Jean-Pierre Dupuy, prophet of what he calls "enlightened doomsaying," has long warned that modern society is on a path to self-destruction. In this book, he pleads for a subversion of this crisis from within, arguing that it is our lopsided view of religion and reason that has set us on this course. In denial of our sacred origins and hubristically convinced of the powers of human reason, we cease to know our own limits: our disenchanted world leaves us defenseless (...) against a headlong rush into the abyss of global warming, nuclear holocaust, and the other catastrophes that loom on our horizon. Reviving the religious anthropology of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss and in dialogue with the work of René Girard, Dupuy shows that we must remember the world's sacredness in order to keep human violence in check. A metaphysical and theological detective, he tracks the sacred in the very fields where human reason considers itself most free from everything it judges irrational: science, technology, economics, political and strategic thought. In making such claims, The Mark of the Sacred takes on religion bashers, secularists, and fundamentalists at once. Written by one of the deepest and most versatile thinkers of our time, it militates for a world where reason is no longer an enemy of faith. (shrink)

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, prophet of what he calls "enlightened doomsaying," has long warned that modern society is on a path to self-destruction. In this book, he pleads for a subversion of this crisis from within, arguing that it is our lopsided view of religion and reason that has set us on this course. In denial of our sacred origins and hubristically convinced of the powers of human reason, we cease to know our own limits: our disenchanted world leaves us defenseless (...) against a headlong rush into the abyss of global warming, nuclear holocaust, and the other catastrophes that loom on our horizon. Reviving the religious anthropology of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss and in dialogue with the work of René Girard, Dupuy shows that we must remember the world's sacredness in order to keep human violence in check. A metaphysical and theological detective, he tracks the sacred in the very fields where human reason considers itself most free from everything it judges irrational: science, technology, economics, political and strategic thought. In making such claims, _The Mark of the Sacred _ takes on religion bashers, secularists, and fundamentalists at once. Written by one of the deepest and most versatile thinkers of our time, it militates for a world where reason is no longer an enemy of faith. (shrink)

This is an essay on place in light of the ecological crisis as an exercise in what Pierre Charbonnier has recently called ecological reason, that is, “the environmental reflexivity of our species.” How do the roots of our prevailing political and economic relationships to the many lands that sustain us appear retroactively from the perspective of ecological reason? In a kind of tragic reversal, the mad rush to global prosperity and political dignity now appears as the emerging catastrophe (...) of our failure to heed the terrestrial affordances that sustain us. I explicate this problem and root about for responses to it by lacing together the recent work of Charbonnier as well as John Sallis, Bruno Latour, and Brian Burkhart in a single weave of place-specific thinking. How can we begin to rethink place from the ground up? (shrink)

Ways of Seeing is a unique collaboration between an eminent philosopher and a world famous neuroscientist. It focuses on one of the most basic human functions - vision. What does it mean to 'see'. It brings together electrophysiological studies, neuropsychology, psychophysics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. The first truly interdisciplinary book devoted to the topic of vision, it will make a valuable contribution to the field of cognitive science.

Drawing on the Begriffsgeschichte of Reinhart Koselleck and the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, my book The Invention of the ‘Underclass’ draws a microhistory of the birth, diffusion, and demise of this racialized folk devil at the intersection of the academic field, the journalistic field, and the politics-policy-philanthropic field. This history illuminates the politics of knowledge about dispossessed and dishonored categories in the metropolis and suggests three notions that can help researchers parse the use and abuse of other social (...) science constructs and thus practice better conceptual hygiene: lemming effects (illustrated by the wild rush to deploy ‘diaspora’), conceptual speculative bubble (as with ‘racial capitalism’), and turnkey problematics (such as the ‘resilient city’ and the ‘creative city’). I discuss the factors that foster the development of epistemic bandwagons, speculation, and turnkeys, and specify the criteria that make for a robust concept in terms of semantics (clarity and neutrality), logics (coherence and type-specificity), and heuristics (empirical adequacy and theoretical productivity). (shrink)

Recognized as a masterpiece of Nietzsche scholarship, NIETZSCHE AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE is available here for the first time in English. Author Pierre Klossowski suggests that Nietzsche's ideas and beliefs did not stem from his personal pathology, but rather were applied in a pathological manner. Thereby Nietzsche's beliefs resonated dynamically and intellectually with his alternating lucidity and delirium.

According to an influential view, one function of mirror neurons (MNs), first discovered in the brain of monkeys, is to underlie third-person mindreading. This view relies on two assumptions: the activity of MNs in an observer’s brain matches (simulates or resonates with) that of MNs in an agent’s brain and this resonance process retrodictively generates a representation of the agent’s intention from a perception of her movement. In this paper, I criticize both assumptions and I argue instead that the activity (...) of MNs in an observer’s brain is enhanced by a prior representation of the agent’s intention and that their task is to predictively compute the best motor command suitable to satisfy the agent’s intention. (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)

Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. The puzzles of intentionality lie at the interface between the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. The word itself, which is of medieval Scholastic origin, was rehabilitated by the philosopher Franz Brentano towards the end of the nineteenth century. ‘Intentionality’ is a philosopher's word. It derives from the Latin word intentio, which in turn derives from the verb (...) intendere, which means being directed towards some goal or thing. The entry falls into eleven sections. (shrink)

We study one way in which stable phenomena can exist in an NIP theory. We start by defining a notion of ‘pure instability’ that we call ‘distality’ in which no such phenomenon occurs. O-minimal theories and the p-adics for example are distal. Next, we try to understand what happens when distality fails. Given a type p over a sufficiently saturated model, we extract, in some sense, the stable part of p and define a notion of stable independence which is implied (...) by non-forking and has bounded weight. (shrink)

We show basic facts about dp-minimal ordered structures. The main results are: dp-minimal groups are abelian-by-finite-exponent, in a divisible ordered dp-minimal group, any infinite set has non-empty interior, and any theory of pure tree is dp-minimal.

Recent empirical and conceptual research has shown that moral considerations have an influence on the way we use the adverb 'intentionally'. Here we propose our own account of these phenomena, according to which they arise from the fact that the adverb 'intentionally' has three different meanings that are differently selected by contextual factors, including normative expectations. We argue that our hypotheses can account for most available data and present some new results that support this. We end by discussing the implications (...) of our account for folk psychology. (shrink)

A new framework for the study of the human moral faculty is currently receiving much attention: the so-called ‘universal moral grammar' framework. It is based on an intriguing analogy, first pointed out by Rawls, between the study of the human moral sense and Chomsky's research program into the human language faculty. In order to assess UMG, we ask: is moral competence modular? Does it have an underlying hierarchical grammatical structure? Does moral diversity rest on culture-dependent parameters? We review evidence that (...) supports negative answers and argue that formal grammatical concepts are of limited value for the study of moral judgments, moral development and moral diversity. (shrink)

Theorists of affect and radical democracy have largely overlooked the importance of intentionally cultivating affective dynamics in the process of changing institutions. We address that lack by introducing the concept of musical groove as an intercorporeal feel for improvisational co-creation. Groove in a political context involves specific practices of modulating dynamics, receptivity, and affects in relationship to specific contexts, people, and practices to powerful effect. We explore how early democratic movements during the American Revolution sought to craft institutional forms capacious (...) enough for such democratic groove despite the fact that key intellectual leaders of the time, such as the Federalists and Benjamin Rush, feared the power of intercorporeal affective flows of democratic enthusiasm and popular improvisation. We read Rush’s critique and his efforts to diminish and control these emergences by harmonizing them in the order as a “negative image” of a radical democratic alternative that would foster improvisation and build enthusiasm for catalysing change today. We discuss how improvisation can, as Pierre Bourdieu perceived, simply function to reproduce the limits of a given socio-political game, which is deeply embedded within us as a “feel for the game” or set of affective dispositions. However, we turn Bourdieu’s own critique against itself to find openings for a habitus of political groove and democratic improvisation that he considered foreclosed. We conclude by fleshing out these insights in relation to affective dynamics among political organizing practices and modest institutional changes during a period of rich local transformation in which we participated in Durham, North Carolina. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bookmarks When most of us think of the losses for literature, music, and art caused by the First World War, the names that typically spring to mind are Rupert Brooke, WUfred Owen, and perhaps George Butterworth. This is conventional Anglocentrism. The millions of young victims of that conflict included many of the most promising artistic and literary talents from across Europe and beyond. The magnitude of this loss is (...) brought home by a new book edited by Tim Cross, TL· Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets, and Playwrights (University of Iowa Press, $17.95, paperbound). The idea is simple, the result moving. Cross has brought together fifty-nine biographical sketches of poets or writers who died in the war, with relevant illustrations and samples of their work. The two-column, 406-page book ranges from the American Alan Seeger and more famous British names, through the Breton poet Jean-Pierre Calloc'h, Germans such as Georg Trakl and Franz Janowitz, the Alsatian Ernst Stadler, the Hungarian Géza Gyóni, and the Armenians Grigor Zohrab, Daniel Varouzan, and Siamant'o. There are Czechs, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Slovenes. It would be difficult tooverestimate the richness of TL· Lost Voices of World War I. As a random taste, here's a tart little piece by the German Gustav Sack, killed in 1916 during the advance on Bucharest. As with the other poetry in the book, this translation (by Anthea Bell) of Piffle (Quark) appears side by side with the original. Year after year, you gnaw your way through life, the years elude your clutch, and in the end, your hair is gray and still you don't amount to much. You eat and drink and court a girl, get chUdren too, the Lord knows why, whUe Time, pursuing its mad whirl, faster and faster rushes by. You lay you down to end your days a penitent; you thus obtain fine tributes to your worthy ways, and so chalk up one last net gain. Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 446-454 Bookmarks447 An appendix lists, with their major works, eight hundred creative artists known to have died as a result of the war. If this book is a record of the genius and aesdietic sensibUity of the human race, it is also a monument to its brutal stupidity. It is a war memorial like none other in my experience. The Heidegger-Hitler cauldron continues to boil, and the appearance in English of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism (Temple University Press, $29.95) wUl further stoke the fire. Editors Tom Rockmore andJoseph Margolis provide a perceptive foreword to this American edition of the book in which they identify four strategies for dealing with Heidegger's involvement with Nazism. We have (1) the plain position that there is "an intrinsic link between Heidegger's thought and Nazism"; (2) the beUef that the link is purely contingent ; (3) the "learned" form of (2), according to which "Heidegger's detractors are insufficiently aware of the entire body of his thought to criticize it"; and (4) the view which concedes (1) but—watch out!—holds that "the uninitiated, those whose philosophical being is not bound up with Heidegger in an essential way, cannot really measure the importance or full significance of Heidegger's work." Tedious to have to say it, but people whose being is so "bound up" with Heidegger are quite possibly the least qualified to comment on his fascism. The old official stance—Heidegger was naive, guilty only of a temporary "political error," worked from within to protect the university, actuaUy wanted to defend Jews, and, my favorite, must have felt real bad, etc.—is demolished by the documentation in Farias's book. Different readers will be impressed by different items in the mass of material Heidegger and Nazism collects, but the overall case is conclusive. OccasionaUy I have the sense that this book contains too many diversions about characters connected with Heidegger. WhUe people Heidegger was friendly with—for example, the Freiburg mayor, Franz Kerber —may have had unimpeachable Nazi credentials, it is not always clear what this teUs us about Heidegger himself. In general, there is a... (shrink)

Drawing on various resources and requirements (as expressed by Dewey, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom), this paper proposes an externalist view of conceptual mental episodes that does not equate them, even partially, with vehicles of any sort, whether the vehicles be located in the environment or in the head. The social and pragmatic nature of the use of concepts and conceptual content makes it unnecessary and indeed impossible to locate the entities that realize conceptual mental episodes in non-personal or subpersonal contentful (...) entities (vehicles). Persons, who engage in social practices of deontic scorekeeping (Brandom), and who are thus able to produce appropriate inferential behaviour, enact conceptual mental episodes and the basis of their supervenience. (shrink)

Through a detailed study of Spinoza's concept of 'experience', Moreau shows how Spinoza extends the power of reason to capture the singularity of individuals: their lives, languages, passions and societies.

This first English-language translation captures the excitement of the original text-already a contemporary classic, and will likely become a standard reference in the history of eighteenth-century thought, politics, and society, and in the ...

Alva Noë’s version of the enactive conception in _Action in Perception_ is an important contribution to the study of visual perception. First, I argue, however, that it is unclear (at best) whether, as the enactivists claim, work on change blindness supports the denial of the existence of detailed visual representations. Second, I elaborate on what Noë calls the ‘puzzle of perceptual presence’. Thirdly, I question the enactivist account of perceptual constancy. Finally, I draw attention to the tensions between enactivism and (...) two trends in cognitive neuroscience: the two-visual systems model of human vision and the theory of internal forward models of action. (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)

What, if anything, is wrong with high executive compensation? Is the common “lay reaction” of indignation and moral outrage justified? In this paper, my main goal is to articulate in a more systematic and philosophical manner the egalitarian responses to these questions. In order to do so, I suggest that we take some insights from recent debates on two versions of egalitarianism: a distributive one, according to which no one should be worse off than others because of unfair distributions of (...) goods and resources, especially ones based on matters of luck or arbitrary factors, and a relational one, which maintains that egalitarian justice requires members of a society to relate to one another as equals. Drawing on recent attempts to highlight the tricky nature of managerial authority, I argue that high inequalities in pay are not simply a distributional matter but should also be analyzed through a relational lens. I also attempt to show that relational egalitarians are well-equipped to question the now dominant “incentives” view of CEO compensation. (shrink)

In his 1910 book On the principle of contradiction in Aristotle, Jan Łukasiewicz claims that syllogistic is independent of the principle of contradiction . He also argues that Aristotle would have defended such a thesis in the Posterior Analytics. In this paper, we first show that Łukasiewicz's arguments for these two claims have to be rejected. Then, we show that the thesis of the independence of assertoric syllogistic vis-à-vis PC is nevertheless true. For that purpose, we first establish that there (...) is no possibility to account for Aristotle's original views on syllogistic without using per impossibile deductions. At last, following an idea due to Smith 1983, we prove that there is a complete reconstruction of assertoric syllogistic using ecthesis instead of reductio ad absurdum. Contrary to what is claimed in Smith 1983, we show that Smith's system SE has to be improved for such a reconstruction. This results in an ecthetic system which is complete with respect to syllogistic arguments, not explosi.. (shrink)

In this paper we first show that Robin Smith’s ecthetic system SE for Aristotle’s assertoric syllogistic is not complete, despite what is claimed by Smith. SE is then not adequate to establish that ecthesis allows one to dispense with indirect or per impossibile deductions in Aristotle’s assertoric logic. As an alternative to SE, we then present a stronger system EC which is adequate for this purpose. EC is a nonexplosive ecthetic system which is shown to be sound and complete with (...) respect to all valid syllogistic arguments with a consistent set of premises. (shrink)

Wittgensteinian readings of Being and Time, and of the source of the intelligibility of Dasein''s world, in terms of language and the average everyday public practices of das Man are partly right and partly wrong. They are right in correcting overly individualist and existentialist readings of Heidegger. But they are wrong in making Heidegger into a proponent of language or everydayness as the final word on intelligibility and the way the world is disclosed to us. The everydayness of das Man (...) and language are partial sources of intelligibility but only insofar as they are comprehended within the greater unitary structure of care and temporality. Care and temporality constitute the foundational underpinnings for disclosure and the intelligibility ofthat wherein Dasein dwells. (shrink)

Suppose that knowledge and ignorance are complements in the sense of being mutually exclusive: for person S and fact p, either S knows that p or is ignorant that p. Understood in this way, ignorance amounts to a lack or absence of knowledge: S is ignorant that p if and only if it is not the case that S knows that p. Let us call the thesis that knowledge and ignorance are opposites the “Complement Thesis”. In this article, I discuss (...) its deployment in an ingenious new argument advanced by Alvin Goldman and Erik Olsson (2009) which, if sound, establishes that there is a kind of knowledge that amounts to nothing more than true belief. I rebut their argument and in doing so delineate some important epistemological lessons brought to light by the contrast between ignorance and knowledge. (shrink)

Frederick Griffith was an English bacteriologist at the Pathological Laboratory of the Ministry of Health in London who believed that progress in the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases would come only with more precise knowledge of the identity of the causative microorganisms. Over the years, Griffith developed and expanded a serological technique for identifying pathogenic microorganisms, which allowed the tracing of the sources of infectious disease outbreaks: slide agglutination. Yet Griffith is not remembered for his contributions to the biology (...) and epidemiology of infectious diseases so much as for discovering the phenomenon known as ‘transformation’. Griffith’s discovery, for many, was a pure case of serendipity whose biological relevance had also largely escaped him. In this paper, I argue that the key to understanding the significance of bacterial transformation – and the scientific legacy of Fred Griffith – rests not only on it initiating a cascade of events leading to molecular genetics but also on its implications for epidemiology based on the biology of host–parasite interactions. Looking at Griffith’s entire career, instead of focusing only on the transformation study, we can better appreciate the place of the latter within Griffith’s overall contributions. Presented in this way, Griffith’s experiment on bacterial transformation also ceases to appear as an anomaly, which in turn leads us to rethink some of the most prevalent historical conceptions about his work. (shrink)

I present and defend here a thesis named vehicleless externalism for conceptual mental episodes. According to it, the constitutive relations there are between the production of conceptual mental episodes by an individual and the inclusion of this individual in social discursive practices make it non-necessary to equate, even partially, conceptual mental episodes with the occurrence of physical events inside of that individual. Conceptual mental episodes do not have subpersonal vehicles; they have owners: persons in interpretational practices. That thesis is grounded (...) on inferentialism and on the endorsement of the idea that "meaning is normative". After having recapitulated this heritage and after having presented that thesis, the paper especially attempts to articulate how, in that framework, we may then positively conceive the relations there are between conceptual mental episodes, intracranial events and inferential behaviour. (shrink)

Dans le traité De la divination dans le sommeil, Aristote entend réfuter la thèse d’une origine divine des rêves qui semblent annoncer les événements futurs. Pour cela, il ne se contente pas de soutenir une thèse différente. Il dénonce également la faiblesse épistémologique de la pratique divinatoire, en proposant un modèle scientifique alternatif : une méthode de classification des rêves et de division par épuisement, qui exclut les rêves inspirés. Cette méthode conduit à souligner le caractère irréductible des faits de (...) hasard et à admettre le caractère inexplicable d’un grand nombre de rêves « véridiques ». La notion de coïncidence ( sumptôma ) joue sur ce point un rôle essentiel. Ce rôle est à la fois descriptif et critique : il permet de définir la classe des rêves dont la dimension véridique est absolument fortuite, et il dénonce l’illusion commune qui les relie à des événements réels. De ce point de vue, le chapitre 1 du De divinatione apporte une contribution, modeste mais spécifique, à la théorie des modalités physiques. (shrink)

This article aims to present a brief historical overview of interpretative theories and methods relevant to those books that are included in either the Protestant Apocrypha or the Catholic Deuterocanonical in the LXX (Septuagint) for the period 1891–2020. The aim of the article is not to give a complete description of all research on apocryphal/deuterocanonical books. The author’s journey with the relevant literature commenced in 2006, when he was appointed as one of the translators of apocryphal texts for a new (...) edition of the new Afrikaans Bible (2020). Initially, he felt trapped as if in a maze. However, as his research progressed and as he met and talked to LXX experts at that stage, the road began to seem less of an obstacle and more like a challenge. One of the important aspects that he discovered was that not every text in the LXX has a so-called Hebrew Vorlage. Although the author describes different approaches used to interpret LXX material, for example historical-grammatical methods, his focus is on South African LXX research that has made a unique contribution to the previous and existing research, especially by the researchers of the North-West University. Contribution: The article briefly discusses several researchers who have made unique contributions to the LXX apocryphal/deuterocanonical research during the last decade. These scholars utilised different methods to interpret the LXX texts – methods that were not previously employed regularly if at all, for example narratology and narrative theory, cognitive linguistics, cultural anthropology, semiotic theory, rhetorical theory and performance theory. (shrink)

To subscribe to the embodied mind (or embodiment) framework is to reject the view that an individual’s mind is realized by her brain alone. As Clark ( 2008a ) has argued, there are two ways to subscribe to embodiment: bodycentrism (BC) and the extended mind (EM) thesis. According to BC, an embodied mind is a two-place relation between an individual’s brain and her non-neural bodily anatomy. According to EM, an embodied mind is a threeplace relation between an individual’s brain, her (...) non-neural body and her non-bodily environment. I argue that BC can be given a weak and a strong interpretation, according to whether it accepts a functionalist account of the contribution of the non-neural body to higher cognitive functions and a computational account of the contents of concepts and the nature of conceptual processing. Thus, weak BC amounts to an incomplete version of EM. To accept a weak BC approach to concepts is to accept concept-empiricism. I raise four challenges for concept-empiricism and argue that what is widely taken as evidence for concept-empiricism from recent cognitive neuroscience could only vindicate weak BC if it could be shown that the non-neural body, far from being a tool at the service of the mind/brain, could be constitutive of the mind. If correct, EM would seem able to vindicate the claim that both bodily and non-bodily tools are constitutive of an individual’s mind. I scrutinize the basic arguments for EM and argue that they fail. This failure backfires on weak BC. One option left for advocates of BC is to endorse a strong, more controversial, BC approach to concepts. (shrink)

: Fodor was passionately unwilling to compromise. Of his several commitments, I focus here on informational atomism. Fodor staunchly rejected semantic holism for two conspiring reasons. He took it to threaten his commitment to the nomic character of psychological explanation. He also took it to pave the way towards relativism, which he found deeply offensive. In this paper, I reconstruct the strands of Fodor’s commitment to the computational version of the representational theory of mind that led him to informational atomism. (...) I take issue with three features of informational atomism. First, I argue that it deprives content from its expected causal role in psychological explanation. Secondly, I take issue with Fodor’s claim that only informational atomism can meet the requirements of the principle of compositionality. Finally, I argue that informational atomism yields a bloated or unwieldy category of nomic properties. Keywords: Informational Atomism; Representational Theory of Mind; Psychological Explanation; Principle of Compositionality; Jerry A. Fodor Fare i conti con l’atomismo informazionale: uno dei lasciti di Jerry Fodor Riassunto : Fodor è stato fortemente maldisposto al compromesso. Tra le molte cose di cui si è occupato, intendo qui concentrarmi sull’atomismo informazionale. Fodor ha coerentemente rifiutato l’olismo semantico per due ragioni convergenti. Lo vedeva come minaccia per il suo impegno verso il carattere nomico della spiegazione psicologica e come porta aperta verso il relativismo, cosa che considerava profondamente minacciosa. In questo lavoro, intendo riprendere le fila dell’impegno di Fodor verso la versione computazionale della teoria rappresentazionale della mente che lo ha portato all’atomismo informazionale, chiarendo tuttavia che non sono d’accordo con tre aspetti dell’atomismo informazionale. In primo luogo, mostrerò come questo sottragga al contenuto il suo ruolo causale nella spiegazione psicologica. In secondo luogo, non sono d’accordo con l’affermazione di Fodor per cui solo l’atomismo informazionale possa soddisfare i requisiti del principio di composizionalità. Illustrerò infine come l’atomismo informazionale ceda il passo a un insieme di proprietà nomiche ampio o difficile da gestire. Parole chiave: Atomismo informazionale; Teoria rappresentazionale della mente; Spiegazione psicologica; Principio di composizionalità; Jerry A. Fodor. (shrink)

I pursue here three related aims. First, I criticise some of the metaphysical claims made on behalf of the so-called `enactive' approach to visual experience. Secondly, I explain why the enactive view of visual experience is hard to square with the evidence in favour of the two-visual-systems model of human vision. Finally, I explore one possible way to develop the `pre-emptive perception' framework and explain why, contrary to first appearances, some of the fundamental discoveries of brain mechanisms, whose function might (...) be to underlie pre-emptive perception, do not really support the enactive approach to visual experience. (shrink)

Editor’s Introduction The following text was prepared by Pierre Bourdieu for delivery at a conference on his work held at Duke University, April 21–23, 1995. Entitled “Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture,” the conference was sponsored by the Duke Graduate Program in Literature and included such well‐known literary scholars as Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Jonathan Culler, and Fredric Jameson. Bourdieu, of course, was the invited guest of honor, but was uncertain as to whether he should make the effort of attending, (...) particularly since he was recovering from a short period of poor health. As I too had been invited , Bourdieu discussed the question with me in Paris.He was rather concerned about wrongheaded, trendy applications of his theories by American literary scholars, who often misunderstand his work because they simply do not know the intellectual landscape to which it relates. Reading such conference paper titles as “Cross‐Dressing for Success: The Scramble for Symbolic Power in Tabitha Sweeney’s Female Quixotism,” Bourdieu confessed his fear of being taken as simply the French intellectual flavor of the month, one whose theory is used simply as grist for the American academy’s industrious mills of literary interpretation.He ultimately decided to send the following text to be read at the conference in his absence. It treats, with polite frankness, his worries about being misinterpreted through importation into the American theoretical field with its peculiar conception of French philosophy; Bourdieu’s paper situates these particular worries within a more general account of “allodoxic”distortions caused by the international travel of theory; but it also tries to prevent further misunderstanding by offering a brief contextualization of his theory and a brief summary of his method of analysis through fields. The translation of Bourdieu’s text was prepared by Loïc Wacquant, and is presented here with only minor adjustments. (shrink)

Depuis la revolution scientifique du XVIIe siecle, la science est tourmentee par le sens a donner a sa propre entreprise. Plusieurs tentatives pour fonder l'intelligibilite de la nature sur les structures pretendument immuables de la raison ont echoue. Mais l'echec philosophique est a la mesure du succes aveuglant des connaissances scientifiques, qui n'ont plus que faire du scrupule de principe. Kant n'est-il pas un des avocats les plus eminents de ce scrupule tombe en desuetude? Face au divorce consomme entre physique (...) et metaphysique, il restait a se demander, avec Kant, ce que la raison a a gagner si chacune se force malgre tout a parler le langage de l'autre. Effort douloureux mais riche d'enseignement: si la physique est poussee dans cet horizon de la metaphysique qui lui est etranger, elle retrouve le moyen de s'aventurer dans une reflexion sur son propre point de depart. Reflexion qui hante encore la science aujourd'hui, meme si c'est a son insu. Dans ce premier geste il doit y avoir quelque chose de definitif: seule la philosophie kantienne de la nature nous met vraiment aux prises avec lui. Pierre Kerszberg est professeur de philosophie a l'universite d'Etat de Pennsylvannie. (shrink)