Mineral waters were a delicate and unstable product whose value as a remedy increased in early modern France. If it was once the prised luxury of the nobility travelling to the spa, the eighteenth century slowly watched it turned into a commodity. The waters became widely available in bottles and were sold in bureaus of distribution. Despite the logistical challenges of selecting and carrying the waters to their new urban public, many different springs made their way into most of France’s (...) cities. This took place under the watch and regulation of a uniquely dedicated institution, the Société de Médecine. This Société eventually settled its authority over the management of mineral waters, thanks to the backing of state power, the influence of the Academy and the newly recognized authority of chemists as analysts of waters. The purpose of this paper is to bring to light this overlooked institution and its essential role in the administration of mineral waters. Though it never eradicated fraud or succeeded in creating a full scientific and economic monopoly, it greatly broadened the budding trade of bottled water in France and gave a powerful incentive for chemists to better their mastering of the particularly challenging analysis of water. (shrink)

La production et la diffusion des résultats scientifiques soulèvent un certain nombre de questions juridiques. L’activité scientifique est en effet, en bonne part, une activité de création, donnant naissance à des œuvres au sens du Code de la propriété intellectuelle. Le chercheur est aussi et souvent un auteur dans l’accomplissement de sa tâche. En France, comme dans un certain nombre d’autres États, la recherche est pour l’essentiel du côté du secteur public, dont les personnels relèvent, en général, du statut de (...) la fonction publique, et la production dans ce cadre doit articuler liberté de créer du chercheur et intérêt public. La reconnaissance des droits des chercheurs sur la création scientifique se heurte à certaines difficultés, dont un bon nombre se concentrent sur les questions de paternité. Le mode collectif sur lequel se réalise la création scientifique rend encore plus ardue la détermination de la qualité d’auteur. Les nouveaux modes de production de la connaissance sur les réseaux Internet s’accommodent mal des différents schémas de création collective. Comment qualifier une œuvre initiée par une personne, volontairement versée dans l’espace public pour être discutée, poursuivie et transformée par d’autres ? La question du statut de la création rejoint ici celui de son mode de diffusion.The production and dissemination of scientific results raise a number of legal questions. Scientific activity is in fact, and largely, a creative activity that produces « works » as defined in the Intellectual Property Code. Researchers are often also authors in the performance of their tasks. In France, as in a number of other countries, research is essentially a public sector activity employing staff who are usually civil servants and whose output needs to reconcile the freedom to perform creative research with the public interest. The recognition of researchers’ rights in creative scientific work comes up against a number of difficulties, many of which have to do with paternity issues. The collective nature of creative scientific work makes authorship all the harder to determine. The new methods of knowledge production through the Internet do not fit easily into the various provisions covering collective creation. What description can be given to a work initiated by one person, deliberately handed over into the public sphere for discussion, then continued and transformed by other people? In this context, the question of creative authorship is closely tied to the issue of science dissemination. (shrink)

Internet modifie la circulation publique de l’information et des opinions. Le tournant décisif s’opère avec la naissance des réseaux sociaux. Le public est désormais impliqué. Chaque citoyen peut devenir média. De nouveaux acteurs apparaissent : les blogueurs, les moteurs de recherche. Le Web 2.0 interpelle les valeurs et les pratiques du journalisme. Qu’est-ce que le journalisme ? Qui est journaliste ? Les questions se posaient déjà avant l’avènement d’Internet. Elles prennent une acuité nouvelle. Les journalistes perdent plusieurs de leurs privilèges. (...) Des procédures de leur métier sont remises en cause. Leur déontologie doit s’adapter. Les barrières corporatistes sont inopérantes. Sur le Web, le journalisme est une activité plus ouverte que jamais. Dès maintenant, la question est : en quoi est-ce du journalisme ? La liberté de l’information est un bien com­mun en démocratie. Un partage des responsabilités entre journalisme et public pourrait ouvrir sur une éthique participative. (shrink)

Reflects the many facets of Jean Piaget's work.

Through tracing the articulation, rise and eventual fall of Marxist theory in France, I seek in my dissertation to show the difficulties of wedding Marxist theory to ameliorative political practices.Specifically, I follow the development of French Marxism between 1920--1965 in order to demonstrate how the thought of Althusser is a reaction to and correction of both the crude materialist philosophy of the French Communist Party and of the more sophisticated humanist Marxism of such intellectuals as Cornu, Lefebvre, Garaudy, Sartre (...) and Merleau-Ponty. I do not affect this tracing to show that Marx's notions are untenable or artificial and that they will therefore always lead to problems in their application. Instead, I argue with Louis Althusser that Marx's philosophical insights into the relationship between humans and world remain of value and that they may serve as a guide for political practice. Both my analysis and my critique is intended as a response to those who, citing the apparent theoretical and practical inconsistencies and failures of Marxist practice, would criticize and altogether abandon this project. (shrink)

This volume gathers together for the first time are all the key texts in a crucial debate in modern philosophy, centered on Leibniz's famous 1695 essay, the "New System of the Nature of Substances and their Communication," in which he introduced his strikingly original theory of metaphysics. His "system" became increasingly famous and drew him into discussion and development of these ideas, both in public and in private, with a variety of thinkers, most notably the great French philosopher Pierre Bayle. (...) Woolhouse's and Francks's new English edition gives the only full representation of this debate, and will therefore be essential reading for anyone who wishes to gain a proper understanding of Leibniz's philosophy and its intelletual context. All the texts are newly translated and extensively annotated; many appear in English for the first time. (shrink)

This chapter offers a proceduralist argument against capital punishment. More specifically, it contends that the possibility of irrevocable mistakes precludes the just administration of the death penalty. At stake is a principle of political morality: legal institutions must strive to remedy their mistakes and to compensate those who suffer from wrongful sanctions. The incompatibility of remedy and execution is the crux of the irrevocability argument: because the wrongly executed cannot enjoy the morally required compensation, execution is impermissible. Along with defending (...) his key premises, Yost explains the complicated role that sentencing uncertainty plays in the argument. He concludes by noting some of the flaws in substantive consequentialist and retributivist justifications of capital punishment. (shrink)

Plato's dialogues frequently criticize traditional Greek myth, yet Plato also integrates myth with his writing. Daniel S. Werner confronts this paradox through an in-depth analysis of the Phaedrus, Plato's most mythical dialogue. Werner argues that the myths of the Phaedrus serve several complex functions: they bring nonphilosophers into the philosophical life; they offer a starting point for philosophical inquiry; they unify the dialogue as a literary and dramatic whole; they draw attention to the limits of language and the limits of (...) knowledge; and they allow Plato to co-opt cultural authority as a way of defining and legitimating the practice of philosophy. Platonic myth, as a species of traditional tale, is thus both distinct from philosophical dialectic and similar to it. Ultimately, the most powerful effect of Platonic myth is the way in which it leads readers to participate in Plato's dialogues and to engage in a process of self-examination. (shrink)

Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes. Yanofsky describes (...) simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world -- our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there. (shrink)

Résumé De la fondation de l’INRA en 1946 à la loi sur l’élevage de 1966, la génétique animale française vit une période d’une exceptionnelle intensité, qui la fait passer de la marge de la recherche nationale à une position de carrefour entre science, société et politiques agricoles. Les archives et la mémoire des acteurs de la recherche et de l’appui technique mettent en lumière cette histoire : la fabrique d’une véritable économie politique du cheptel, marquée au sceau de la rationalisation (...) des bioressources, dans une dynamique hybride de biosciences appliquées, de « politique des grands nombres » et d’imaginaire du « progrès ». Une analyse diachronique en termes d’économie de la connaissance offre un récit intégrateur de la modernisation agricole dans ses dimensions biologique, sociale, technique et politique, en en restituant la conflictualité interne, mais également le rôle insoupçonné dans l’émergence d’une réflexivité critique au sein même du dispositif génétique. (shrink)

This article is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the colloque 'Histoire des Mentalités, Histoire des résistances, ou les Prisons de longue durée', Aix-La Baume, 20–21–22 septembre 1980.

This paper presents a way of building social cohesion open to diversity, assuming that democracy is alive only when it is reinvented. It challenges social trust to welcome diversity, thus allowing for a continual reinvention of democratic cohesion. Articulating cultural diversity and trust represents a major challenge for democratic coexistence. Philosophy is called to take into account the existing models of social cohesion and trust, and to reinvent democracy by defining a new paradigm of trust integrating social and cultural diversity.