Inspiré par des analyses décisives de penseurs aussi dissemblables que Nietzsche, Heidegger, Althusser et Foucault, nous avons tenté d’esquisser un cadre théorique réaliste dans lequel le phénomène mal compris de l’intégrisme contemporain puisse être interprété comme un phénomène au sens existentiel de ce terme. C’est-à-dire, comme une réalité phénoménale qui affecte l’existence de l’individu moderne dans sa contingence historique. Laquelle présuppose et met en relief l’incontournable fragilité métaphysique de l’homme en tant qu’être mortel. Un être («Dasein») dont l’existence se laisse (...) souvent restreindre et appauvrir par la fuite permanente de la mort. Une fuite dont le questionnement critique lui ouvre («Erschliessen» au célèbre sens heideggérien dans Sein und Zeit) l’horizon de sa singularité finie. La fonction de l’idéologie intégriste est conçue, suivant la critique d’Althusser, comme l’assignation de l’homme à une «résidence fixe». Autrement dit, un cadre conceptuel rigide dans lequel une «onto-idéologie» intégriste persécute «l’Être» mortel qui se laisse persécuter («Sich Nachstellen des Seins») comme le souligne Heidegger dans sa Conférence de Brême «Le Danger» («Die Gefahr»). Sauvegarder notre monde de l’intégrisme présuppose donc un nouvel «art». Un «art» dont la pratique reflète un mouvement de liberté d’être dont la valorisation universelle est la principale tâche de la philosophie contemporaine. (shrink)

In this book, written in the wake of such influential European thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and Vattimo, Simon Oliai argues that unless the “European” affirmation of man’s finite existence becomes universal, we shall never rid ourselves of the repressive shadow of a long dead metaphysical idol.

The economic theory of contract is being reshaped in ways which resonate with the findings of socio-legal contract scholars and of industrial economists and sociologists in the Marshallian tradition, who emphasise the 'embeddedness' of organizations within their social and cultural environment. Contractual co-operation is seen as depending on institutional factors which serve to enhance 'trust', and arrangements which in the past were criticized as the product of collusion are being reassessed as potentially efficient responses to market failure. An active debate (...) has begun on how instruments of public policy can best be deployed to arrive at an effective balance between co-operation and competition. This affects both the competitiveness of private sector organizations and the success of deregulatory reforms in the public sphere. These issues are explored within four main areas: developments in private-sector contracting; contract and organization in the public sector; the economics of contract law; and competitiveness and competition policy. (shrink)

The traditional view of symbol grounding seeks to connect an a priori internal representation or ‘form’ to its external referent. But such a ‘form’ is usually itself systematically composed out of more primitive parts, so this view ignores its grounding in the physics of the world. Some previous work simulating multiple talking/listening agents has effectively taken this stance, and shown how a shared discrete speech code can emerge. Taking the earlier work of Oudeyer, we have extended his model to include (...) a dispersive force intended to account broadly for a speaker’s motivation to increase auditory distinctiveness. New simulations show that vowel systems result that are more representative of the range seen in human languages. These simulations make many profound abstractions and assumptions. Relaxing these by including more physically and physiologically realistic mechanisms for talking and listening is seen as the key to replicating more complex and dynamic aspects of speech, such as consonant-vowel patterning. (shrink)

The traditional view of symbol grounding seeks to connect an a priori internal representation or ‘form’ to its external referent. But such a ‘form’ is usually itself systematically composed out of more primitive parts, so this view ignores its grounding in the physics of the world. Some previous work simulating multiple talking/listening agents has effectively taken this stance, and shown how a shared discrete speech code can emerge. Taking the earlier work of Oudeyer, we have extended his model to include (...) a dispersive force intended to account broadly for a speaker’s motivation to increase auditory distinctiveness. New simulations show that vowel systems result that are more representative of the range seen in human languages. These simulations make many profound abstractions and assumptions. Relaxing these by including more physically and physiologically realistic mechanisms for talking and listening is seen as the key to replicating more complex and dynamic aspects of speech, such as consonant-vowel patterning. (shrink)

Addressing both collegiate and professional sports, the updated edition of Fair Play: The Ethics of Sport explores the ethical presuppositions of competitive athletics and their connection both to ethical theory and to concrete moral dilemmas that arise in actual athletic competition. This fourth edition has been updated with new examples, including a discussion of Spygate by the New England Patriots and recent discoveries on the use of performance enhancing drugs by top athletes. Two additional authors, Cesar R. Torres and Peter (...) F. Hager, bring to this edition a discussion of the moral issues involved in youth sports and the ethics of being a fan, as well as a fresh perspective on the theories of broad internalism and the quest for excellence. Furthermore, major criticisms of broad internalism by philosophers William J. Morgan and Scott Kretchmar add a new dimension to the discussion on the moral foundations of winning. (shrink)

We demonstrate that the quantum-mechanical description of composite physical systems of an arbitrary number of similar fermions in all their admissible states, mixed or pure, for all finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, is not in conflict with Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII). We discern the fermions by means of physically meaningful, permutation-invariant categorical relations, i.e. relations independent of the quantum-mechanical probabilities. If, indeed, probabilistic relations are permitted as well, we argue that similar bosons can also be discerned in all (...) their admissible states; but their categorical discernibility turns out to be a state-dependent matter. In all demonstrated cases of discernibility, the fermions and the bosons are discerned (i) with only minimal assumptions on the interpretation of quantum mechanics; (ii) without appealing to metaphysical notions, such as Scotusian haecceitas, Lockean substrata, Postian transcendental individuality or Adamsian primitive thisness; and (iii) without revising the general framework of classical elementary predicate logic and standard set theory, thus without revising standard mathematics. This confutes: (a) the currently dominant view that, provided (i) and (ii), the quantum-mechanical description of such composite physical systems always conflicts with PII; and (b) that if PII can be saved at all, the only way to do it is by adopting one or other of the thick metaphysical notions mentioned above. Among the most general and influential arguments for the currently dominant view are those due to Schrodinger, Margenau, Cortes, Dalla Chiara, Di Francia, Redhead, French, Teller, Butterfield, Giuntini, Mittelstaedt, Castellani, Krause and Huggett. We review them succinctly and critically as well as related arguments by van Fraassen and Massimi. (shrink)

The precise 1:1 segregation of Mendelian heredity is ordinarily taken for granted, yet there are numerous examples of ‘cheating’ genes that perpetuate themselves in the population by biasing the Mendelian process in their favor. One example is the Segregation Distortion system of Drosophila melanogaster, in which the distorting gene causes its homologous chromosome to produce a nonfunctional sperm. This system depends on three closely linked components, whose molecular basis is beginning to be understood.The system is characterized by numerous modifiers changing (...) the degree of distortion. Mathematical theory shows that unlinked modifiers that change the degree of distortion in the direction of Mendelism always increase in the population. This provides a mechanism for removing cheaters and preserving the honesty of the Mendelian gene‐shuffle. (shrink)

As the gap between the need for and supply of human organs continues to widen, the aim of securing additional sources of these “gifts of the body” has become a seemingly overriding moral imperative, one that could—and some argue, should—override the widespread ban on organ markets. As a medical practice, organ transplantation entails the inherent risk that one human being, a donor, will become little more than a means to the end of healing for another human being and that he (...) or she will come to have a purely instrumental value. With the establishment of organ markets, not only will the harms of instrumentalization be a reality—the ends of medicine will be further compromised and confused. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Chapter One: Wrong Question, Right Answer -- Exercise 1: Getting right into it -- Exercise 2: Watching your hand -- Exercise 3: Marking practice -- Chapter Two: Realistic Drawing -- Exercise 4: Picking an object to draw -- Exercise 5: Attentive looking -- Exercise 6: Noticing awareness -- Exercise 7: Marking from the sense of sight -- Exercise 8: Simple rendering -- Exercise 9: Try perspective -- Exercise 10: Working inward -- Chapter Three: Systematic Drawing -- (...) Exercise 11: The circular arrow - a visual mantra -- Exercise 12: Improvising between two points and finding the world in between -- Exercise 13: Thought as art -- Exercise 14: All four pixel images -- Exercise 15: Book of compositions -- Chapter Four: Improvisational Drawing -- Exercise 16: Going outside the box -- Exercise 17: Not-breath awareness -- Exercise 18: Growing improvisation -- Exercise 19: Chasing the Coltrane Effect -- Exercise 20: Drawing to reveal inner conditions -- Exercise 21: Noticing Intuition -- Exercise 22: You are the universe drawing -- Chapter Five: Reading the Drawings -- Exercise 23: An exact physical description -- Exercise 24: Feeling the meaning -- Exercise 25: The story we tell ourselves -- Exercise 26: Connecting our story to a larger story -- Chapter Six: The Search for the Source of Creativity -- Exercise 27: Priming the source -- Exercise 28: Sitting still at the origin -- Exercise 29: Embedded sources -- Exercise 30: Mindful of the path -- Chapter Seven: Meta-Drawing -- Exercise 31: Sharing with yourself -- Exercise 32: Sharing with a trusted friend -- Exercise 33: Sharing with the world. (shrink)

F. H. Jacobi , a key figure in the philosophical debates at the close of the eighteenth century in Germany, has long been regarded as an irrationalist for allegedly advocating a blind ‘leap of faith’. The central claim of this essay is that this venerable charge is misplaced. Following a reconstruction of what a charge of irrationalism might amount to, two of Jacobi's most important works, the Spinoza Letters and David Hume , are scrutinized for traces of irrationalism. Far from (...) being an irrationalist, Jacobi is best read as questioning the analytical-geometrical model of rationality popular among his contemporaries, and of proposing a more naturalistic theory of rationality that situates it more firmly in human psychology, the ultimate import of which lies in a reconceptualization of the relation between faith and reason. (shrink)

Social norms – rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community – are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is (...) little agreement among these researchers about what these psychological prerequisites are. This makes empirical study of animal social norms difficult, since it is not clear what we are looking for and thus what should count as behavioural evidence for the presence (or absence) of social norms in animals. To break this impasse, we offer an approach that moves beyond contested psychological criteria for social norms. This approach is inspired by the animal culture research program, which has made a similar shift away from heavily psychological definitions of ‘culture’ and to become organized around a cluster of more empirically tractable concepts of culture. Here, we propose an analogous set of constructs built around the core notion of a normative regularity, which we define as a socially maintained pattern of behavioural conformity within a community. We suggest methods for studying potential normative regularities in wild and captive primates. We also discuss the broader scientific and philosophical implications of this research program with respect to questions of human uniqueness, animal welfare and conservation. (shrink)