We explore in this paper the relation between activities, communication channels and media, and common ground building in global teams. We define re-representation as a sequence of representations of the same concept using different communication channels and media. We identified the re - representation technique to build common ground that is used by team members during multimodal and multimedia communicative events in cross-disciplinary, geographically distributed settings. Our hypotheses are as follows: (1) Significant sources of information behind decisions and request for (...) actions are embedded within the fabric of communicative events in which participants use both informal and formal media to express their ideas. Capturing these information sources can facilitate common ground building and accelerate the execution of action requests. (2) Re-representations of concepts, i.e., sequences of representations using diverse media and communication channels, mediate and accelerate common ground building. (3) The use of intra- or interdisciplinary re-representations correlates with high team performance, i.e., effective team process and high product quality. We used AEC Global Teamwork course offered in 2008–2009 as the testbed for our study to validate our hypothesis. (shrink)

One of the challenges facing Continental Philosophy is how to maintain its identity as “Continental” (and thus as “European”) while avoiding the dangers of Euro-centrism. This challenge calls for many approaches, but one entry point is through the question of Europe—can we think a European identity that is pluralistic and radically open to its others, a Europe that is not Euro-centric? Rodolphe Gasché, in his recently published Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford 2009), (...) articulates just such a concept of Europe, providing careful studies of Husserl, Heidegger, Patočka, and Derrida, as well as his own insights. In spring of 2009, the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University invited Prof. Gasché for a discussion of Europe, or the Infinite Task. Peg Birmingham and Franklin Perkins presented papers engaging and responding to the book, and Rodolphe Gasché subsequently offered his response. The three essays are published together here, with slight revisions but retaining their original character as a dialogue. We hope that the lively debate they express will serve to stimulate further discussion of the relationships among philosophy, Europe, and openness to others. (shrink)

Les courtiers du savoir sont présentés comme des acteurs se déplaçant entre deux mondes, les producteurs de savoir et les utilisateurs de savoir. Leur travail ne consiste pourtant pas seulement à servir de véhicule entre les deux mondes ; ils opèrent d’une triple manière : ils mettent les savoirs en circulation, les traduisent et les solidifient. Ils établissent en fait des connexions très particulières transitoires, temporaires et flexibles. L’article s’attache à décrire ces opérations pour montrer que le courtage conduit vers (...) un nouveau monde aux contours incertains et surtout imprévisibles.Knowledge brokers may be described as people moving between the two different worlds of knowledge producers and knowledge users. However, they do more than merely shuttle knowledge between the two worlds. Their task is threefold: they bring knowledge into circulation, translate it and give it solid substance. To do so, they establish very specific, transitory, temporary and flexible connections. This article describes their operations to show that knowledge brokering is ushering in a new world whose boundaries are not only uncertain but also unpredictable. (shrink)

Lacan fait régulièrement référence à Kierkegaard dans son enseignement et ce dernier occupe une place cruciale dans le retour à Freud. En analysant les écrits de Kierkegaard, l'auteur éclaire certains concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, remet en question le rapport de Lacan à Hegel et établit une nouvelle perspective entre psychanalyse et existentialisme.

ABSTRACT The focus of this essay is Kant's argument in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals III that regarding oneself as rational implies regarding oneself as free. After setting out an interpretation of how the argument is meant to go, I argue that Kant fails to show that regarding oneself as free is incompatible with accepting universal causal determinism. However, I suggest that the argument succeeds in showing that regarding oneself as rational is inconsistent with accepting universal causal determinism (...) if one accepts a certain, plausible view of the explanation of events. RESUMEN El ensayo se enfoca en el argumento de Kant en la Fundamentación de la metafísica de las costumbres III según el cual considerarse racional implica verse a uno mismo como libre. Se interpreta la forma en que debe entenderse el argumento y se afirma que Kant no logra demostrar que considerarse libre es incompatible con la aceptación del determinismo casual universal. No obstante, se sugiere que el argumento sí logra demostrar que considerarse a uno mismo como racional es incompatible con la aceptación del determinismo casual universal, si se acepta una cierta versión plausible de la explicación de los eventos. (shrink)

Christine Jackson has succeeded in writing the modern biography of Edward Herbert long sought by early modern scholars. Jackson’s Courtier, Scholar, and Man of the Sword paints a rich picture of Ed...

In this article, I consider the gesture confronted with its own impossibility, in situations that open the gesture to a dimension of transcendence. Focusing first on the event of beauty, as it is discussed by Jean‑Louis Chrétien, and on the encountering of the face, as it is considered by Emmanuel Lévinas, this paper envisions a “below” and a “beyond” of the gesture, in exceptional situations where the gesture is faced with an excess, acquiring a dimension of a theopathy. Subsequently, I (...) emphasize that the transcendence that takes gesture beyond itself can inhabit and nourish the daily gestures, and this can be an occasion of pain and difficulties. In this perspective, Simone Weil shows how the repeated gestures of manual labour can become the mirror of supernatural beauty. (shrink)

Rodolphe Calin | : Comment rendre compte de l’articulation entre l’image et le langage, plus précisément, de la double dimension, langagière et figurative, que présente le langage dans les figures de rhétorique? L’article essaie de montrer que, pour répondre à cette question, Ricoeur n’aura pas seulement eu besoin, dans la sixième étude de La métaphore vive, de développer une sémantique de l’image consistant à penser l’image comme une dimension du procès de la prédication métaphorique, mais également, comme en témoigne (...) son article « Image et langage dans la psychanalyse », une sémiotique de l’image, une sémiotique non linguistique permettant de faire droit à la dimension « pictoriale » qu’acquiert le langage en devenant figuré. Et dans la mesure où la sémantique et la sémiotique de l’image mettent en jeu deux modèles distincts, l’un prédicatif, l’autre substitutif, qui tour à tour permettent de décrire le schématisme de l’imagination, ce sont ici deux approches de l’imagination créatrice qui sont requises pour rendre compte du langage figuré. | : How to explain the connection between images and language? More precisely, how to give an account of the double dimension, both linguistic and figurative, that language presents in rhetorical figures? The present article attempts to show that in order to answer this question, Ricoeur had to develop not only a semantics of the image in La métaphore vive, where the image is conceived as a part of the process of metaphorical predication, but also, as evidenced by his article “Image and language in psychoanalysis,” a semiotics of the image — i.e., a non-linguistic semiotics making it possible to grant the “pictorial” dimension that language acquires in becoming figurative. And to the extent that the semantics and semiotics of the image deploy two distinct models — one predicative, the other substitutive — which alternately describe the schematism of the imagination, it becomes clear that two approaches of the creative imagination are required to account for figurative language. (shrink)

This text articulates the concept of subjective truth developed by Søren Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, in connection to a conception of testimony which both exceeds and reveals the possibilities of thinking and acting of the witness. This imbalance between the testimony and the witness finds an important extension in the distinction between the Saying and the Said made by Emmanuel Lévinas in Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. This distinction opens up an understanding of thought as (...) affectivity and allows witnessing to be viewed in the light of responsibility to the other. By being part of this philosophical heritage, Jean-Louis Chrétien shows how the testimony of the infinite is also phenomenalized in the experience of a chant that discovers its own modalities in this excess of beauty on the voice that tries to say it. (shrink)

Against all expectations. The phenomenon of attention in aesthetic experienceThis paper aims to show how aesthetic experience, by the type of attention it requires, can lead us to consider sensitivity as a way to take care of the visible. Based on a reflection about the concept of repetition developed by Sören Kierkegaard, it is shown how attention is at the same time a manner to concern for oneself and to concern for the sensitive environment. The main thesis of this article (...) is that artistic creation can be considered as a privileged path to experiment in how far the expectation influences our perception of the sensitive. By inviting us to embrace a certain kind of presence, art works can as well be considered as an outstanding way of access to reality. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to emphasize the notion of accomplishment in Levinas, partly building on the unpublished works of the author, where it appears as a keyword of his philosophy. It is a matter of highlighting the double filiation of this term, as an extension of the Husserlian notion of intuitive fullfilment to the entire existence and as a resumption of the hermeneutical and theological notion of figural interpretation. By showing how Levinas applies the structure symbol-accomplishment to the (...) existence, envisaged in its double dynamism of position and participation, this article intends to emphazise the importance—but also the difficulties—of the notion of history in his philosophy. (shrink)

Deconstruction is no game of mirrors, revealing the text as a play of surface against surface. Its more radical philosophical effort is to get behind the mirror and question the very nature of reflection. The Tain of the Mirror explores that gritty surface without which no reflection would be possible.

There is witness, a unique structure, an exception to the rule of being, irreducible to representation, only of the Infinite (OB 146). It is with this excessive phrase that Levinas collects his thoughts on testimony. How are we to understand this excess? If the phrase is excessive, it is not an exaggerated phrase — not a phrase which, by its very exaggeration, would hold that testimony achieves its supreme signification in religious experience. It is not a question here of giving (...) value to the primacy of religious experience over all other experience, but rather a question of showing that religion, understood as the relation to the holy, to what is absolutely separate, is not of the nature of experience — that is, not of the nature of comprehension and thematization, if experience means thematization. The religious manifests no primacy here, but rather an irreducible singularity, an exception. If there is a restriction, it is not to the benefit of an experience, but rather to that which escapes experience, to the benefit of what alone gives rise to no experience. The Infinite is not the witnessed par excellence, the supreme witnessed (the supreme witness falling to the supreme existent), but that to which we can only bear witness and which alone gives rise to a testimony: “testimony does not thematize that of which it is the witness, and as such it can be a witnessing only of the Infinite” (GDT 196–97). That one can bear witness only to the Infinite means that one can bear witness only to that which absolutely escapes experience, which consequently means that “testimony . . . does not presuppose an experience”(GDT 197). (shrink)

Edmund Husserl. Infinite tasks -- Universality and spatial form -- Universality in the making -- Martin Heidegger. Singular essence -- The strangeness of beginnings -- The originary world of tragedy -- Jan Patoka. Care of the soul -- The genealogy of Europe-responsibility -- Jacques Derrida. European memories -- This little thing that is Europe -- De-closing the horizon.

Levinas n'est pas le premier ni le seul penseur à avoir eu le souci de décrire la subjectivité pour elle-même et à partir d'elle-même. Cette subjectivation, toujours à reprendre, Levinas l'aura envisager lui-même doublement, en deux lieux distincts, l'ontologie et l'éthique. L'ontologie dans la mesure où elle se propose de déduire la signification de l'étant subjectif dans l'être, l'éthique dans la mesure où elle pense l'unicité du moi à partir de la responsabilité pour autrui. L'ontologie et l'éthique sont, pour Levinas, (...) deux figures de l'egologie, elles décrivent deux manières d'être soi. Pour le comprendre l'auteur rétablit les rapports souvent oubliés entre Levinas et Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty et Henry. (shrink)

Nine essays written over a dozen years explore problems of engaging the ideas of the contemporary French philosopher and their reception in the US. Deconstruction as criticism, the eclipse of difference, structural infinity, and responding responsibly are among the perspectives. Several of the essays have been previously published. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Ce volume des Cahiers de philosophie de l’Université de Caen, qui contient le dossier de la soutenance de thèse d’Emmanuel Levinas ainsi que des études sur les deux volumes d’inédits, tient à marquer l’importance historique du lancement des Œuvres complètes non seulement pour la diffusion et l’étude de la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas dans le monde, mais également pour cet avenir qu’est la phénoménologie. Ce projet n’aurait pas pu avoir lieu...

Le portrait de l'homme -- Le Cabinet inestimable de la femme.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is no doubt an autocratic regime, where the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamanie, has taken it upon himself to micromanage the suppression of the opposition for many years. In this respect and in the eyes of most Iranians, the resignation and submission of the Iranian reformists, including the former president Mohammad Khatami, is puzzling if not downright treacherous. By appropriating the insight of an Italian Renaissance writer, Baldassare Castiglione, in his book, Il Libro del Cortegiano or (...) The Book of the Courtier, I hope to offer an alternative interpretation of the confounding position of the Iranian reformists. Contrary to its prevalent reading in its scholarship, which takes Il Libro del Cortegiano as an apolitical book, its more recent scholarship has discovered a political program, according to which in the absence of freedom aims to ameliorate the conduct of the tyrant through the actions of the courtier, who provides an example of honourable conduct and public service. I propose to adopt the ideal of cortegiano as a heuristic device that, when applied to the Iranian situation, can explain Mr. Khatami and his fellow reformists’ acquiescence that as a stratagem of resistance that, in the absence of a better alternative, works as the politics of the second best to make their “master” a better leader by offering an example of a more virtuous leader. (shrink)

"This book in the main consists of lectures that I first delivered in 2010 at the Collegium Phenomenologicum at Citta di Castello, Italy, and subsequently expanded for a three-day seminar at the Universidad Diego Portales at Santiago, Chile, in 2011. In spring 2012 my graduate lecture course in the Department of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo was devoted to the subject "geophilosophy." It was on this occasion that I expanded the earlier lectures to the (...) dimensions of the book in its present form.". (shrink)

Ricœur and Levinas both think the constitution of the subject on the basis of a critique of consciousness. Subjectivity is to think from the proof of a sense that the subject does not constitute, but that requires the subject. Yet Levinas and Ricœur don't achieve this critique in the same way. The aim of this article is to confront these different ways.