While 90 percent of participants in a 2005 Gallup poll indicated that they would donate an organ if asked, only 40 percent of Americans have registered to do so, according to 2012 data from Donate Life America; likely even fewer have shared their donation wishes with loved ones. Undoubtedly, the single biggest reason for the discrepancy between the number of potential transplants and the number actually performed is our failure to talk with loved ones about our wishes regarding organ donation. (...) Although many resources already exist to hold these conversations, we can do more, and the emergence of social media provides an intriguing new opportunity. Two years ago, Organize.org set out to create the first nationwide organ donation registry in the United States. (shrink)

When formal literacy instruction begins, around the age of 5 or 6, children from families low in socioeconomic status tend to be less prepared than children from families of higher SES. The goal of our study is to explore one route through which SES may influence children's early literacy skills: informal conversations about letters. The study builds on previous studies of parent–child conversations that show how U. S. parents and their young children talk about writing and provide preliminary evidence about (...) similarities and differences in parent–child conversations as a function of SES. Focusing on parents and children aged three to five, we conducted five separate analyses of these conversations, asking whether and how family SES influences the previously established patterns. Although we found talk about letters in both upper and lower SES families, there were differences in the nature of these conversations. The proportion of letter talk utterances that were questions was lower in lower SES families and, of all the letter names that lower SES families talked about, more of them were uttered in isolation rather than in sequences. Lower SES families were especially likely to associate letters with the child's name, and they placed more emphasis on sequences in alphabetic order. We found no SES differences in the factors that influenced use of particular letter names, but there were SES differences in two-letter sequences. Focusing on the alphabet and on associations between the child's name and the letters within it may help to interest the child in literacy activities, but they many not be very informative about the relationship between letters and words in general. Understanding the patterns in parent–child conversations about letters is an important first step for exploring their contribution to children's early literacy skills and school readiness. (shrink)

Evidence shows that changes in the architecture, design, and decor of health care facilities can improve patient care and in the long run reduce expenses. These essays detail the state of the research, look inside two hospitals that put some of these innovations into practice, and consider how design fits into the moral mission ofhealth care.

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 49-57, March‐April 2022.

Reply to a commentary by Kate Robins‐Browne.

It is natural to think of remembering in terms of causation: I can recall a recent dinner with a friend because I experienced that dinner. Some fifty years ago, Martin and Deutscher (1966) turned this basic thought into a full-fledged theory of memory, a theory that came to dominate the landscape in the philosophy of memory. Remembering, Martin and Deutscher argue, requires the existence of a specific sort of causal connection between the rememberer's original experience of an event and his (...) later representation of that event: a causal connection sustained by a memory trace. In recent years, it has become apparent that this reference to memory traces may be out of step with memory science. Contemporary proponents of the causal theory are thus confronted with the question: is it possible to develop an empirically adequate version of the theory, or is it time to move beyond it? This chapter traces the recent history of the causal theory, showing how increased awareness of the theory’s problems has led to the development of modified version of the causal theory and ultimately to the emergence of postcausal theories. (shrink)

_The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Second Edition_ is an invaluable guide and major reference source to the major topics, problems, concepts and debates in philosophy of psychology and is the first companion of its kind. A team of renowned international contributors provide forty-nine chapters organised into six clear parts: Historical background to Philosophy of Psychology Psychological Explanation Cognition and Representation The biological basis of psychology Perceptual Experience Personhood. _The Companion_ covers key topics such as the origins of experimental (...) psychology; folk psychology; behaviorism and functionalism; philosophy, psychology and neuroscience; the language of thought, modularity, nativism and representational theories of mind; consciousness and the senses; dreams emotion and temporality; personal identity and the philosophy of psychopathology. For the_ second edition_ many of the current chapters have been updated, and seven new chapters added on important new topics such predictive processing, comparative cognition, learning, and group cognition, as well as a new introductory chapter by the editors on the demarcation between philosophy and psychology. Essential reading for all students of philosophy of mind, science and psychology, _The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology _will also be of interest to anyone studying psychology and its related disciplines. (shrink)

This paper examines how the oncomouse became a patentable invention. The oncomouse began life in the laboratory, where it was genetically modified for use as a research tool to assist with the study of human cancer. Its design, a product of genetic modification, made the oncomouse potentially patentable subject matter. The United States was the first jurisdiction to award the patent and several others followed. However, the question of animal patenting was most contentious in Europe and Canada. In this paper (...) I examine debates about animal patenting within the legal and moral spaces created by United States, European and Canadian patent law, focusing on differences that emerged in each case. I argue that oncomouse as a patentable invention was made possible and acceptable as different ways of being mouse as natural animal, research tool and invention were made to cohere: that is as they were made to overlap and depend upon one another. In the paper I use the term "cohere" to describe the logic of animal patenting that emerged with, and was essential to, the outcome in each jurisdiction. I describe an ontological politics of connecting and separating different ways of being mouse, as the oncomouse's genetic modification, risks, benefits, and suffering were juxtaposed with patent law, precedent, laboratory protocols, and understandings of human agency and control. As connections and separations were made, a relation, "natural animal-research tool-invention", was established, and logic of animal patenting emerged: but differently each case. (shrink)

The Archival and Constructive views of memory offer contrasting characterizations of remembering and its relation to memory errors. I evaluate the descriptive adequacy of each by offering a close analysis of one of the most prominent experimental techniques by which memory errors are elicited—the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Explaining the DRM effect requires appreciating it as a distinct form of memory error, which I refer to as misremembering. Misremembering is a memory error that relies on successful retention of the targeted event. It (...) differs from both successful remembering and from confabulation errors, where the representation produced is wholly inaccurate. As I show, neither the Archival nor the Constructive View can account for the DRM effect because they are insensitive to misremembering’s unique explanatory demands. Fortunately, the explanatory limitations of the Archival and Constructive Views are complementary. This suggests a way.. (shrink)

The more interest philosophers take in memory, the less agreement there is that memory exists—or more precisely, that remembering is a distinct psychological kind or mental state. Concerns about memory’s distinctiveness are triggered by observations of its similarity to imagination. The ensuing debate is cast as one between discontinuism and continuism. The landscape of debate is set such that any extensive engagement with empirical research into episodic memory places one on the side of continuism. Discontinuists concerns are portrayed as almost (...) exclusively conceptual and a priori. As philosophers of memory become increasingly interested in memory science, this pushes continuism into an apparent lead. The aim of this paper is to challenge this characterization of the continuism debate—namely, that a naturalistic approach to the philosophy of mind and memory favors continuism. My response has two components. First, I argue for weakening the alignment between naturalism and continuism. Second, I defend a naturalistically oriented, empirically-informed discontinuism between memory and imagination. I do so by introducing seeming to remember, which I argue is distinct from other mental attitudes—most importantly, from imagining. (shrink)

Confabulation is a symptom central to many psychiatric diagnoses and can be severely debilitating to those who exhibit the symptom. Theorists, scientists, and clinicians have an understandable interest in the nature of confabulation—pursuing ways to define, identify, treat, and perhaps even prevent this memory disorder. Appeals to confabulation as a clinical symptom rely on an account of memory’s function from which cases like the above can be contrasted. Accounting for confabulation is thus an important desideratum for any candidate theory of (...) memory. Many contemporary memory theorists now endorse Constructivism, where memory is understood as a capacity for constructing plausible representations of past events. Constructivism’s aim is to account for and normalize the prevalence of memory errors in everyday life. Errors are plausible constructions that, on a particular occasion have led to error. They are not, however, evidence of malfunction in the memory system. While Constructivism offers an uplifting repackaging of the memory errors to which we are all susceptible, it has troubling implications for appeals to confabulation in psychiatric diagnosis. By accommodating memory errors within our understanding of memory’s function, Constructivism runs the risk of being unable to explain how confabulation errors are evidence of malfunction. After reviewing the literature on confabulation and Constructivism, respectively, I identify the tension between them and explore how different versions of Constructivism may respond. The paper concludes with a proposal for distinguishing between kinds of false memory—specifically, between misremembering and confabulation—that may provide a route to their reconciliation. (shrink)

Clinical use of the term “confabulation” began as a reference to false memories in dementia patients. The term has remained in circulation since, which belies shifts in its definition and scope over time. “Confabulation” now describes a range of disorders, deficits, and anomalous behaviors. The increasingly wide and varied use of this term has prompted many to ask: what is confabulation? In recent years, many have offered answers to this question. As a general rule, recent accounts are accounts of broad (...) confabulation: attempts to unify the seemingly disparate features of all or most confabulatory phenomena under a shared set of characteristics or mechanisms. In this paper, I approach the question differently. I focus on a particular form of confabulation—mnemonic confabulation—so as to understand its distinctive features and the ways in which it does fit into accounts of broad confabulation. Understanding mnemonic confabulation is a project in the philosophy of memory; it plays an important role in guiding theories of remembering, as a form of error that must be distinguished from genuine remembering. Mnemonic confabulation, as I define it in Sect. 2, occurs when there is no relation between a person’s seeming to remember a particular event or experience and any event or experience from their past—either because there is no such event in their past or because any similarity to such an event is entirely coincidental. This account draws on my own theory of remembering, but shares many important points of consensus with other accounts of mnemonic confabulation, which I highlight in Sect. 3. In Sect. 4, I turn to accounts of broad confabulation—identifying three features such accounts have in common—and, for each, I argue that mnemonic confabulation lacks the requisite feature. As an error, mnemonic confabulation has more in common with perceptual hallucination than with the confabulatory phenomena included in standard accounts of broad confabulation. Recognizing that, despite the shared use of the term “confabulation” mnemonic confabulation and broad forms of confabulation are unrelated, is important for continued progress in debates about each. (shrink)

This article presents a theoretical model of the self processes involved in autobiographical memories and proposes competing hypotheses for the role of visual perspective in autobiographical memory retrieval. Autobiographical memories can be retrieved from either the 1st person perspective, in which individuals see the event through their own eyes, or from the 3rd person perspective, in which individuals see themselves and the event from the perspective of an external observer. A growing body of research suggests that the visual perspective from (...) which a memory is retrieved has important implications for a person’s thoughts, feelings, and goals, and is integrally related to a host of self-evaluative processes. We review the relevant research literature, present our theoretical model, and outline directions for future research. (shrink)

The pressures that led to the evolution of episodic memory have recently seen much discussion, but a fully satisfactory account of them is still lacking. We seek to make progress in this debate by taking a step backward, identifying four possible ways that episodic memory could evolve in relation to simulationist future planning—a similar and seemingly related ability. After distinguishing each of these possibilities, the paper critically discusses existing accounts of the evolution of episodic memory. It then presents a novel (...) argument in favor of the view that episodic memory is a by-product of the evolution of simulationist future planning. The paper ends by showing that this position allows for the maintenance of the traditional view that episodic memory operates on stored memory traces, as well as explaining a number of key features of episodic memory: its being subject to frequent and systematic errors, its neural co-location with the capacity for simulationist future planning, and the potential existence of non-human episodic memory. (shrink)

According to the Causal Theory of Memory, remembering a particular past event requires a causal connection between that event and its subsequent representation in memory, specifically, a connection sustained by a memory trace. The CTM is the default view of memory in contemporary philosophy, but debates persist over what the involved memory traces must be like. Martin and Deutscher argued that the CTM required memory traces to be structural analogues of past events. Bernecker and Michaelian, contemporary CTM proponents, reject structural (...) analogues in favor of memory traces as distributed patterns of event features. The proposals are understood as distinct accounts of how memory traces represent past events. But there are two distinct questions one could ask about a trace’s representational features. One might ask how memory traces, qua mental representations, have their semantic properties. Or, what makes memory traces, qua mental representations of memories, distinct from other mental representations. Proponents of the CTM, both past and present, have failed to keep these two questions distinct. The result is a serious but unnoticed problem for the CTM in its current form. Distributed memory traces are incompatible with the CTM. Such traces do not provide a way to track the causal history of individual memories, as the CTM requires. If memory traces are distributed patterns of event features, as Bernecker and Michaelian each claim, then the CTM cannot be right. (shrink)

Optogenetics makes possible the control of neural activity with light. In this article, I explore how the development of this experimental tool has brought about methodological and theoretical advances in the neurobiological study of memory. I begin with Semon’s distinction between the engram and the ecphory, explaining how these concepts present a methodological challenge to investigating memory. Optogenetics provides a way to intervene into the engram without the ecphory that, in turn, opens up new means for testing theories of memory (...) error. I focus on a series of experiments where optogenetics is used to study false memory and forgetting. (shrink)

The sense of agency is a central aspect of human self-consciousness and refers to the experience of oneself as the agent of one’s own actions. Several different cognitive theories on the sense of agency have been proposed implying divergent empirical approaches and results, especially with respect to neural correlates. A multifactorial and multilevel model of the sense of agency may provide the most constructive framework for integrating divergent theories and findings, meeting the complex nature of this intriguing phenomenon.

As the Mohist doctrine of inclusive care (jian ai 兼愛) is usually understood, it is an affront to both human nature and commonsense morality.1 We are told that the Mohists rejected all particularist ties, especially to family, in the interests of a radically universalist ethic.2 But love for those close to us is deeply rooted in our natures, and few would deny that this love has moral significance. If the Mohists did deny this, it would be easy to dismiss them, (...) regardless of the abstract weight of their arguments. But the Mohists did not deny this. They consistently took it for granted that we have special attitudes and obligations toward those close to us. Filial piety was one of their core values, and .. (shrink)

Constructivists about memory argue that memory is a capacity for building representations of past events from a generalized information store. The view is motivated by the memory errors discovered in cognitive psychology. Little has been known about the neural mechanisms by which false memories are produced. Recently, using a method I call the Optogenetic False Memory Technique, neuroscientists have created false memories in mice. In this paper, I examine how Constructivism fares in light of O-FaMe results. My aims are two-fold. (...) First, I argue that errors found in O-FaMe and cognitive psychology are similar behaviorally. Second, Constructivists should be able to explain the former since they purport to explain the latter, but they cannot. I conclude that O-FaMe studies reveal details about the mechanism by which false memories are produced that are incompatible with the explanatory approach to false memories favored by Constructivism. (shrink)

The public, mental health consumers, as well as mental health practitioners wonder about what kinds of values mental health professionals hold, and what kinds of values influence psychiatric diagnosis. Are mental disorders socio-political, practical, or scientific concepts? Is psychiatric diagnosis value-neutral? What role does the fundamental philosophical question "How should I live?" play in mental health care? In his carefully nuanced and exhaustively referenced monograph, psychiatrist and philosopher of psychiatry John Z. Sadler describes the manifold kinds of values and (...) value judgements involved in psychiatric diagnosis and classification systems like the DSM. Professor Sadler takes the reader on a fascinating conceptual tour of the inner workings of psychiatric diagnosis, considering the role of science, culture, sexuality, politics, gender, technology, human nature, patienthood, and professions in building his vision of a more humane psychiatric diagnostic process. (shrink)

Evidence does not support the claim that observers universally recognize basic emotions from signals on the face. The percentage of observers who matched the face with the predicted emotion (matching score) is not universal, but varies with culture and language. Matching scores are also inflated by the commonly used methods: within-subject design; posed, exaggerated facial expressions (devoid of context); multiple examples of each type of expression; and a response format that funnels a variety of interpretations into one word specified by (...) the experimenter. Without these methodological aids, matching scores are modest and subject to various explanations. (shrink)

This article is a study of the Later Mohists' 'Lesser Selection (Xiaoqu)', which, more than any other early Chinese text, seems to engage in the study of logic. I focus on a procedure that the Mohists called mou . Arguments by mou are grounded in linguistic parallelism, implying perhaps that the Mohists were on the way to a formal analysis of argumentation. However, their main aim was to head off arguments by mou that targeted their own doctrines, and if their (...) argument succeeds then it entails that linguistic parallelism can never ground a cogent argument. In a way, this committed them to the view that formal logic cannot work, but the fact that they did not pursue this line of investigation was by no means inevitable. One consequence of this study is that the Later Mohists conducted their logical work by studying the behaviour of terms and verb phrases, and did not identify the sentence as a significant linguistic unit. This tends to confirm Chad Hansen's generalisation that early Chinese philosophers did not posit sentences or other sentence-like entities such as propositions, beliefs, or laws. Focusing on subsentential expressions did not stop the Mohists from addressing genuinely logical issues, but it may help explain the fact that they never developed a conception of logical structure. This study includes the complete Chinese text of the 'Lesser Selection' and a translation in English. (shrink)

In Memory: A Philosophical Study, Bernecker argues for an account of contiguity. This Contiguity View is meant to solve relearning and prompting, wayward causation problems plaguing the causal theory of memory. I argue that Bernecker’s Contiguity View fails in this task. Contiguity is too weak to prevent relearning and too strong to allow prompting. These failures illustrate a problem inherent in accounts of memory causation. Relearning and prompting are both causal relations, wayward only with respect to our interest in specifying (...) remembering’s requirements. Solving them requires saying more about remembering, not causation. I conclude by sketching such an account. (shrink)

This essay defends a novel interpretation of the term xìng 性 as it occurs in Chinese texts of the late Warring States period (roughly 320–221 BCE). The term played an important role both in the famous controversy over the goodness or badness of people’s xìng and elsewhere in the intellectual discourse of the period. Extending especially the work of A.C. Graham, the essay stresses the importance for understanding xìng of early Chinese assumptions about spontaneity, continuity, health, and (in the human (...) case) motivation. These assumptions make xìng fundamentally different from the contemporary nature concepts with which it is often equated. In particular, people’s xìng is not a near-equivalent of human nature or (in modern Chinese) of rénxìng 人性. (shrink)

In Memory: A Self-Referential Account, Fernández offers a functionalist account of the metaphysics of memory, which is portrayed as presenting significant advantages over causal and narrative theories of memory. In this paper, I present a series of challenges for Fernández’s functionalism. There are issues with both the particulars of the account and the use of functionalism more generally. First, in characterizing the mnemonic role of episodic remembering, Fernández fails to make clear how the mental image type that plays this role (...) should be identified. Second, I argue that a functionalist approach, which appeals to the overall structure of the memory system and tendencies of mental state types, is ill-suited to the metaphysical question about episodic remembering that is of interest to the causal and narrative theorists with which Fernandez engages. Fernández’s self-referential account of memory has many other virtues, but functionalism is a poor fit for episodic remembering. (shrink)

The idea that remembering involves an engram, becoming stable and permanent via consolidation, has guided the neuroscience of memory since its inception. The shift to thinking of memory as continuo...

The Later Moists grounded our linguistic abilities in our ability to distinguish between kinds on the basis of manifest similarities and differences among things. Proper names, however, require a different treatment. According to the Moists, when we use a proper name, we borrow a word for one kind of thing and use it to refer to something else, as when we name dogs “crane.” This view probably responds in part to arguments that the possibility of using any word to refer (...) to any thing threatens the stability of language. Proper names may borrow from terms with existing uses, but arguably they do not thereby undermine those uses. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What kind of basic minimum do we owe to others? This paper defends a new procedure for answering this question. It argues that its minimally good life account has some advantages over the main alternatives and that neither the first-, nor third-, person perspective can help us to arrive at an adequate account. Rather, it employs the second-person perspective of free, reasonable, care. There might be other conditions for distributive justice, and morality certainly requires more than helping everyone to (...) secure a basic minimum. Still, if the minimally good life account is correct, and we owe everyone a basic minimum, we must ensure that everyone lives well enough. (shrink)

The study of the neural basis of memory has advanced over the past decade. A key contributor to this memory “renaissance” has been new tools. On its face, this matches what might be described as a neuroscientific revolution stemming from the development of tools, where this revolution is largely independent of theory. In this paper, we challenge this tool revolution account by focusing on a problem that arises in applying it to this “renaissance”: it is centered around memory, but the (...) tools were not developed for solving problems in memory science. To resolve this problem, we introduce an account that distinguishes tool development and tool uptake, and we argue that while theoretical considerations may not inform development, they do inform uptake. Acknowledging the distance between these stages of tool use draws our attention to the questions of why and how tool uptake occurs in the domains that it does. (shrink)

This article studies the impact of a robot’s appearance on interactions involving four children with autism. This work is part of the Aurora project with the overall aim to support interaction skills in children with autism, using robots as ‘interactive toys’ that can encourage and mediate interactions. We follow an approach commonly adopted in assistive robotics and work with a small group of children with autism. This article investigates which robot appearances are suitable to encourage interactions between a robot and (...) children with autism. The children’s levels of interaction with and response to different appearances of two types of robots are compared: a small humanoid doll, and a life-sized ‘Theatrical Robot’. The small humanoid robot appeared either as a human-like ‘pretty doll’ or as a ‘robot’ with plain features. The Theatrical Robot was presented either as an ordinary human, or with plain clothing and a featureless, masked face. The results of these trials clearly indicate the children’s preference in their initial response for interaction with a plain, featureless robot over the interaction with a human-like robot. In the case of the life-size Theatrical Robot, the response of children towards the plain/robotic robot was notably more social and pro-active. Implications of these results for our work on using robots as assistive technology for children with autism and their possible use in autism research are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, we locate a general rhetorical strategy employed in theoretical discourse wherein philosophers argue from the mere existence of internalized oppression to some kind of epistemic, moral, political, or cognitive deficiency of oppressed people. We argue that this strategy has harmful consequences for oppressed people, breaking down our analysis in terms of individual and structural harms within both epistemic and moral domains. These harms include attempting to undermine the self-trust of oppressed people, reinforcing unjust epistemic power hierarchies, undermining (...) the moral agency of oppressed people, and obscuring real issues of oppression. In light of these many harms, we conclude that there are pro tanto reasons not to employ this strategy, and instead offer a series of suggestions for those considering adopting such a rhetorical move. (shrink)

Various authors debate the question of whether neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility. However, a plethora of different techniques and technologies, each with their own abilities and drawbacks, lurks beneath the label “neuroscience”; and in criminal law responsibility is not a single, unitary and generic concept, but it is rather a syndrome of at least six different concepts. Consequently, there are at least six different responsibility questions that the criminal law asks—at least one for each responsibility concept—and, I will suggest, (...) a multitude of ways in which the techniques and technologies that comprise neuroscience might help us to address those diverse questions. In a way, on my account neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility in many ways, but I hesitate to state my position like this because doing so obscures two points which I would rather highlight: one, neither neuroscience nor criminal responsibility are as unified as that; and two, the criminal law asks many different responsibility questions and not just one generic question. (shrink)

“Mansplaining” is by now part of the common cultural vernacular. Yet, academic analyses of it—specifically, philosophical ones—are missing. This paper sets out to address just that problem. Analyzed through a lens of epistemic injustice, the focus of the analysis concerns both what it is, and what its harms are. I argue it is a form of epistemic injustice distinct from testimonial injustice wherein there is a dysfunctional subversion of the epistemic roles of hearer and speaker in a testimonial exchange. As (...) these are roles of power and are crucial to our existence and functioning within epistemic communities, the wrong and harms suffered from this injustice are serious and, I argue, distinct from other types already discussed in the literature. I close by considering an alternative model of mansplaining as a form of silencing, as well as briefly diagnosing its general underlying cause and possible solutions. (shrink)

Etrange personnage que Pierre Nicole. La postérité l'a rangé parmi les deuxièmes rôles de Port-Royal, une sorte de permanent du parti janséniste. Il a secondé le grand Arnauld, instruit Racine dans les Petites Ecoles, aidé Pascal et traduit en latin ses Provinciales. Fidèle entre les fidèles, et en même temps mal à l'aise dans cette atmosphère de fronde et de résistance que représente le milieu de Port-Royal, au sein de la France du XVII e siècle, ce latiniste timoré ne (...) songeait qu'aux Moyens de conserver la paix avec les hommes - titre de l'un de ses essais les plus célèbres. Dès que les tensions semblent s'apaiser, pendant la trêve appelée "la Paix de l'Eglise", Nicole peut enfin laisser libre cours à sa vocation de moraliste et de psychologue. Il publie, volume après volume ses Essais de morale : le succès sera tel que le libraire, après la mort de Pierre Nicole, s'ingéniera à en augmenter la série jusqu'à atteindre vingt-cinq volumes. Depuis la fin du XVIII e siècle, ce classique de la littérature morale était devenu pour ainsi dire inaccessible. On en publie parfois quelques pages choisies, défigurées par les coupures et les corrections. Il est proposé ici au lecteur moderne de redécouvrir dix essais de Nicole, donnés dans leur intégralité. Certains nous replongent dans les principes moraux d'un autre âge (et tirent de cet exotisme une part de leur valeur). D'autres présentent les qualités de finesse, le piquant, le goût du paradoxe qui ont longtemps fait juger Nicole comme un des grands représentants, à côté de Pascal et de La Rochefoucauld, de la littérature morale classique. L'oeuvre morale de Nicole s'avère ainsi demeurer passionnante pour un lecteur moderne, au moins à trois égards : 1/ ses considérations sur l'amour-propre, qui constituent les premiers jalons d'un utilitarisme économique ; 2/ ses réflexions sur la sociabilité et une approche originale de la civilité ; 3/ ses observations pédagogiques, émanant d'un des principaux maîtres des Petites Ecoles de Port-Royal. (shrink)