Le travail de recherche de Julia Bush s’inscrit dans le champ encore négligé de l’histoire des femmes conservatrices, impérialistes et anti-suffragistes. Après Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (2000), ses contributions aux revues Women’s History Review (2002), History of Education (2005) et à l’ouvrage collectif Suffrage Outside Suffragism (2007) ont anticipé son dernier livre Women Against the Vote. Les histoires modernes du suffragisme ignorent trop souvent les anti-suffragistes engagées...

L’historienne Karen Offen montre une nouvelle fois son intérêt pour les féminismes du monde ; son ouvrage se veut d’abord le pendant de celui de Bonnie Smith, Global Feminisms since 1945, publié en 2000 dans la même collection dite pour étudiants. C’est aussi un redéploiement de son précédent ouvrage European Feminisms, a Political History (Stanford University, 2000) augmenté d’aires géographiques comme le Japon, l’Inde, l’Australie, ou encore le Moyen-Orient, l’Amérique latine et la Chine. L...

Mary Wollstonecraft est encore trop peu connue du monde académique français, et donc malheureusement quasi inconnue du grand public français qui ne peut imaginer combien cette auteure marqua son époque bien au-delà des frontières de l’Angleterre. L’introduction savante d’Isabelle Bour se partage entre un apport biographique, toujours fascinant quand il s’agit de Wollstonecraft, grande voyageuse, grande amoureuse, grande réformatrice et grande écrivaine (p. 7-20), un développement sur « La réc...

Les textes réunis et présentés par Neil Davie sont traduits par Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec, Baudouin Millet et Jean-Charles Perquin et publiés dans la collection « Les fondamentaux du féminisme anglo-saxon » dirigée par Frédéric Regard. Ce travail d’équipe met en perspective le rôle inestimable de passeurs que tiennent les collègues anglicistes en France pour la communauté francophone de chercheures. Cet ouvrage de 223 pages se compose d’une introduction générale de Neil Davie, de quatre par...

A natural view is that linguistic understanding is a source of justification or evidence: that beliefs about the meaning of a text or speech act are prima facie justified when based on states of understanding. Neglect of this view is largely due to the widely held assumption that understanding a text or speech act consists in knowledge or belief. It is argued that this assumption rests, in part, on confusing occurrent states of understanding and dispositions to understand. It is then (...) argued that occurrent states of understanding are not states of belief of knowledge since a subject may fail to believe that a text or speech act means what she understands it to mean if she doubts the reliability or truthfulness of that understanding. States of understanding, it is maintained, belong in the same epistemic category as states of perception and memory. (shrink)

With this work J. B. Schneewind has provided the most comprehensive history of modern moral philosophy available in English. Beginning with the moral theology of the Reformation and ending with Kant, Schneewind’s book offers a panorama of moral philosophy that includes the early modern natural lawyers and their metaphysical critics, the British sentimentalists and their rationalist opponents, and a whole series of eighteenth-century attempts to develop a secular moral philosophy grounded in autonomous human reason and will. Despite its broader multinational (...) scope and its focus on ethics rather than epistemology, Schneewind’s book seems destined to replace Beck’s Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors, as culminating and summating the work of the next generation of scholars working within the historiographical canons of American Kantianism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War looks ever more like a slice of history rather than a contemporary reality. During those same twenty years, scholarship on science, technology, and the state during the Cold War era has expanded dramatically. Building on major studies of physics in the American context—often couched in terms of “big science”—recent work has broached scientific efforts in other domains as well, scrutinizing Cold War scholarship in increasingly international and comparative (...) frameworks. The essays in this Focus section take stock of current thinking about science and the Cold War, revisiting the question of how best to understand tangled (and sometimes surprising) relationships between government patronage and the world of ideas. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War looks ever more like a slice of history rather than a contemporary reality. During those same twenty years, scholarship on science, technology, and the state during the Cold War era has expanded dramatically. Building on major studies of physics in the American context—often couched in terms of “big science”—recent work has broached scientific efforts in other domains as well, scrutinizing Cold War scholarship in increasingly international and comparative (...) frameworks. The essays in this Focus section take stock of current thinking about science and the Cold War, revisiting the question of how best to understand tangled (and sometimes surprising) relationships between government patronage and the world of ideas. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of mind has tended to make the believer disappear. In response, Matt Boyle and Pamela Hieronymi have argued that believing is an act or activity, not a mental state. I argue that this response fails to fully critique contemporary accounts of believing. Such accounts assume that states of believing are particulars; with semantic properties; that we attend to in reflection and act on in inference; and with a rich causal life of their own. Together, these assumptions leave no (...) room for the believer in an account of believing. But these assumptions are not entailed by the idea that believing is a mental state. Careful reflection on other kinds of states helps us see how to put the believer back in the heart of our account of believing. (shrink)

‘Jason…chosen leader because his superior declines the honour, subordinate to his comrades, except once, in every trial of strength, skill, or courage, a great warrior only with the help of magical charms, jealous of honour but incapable of asserting it, passive in the face of crisis, timid and confused before trouble, tearful at insult, easily despondent, gracefully treacherous in his dealings with the love-sick Medea but cowering before her later threats and curses, coldly efficient in the time-serving murder of an (...) unsuspecting child (sic), reluctant even in marriage.’ So Carspecken put the case against Jason's heroism. In the face of such an indictment, Lawall's plea in mitigation, ‘it must be admitted that [Jason] often reveals the qualities of a true gentleman’, seems somehow inadequate. Criticism since Carspecken has found various overlapping categories for Jason which both take account of the earlier negative judgements and preserve the centrality of his ‘personality’ and character in the poem: Jason is the quiet diplomat who works through consensus rather than force, his is a heroism of sex-appeal, he is an anti-hero, the embodiment of Sceptic ‘suspension of judgement’, or, alternatively, he is ‘one of us’, credible and lifelike. Carspecken himself tried a different tack: the poem is concerned not with individual heroism but with the heroism of the group (cf. 1.1, 4.1773–81). (shrink)

In treating human nature as a ‘moral entity’, imposed by God for reasons into which man could have no direct insight, Samuel Pufendorf reconfigured the architecture of natural law thought in a fundamental way. For this meant that rather than deducing norms from a nature in which they had been embedded by God and could be discerned by self-reflective reason, man had to derive them by observing the requirements of the exigent condition in which he happened to find himself; and (...) it further meant that such observation would be gathered via erudite citation of humanist authorities, rather than from philosophical reflection or introspection. As a result of this reconstruction, Pufendorfian natural law was opened to the normative structure of historically existing juridical-constitutional orders, for which it supplied both a propaedeutic and an abstract rationale. At the same time, however, theological and philosophical forms of natural law, based on normative moral anthropologies, continued unabated, this giving rise to a partitioning of the field into an introspective philosophy of law, and an observational legal humanism. (shrink)

In reading Wittgenstein one can, and for the most part perhaps should, treat the expression ‘language-game’ as a term of art, a more or less arbitrarily chosen item of terminology meaning something like ‘an actual or possible way of using words’. It would then be a fairly routine task to work out answers to such questions as what features of the ways a word is used are emphasized by this term of art, what philosophical purposes are served by the description (...) of primitive language-games or of variations on actual language-games, or in exactly what way those purposes are supposed to be served. (shrink)

Already at a relatively early stage, modern sign language linguistics focused on the representation of (actions, locations, and motions of) referents (1) through the use of the body and its different articulators and (2) through the use of particular handshapes (in combination with an orientation, location, and/or movement). Early terminology for (1) includesrole playing, role shifting, androle takingand for (2)classifier constructions/predicatesandverbs of motion and location. More recently, however, new terms, includingenactmentandconstructed actionfor (1) anddepicting signsfor (2) have been introduced. This article (...) provides a brief overview of the history of enactment and depiction in the sign linguistic literature but mainly focuses on issues related to terminology (and terminology shifts). First, we consider the relation between role shifting and constructed action. We question the idea that these terms can be used interchangeably and rather suggest that they capture different, but related functions. Subsequently, we zoom in on the conceptualization of depicting signs, indicating verbs, pointing signs and fully lexical signs and the relation between these signs and the method of depicting. Where earlier research often associates depicting with the use of specific types of structures, we promote the idea that depicting is a semiotic diverse practice. In doing so, we show that the conceptualization of the different sign types and the terms that are used to refer to these phenomena do not accurately capture the way these signs are used in actual signed discourse and propose a reconceptualization of the different sign types in the lexico-grammar of Flemish Sign Language (VGT) as composite signs that can describe, depict and indicate meaning in various ways. In this way, this article illustrates (1) the risks that may come with the execution of terminology shifts and (2) the importance of making a clear distinction between form and function, i.e., we show that it is important to be careful with assuming a (too) exclusive relation between a certain function and one or more particular forms. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay argues that a new way of understanding science and nature emerged and flourished in the human sciences in America between roughly 1920 and 1970. This new outlook was characterized by the prefiguration of all subjects of study as systems defined by their structures, not their components. Further, the essay argues that the rise of this new outlook was closely linked to the Organizational Revolution in American society, which provided new sets of problems, new patrons, and new control (...) technologies as “tools to think with” for researchers in this period. As examples of this new way of thinking and of the multidirectional traffic connecting control technologies, the Organizational Revolution, and the social sciences, the essay looks at Chester Barnard and his book The Functions of the Executive, at Warren Weaver and his essays on communication theory and on science and “organized complexity,” and at the works of J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor on human/computer symbiosis through computer-based communications. (shrink)

This study throws new light on the composition of Boyle's Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature ; it also draws more general conclusions about Boyle's methods as an author and his links with his context. Its basis is a careful study of the extant manuscript drafts for the work, and their relationship with the published editions. Section 2 describes Boyle's characteristic method of composition from the late 1650s onwards, involving the dictation of discrete sections of text to (...) amanuenses; it also assesses the effect this had on the structure and presentation of Boyle's writings. Section 3 considers the published text section by section and indicates which parts were written when; it also surveys unpublished draft material relating to the work. Section 4 places the work in context, considering the intellectual threats that Boyle sought to confront in it, both when he initially composed it in the 1660s and when he rewrote it c. 1680. It thus anchors him more precisely than hitherto in the intellectual debates of his day. (shrink)

Eric G. Forbes, Lesley Murdin, & Frances Willmoth, volume 2, 1682–1703, volume 3, 1703–1719; Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol & Philadephia, 1997, 2002, pp. xlvii+1095, lxvi+1038, Price £199 each hardback, ISBN 0-7503-0391-3, 0-7503-0763-3The correspondence of John Wallis, volume 1 Philip Beeley, & Christoph J. Scriba, with the assistance of Uwe Mayer and Siegmund Probst; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, pp. xlvii+651, Price £120 hardback, ISBN 0-19-851066-7 The Hartlib Papers. Second edition. A complete text and image database of the papers of (...) Samuel Hartlib HROnline, Sheffield, 2 CDs, Price £1,500, ISBN 0-9542608-0-5The Letters of Jan Jonston to Samuel HartlibW. J. Hitchens, Adam Matruszewski, & John Young ; Retro-Art, Warsaw, 2000, pp. 269, Price £25 paperback, ISBN 83-87992-12-7. (shrink)

John Locke:When we set before our eyes a round globe of uniform colour, v.g. gold, alabaster or jet, it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted in our mind is of a flat circle, variously shadowed, with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But we having, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us, what alterations are made in the reflections of light by the difference of (...) the sensible figures of bodies: the judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes.H.H. Price:…. a distant hillside which is full of protuberances, and slopes upwards at quite a gentle angle, will appear flat and vertical….. This means that the sense-datum, the colour expanse which we sense, actually is flat and vertical. (shrink)

The following are not among the least puzzling remarks in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations:572. Expectation is, grammatically, a state; like: being of an opinion, hoping for something, knowing something, being able to do something. But in order to understand the grammar of these states it is necessary to ask: ‘What counts as a criterion for anyone's being in such a state?’ 573.… What, in particular cases, do we regard as criteria for someone's being of such and such an opinion? When do (...) we say: he reached this opinion at that time? When he has altered his opinion? And so on. The picture which the answers to these questions give us shews what gets treated grammatically as a state here. (shrink)

Allegories, rhetoric, imagery, commonplaces, cliches and archetypes are discussed in connection with the literary work of authors such as Montaigne, Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Emile Zola and James Joyce.

It is a curious thing about the philosophy of mind, that it includes surprisingly little about minds. In an average anthology on the subject, or a book like Ryle's, one finds discussions of thinking, imagining, believing, willing, remembering, and so on, but not of minds. It seems to be assumed that investigating these topics is investigating minds; but whether that is true is not itself made a topic for investigation.

Eric G. Forbes, Lesley Murdin and Francis Willmoth , The Correspondence of John Flamsteed, First Astronomer Royal. Volume 1: 1666–1682. Bristol and Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1995. Pp. xlix+955. ISBN 0-7503-0147-3. £140.00, $280.00.Heinz-Jurgen Hess, James G. O'Hara and Herbert Breger , Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. Dritte Reihe, Mathematischer, naturwissenschaftlicher und technischer Briefwechsel: Volume 3, 1680–1683; Volume 4, 1683–1690. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1991, 1995. Pp. lxx+895; lxvi+747. ISBN 3-05-000766-4, DM 490.00 ; 3-05-002602-2, DM 490.00 .Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann , (...) Samuel Pufendorf. Gesammelte Werke, Band 1: Briefwechsel . Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996. Pp. xxix+453. ISBN 3-05-001920-4. DM 298.00.The editing of the correspondence of major figures in intellectual history is an essential scholarly activity. Yet in this country in recent years it has neither been the priority it should be, nor has it received the support that it deserves. Of course there have been exceptions to this, perhaps notably – for the early modern period – the epic one-man effort of Esmond de Beer in his later years in producing The Correspondence of John Locke . A further exception, the edition of The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg by A. R. and M. B. Hall, was unfortunately flawed by the need to change publishers midway in the series, which has led to a marked disparity in the availability of the latter part of the set compared with its early volumes. In any case, like the Locke edition, this was conceived in the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, and few have ventured such enterprises since. Virtually the only exception is Noel Malcolm's edition of the manageable-sized Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes . Moreover, it is revealing of the acute need to justify the publication of such material felt by editors and publishers alike that the promotional leaflet for this edition went so far as to claim that it was ‘one of the most important scholarly publications of the twentieth century’ – a claim that is the more ironic in view of the quite significant shortcomings in its method of presenting the material that it contains. (shrink)