This classic work in the philosophy of physical science is an incisive and readable account of the scientific method. Pierre Duhem was one of the great figures in French science, a devoted teacher, and a distinguished scholar of the history and philosophy of science. This book represents his most mature thought on a wide range of topics.

Le philosophe doit fournir au législateur les moyens théoriques d'établir dans les cités des constitutions droites, seules à même de rendre les citoyens vertueux, et donc heureux, en les faisant obéir à de bonnes lois. Plutôt que d'instaurer une fois pour toutes une cité "parfaite", il faut, le plus souvent, réformer les institutions existantes et notamment mélanger les aspects positifs des différentes constitutions déviées. Même s'il entend promouvoir la concorde entre les citoyens, Aristote reconnaît le caractère à la fois naturel (...) et parfois bénéfique de la lutte des classes qui empêche une faction de devenir hégémonique. En permettant au législateur d'analyser la réalité sur laquelle il doit travailler, Les Politiques sont le premier traité de science politique."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Non-cognitive gadgets are fancy tools shaped to meet specific, local needs. Cecilia Heyes defines cognitive gadgets as dedicated psychological mechanisms created through social interactions and culturally, not genetically, inherited by humans. She has boldly proposed that many human cognitive mechanisms are gadgets. If true, these claims would have far-reaching implications for our scientific understanding of human social cognition. Here we assess Heyes’s cognitive gadget approach as it applies to mindreading. We do not think that the evidence supports Heyes’s thought-provoking thesis (...) that human children are taught to read minds the way they are taught to read words. We highlight a potential circularity lurking behind this analogy, and we explain why we are unpersuaded by Heyes’s anti-mentalistic proposal for handling data inconsistent with the gadget view, which others take to be evidence for mindreading in human infancy. We conclude that while human minds may well be filled with gadgets, mindreading is unlikely to be one of them. (shrink)

We defend, from a contractarian perspective, that the fair price of an insurance policy is the amount that the contracting parties agree when they are both equally uncertain about the insured event. Drawing on the approach developed by R. Sugden in _The Community of Advantage_, we answer two standard objections raised against contractarianism in the actuarial sciences: (1) people are not wise enough to assess their actuarial risks; (2) they are not rational enough to decide which insurance policy suits them (...) better. We show under which circumstances people can make fair actuarial agreements, without presupposing any objective risk or rationality benchmarks. (shrink)

This is the first part of Raymond Aron's landmark two-volume study of the sociological tradition¿arguably the definitive work of its kind. More than a work of reconstruction, Aron's study is, at its deepest level, an engagement with the very question of modernity: How did the intellectual currents which emerged in the eighteenth century shape the modern political and philosophical order? With scrupulous fairness, Aron examines the thought and arguments of the major social thinkers to discern how they answered this question. (...) Volume One explores three traditions: the French liberal school of political sociology, represented by Montesquieu and Tocqueville; the Comtean tradition, anticipating Durkheim in its elevation of social unity and consensus; and the Marxists, who posited the struggle between classes and placed their faith in historical necessity. In his customary clear and penetrating prose, Aron argues that each of these schools offers its own theory of the diversity of societies and that ¿each is inspired both by moral convictions and by scientific hypotheses.¿ This Routledge Classics edition includes an introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson. (shrink)

Highlighting the social tensions that confront the liberal tradition, Pierre Manent draws a portrait of what we, citizens of modern liberal democracies, have become. For Manent, a discussion of liberalism encompasses the foundations of modern society, its secularism, its individualism, and its conception of rights. The frequent incapacity of the morally neutral, democratic state to further social causes, he argues, derives from the liberal stance that political life does not serve a higher purpose. Through quick-moving, highly synthetic essays, he (...) explores the development of liberal thinking in terms of a single theme: the decline of theological politics. The author traces the liberal stance to Machiavelli, who, in seeking to divorce everyday life from the pervasive influence of the Catholic church, separated politics from all notions of a cosmological order. What followed, as Manent demonstrates in his analyses of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Guizot, and Constant, was the evolving concept of an individual with no goals outside the confines of the self and a state with no purpose but to prevent individuals from dominating one another. Weighing both the positive and negative effects of such a political arrangement, Manent raises important questions about the fundamental political issues of the day, among them the possibility of individual rights being reconciled with the necessary demands of political organization, and the desirability of a government system neutral about religion but not about public morals. (shrink)

In Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness, Pierre Keller examines Kant's theory of self-consciousness and argues that it succeeds in explaining how both subjective and objective experience are possible. Previous interpretations of Kant's theory have held that he treats all self-consciousness as knowledge of objective states of affairs, and also that self-consciousness can be interpreted as knowledge of personal identity. By developing this striking new interpretation Keller is able to argue that transcendental self-consciousness underwrites a general theory of objectivity (...) and subjectivity at the same time. (shrink)

Alors que la théologie morale fondamentale rentre de plus en plus en contradiction avec les usages contemporains, Il faut interroger le relativisme qui ébranle les fondements de la morale et qui, a priori, constitue une entrave pour la vie humaine naissante. Il s'agit d'une critique du relativisme et la défense de la loi naturelle. La conception de l'absolutisation de la liberté signifie que l'homme n'a pour ultime référence que lui-même. Ayant exclu Dieu et sa loi, il se fait lui-même sa (...) propre loi. Il s'ensuit donc un relativisme où l'homme se ferme à toute influence extérieure et pose comme critère de son action, ses propres opinions et ses désirs. La présente recherche se veut être une démonstration qui entend libérer ou préserver la théologie morale fondamentale du joug du relativisme et sauvegarder l'essence divine de la vie humaine. La liberté doit être perçue comme un don de Dieu et une participation de l'homme. (shrink)

In this 1999 book Pierre Keller examines the distinctive contributions, and the respective limitations, of Husserl's and Heidegger's approach to fundamental elements of human experience. He shows how their accounts of time, meaning, and personal identity are embedded in important alternative conceptions of how experience may be significant for us, and discusses both how these conceptions are related to each other and how they fit into a wider philosophical context. His sophisticated and accessible account of the phenomenological philosophy of (...) Husserl and the existential phenomenology of Heidegger will be of wide interest to students and specialists in these areas, while analytic philosophers of mind will be interested by the detailed parallels which he draws with a number of concerns of the analytic philosophical tradition. (shrink)

The dissertation seeks to gain a comprehensive understanding of Frege's watershed work of logic, the 1879 Begriffsschrift . The treatise is the first since Aristotle's instauration of the discipline to have succeeded in completely recasting logic. Very generally stated, the dissertation aims at making explicit the conceptual origins of modern logic. To do that will require that each of the achievements of Concept-script be examined from one or more vantage points: either within the perspective of Frege's larger and guiding ambition, (...) that of providing a logical justification of arithmetic; or with respect to the horizon of modernity; or in relation to later developments in logical theory and the philosophy of language, developments stimulated, albeit not exclusively, by Frege's very work. The vantage point adopted in each case will depend on the nature of the topic and the extent to which it requires to be made explicit. One perspective will have preponderance, that of Frege's relationship to his early modern ancestors, a group that includes philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians. Since modernity is constituted in a nearly constant critical, if not polemical, relationship to the Ancients, they will also at times be drawn into the discussion. The elucidation of Frege's breakthrough work will be guided by the following thesis: Frege's attempt to justify arithmetic logically and the fine work of clarification he produced in actualizing this project; his discovery of function-theoretic logic and his fashioning of a concept-script ; and his critique of natural language and the attendant semantics developed over the course of that critique constitute an unfolding and an extension of the primacy of universal method over ontology that is the signature of modern inquiry. (shrink)

Pour qui s’intéresse à la philosophie des mathématiques, Roger Apéry (1916-1994) incarne le défenseur de la mathématique constructive et l’adversaire résolu du formalisme et du bourbakisme. On sait moins qu’il est aussi l’un des premiers universitaires français à avoir fait la promotion de la théorie des catégories, pourtant hautement structuraliste et souvent jugée comme très formelle. L’objectif principal de notre étude est de préciser les conditions historiques et la teneur philosophique du double enthousiasme d’Apéry, afin de vérifier la cohérence d’une (...) pensée libre, originale et attachante. (shrink)

War has always been a problem that has plagued our existence, and begged for civility and restriction in its use. The idea behind engaging in war has often been based on assuring a place for peace in the not so distant future, whether the motivation was normative, as within the Just War Doctrine, or simply the hope that victory would lead to the end of organized violence. A group of scholars, intellectuals, and practitioners has been brought together in this volume (...) to posit an alternative route — through justice — to what has thus far been elusive for humankind: a durable peace among and between peoples. (shrink)

This chapter distinguishes Just Peace from its closest ‘moral’ neighbours — a stable peace and positive peace. Drawing on both consequentialist and deontological considerations, Allan develops an international ethical scale to evaluate different acts from a moral standpoint, with different levels of conflict as the baseline of ethical behavior. The more extreme the discord, the worse it is considered on the scale; the more harmonious, the better. Arguing that absolute unhappiness and absolute happiness are not of this world, Allan presents (...) eight intermediary moral situations, each being superseded by the next one in ethical terms: genocide, war, non-war, Just War, stable peace, Just Peace, positive peace, and Global Care. He develops an ethic of ‘global care’ based on feminist theories of care, religious and secular declarations on a global ethic, evolutionary theory arguments, and a critique of a liberal human rights approach. (shrink)

In this concluding chapter, Allan and Keller posit that Just Peace should be defined as a process resting on four necessary and sufficient conditions: thin recognition whereby the other is accepted as autonomous; thick recognition whereby identities need to be accounted for; renouncement, requiring significant sacrifices from all parties; and rule, the objectification of a Just Peace by a ‘text’ requiring a common language respecting the identities of each, and defining their rights and duties. This approach, based on a language-oriented (...) process amongst directly concerned parties, goes beyond liberal and culturalist perspectives. By moving beyond the idea of a peace founded on norms claiming universal scope, each side of a conflict has a place at the negotiating table to present their own perspective on what justice might entail. This inclusion into the decision-making process helps create the feeling of personal investment in the final negotiated product. In addition, negotiators need to work towards building a novel shared reality as well as a new common language to help foster an enduring harmony between previously clashing peoples. (shrink)

Philosophia Scientiae 23-3, p. 35-66, doi : 10.4000/philosophiascientiae.2048 Dans les échanges de fichiers durant les corrections des épreuves de notre article, nous avons transmis nos figures avec une notation erronée. Par ailleurs une des figures a sauté au cours des mêmes échanges, du fait d’une inattention de notre part. Elle est reproduite ci-dessous. Dans l’article publié dans la version p...

« Trouble dans la matière » : cette formule, à première vue énigmatique, prend sens une fois mise en résonance avec celle que Judith Butler avait utilisée pour intituler son ouvrage, Trouble dans le genre : la démarche d’Audrey Benoit adopte la même perspective critique, signalée par la référence à un « trouble » ou remise en question d’un certain nombre d’idées reçues ; simultanément, elle décale le point d’application de cette critique du problème spécifique du « genre », dont (...) les incidence... (shrink)

We prove a couple of results on NTP2 theories. First, we prove an amalgamation statement and deduce from it that the Lascar distance over extension bases is bounded by 2. This improves previous work of Ben Yaacov and Chernikov. We propose a line of investigation of NTP2 theories based on S1 ideals with amalgamation and ask some questions. We then define and study a class of groups with generically simple generics, generalizing NIP groups with generically stable generics.

General relativity and quantum mechanics have both revealed the relativity of certain notions that were previously thought to be absolute. I clarify the precise sense in which these theories are relational, and I argue that the various aspects of relationality pertain to the same movement in the progress of physical theories.

In the intersection between eugenics past and present, disability has never been far beneath the surface. Perceived and ascribed disabilities of body and mind were one of the core sets of eugenics traits that provided the basis for institutionalized and sterilization on eugenic grounds for the first 75 years of the 20th-century. Since that time, the eugenic preoccupation with the character of future generations has seeped into what have become everyday practices in the realm of reproductive choice. As Marsha Saxton (...) (2000) and Adrienne Asch (2000, 2003) have forcefully argued, the use of prenatal screening technologies to facilitate the selective abortion of fetuses with features that signify disabling traits—the paradigm here being trisomy 21 in a fetus indicating Down Syndrome in the child—express a negative view of such disabilities sufficient to warrant terminating an otherwise wanted pregnancy. The eliminative structure of what Rosemary Garland Thompson (2012) has called eugenic logic persists in contemporary practices governing reproductive choice, social inclusion, and democratic participation and their relationship to disability. The tie between eugenics and contemporary disability studies suggests that eugenics and reflection on its history can also play a more positive role in disability politics. After focusing on eugenics in the first half of the paper, we will shift in the second half of the paper to eugenic resonances in contemporary thought and practice, concluding with some thoughts about ongoing practices of silencing and the very idea of eradicating disability. (shrink)

These selections from Le système du monde, the classic ten-volume history of the physical sciences written by the great French physicist Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), focus on cosmology, Duhem's greatest interest. By reconsidering the work of such Arab and Christian scholars as Averroes, Avicenna, Gregory of Rimini, Albert of Saxony, Nicole Oresme, Duns Scotus, and William of Occam, Duhem demonstrated the sophistication of medieval science and cosmology.

Johnson-Laird's mental models theory claims that reasoning is a semantic process of construction and manipulation of models in working memory of limited capacity. Accordingly, both a deduction and a given interpretation of a premise would be all the harder the higher the number of models they require. The purpose of the present experiment was twofold. First, it aimed to demonstrate that the interpretation of if...then conditional sentences in children (third, sixth, and ninth graders) evolves as a function of the number (...) of models the children can produce. We proposed a theory of conditional reasoning development that hypothesises a developmental trend of three successive levels of interpretations underlain by one, two, and then three models, i.e. conjunctive, biconditional, and conditional respectively. Second, we aimed to show that these different levels correlate with working memory capacities: the higher the working memory span, the higher the number of models underlying the conditional interpretation. These two hypotheses were verified, supporting the mental models theory. The results are compared with the rival theory of mental logic. (shrink)

Résumé Dans ce travail, nous tenterons de voir en quoi prendre au sérieux le caractère fluent des processus implique une liaison indissoluble mais aussi une dualité entre potentiel de connexions et actualisation des processus de connexion. Nous nous demanderons aussi si cela peut ou non être compatible avec l’entreprise d’une synthèse entre une ontologie fondamentale en termes de processus et une ontologie qui assurerait la validité de la connaissance ; et enfin dans quelle mesure Whitehead était justifié à adopter, dans (...) sa « philosophie de l’organisme », un point de vue englobant, incluant Dieu et le monde, pour fonder cette assurance. (shrink)

Découvrant, à Argos, le texte d’une donation de princes lagides (monnaies et objets en or) et de cités chypriotes (sommes transcrites en drachmes et oboles), sans nul doute pour un sanctuaire local, l’auteur s’est interrogé (BCH 1982) sur les montants originels envoyés par les cités, la mention d’oboles, inexistantes matériellement, montrant qu’il s’agissait d’une traduction comptable. Il était parvenu à un taux de change minimal, proche du rapport entre les poids des monnaies, taux imaginé beaucoup plus fort par O. Picard, (...) dans un codicille à son article. De fait, il n’y a pas eu de change du tout : objets princiers et numéraire chypriote sont rentrés tels quels dans le trésor du temple, comme nous le montrent les inventaires de trésors religieux, déliens notamment. Les transcriptions en monnaie locale sont simplement destinées à donner aux fidèles du sanctuaire argien une idée de la valeur des dons, et le rapport de 1,44 entre les monnaies est exactement le taux d’équivalence fiduciaire entre le monnayage lagide et celui d’Argos, celui à partir duquel on peut mesurer à leur juste valeur les déformations que lui apportent les taux commerciaux. (shrink)

À partir d’une anthropologie historique des témoignages sur la sophia de Thalès et Anaxagore, cet article tente de discuter l’idée, encore dominante dans l’historiographie courante de la philosophie, d’une « naissance de la philosophie » en Ionie au vie siècle, coïncidant avec un passage du « mythe à la Raison », du « religieux » au « scientifique ». Le savoir-sagesse des « Ioniens », y compris dans ses aspects que nous définirions comme « rationnels », ne peut se pratiquer (...) que dans la dépendance des dieux. Les deux figures étudiées sont celles pour lesquelles les témoignages sont suffisamment nombreux : il s’agit de Thalès, le fondateur de l’école, et d’Anaxagore, qui en aurait transmis l’esprit à Athènes. (shrink)

Alors que la narratologie prétendait dévoiler les structures du récit en général, Vincent Descombes, dans son livre sur Proust, affirme qu’une science conséquente de la littérature doit rendre compte de la manière particulière qu’a chaque genre littéraire de produire du sens. Nous présentons dans cet article une approche noétique des genres qui, tentant de dépasser l’opposition entre sémiologie et herméneutique, s’intéresse à la manière dont les structures symboliques créent des modes de pensée particuliers. En remarquant que les fondateurs de la (...) narratologie, sous couvert de fiction, ont en réalité analysé le seul genre romanesque, elle propose de repartir de leur travail pour mettre au jour le fonctionnement des synthèses diachronique et synchronique propres au roman. N’en restant pas à cette analyse des structures sémiotiques, la noétique procède à leur interprétation phénoménologique, et montre que le mode de pensée du roman est celui de ce que Hegel appelle l’expérience de la conscience. (shrink)

Alors que la narratologie prétendait dévoiler les structures du récit en général, Vincent Descombes, dans son livre sur Proust, affirme qu’une science conséquente de la littérature doit rendre compte de la manière particulière qu’a chaque genre littéraire de produire du sens. Nous présentons dans cet article une approche noétique des genres qui, tentant de dépasser l’opposition entre sémiologie et herméneutique, s’intéresse à la manière dont les structures symboliques créent des modes de pensée particuliers. En remarquant que les fondateurs de la (...) narratologie, sous couvert de fiction, ont en réalité analysé le seul genre romanesque, elle propose de repartir de leur travail pour mettre au jour le fonctionnement des synthèses diachronique et synchronique propres au roman. N’en restant pas à cette analyse des structures sémiotiques, la noétique procède à leur interprétation phénoménologique, et montre que le mode de pensée du roman est celui de ce que Hegel appelle l’expérience de la conscience. (shrink)

Résumé À partir de 1870, la poésie semble s’être soudain libérée de toutes les règles. Ce n’est pas tout à fait le cas, puisque l’abolition des conventions signa la naissance des contraintes – et d’un nouveau type de poésie, à la fois hermétique et ludique. Nous construisons dans cet article un concept de contrainte à même de rendre compte de cette transformation radicale de la poésie au cours du vingtième siècle (notamment par différence avec les concepts de résistance, de convention (...) et de dispositif), en même temps que nous présentons les tenants linguistiques et les aboutissants esthétiques de cette nouvelle poésie de la singularité impersonnelle. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to study complex ecological models exhibiting simple dynamics. We consider large scale systems which can be decomposed into weakly coupled subsystems. Perturbation Theory is used in order to get a reduced set of differential equations governing slow time varying global variables. As examples, we study the influence of the individual behaviour of animals in competition and predator-prey models. The animals are assumed to do many activities all day long such as searching for food of (...) different types. The degree of competition as well as the predation pressure are dependent upon these activities. Preys are more vulnerable when doing some activities during which they are very exposed to predators attacks rather than for others during which they are hidden. We study the effect of a change in the average individual behaviour of the animals on interspecific relationships. Computer simulations of the whole sets of equations are compared to simulations of the reduced sets of equations. (shrink)

Crossing the Stream, Leaving the Cave brings philosophers from two of the world's great philosophical traditions--Platonic and Indian Buddhist--into joint inquiry on topics in metaphysics, epistemology, mind, language, and ethics. An international team of scholars address selected questions of mutual concern to Buddhist and Platonist: How can knowledge of reality transform us? Will such transformation leave us speechless, or disinterested in the world around us? What is cause? What is self-knowledge? And how can dreams shed light on waking cognition? What (...) do the paradoxes thrown up by abstract thought about fundamental notions such as being and unity reveal? Is it possible to attain unity in ourselves, and should we even try? Would doing so make us happy--and is such happiness consistent with both contemplation of reality and action in the world? With close readings of texts by Buddhaghosa, Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Dignaga, Bhaviveka, Santideva; by Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Olympiodorus, and Damascius (among others), these studies consider not just the different answers Buddhists and Platonists might give to these questions, but also the criticisms they might bring to each other's positions, the sort of arguments they use, and the use they put these arguments to. Bringing Platonic and the Buddhist perspectives jointly to bear creates a cosmopolitan philosophical exchange which yields greater conceptual clarity on the questions and the terms in which they are cast, reveals unnoticed conceptual connections, and opens up new possibilities for addressing central philosophical concerns. (shrink)

In this thesis, we study transfer principles in the context of certain Henselian valued fields, namely Henselian valued fields of equicharacteristic $0$, algebraically closed valued fields, algebraically maximal Kaplansky valued fields, and unramified mixed characteristic Henselian valued fields with perfect residue field. First, we compute the burden of such a valued field in terms of the burden of its value group and its residue field. The burden is a cardinal related to the model theoretic complexity and a notion of dimension (...) associated to $\text {NTP}_2$ theories. We show, for instance, that the Hahn field $\mathbb {F}_p^{\text {alg}})$ is inp-minimal, and that the ring of Witt vectors $W$ over $\mathbb {F}_p^{\text {alg}}$ is not strong. This result extends previous work by Chernikov and Simon and realizes an important step toward the classification of Henselian valued fields of finite burden. Second, we show a transfer principle for the property that all types realized in a given elementary extension are definable. It can be written as follows: a valued field as above is stably embedded in an elementary extension if and only if its value group is stably embedded in the corresponding extension of value groups, its residue field is stably embedded in the corresponding extension of residue fields, and the extension of valued fields satisfies a certain algebraic condition. We show, for instance, that all types over the power series field $\mathbb {R})$ are definable. Similarly, all types over the quotient field of $W$ are definable. This extends previous work of Cubides and Delon and of Cubides and Ye.These distinct results use a common approach, which has been developed recently. It consists of establishing first a reduction to an intermediate structure called the leading term structure, or $\operatorname {\mathrm {RV}}$ -sort, and then of reducing to the value group and residue field. This leads us to develop similar reduction principles in the context of pure short exact sequences of abelian groups.prepared by Pierre Touchard.E-mail: pierre[email protected]: https://miami.uni-muenster.de/Record/a612cf73-0a2f-42c4-b1e4-7d28934138a9. (shrink)