. HFS, consacré aux Héroïnes (2009). C’est aussi le titre d’une collection éditée chez Grasset, dont l’intention n’est pas de célébrer encore une fois les femmes pionnières, connues depuis trente ans par les historien/ne/s du féminisme. Il s’agit plutôt, pour Fiammetta Vener et Caroline Fourest, qui la dirigent, de « sortir de l’obscurité » des femmes...

Sex, Gender, Ethics, and the Darwinian Evolution of Humanity examines the impact of Darwin's 'Descent of Man' on contemporary biology and the humanities. Its publication in 1871 was a founding event in anthropology. Its content was primarily concerned with the development of sexual life, social life, and intellectual life, not only as outcomes of evolution, but as components that have actively intermixed over time with the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection. The stamp of Darwinism on modern thought is still very (...) important and brings novelties to academic studies. Several fields influenced by Darwinian anthropology developed in recent decades, including evolutionary ethics, the evolution of sociality and sexual communication in animal and plant species. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are topics that draw heavily on Darwin's 'Descent of Man'. The understanding of Darwin's thought has also progressed greatly in recent decades, following the systematic study of Darwin's correspondence and notebooks, leading to a reassessment of the development of his thought on humans, social groups, and heredity, and how they come together in his theory of evolution. The book combines a historical perspective on Darwin's achievement and his legacy. It will be of interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields, from experimental biology to the social and historical sciences. (shrink)

À propos des vénérables malentendus philosophiques et de l'inévitable transition culturelle.

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

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

Having served for a long time under Ostrogothic kings, then removed from office, Cassiodorus (vith century) designed his writings for the members of the famous monastery that he founded at Vivarium. In his monumental Expositio Psalmorum, meant for the novices, he wanted to give his readers not only an exegesis of the biblical text, but rudiments of Liberal Arts too, especially of dialectics and logic. This paper intends to show Cassiodorus’ conception of an orthodox study of dialectics, and his pedagogical (...) devices. Then is considered the way in which Cassiodorus applies in his commentary categorical and hypothetical syllogistics. Finally, special attention is given to Cassiodorus’ rigorous demonstration about the famous Three Chapters controversy. In the dialectical passages of the Expositio appears the artificial cha­racter of this attempt to reconcile secular culture and biblical exegesis. The best in Cassiodo­rus’ enterprise is his enthusiasm. (shrink)

La pensée de Nietzsche, loin d'avoir vieilli, suggère et appelle de nouvelles et continuelles reformulations. Le souci qui fut le sien, celui du dépassement du nihilisme, demeure notre souci premier. Le nihilisme n'est pas l'absence de valeurs et de sens, mais leur affaiblissement indéfini. Les sens anciens, subsistent mais frappés d'asthénie, d'insuffisance, d'irréalité. Dans le nihilisme, rien ne vaut plus, ou tout se vaut, tout s'égalise, tout est égal, équivalent, sans force. Tout est dépassé, usé, affaibli, terni, mourant. Pour sortir (...) d'un potentiellement interminable crépuscule des valeurs et des sens anciens, Nietzsche ne voit d'autre issue que leur renversement, leur totale refondation. (shrink)

What do repair and reparation tell us about human beings? They speak to our (natural) vulnerability, our (moral) fallibility, and our (social) incompleteness, but also about the many capabilities we draw upon to mitigate these shortcomings. It is from the heart of human finitude that repair and reparation draw meaning.

Opponents to consciousness in fish argue that fish do not feel pain because they do not have a neocortex, which is a necessary condition for feeling pain. A common counter-argument appeals to the multiple realizability of pain: while a neocortex might be necessary for feeling pain in humans, pain might be realized differently in fish. This paper argues, first, that it is impossible to find a criterion allowing us to demarcate between plausible and implausible cases of multiple realization of pain (...) without running into a circular argument. Second, opponents to consciousness in fish cannot be provided with reasons to believe in the multiple realizability of pain. I conclude that the debate on the existence of pain in fish is impossible to settle by relying on the multiple realization argument. (shrink)

Studying consciousness requires contrasting conscious and unconscious perception. While many studies have reported unconscious perceptual effects, recent work has questioned whether such effects are genuinely unconscious, or whether they are due to weak conscious perception. Some philosophers and psychologists have reacted by denying that there is such a thing as unconscious perception, or by holding that unconscious perception has been previously overestimated. This article has two parts. In the first part, I argue that the most significant attack on unconscious perception (...) commits the criterion content fallacy: the fallacy of interpreting evidence that observers were conscious of something as evidence that they were conscious of the task-relevant features of the stimuli. In the second part, I contend that the criterion content fallacy is prevalent in consciousness research. For this reason, I hold that if unconscious perception exists, scientists studying consciousness could routinely underestimate it. I conclude with methodological recommendations for moving the debate forward. (shrink)

Whether the prefrontal cortex is part of the neural substrates of consciousness is currently debated. Against prefrontal theories of consciousness, many have argued that neural activity in the prefrontal cortex does not correlate with consciousness but with subjective reports. We defend prefrontal theories of consciousness against this argument. We surmise that the requirement for reports is not a satisfying explanation of the difference in neural activity between conscious and unconscious trials, and that prefrontal theories of consciousness come out of this (...) debate unscathed. (shrink)

As for most measurement procedures in the course of their development, measures of consciousness face the problem of coordination, i.e., the problem of knowing whether a measurement procedure actually measures what it is intended to measure. I focus on the case of the Perceptual Awareness Scale to illustrate how ignoring this problem leads to ambiguous interpretations of subjective reports in consciousness science. In turn, I show that empirical results based on this measurement procedure might be systematically misinterpreted.

This paper explores what happens when artists fail to execute their goals. I argue that taxonomies of failure in general, and of failed-art in particular, should focus on the attempts which generate the failed-entity, and that to do this they must be sensitive to an attempt’s orientation. This account of failed-attempts delivers three important new insights into artistic practice: there can be no accidental art, only deliberate and incidental art; art’s intention-dependence entails the possibility of performative failure, but not of (...) failed-art; and art’s intention-dependence is perfectly compatible with the role that luck plays in artistic creation. (shrink)

Phillips argues that blindsight is due to response criterion artefacts under degraded conscious vision. His view provides alternative explanations for some studies, but may not work well when one considers several key findings in conjunction. Empirically, not all criterion effects are decidedly non-perceptual. Awareness is not completely abolished for some stimuli, in some patients. But in other cases, it was clearly impaired relative to the corresponding visual sensitivity. This relative dissociation is what makes blindsight so important and interesting.

Consciousness scientists have not reached consensus on two of the most central questions in their field: first, on whether consciousness overflows reportability; second, on the physical basis of consciousness. I review the scientific literature of the 19th century to provide evidence that disagreement on these questions has been a feature of the scientific study of consciousness for a long time. Based on this historical review, I hypothesize that a unifying explanation of disagreement on these questions, up to this day, is (...) that scientific theories of consciousness are underdetermined by the evidence, namely, that they can be preserved “come what may” in front of (seemingly) disconfirming evidence. Consciousness scientists may have to find a way of solving the persistent underdetermination of theories of consciousness to make further progress. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that fiction is necessarily incomplete, but some recent work postulates the existence of universal fictions—stories according to which everything is true. Building such a story is supposedly straightforward: authors can either assert that everything is true in their story, define a complement function that does the assertoric work for them, or, most compellingly, write a story combining a contradiction with the principle of explosion. The case for universal fictions thus turns on the intuitive priority we assign (...) to the law of non-contradiction. My goal in this paper is to show that our critical and reflective literary practices set constraints on story-telling which preclude universal fictions. I will raise four stumbling blocks for universal fictionalists: the gap between saying and making true, our actual interpretive reactions to story-level contradictions, the criteria we accept for what counts as a story in our literary practices, and the undesirability of the universal fictionalist’s closure principles. (shrink)

The premise that every work belongs to an art-kind has recently inspired a kind-centred approach to theories of art. Kind-centred analyses posit that we should abandon the project of giving a general theory of art and focus instead on giving theories of the arts. The main difficulty, however, is to explain what makes a given kind an art-kind in the first place. Kind-centred theorists have passed this buck on to appreciative practices, but this move proves unsatisfactory. I argue that the (...) root of this dissatisfaction stems not from the act of kicking the can down the road, but from not kicking it far enough. The missing ingredient, I argue, is a notion of convention which does the work of marking the difference between art and non-art for a given physical medium. (shrink)

Consciousness is scientifically challenging to study because of its subjective aspect. This leads researchers to rely on report-based experimental paradigms in order to discover neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs). I argue that the reliance on reports has biased the search for NCCs, thus creating what I call 'methodological artefacts'. This paper has three main goals: first, describe the measurement problem in consciousness science and argue that this problem led to the emergence of methodological artefacts. Second, provide a critical assessment of (...) the NCCs put forward by the global neuronal workspace theory. Third, provide the means of dissociating genuine NCCs from methodological artefacts. (shrink)

Les Leçons d'histoire de la philosophie du droit sont un jalon fondamental de la philosophie du droit de Michel Villey. Elles ambitionnent de construire une synthèse des apports nécessaires et successifs de l'histoire de la philosophie : " Il ne suffit plus de s'installer dans le sillage du seul Thomas, celui de Kant ou celui de Comte ; mais toutes ces doctrines ensemble sont les données de notre problème. Seule aura chance d'être acceptée par le corps social, seule pourra (...) devenir efficace, seule sera vraie la philosophie qui aura su réunir et réconcilier, sans en sacrifier aucun, ces aspects encore dispersés de la tradition. " A l'heure en particulier où les juges retrouvent progressivement leur rôle social fondamental, les juristes doivent relire ces développements qui leur confèrent collectivement le lourd privilège de réaliser la Justice, non pas idéale, mais simplement possible et concrète. (shrink)

The debate about the nature of the representational format of concepts seems to have reached an impasse. The debate faces two fundamental problems. Firstly, amodalists (i.e., those who argue that concepts are represented by amodal symbols) and modalists (i.e., those who see concepts as involving crucially representations including sensorimotor information) claim that the same empirical evidence is compatible with their views. Secondly, there is no shared understanding of what a modal or amodal format amounts to. Both camps recognize that the (...) two formats play essential roles in higher cognition, leading to an increasing number of hybrid proposals. In this paper, I argue that the existence of those fundamental problems should make us suspicious about a modal/amodal dichotomy. Also, I suggest that hybrid approaches, as they currently stand, do not provide suitable solutions to the impasse. Instead, we should overcome the dichotomy and treat the modal/amodal distinction as a graded phenomenon. I illustrate this hypothesis with an example of a cognitive-computational model of concepts based on the Predictive Processing framework. (shrink)

Concept contextualism is the view that the information associated with a concept is dependent on the context in which it is tokened. This view is gaining support in recent years. The received and c...

This paper describes and critically reflects on a participatory policy process which resulted in a government decision not to introduce genetically modified cotton in farmers’ fields in Mali. In January 2006, 45 Malian farmers gathered in Sikasso to deliberate on GM cotton and the future of farming in Mali. As an invited policy space convened by the government of Sikasso region, this first-time farmers' jury was unique in West Africa. It was known as l’ECID—Espace Citoyen d’Interpellation Démocratique —and it had (...) an unprecedented impact on the region. In this Deliberative and Inclusive Process, the ECID combined the citizens’ jury method with indigenous methods for debate and dialogue, including the traditional African palaver. The ECID brought together male and female producers representing every district in the Sikasso region of southern Mali, specialist witnesses from various continents and a panel of independent observers, as well as resource persons and members of the national and international press and media. As an experiment in deliberative democracy, the ECID of Sikasso aimed to give men and women farmers the opportunity to share knowledge on the benefits and risks of GM cotton, and make policy recommendations on the future of GM technology in Malian agriculture. Designed as a bottom-up and participatory process, the ECID’s outcomes significantly changed national policy on the release of GM technology and have had an enduring influence in Mali. In this paper, we describe our positionality as action researchers and co-organisers of the ECID. We explain the methodology used for the ECID of Sikasso and critically reflect on the safeguards that were put in place to ensure a balanced and trustworthy deliberative process. The ECID and its key outcomes are discussed in the context of the political economy of GM cotton in West Africa. Last, we briefly highlight the relevance of the ECID for current international debates on racism in the theory and practice deliberative democracy; the production of post-normal transdisciplinary knowledge for technology risk-assessments; and the politics of knowledge in participatory policy-making for food and agriculture. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 4, Page 631-641, May 2022. Academic freedom is currently threatened not only in dictatorial or authoritarian regimes but in democracies as well. Thus, this analysis of the contemporary French experience, in which we observe a destructive climate maintained by intellectuals and political actors on both the right and the left. The extremization, intolerance, and radicalization of debates have increased since the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017. At the same time, university institutions often (...) appear overwhelmed or powerless in the face of both internal and external dangers. (shrink)

This book is the final outcome of two projects. My first project was to publish a set of texts written by Schrodinger at the beginning of the 1950's for his seminars and lectures at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. These almost completely forgotten texts contained important insights into the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and they provided several ideas which were missing or elusively expressed in SchrOdinger's published papers and books of the same period. However, they were likely to be (...) misinterpreted out of their context. The problem was that current scholarship could not help very much the reader of these writings to figure out their significance. The few available studies about SchrOdinger's interpretation of quantum mechanics are generally excellent, but almost entirely restricted to the initial period 1925-1927. Very little work has been done on Schrodinger's late views on the theory he contributed to create and develop. The generally accepted view is that he never really recovered from his interpretative failure of 1926-1927, and that his late reflections are little more than an expression of his rising nostalgia for the lost ideal of picturing the world, not to say for some favourite traditional picture. But the content and style of Schrodinger's texts of the 1950's do not agree at all with this melancholic appraisal; they rather set the stage for a thorough renewal of accepted representations. In order to elucidate this paradox, I adopted several strategies. (shrink)

To study consciousness, scientists need to determine when participants are conscious and when they are not. They do so with consciousness detection procedures. A recurring skeptical argument against those procedures is that they cannot be calibrated: there is no way to make sure that detection outcomes are accurate. In this article, I address two main skeptical arguments purporting to show that consciousness scientists cannot calibrate detection procedures. I conclude that there is nothing wrong with calibration in consciousness science.

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...) do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. (shrink)

This book is an English-language translation of a bestselling book in France that explores the relationship between humans and new technologies.

Contient le résumé du cours publié dans l'"Annuaire du Collège de France", 76e année, Histoire des systèmes de pensée, année 1974-1975.

Annoncé à grand fracas, le décryptage do génome humain devait nous révéler le secret ultime de la vie et ouvrir la voie à de nouvelles thérapies miracles. Espoirs déçus : à l'ère de la post-génomique, les secrets du vivant sont maintenant recherchés dans les théories de la complexité, dans la convergence des efforts des biologistes, des physiciens et des mathématiciens. Comment comprendre la signification de cette succession rapide d'objectifs apparemment différents, de cette alternance d'espoirs et de désillusions? Dans ce livre (...) novateur, Michel Morange propose une clé pour rendre compte de ces difficultés, et de beaucoup d'autres analogues touchant toutes les branches de la biologie. Les annonces sensationnelles reflètent l'espoir toujours déçu qu'une explication unique pourrait suffire. Or les faits biologiques - comme ceux relevant de bien d'autres disciplines scientifiques -ne peuvent être expliqués par un principe d'intelligibilité unique. Exemples à l'appui et de façon très pédagogique, Michel Morange montre pourquoi des explications différentes doivent être articulées pour décrire le fonctionnement des macromolécules aussi bien que l'évolution humaine ou le développement des cancers. Admettre une idée aussi simple n'est pas évident, car tout scientifique a été formé à privilégier un principe d'intelligibilité particulier. L'articulation entre explications différentes est pourtant indispensable pour le progrès des connaissances ; elle est aussi une exigence éthique ; elle est requise pour que la science conserve sa place dans nos sociétés. (shrink)

Local theories of consciousness state that one is conscious of a feature if it is adequately represented and processed in sensory brain areas, given some background conditions. We challenge the core prediction of local theories based on long-lasting postdictive effects demonstrating that features can be represented for hundreds of milliseconds in perceptual areas without being consciously perceived. Unlike previous empirical data aimed against local theories, localists cannot explain these effects away by conjecturing that subjects are phenomenally conscious of features that (...) they cannot report. We also discuss alternative explanations that localists could offer. (shrink)

Emergence is interpreted in a non-dualist framework of thought. No metaphysical distinction between the higher and basic levels of organization is supposed, but only a duality of modes of access. Moreover, these modes of access are not construed as mere ways of revealing intrinsic patterns of organization: They are supposed to be constitutive of them, in Kant’s sense. The emergent levels of organization, and the inter-level causations as well, are therefore neither illusory nor ontologically real: They are objective in the (...) sense of transcendental epistemology. This neo-Kantian approach defuses several paradoxes associated with the concept of downward causation, and enables one to make good sense of it independently of any prejudice about the existence (or inexistence) of a hierarchy of levels of being. (shrink)

... PREFACE Paul Gochet (Liege) "[...] une entite physique ne peut etre envisagee que comme une sorte de concretisation, de consolidation locale dans un ...

The two major options on which the current debate on the interpretation of quantum mechanics relies, namely realism and empiricism, are far from being exhaustive. There is at least one more position available, which is metaphysically as agnostic as empiricism, but which shares with realism a committment to considering the structure of theories as highly significant. The latter position has been named transcendentalism after Kant. In this paper, a generalized version of Kant's method is used. This yields a reasoning that (...) one is entitled to call a transcendental deduction of some major formal features of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

L’opposition de la transcendance à l’immanence exige qu’on localise l’immanence dans le temps. La transcendance devient alors passage du temps à l’intemporel. Mais l’intemporel peut être soit l’éternel, soit l’instant. Il y a donc deux transcendances, l’une vers l’éternel, qui est ascendante et active : la transcendance pratique ; l’autre vers l’instant, qui est descendante et esthétique : la transcendance sensible.