The health and human rights movement (HHR) shows obvious signs of maturation both internally and externally. Yet there are still many questions to be addressed. These issues include the movement’s epistemological status and its perspectives of development. This paper discusses critically the conditions of emergence of HHR, its identity, its dominant schools of thought, its epistemological postures and its methodological issues. Our analysis shows that: (a) the epistemological status of HHR is ambiguous; (b) its identity is uncertain in the absence (...) of a validated definition: is it an action movement, an interdisciplinary field, a domain, an approach, a setting or a scientific discipline? (c) its main schools of thoughts are defined as “advocacists”, “ethicists”, “interventionists”, “normativists”; (d) the movement is in the maturation process as a discipline in which “interface”, “distance”, “interference” and “fusion” epistemological postures represent the fundamental steps; (e) parent disciplines (health sciences and law) competences, logics and cultures introduce duality and difficulties in knowledge production, validation and diffusion; (f) there is need to re-write the history of the HHR movement by inscribing it not only into the humanitarian or public health perspectives but also into the evolution of sciences and its social, political and economical conditions of emergence. The ambiguous epistemological status of this field, the need to re-write its history, the methodological duality in its research, the question of the competence of the knowledge validation, as well as the impact of HHR practice on national and international health governance are the challenges of its future development. To meet those challenges; we call for the creation and implementation of an international research agenda, the exploration of new research topics and the evaluation of the movement’s contribution to the national and global public health and human rights governance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Preface: Virtual Entities in ScienceRobert Harlander, Jean-Philippe Martinez, Friedrich Steinle, and Adrian WüthrichIt is not only since the sudden increase of online communication due to the COVID-19 situation that the concept of the “virtual” has made its way into everyday language. In this context, it mostly denotes a digital substitute for a real object or process. Virtual reality is perhaps the best-known term in this respect. With these (...) digital connotations, “virtuality” has also been used in science and research: Chemists use virtual laboratories, biologists do virtual scanning of molecular structures, and geologists engage in virtual field trips. But the concept of the virtual has a much longer tradition, dating back to long before the dawn of the digital age. Virtual images and virtual displacements were introduced in classical physics already in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively. They represent auxiliary objects or processes without instantiation, with the purpose of efficiently describing specific physical systems. In today’s physics, the term “virtual” is mostly associated with the quantum world, first and foremost with the “virtual particle” of quantum field theory. It has become such an integral part of modern high energy physics that its ontological character may be considered to go beyond the purely auxiliary, which is typically associated with the virtual. [End Page 263]In other disciplines, however, use of the term virtual without a digital connotation is much rarer. While concepts like “virtual adrenaline” show up in physiological research around 1940s, and Charles Darwin, in a private note in January 1840,1 spoke of “virtual change” in the context of embryology, these examples seem to be singular occurrences of entities that were explicitly called “virtual.” The basic idea behind the terminology of the virtual, however, might be much more common, even outside of physics. The “invisible hand” in economics, or the “vital force” in biology, for instance, may carry aspects of a virtual entity, even if they have not been referred to that way.These different observations raise several questions about the status of virtual entities in science. What has led scientists to call one entity “virtual” and not another? Do all virtual entities in science have the same roots and meet the same characteristics? Are they more than auxiliary objects or processes? Why does physics seem to occupy a specific position with respect to the use of the notion of virtuality? These are some points that led us to discuss virtual entities in science during a workshop, out of which grew the present collection. We invited contributions that addressed the historical formation and philosophical interpretation of concepts of virtual entities in physics and other disciplines—in whatever terms they may come. The main goal of the workshop was to bring to the fore similarities and differences in the meanings and functions of these concepts, so as to be able to precisely characterize why certain entities are considered virtual in specific contexts, why a different terminology was often used in each individual case, and in what sense the virtual entities relate to the real world.The organization of the workshop was part of our project “The formation and development of the concept of virtual particles,” a subproject of the Research Unit “The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider,” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and Der Wissenschaftsfonds (FWF). The workshop took place online on four consecutive Fridays in March 2021. It brought together contributors who discussed the role of the concept of the virtual in theoretical as well as experimental activities, and investigated into the origins of the terminology of the virtual as it was applied to the various disciplines of natural science. Dealing with historical, philosophical, but also methodological questions, the presentations covered a wide time range, from the Middle Ages to the present day. While physics naturally emerged as the dominant field, natural philosophy, computer science and biology were also addressed. The papers in this volume were contributed by participants in this workshop and approach the subject from different angles. [End Page 264]First, Friedrich Steinle provides us with an introductory piece that reflects on the specific meaning of the use of the term ‘virtual’ in science. He highlights and... (shrink)

This research investigates 3- and 5-year-olds' relative fairness in distributing small collections of even or odd numbers of more or less desirable candies, either with an adult experimenter or between two dolls. The authors compare more than 200 children from around the world, growing up in seven highly contrasted cultural and economic contexts, from rich and poor urban areas, to small-scale traditional and rural communities. Across cultures, young children tend to optimize their own gain, not showing many signs of self-sacrifice (...) or generosity. Already by 3 years of age, self-optimizing in distributive justice is based on perspective taking and rudiments of mind reading. By 5 years, overall, children tend to show more fairness in sharing. What varies across cultures is the magnitude of young children's self-interest. More fairness (less self-interest) in distributive justice is evident by children growing up in small-scale urban and traditional societies thought to promote more collective values. (shrink)

How could the initial, drastic decisions to implement “lockdowns” to control the spread of COVID-19 infections be justifiable, when they were made on the basis of such uncertain evidence? We defend the imposition of lockdowns in some countries by first, and focusing on the UK, looking at the evidence that undergirded the decision, second, arguing that this provided us with sufficient grounds to restrict liberty given the circumstances, and third, defending the use of poorly-empirically-constrained epidemiological models as tools that can (...) legitimately guide public policy. (shrink)

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were put on digital contact tracing, using mobile phone apps to record and immediately notify contacts when a user reports as infected. Such apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as second waves of COVID-19 are raging, these apps are playing a less important role than anticipated. We argue that this is because most countries have opted for app configurations that cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of (...) likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Mathematical modelling suggests that differently configured apps have the potential to do this. These require, however, that some pseudonymised data be stored on a central server, which privacy advocates have cautioned against. We contend that their influential arguments are subject to two fallacies. First, they have tended to one-sidedly focus on the risks that centralised data storage entails for privacy, while paying insufficient attention to the fact that inefficient contact tracing involves ethical risks too. Second, while the envisioned system does entail risks of breaches, such risks are also present in decentralised systems, which have been falsely presented as ‘privacy preserving by design’. When these points are understood, it becomes clear that we must rethink our approach to digital contact tracing in our fight against COVID-19. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

This is the outline: 1. Introduction : organicisme et personnalisme 2. Un effort pour philosopher sur tout 3. La théologie et la question de l’infra-substantiel 3.1 Un schème de pensée qui pose problème 3.2 Le statut de l’immortalité 4. Substance, personne et cosmos.

Epistemic logics are essential to the design of logical systems that capture elements of reasoning about knowledge. In this paper, we study the computability of unifiability and the unification types in several epistemic logics.

This is the outline : I - Quelques étapes aux avancées significatives II - La pensée chrétienne et le hasard d’ignorance III - De quelques difficultés de raisonner sur le probable IV - Téléologie et évolutionnisme V - Où est l’« étage » qui permette de parler d’indépendance ? VI. Qu’y a-t-il à la base de nos concepts d’ordre ? VII - Quelle place pour le hasard ? VIII. Le hasard appréhendé de dos ?

At this stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, two policy aims are imperative: avoiding the need for a general lockdown of the population, with all its economic, social and health costs, and preventing the healthcare system from being overwhelmed by the unchecked spread of infection. Achieving these two aims requires the consideration of unpalatable measures. Julian Savulescu and James Cameron argue that mandatory isolation of the elderly is justified under these circumstances, as they are at increased risk of becoming severely ill (...) from COVID-19, and are thus likely to put disproportionate strain on limited healthcare resources. However, their arguments for this strategy are contingent on the lack of viable alternatives. We suggest that there is a possible alternative: a mandatory, centralised contact-tracing app. We argue that this strategy is ethically preferable to the selective isolation of the elderly, because it does not target members of a certain group, relying instead on the movements of each individual, and because it avoids the extended isolation of certain members of the society. Although this type of contact-tracing app has its drawbacks, we contend that this measure warrants serious consideration. (shrink)

Description courte (Électre, 2019) : Une étude d'un des principaux axes de réflexion du philosophe des sciences et de la nature Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987). À la lumière des découvertes de l'embryogenèse et en s'appuyant par ailleurs sur la théorie de l'information, il proposa une interprétation des concepts unificateurs de la cybernétique mécaniste. -/- Short Descriptor (Electre 2019): A study of one of the main axes of reflection of the French philosopher of science and of nature Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987). Relying on (...) the discoveries about embryogenesis, and also with the use of information theory, Ruyer proposed an interpretation of the main unifying concepts of mechanistic cybernetics. -/- Cet ouvrage propose une étude fouillée d'un des principaux axes de réflexion du philosophe des sciences et de la nature français Raymond Ruyer (1902–1987) : la cybernétique. Après avoir proposé une philosophie structuraliste, Ruyer la modifia à la lumière des découvertes de l'embryogenèse, puis il proposa une interprétation des concepts unificateurs de la cybernétique mécaniste. Réfléchissant sur cette dernière et sur la théorie de l'information, en particulier sur l'origine de l'information, il défendit que cette cybernétique n'était qu'une lecture inversée de la vraie cybernétique, qui nous donnerait de lire dans l'expérience même les traces du pouvoir morphogénétique, appréhendé comme un champ axiologique. Dans un texte résumant son propre parcours, Ruyer affirma finalement que la critique de la théorie de l'information « peut donner […] l'espoir d'aboutir à quelque chose comme une nouvelle théologie. » Les idées directrices de Ruyer sont tout particulièrement contextualisées ici à partir de la question du développement des formes en biologie, et de celles de la génétique, de la genèse stochastique de l'ordre, et de l'identification mentale ou physique de l'information. Il se termine en départageant ce qui est théologique et axiologique dans ce projet de métaphysique qui, bien que resté inachevé, n'en représente pas moins le plus impressionnant conçu en France au siècle dernier. – This book offers an in-depth study of one of the main axes in the reflection of French philosopher of science and nature Raymond Ruyer. In a text summarising his own development, Ruyer stated about the philosophical critique of information theory that it "is what can give the most long-lasting hope of getting to something like a new theology." After propounding a structuralist philosophy, and distinguishing between form and structure, to then modify it in the light of discoveries in embryogenesis, Ruyer offered a re-evaluation of the unifying concepts of mechanistic cybernetics. Thinking about it and about information theory, he defended the idea that this cybernetics was in reality an inverted reading of the real one, which would allow us to read in experience itself traces of the morphogenetic power, apprehended as the axiological field. On some transversal points, the development of forms in biology and genetics, the stochastic genesis of order, the identification of information with either psychological and mental, or physical reality, behaviour, and the access to meaning, this work exposes the main ideas of Ruyer while situating them in the context of the breadth of others' contributions. It ends by determining what is theological and axiological in this project for a metaphysics which, although unfinished, is nevertheless the most impressive effort done in France in the last century. – Available on i6doc dot com (ISBN 978-2-930517-56-8 ; pdf 978-2-930517-57-5). (shrink)

This paper argues that in some explanations mathematics are playing an explanatory rather than a representational role, and that this feature unifies many types of non-causal or non-mechanistic explanations that some philosophers of science have been recently exploring under various names. After showing how mathematics can play either a representational or an explanatory role by considering two alternative explanations of a same biological pattern—“Bergmann’s rule”—I offer an example of an explanation where the bulk of the explanatory job is done by (...) a mathematical theorem, and where mechanisms involved in the target systems are not explanatorily relevant. Then I account for the way mathematical properties may function in an explanatory way within an explanation by arguing that some mathematical propositions involving variables non directly referring to the target system features constitute constraints to which a whole class of systems should comply, provided they are describable by a mathematical object concerned by those propositions. According to such “constraint account”, those mathematical facts are directly entailing the explanandum, as a consequence of such constraints. I call those explanations “structural”, because here properties of mathematical structures are accounting for the explanandum; various kinds of mathematical structures thereby define various types of structural explanations. (shrink)

De l'Antiquité à la Renaissance, la notion d'harmonie a lié les mathématiques, l'astronomie et la musique. Renouant avec cette tradition millénaire, Jean-Philippe Uzan vous invite à écouter le chant des étoiles, les vibrations du cosmos et le cri du big bang. Une balade cosmique entre sciences et musique, vertigineuse et inspirante. Jean-Philippe Uzan est physicien théoricien, spécialiste de la théorie du big bang. Il est directeur de recherche au CNRS/Institut d'astrophysique de Paris et directeur adjoint de l'Institut Henri (...) Poincaré. (shrink)

This paper is based on the archives of Michel Foucault collected (since 2013) at the Manuscripts Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Our investigation focuses in particular on a complete manuscript, until now totally unknown and entitled ‘ Phénoménologie et psychologie’ (‘Phenomenology and Psychology’). This manuscript could be the first project for a thesis devoted to ‘The Notion of the “World” in Phenomenology’, written around 1953–4, at the same time as a manuscript on Binswanger and existential psychiatry (...) and as a manuscript on philosophical anthropology. We aim to show the importance that phenomenology seems to have held for Foucault at the beginning of the 1950s and in particular the role that it could have played in Foucault’s distancing himself from a naturalist psychology and a philosophy of consciousness to which he opposes a philosophy of the world, of being and of language. Foucault thus discovers a truth of the phenomenology which rests on the radicality of the transcendental gesture and on the access to an ontology gathering the being, the meaning and the language. (shrink)

This monographic chapter explains how expected utility (EU) theory arose in von Neumann and Morgenstern, how it was called into question by Allais and others, and how it gave way to non-EU theories, at least among the specialized quarters of decion theory. I organize the narrative around the idea that the successive theoretical moves amounted to resolving Duhem-Quine underdetermination problems, so they can be assessed in terms of the philosophical recommendations made to overcome these problems. I actually follow Duhem's recommendation, (...) which was essentially to rely on the passing of time to make many experiments and arguments available, and evebntually strike a balance between competing theories on the basis of this improved knowledge. Although Duhem's solution seems disappointingly vague, relying as it does on "bon sens" to bring an end to the temporal process, I do not think there is any better one in the philosophical literature, and I apply it here for what it is worth. In this perspective, EU theorists were justified in resisting the first attempts at refuting their theory, including Allais's in the 50s, but they would have lacked "bon sens" in not acknowledging their defeat in the 80s, after the long process of pros and cons had sufficiently matured. This primary Duhemian theme is actually combined with a secondary theme - normativity. I suggest that EU theory was normative at its very beginning and has remained so all along, and I express dissatisfaction with the orthodox view that it could be treated as a straightforward descriptive theory for purposes of prediction and scientific test. This view is usually accompanied with a faulty historical reconstruction, according to which EU theorists initially formulated the VNM axioms descriptively and retreated to a normative construal once they fell threatened by empirical refutation. From my historical study, things did not evolve in this way, and the theory was both proposed and rebutted on the basis of normative arguments already in the 1950s. The ensuing, major problem was to make choice experiments compatible with this inherently normative feature of theory. Compability was obtained in some experiments, but implicitly and somewhat confusingly, for instance by excluding overtly incoherent subjects or by creating strong incentives for the subjects to reflect on the questions and provide answers they would be able to defend. I also claim that Allais had an intuition of how to combine testability and normativity, unlike most later experimenters, and that it would have been more fruitful to work from his intuition than to make choice experiments of the naively empirical style that flourished after him. In sum, it can be said that the underdetermination process accompanying EUT was resolved in a Duhemian way, but this was not without major inefficiencies. To embody explicit rationality considerations into experimental schemes right from the beginning would have limited the scope of empirical research, avoided wasting resources to get only minor findings, and speeded up the Duhemian process of groping towards a choice among competing theories. (shrink)

This chapter of the Handbook of Utility Theory aims at covering the connections between utility theory and social ethics. The chapter first discusses the philosophical interpretations of utility functions, then explains how social choice theory uses them to represent interpersonal comparisons of welfare in either utilitarian or non-utilitarian representations of social preferences. The chapter also contains an extensive account of John Harsanyi's formal reconstruction of utilitarianism and its developments in the later literature, especially when society faces uncertainty rather than probabilistic (...) risk. (shrink)

Public announcement logic is an extension of multiagent epistemic logic with dynamic operators to model the informational consequences of announcements to the entire group of agents. We propose an extension of public announcement logic with a dynamic modal operator that expresses what is true after any announcement: after which , does it hold that Kφ? We give various semantic results and show completeness for a Hilbert-style axiomatization of this logic. There is a natural generalization to a logic for arbitrary events.

The sense of shared values is a specific aspect of human sociality. It originates from reciprocal social exchanges that include imitation, and empathy, but also negotiation from which meanings, values and norms are eventually constructed with others. Research suggests that this process starts from birth via imitation and mirroring processes that are important foundations of sociality providing a basic sense of social connectedness and mutual acknowledgment with others. From the second month, mirroring, imitative and other contagious responses are bypassed. Neonatal (...) imitation gives way to first signs of reciprocation (primary intersubjectivity), and joint attention in reference to objects (secondary intersubjectivity). We review this development and propose a third level of intersubjectivity, that is the emergence of values that are jointly represented and negotiated with others, as well as the development of an ethical stance accompanying emerging theories of mind from about 4 years of age. We propose that tertiary intersubjectivity is an ontogenetically new process of value negotiation and mutual recognition that are the cardinal trademarks of human sociality. (shrink)

Stochastic independence has a complex status in probability theory. It is not part of the definition of a probability measure, but it is nonetheless an essential property for the mathematical development of this theory. Bayesian decision theorists such as Savage can be criticized for being silent about stochastic independence. From their current preference axioms, they can derive no more than the definitional properties of a probability measure. In a new framework of twofold uncertainty, we introduce preference axioms that entail not (...) only these definitional properties, but also the stochastic independence of the two sources of uncertainty. This goes some way towards filling a curious lacuna in Bayesian decision theory. (shrink)

We develop a formal semantic analysis of the alarm calls used by Campbell’s monkeys in the Tai forest and on Tiwai island —two sites that differ in the main predators that the monkeys are exposed to. Building on data discussed in Ouattara et al. :e7808, 2009a; PNAS 106: 22026–22031, 2009b and Arnold et al., we argue that on both sites alarm calls include the roots krak and hok, which can optionally be affixed with -oo, a kind of attenuating suffix; in (...) addition, sentences can start with boom boom, which indicates that the context is not one of predation. In line with Arnold et al., we show that the meaning of the roots is not quite the same in Tai and on Tiwai: krak often functions as a leopard alarm call in Tai, but as a general alarm call on Tiwai. We develop models based on a compositional semantics in which concatenation is interpreted as conjunction, roots have lexical meanings, -oo is an attenuating suffix, and an all-purpose alarm parameter is raised with each individual call. The first model accounts for the difference between Tai and Tiwai by way of different lexical entries for krak. The second model gives the same underspecified entry to krak in both locations, but it makes use of a competition mechanism akin to scalar implicatures. In Tai, strengthening yields a meaning equivalent to non-aerial dangerous predator and turns out to single out leopards. On Tiwai, strengthening yields a nearly contradictory meaning due to the absence of ground predators, and only the unstrengthened meaning is used. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage se propose de degager un champ de recherche aux confins de la psychomecanique du langage et de la psychologie genetique, de mettre a jour les desseins croises de ces deux theories. De la reussite de l'entreprise ou de son echec depend en partie une meilleure comprehension de l'acquisition des connaissances linguistiques par l'enfant et celle du rapport langage-pensee et donc du fonctionnement du langage pris en charge par un sujet parlant ou ecrivant, celles des mecanismes structuraux porteurs de (...) la realisation de l'acte de langage avec ses variations idiolectales ou sociolectales. Pour acceder a la psycholinguistique et plus generalement a une anthropologie du langage, le chercheur doit disposer d'une theorisation precise de l'objet qu'est le langage, condition de toute amplification interdisciplinaire. (shrink)

This is the outline: 1. Introduction – Quelques remarques sur Dieu 2. Science et religion vont-elles se rencontrer ? 3. Le conflit va-t-il tout emporter ? 4. Au coeur du problème : une version sclérosée du dogmatisme 5. Quelle posture pour la rencontre entre science et religion ? 6. Y a-t-il une synthèse à l’horizon ? À quelles conditions ?

Following a previous elaboration of the concept of weak individuality and some examples of its instances in ecology and biology, the article focuses on general features of the concept, arguing that in any ontological field individuals are understood on the basis of our knowledge of interactions, through the application of these general formulas for extracting individuals from interactions. Then, the specificities of the individuality in the sense of this weak concept are examined in ecology; I conclude by addressing the differences (...) between ecosystems and organisms as they appear in the viewpoint of such concept. (shrink)

We propose two alternatives to Xu’s axiomatization of Chellas’s STIT. The first one simplifies its presentation, and also provides an alternative axiomatization of the deliberative STIT. The second one starts from the idea that the historic necessity operator can be defined as an abbreviation of operators of agency, and can thus be eliminated from the logic of Chellas’s STIT. The second axiomatization also allows us to establish that the problem of deciding the satisfiability of a STIT formula without temporal operators (...) is NP-complete in the single-agent case, and is NEXPTIME-complete in the multiagent case, both for the deliberative and Chellas’s STIT. (shrink)

The Pareto principle states that if the members of society express the same preference judgment between two options, this judgment is compelling for society. A building block of normative economics and social choice theory, and often borrowed by contemporary political philosophy, the principle has rarely been subjected to philosophical criticism. The paper objects to it on the ground that it indifferently applies to those cases in which the individuals agree on both their expressed preferences and their reasons for entertaining them, (...) and those cases in which they agree on their expressed preferences, while differing on their reasons. The latter are cases of "spurious unanimity", and it is normatively inappropriate, or so the paper argues, to defend unanimity preservation at the social level for them, so the Pareto principle is formulated much too broadly. The objection seems especially powerful when the principle is applied in an ex ante context of uncertainty, in which individuals can disagree on both their probabilities and utilities, and nonetheless agree on their preferences over prospects. (shrink)

Natural selection is often envisaged as the ultimate cause of the apparent rationality exhibited by organisms in their specific habitat. Given the equivalence between selection and rationality as maximizing processes, one would indeed expect organisms to implement rational decision-makers. Yet, many violations of the clauses of rationality have been witnessed in various species such as starlings, hummingbirds, amoebas and honeybees. This paper attempts to interpret such discrepancies between economic rationality and biological rationality. After having distinguished two kinds of rationality we (...) introduce irrationality as a negation of economic rationality by biologically rational decision-makers. Focusing mainly on those instances of irrationalities that can be understood as exhibiting inconsistency in making choices, i.e. as non-conformity of a given behaviour to axioms such as transitivity or independence of irrelevant alternatives, we propose two possible families of Darwinian explanations that may account for these apparent irrationalities. First, we consider cases where natural selection may have been an indirect cause of irrationality. Second, we consider putative cases where violations of rationality axioms may have been directly favored by natural selection. Though the latter cases seem to clearly contradict our intuitive representation of natural selection as a process that maximizes fitness, we argue that they are actually unproblematic; for often, they can be redescribed as cases where no rationality axiom is violated, or as situations where no adaptive solution exists in the first place. (shrink)

According to a theorem recently proved in the theory of logical aggregation, any nonconstant social judgment function that satisfies independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) is dictatorial. We show that the strong and not very plausible IIA condition can be replaced with a minimal independence assumption plus a Pareto-like condition. This new version of the impossibility theorem likens it to Arrow’s and arguably enhances its paradoxical value.

This article offers a summary of Whitehead’s life, along with bibliographical indications, and it additionnally gives reference markers to help understand how Whitehead renewed cosmology by unearthing a new understanding of a subject that would not be detached from its corporeal rootedness. Then, a more particular understanding of Whitehead’s criticism of the technoscentific project is sought, as to its absence of self-scrutiny. An additional consideration of ecology, and then religion, are offered.

We raise the following problem for so-called target-centred virtue ethics. An important motivation for adopting target-centred virtue ethics over other forms of virtue ethics is its supposedly distinctive account of right action: an action is right if and only if and because it is virtuous, and what makes an action virtuous is that it hits the target of the virtues. We argue that the account is not distinctive of target-centred virtue ethics, because it is an account that is widely endorsed (...) by Neo-Aristotelians. Hence, the argument of this paper undermines a central motivation for adopting target-centred virtue ethics. As a solution, we suggest that there is theoretical room for a target-centred account that is not Neo-Aristotelian, and we draw on the work of Confucian philosopher Wáng Yángmíng to provide one. We defend the resulting account by arguing that it has the advantage of being able to offer us a more plausible response to the self-centredness objection that has long been a problem for Neo-Aristotelians. (shrink)

What we read in the major synthetic writings of Teilhard shows a thought aware of the incessant interaction between natural entities and the organizing power which exerts an attraction on them that becomes practically infallible beyond a tipping point. This testifies of a prescient view that has many connections to the mode of thinking of cybernetics.

This paper investigates the degree to which information theory, and the derived uses that make it work as a metaphor of our age, can be helpful in thinking about God’s immanence and transcendance. We ask when it is possible to say that a consciousness has to be behind the information we encounter. If God is to be thought about as a communicator of information, we need to ask whether a communication system has to pre-exist to the divine and impose itself (...) to God. If we want God to be Creator, and not someone who would work like a human being, ‘creating’ will mean sustaining in being as much the channel, the material system, as the message. Is information control? It seems that God’s actions are not going to be informational control of everything. To clarify the issue, we attempt to distinguish two kinds of ‘genialities’ in nature, as a way to evaluate the likelihood of God from nature. We investigate concepts and images of God, in terms of the history of ideas but also in terms of philosophical theology, metaphysics, and religious ontology. (shrink)

This presentation discusses a notion encountered across disciplines, and in different facets of human activity: autonomous activity. We engage it in an interdisciplinary way. We start by considering the reactions and behaviors of biological entities to biotechnological intervention. An attempt is made to characterize the degree of freedom of embryos & clones, which show openness to different outcomes when the epigenetic developmental landscape is factored in. We then consider the claim made in programming and artificial intelligence that automata could show (...) self-directed behavior as to the determination of their step-wise decisions on courses of action. This question remains largely open and calls for some important qualifications. We try to make sense of the presence of claims of freedom in agency, first in common sense, then by ascribing developmental plasticity in biology and biotechnology, and in the mapping of programmed systems in the presence of environmental cues and self-referenced circuits as well as environmental coupling. This is the occasion to recall attempts at working out a logical and methodological approach to the openness of concepts that are still to be found, and assess whether they can operate the structuring intelligibility of a yet undeveloped or underdeveloped field of study, where a “bisociation" and a unification of knowledge might be possible. (shrink)

Biological individuals are usually defined by evolutionists through a reference to natural selection. This article looks for a concept of individuality that would hold at the same time for organisms and for communities or ecosystems, the latter being unaffected by natural selection. In the wake of Simon’s notion of “quasi-independence,” I elaborate a concept of “weak individuality” defined by probabilistic connections between sub-entities, read off our knowledge of their interactions. This formal scheme of connections allows one to infer what are (...) the individuals in the domain addressed by the theory of the interactions. The article argues that if ecosystems do not have strong individuality, they still possess a weak individuality, ecological theories providing the values of the variables in the formula for individuality. (shrink)

This is the outline: I. Remarques introductives sur l'émergence. 1 Le problème de l'émergence. 2. L'émergence en acte. a) En physique. b) Dans les sciences naturelles. II. Ruyer et la critique de l'émergentisme. III. Le dilemme épistémologique que pose l'émergence. IV. La présence du propos de Meyerson derrière celui de Ruyer. Pour conclure.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) foi filósofa, escritora, ativista política e humanista. Nasceu em Paris, no seio de família judaica. Formou-se em filosofia pela Université de Sorbonne e se tornou a primeira mulher catedrática da França. Militou fervorosamente pela causa dos trabalhadores fabris e, posteriormente, lutou na Guerra Civil Espanhola. Faleceu aos trinta e quatro anos por motivos de saúde.[1] [1] Para mais informações, vide texto disponível em:. Acesso em: 25 de junho de 2019.

Quelles sont les capacités et valeurs qui peuvent animer des académiques en ces temps de changement où nous vivons?? À cette question, généralement non explicite dans leurs travaux, ont répondu quinze chercheuses et chercheurs de différentes spécialités. En revisitant leurs thèmes de recherche ou leur parcours sous cet angle, il se dessine une constellation où semblent émerger trois pôles?: critique, imagination, interdépendance.00Avec les contributions de : 00Philippe Baret, Tom Bauler, Philippe Bourdeau, Isabelle Ferreras, François Gemenne, Marie-Françoise Godart, Marine Lugen, (...) Delphine Misonne, Muriel Moser, François Ost, Benoît Timmermans, Christian Vandermotten, Didier Viviers et Arnaud Zacharie. (shrink)

The comprehension of living organisms in all their complexity poses a major challenge to the biological sciences. Recently, systems biology has been proposed as a new candidate in the development of such a comprehension. The main objective of this paper is to address what systems biology is and how it is practised. To this end, the basic tools of a systems biological approach are explored and illustrated. In addition, it is questioned whether systems biology ‘revolutionizes’ molecular biology and ‘transcends’ its (...) assumed reductionism. The strength of this claim appears to depend on how molecular and systems biology are characterised and on how reductionism is interpreted. Doing credit to molecular biology and to methodological reductionism, it is argued that the distinction between molecular and systems biology is gradual rather than sharp. As such, the classical challenge in biology to manage, interpret and integrate biological data into functional wholes is further intensified by systems biology’s use of modelling and bioinformatics, and by its scale enlargement. (shrink)

This is the outline: 1. Introduction 2. La compréhension théorique – 2.1 Le dynamisme conceptuel et l'a priori 2.2 L'horizon conceptuel – 3. Compréhension et singularité 4. La production de signifiance 5. La présence du mystère 6. Le problème de la substantialité : l'un et le multiple – 6.1 La notion d'un ordre implicite.

As Aristotle classically defined it, continuity is the property of being infinitely divisible into ever-divisible parts. How has this conception been affected by the process of mathematization of motion during the 14th century? This paper focuses on Nicole Oresme, who extensively commented on Aristotle’s Physics, but also made decisive contributions to the mathematics of motion. Oresme’s attitude about continuity seems ambivalent: on the one hand, he never really departs from Aristotle’s conception, but on the other hand, he uses it in (...) a completely new way in his mathematics, particularly in his Questions on Euclidean geometry, a tantamount way to an atomization of motion. If the fluxus theory of natural motion involves that continuity is an essential property of real motion, defined as a res successiva, the ontological and mathematical structure of this continuity implies that continuum is in some way “composed” of an infinite number of indivisibles. In fact, Oresme’s analysis opened the path to a completely new kind of mathematical continuity. (shrink)

This is the outline: 6. L'absence du concept de l'individualité 7. L'existence illimitée (boundless) Métaphore et analogie 8. L'évolution et l'existence comme durée individuelle dans le temps cosmique 9. L'option de la nécessité naturelle 10. L'inconnaissabilité ultime.

Penser avec Pierre Macherey – avec Foucault. Tel est l’objet des lignes qui vont suivre. Penser avec, ce n’est pas simplement penser quelque chose, ce qui revient à circonscrire un objet pour en faire justement un ob-jet pour la pensée, disponible pour une pensée compréhensive ou conceptuelle qui s’en empare. Ce n’est pas non plus, lorsque l’on s’applique à penser une autre pensée, celle d’un autre que soi, chercher à en restituer seulement le sens général ou les arguments particuliers, e...