Tristan Murail est, avec Gérard Grisey, un des deux grands représentants de ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler la "musique spectrale". L'expression indique une référence constante à la structure microscopique des spectres sonores : c'est la vie intérieure des sons, avec leur harmonicité ou inharmonicité, leurs transitoires d'attaque ou d'extinction, qui constitue chez Murail le modèle par excellence pour construire des formes musicales. Cet ouvrage - le premier entièrement consacré à l'œuvre de Murail - évoque sa situation esthétique face à d'autres (...) courants de la musique d'après 1945. Un long entretien donne la parole au compositeur, pour retracer un parcours qui l'a mené de Messiaen à Scelsi et au-delà, ainsi qu'au pédagogue (Murail enseigne depuis plusieurs années aux Etats-Unis). Une analyse approfondie de l'une de ses pièces marquantes, L'Esprit des dunes, permet d'entrer dans son atelier, de suivre le processus de création qui conduit de l'analyse des sons à l'invention des formes. Enfin, Tristan Murail lui-même revient en détail sur chacune de ses œuvres, nous livrant son regard rétrospectif en un document précieux. (shrink)

Misremembering is a systematic and ordinary occurrence in our daily lives. Since it is commonly assumed that the function of memory is to remember the past, misremembering is typically thought to happen because our memory system malfunctions. In this paper I argue that not all cases of misremembering are due to failures in our memory system. In particular, I argue that many ordinary cases of misremembering should not be seen as instances of memory’s malfunction, but rather as the normal (...) result of a larger cognitive system that performs a different function, and for which remembering is just one operation. Building upon extant psychological and neuroscientific evidence, I offer a picture of memory as an integral part of a larger system that supports not only thinking of what was the case and what potentially could be the case, but also what could have been the case. More precisely, I claim that remembering is a particular operation of a cognitive system that permits the flexible recombination of different components of encoded traces into representations of possible past events that might or might not have occurred, in the service of constructing mental simulations of possible future events. So that imagination and memory are but one thing, which for diverse considerations hath diverse names.Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 1.2. (shrink)

Afin de proposer un cadre général pour l'étude de la société transnationale actuellement en émergence, l'article examine de manière critique les principales démarches disciplinaires en cours aujourd'hui. Il souligne l'intérêt d'une approche fondée sur un modèle de type centre/périphérie accompagné de l'hypothèse d'une compétition oligopolistique. Avec ce cadre d'analyse général, la sociologie peut identifier son objet dans le système des liens établis entre les êtres humains par-delà les frontières nationales, que ces liens soient directs ou médiatisés par des institutions (...) transnationales. Une version plus élaborée, et révisée, d'un tel modèle est notamment illustrée par la dynamique de la globalisation culturelle, et par le « système mondial des langues ». (shrink)

La phénoménologie réaliste de Reinach ne se limite pas à une doctrine originale des états de choses et des relations d'essences. Elle procède également, en contrepoint, à une analyse de la relation de causalité dont la phénoménologie transcendantale ne fournit aucun équivalent. Cette analyse, qui met en avant la notion de nécessité matérielle, se déploie à partir d'une relecture critique de Hume, le plus grand représentant moderne de la crise de la causalité. Reinach's realistic phenomenology doesn't limit itself to being (...) an original theory of states of affair and relations of essences. On the counterpart, it is leading an analysis of the relation of causality, of which transcendantal phenomenology doesn't provide any comparable instance. This analysis highlights the notion of material necessity, which is producted upon a critical reading of Humes Treatise, modernity's biggest representant of causality crisis. (shrink)

Singular terms without referents are called empty or vacuous terms. But not all of them are equally empty. In particular, not all proper names that fail to name an existing object fail in the same way: although they are all empty, they are not all equally vacuous. “Vulcan,” “Jacob Horn,” “Odysseus,” and “Sherlock Holmes,” for instance, are all empty. They have no referents. But they are not entirely vacuous or useless. Sometimes they are used in statements that are true or (...) false. We are basically referentialists about proper names. The ordinary semantic function of a proper name is to refer to an object, and to do it directly, that is, without semantically providing any identifying condition that the object should meet to be the referent. To put it differently, we agree that statements containing proper names express singular propositions, i.e., that their truth-conditions involve the referent of the proper name, if it exists, and not any identifying condition of it. Now, since empty names lack a referent, and therefore would not express such a singular proposition, how do we explain that many, if not all, statements containing them have a truth-value? Answering this question for the case of fictional names, in particular, is the aim of this paper. (shrink)

This investigation draws from research on negative polarity item (NPI) illusions in order to explore a new and interesting instance of misalignment observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative markers. Previous research has shown that unlicensed NPIs can be perceived as acceptable when occurring soon after a structurally inaccessible negation (e.g. ever in *The bills that no senators voted for have ever become law). Here we examine the opposite configuration: grammatical sentences created by substituting the NPI ever with the negative (...) adverb never (e.g. The bills that no senators voted for have never become law). The processing and acceptability of these sentences was studied using three tasks: a speeded acceptability judgment (experiment 1), a self-paced reading task (experiment 2), and an offline acceptability rating (experiment 3). The results are consistent across measures in showing that the integration of the adverb never is disrupted by the linearly preceding but structurally inaccessible negative quantifier no in the relative clause. In our view, this pattern of results is in line with Parker and Phillips’ (2016) proposal that NPI illusions arise when the context containing the inaccessible negation has not been fully encoded by the time the NPI ever is encountered, making the embedded negative quantifier transparently available as a licensor. In a similar vein, the disruption effects observed for grammatical sentences containing two negative elements could arise if the negative quantifier is still being integrated when never is encountered, forcing the parser to deal with two negative elements simultaneously. This interpretation suggests that the same incomplete encodings that could be ameliorating the online perception of unlicensed NPIs could also be responsible for deteriorating the perception of the sentences under investigation here. This would represent an illusion of ungrammaticality. Furthermore, these results provide evidence against the speculation that NPI illusions are the consequence of misrepresenting ever as its near neighbor never, given that continuations with never are judged as unacceptable in spite of their grammaticality. Together, these findings inform the landscape of hypotheses on NPI illusions and offer valuable insights on the complexity of multiple negation and the relation between processing difficulty and acceptability. (shrink)

This article challenges Honneth's reading of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel's Social Theory (2001/2010). Focusing on Hegel's method, I argue that this text hardly offers support for the theory of mutual recognition that Honneth purports to derive from it. After critically considering Honneth's interpretation of Hegel's account of the family and civil society, I argue that Hegel's text does not warrant Honneth's tacit identification of mutual recognition with symmetrical instances of mutual recognition, let (...) alone his subsequent projection of symmetrical forms of mutual recognition onto the various spheres of the Philosophy of Right as a whole. I conclude by indicating an alternative way in which Hegel's text might be used to understand contemporary society. (shrink)

Varro's De lingua Latina is a treasure trove of information. Of the originally twenty-five books, six have come down to us more or less complete. Among these, Books 5–7 give us many hundreds of etymologies, and Books 8–10 discuss the question whether Latin morphology is regular or not. What Varro rarely comments on is sociolinguistic variation. The sociolinguistic comments in Varro's work can almost be counted on one hand. For instance, in 5.162 Varro remarks that cenaculum, from cena ‘dinner’, means (...) ‘attic’ in Roman Latin, but that the original meaning was, as one might expect, ‘dining-room’, a meaning preserved in the non-Roman dialects of Latium, Falerii and Corduba in Spain; the meaning also lives on in religious uses in Lanuvium. In 7.96, Varro tells us that some words are pronounced with -ae- by some, but with -ē- by others. We know that non-Roman varieties of Latin monophthongized -ae- earlier than the Roman dialect did. Varro mentions pairs like scaena / scēna ‘stage’, a loan from Greek σκηνή, which shows that -ae- is hypercorrect here. Interestingly, only in one such pair is the variant with -ē- ascribed to country people, in the name Maesius / Mēsius, and this is indeed the only pair where the diphthong -ae- is original rather than the result of hypercorrection. (shrink)

One persistent question in jurisprudence relates to the role of morality in the concept of law. For instance, consider the question of whether unjust statutes are laws. Legal positivists say that they’re laws in every relevant sense, while natural lawyers say that they’re not. This article considers a different answer inspired by recent findings in experimental philosophy: there is one relevant sense in which unjust statutes are laws, but also a different relevant sense in which they aren’t. After considering the (...) ways in which this alternative differs from some of the mainstream theories in general jurisprudence, the article argues that it provides more elegant solutions to two problems that have puzzled legal philosophers in the past: the paradox of customary international law and the shifts in legal discourse over history. (shrink)

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is a relatively new, experimental treatment for patients suffering from treatment-refractory Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). The effects of treatment are typically assessed with psychopathological scales that measure the amount of symptoms. However, clinical experience indicates that the effects of DBS are not limited to symptoms only: patients for instance report changes in perception, feeling stronger and more confident, and doing things unreflectively. Our aim is to get a better overview of the whole variety of changes that (...) OCD patients experience during DBS treatment. For that purpose we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 18 OCD patients. In this paper, we present the results from this qualitative study.We list the changes grouped in four domains: with regard to (a) person, (b) (social) world, (c)characteristics of person-world interactions, and (d) existential stance. We subsequently provide an interpretation of these results. In particular, we suggest that many of these changes can be seen as different expressions of the same process; namely that the experience of anxiety and tension gives way to an increased basic trust and increased reliance on one’s abilities. We then discuss the clinical implications of our findings, especially with regard to properly informing patients of what they can expect from treatment, the usefulness of including CBT in treatment, and the limitations of current measures of treatment success. We end by making several concrete suggestions for further research. (shrink)

The paper analyzes in Plato the integration/συναμφότερον between the human soul and body in Charmides and Timaeus exploring the ideas of health/ὑγίεια and disease/νόσος and how they originate in man. The thesis is that in Plato’s thought there is a strong presence of an integrated view of man, the relationship between the constitutive instances (soul and body) being psychosomatic, since both suffer (πάσχω) influence from each other. The nuances of the soulbody relationship are also considered with regard to the (...) psychophysical aspects of this compound. As a consequence, it goes beyond the dualistic interpretation erroneously propagated by philosophy manuals, which insist that in Plato the soul must despise the body. In other words, what “seems” in Plato’s texts to be a reference to a strong tension between soul and body is in fact a warning by the philosopher of the need for a balanced integration between both. (shrink)

It is widely held that there is a distinctive norm of assertion. A plausible idea is that there is an analogous, perhaps weaker, norm for indirect communication via implicatures. I argue against this type of proposal. My claim is that the norm of assertion is a social norm governing public updates to the conversational record. Off the record implicatures are not subject to social norms of this type. I grant that, as happens in general with intentional actions, off the record (...) communicative acts may be subject to normative assessments on different levels (for instance, regarding their moral or prudential appropriateness). However, such assessments do not generate distinctive norms that apply to all cases of implicature. (shrink)

Information is a central notion for cognitive sciences and neurosciences, but there is no agreement on what it means for a cognitive system to acquire information about its surroundings. In this paper, we approximate three influential views on information: the one at play in ecological psychology, which is sometimes called information for action; the notion of information as covariance as developed by some enactivists, and the idea of information as minimization of uncertainty as presented by Shannon. Our main thesis is (...) that information for action can be construed as covariant information, and that learning to perceive covariant information is a matter of minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance. We argue that the agent’s cognitive system conveys information for acting in an environment by minimizing uncertainty about how to achieve her intended goals in that environment. We conclude by reviewing empirical findings that support our view and by showing how direct learning, seen as instance of ecological rationality at work, is how mere possibilities for action are turned into embodied know-how. Finally, we indicate the affinity between direct learning and sense-making activity. (shrink)

Anarchy and utopia have traditionally had a contentious relationship throughout the history of political thought. Although some anarchic thinkers have occasionally verged on the utopian genre – for instance, French anarchists Joseph Déjacque and Jean Grave, or anarcho-syndicalists Émile Pataud and Émile Pouget – the anarchic mindset has generally shown a deeply-rooted mistrust towards any representation of systematically planned ideal societies, often seen as intellectualist and fundamentally authoritarian projects.

ABSTRACTThis essay investigates the thesis that inhumanity breeds humanity. Many questions arise when we try to corroborate it: Can we say anything at all about the inhumanity of human beings? Why did large‐scale inhumanity occurring before 1700 not elicit a human rights regime? Was the human rights take‐off from 1760 to 1800 triggered by instances of inhumanity, and why did the take‐off not last? Why did the human rights idea eclipse after 1800 only to reemerge after 1945? Were war (...) and genocide the sole causes of the human rights revival after 1945 or were there also other factors? Was the breakthrough in 1977 of human rights as a mass movement related to any inhumanity? And, finally, is the contemporary enthusiasm for human rights, with 1998 as its stepping stone, sufficient to make atrocities unthinkable for good? I conclude that, at several moments in history, inhumanity did propel humanity, but also that there are many other instances in which inhumanity only gave birth to more inhumanity. If the inhumanity thesis were necessarily true, we would need more human rights catastrophes to inspire more human rights progress. And that would be a self‐defeating paradox. (shrink)

While $$\Lambda $$ Λ CDM has emerged as the standard model of cosmology, a small group of physicists defends modified newtonian dynamics (MOND) as an alternative view on cosmology. Exponents of MOND have employed a broad, at times explicitly philosophical, conceptual perspective in arguing their case. This paper offers reasons why that MONDian defense has been ineffective. First, we argue that the defense is ineffective according to Popperian or Lakatosian views–ostensibly the preferred philosophical views on theory assessment of proponents of (...) MOND. Second, we argue that the defense of MOND can instead best be reconstructed as an instance of meta-empirical theory assessment. The formal employment of meta-empirical assessment by MONDians is unconvincing, however, because it lacks a sufficient epistemic foundation. Specifically, the MONDian No Alternatives Argument relies on falsifiability or explanation conditions that lack epistemic relevance, while the argument from Unexpected Explanatory Success fails since there is a known alternative to MOND. In the last part of the paper, we draw some lessons for applications of meta-empirical assessment more generally. (shrink)

The sociology of art has experienced a significant revival during the last three decades. However, in the first instance, this renewed interest was dominated by the ‘production of culture’ perspective and was heavily focused on contextual factors such as the social organization of artistic markets and careers, and displays of ‘cultural capital’ through consumption of the arts. In this article, I outline a new mode of approaching art sociologically that begins with Alfred Gell’s (1998) Art and Agency, but comes to (...) full fruition in what I am calling the ‘new sociology of art’. A major theoretical statement that captures many of the aspirations of the new approach is Jeffrey Alexander’s essay: ‘Iconic Consciousness: The Material Feeling of Meaning’. It is suggested that the new sociology of art has much in common with material culture studies, and that a more robust concept of the artwork’s agency is needed now that art has well and truly taken on a social and cultural life well beyond those institutions traditionally understood as the ‘art world’. (shrink)

What is the role of conscious experience in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge: how should we characterise what is going on in seeing that o is F in order to illuminate the contribution of seeing o to their status as cases of knowing that o is F? My proposal is that seeing o involves conscious acquaintance with o itself, the concrete worldly source of the truth that o is F, in a way that may make it evident to the subject (...) that o is an instance of ‘x is F’ as she understands this, and hence evident that o is F. Seeing that o is F is thus a way of its being evident that o is F and is therefore a way of knowing that o is F. (shrink)

Recently, Petersen provided in this journal a critical discussion of individualisation arguments in the context of social egg freezing. This argument underlines the idea that it is morally problematic to use individual technological solutions to solve societal challenges that women face. So far, however, there is a lack of empirical data to contextualise his central normative claim that individualisation arguments are implausible. This article discusses an empirical study that supports a contextualised reading of the normative work of Petersen. Based on (...) a qualitative interview study, we found that most women could make sense of this argument but addressed other concerns that are overlooked in the premises of moral individualisation arguments, for instance, the influence of relationship formation on the demand of egg freezing. Furthermore, women did not experience social egg freezing as morally problematic. Nonetheless, the interviewees pointed to a need of more societal solutions and even actively advocated for efforts to increase accessibility such as a partial reimbursement and better quality of information. The implications of these findings for empirical bioethics are discussed. While more research is needed, we argue that, in order to better address individualisation arguments and related ethical concerns, we need to contextualise normative evaluations within women’s moral reasoning. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt a reconstruction of the theory of intersections in the geometry of Euclid. It has been well known, at least since the time of Pasch onward, that in the Elements there are no explicit principles governing the existence of the points of intersections between lines, so that in several propositions of Euclid the simple crossing of two lines (two circles, for instance) is regarded as the actual meeting of such lines, it being simply assumed that the (...) point of their intersection exists. Such assumptions are labelled, today, as implicit claims about the continuity of the lines, or about the continuity of the underlying space. Euclid’s proofs, therefore, would seem to have some demonstrative gaps that need to be filled by a set of continuity axioms (as we do, in fact, find in modern axiomatizations).I show that Euclid’s theory of intersections was not in fact based on any notion of continuity at all. This is not only because Greek concepts of continuity (such as the Aristotelian ones) were largely insufficient to ground a geometrical theory of intersections, but also, at a deeper level, because continuity was simply not regarded as a notion that had any role to play in the latter theory. Had Euclid been asked to explain why the points of intersections of lines and circles should exist, it would have never occurred to him to mention continuity in this connection. Ancient geometry was very different from ours, and it is only our modern views on continuity that tend to give rise to the expectation that this latter must be included in the foundations of elementary mathematics.We may hope to reconstruct Euclid’s views on intersections if we undertake a critical examination both of the extension and of the limits of ancient diagrammatic practices. This is tantamount to attempting to understand to what extent the existence of an intersection point may be inferred just from the inspection of a diagram, and in which cases we need rather to supplement such inference by propositional rules. This leads us to discuss Euclid’s definition of a point, and to work out the details of the complex interaction between diagrams and text in ancient geometry. We will see, then, that Euclid may have possessed a theory of intersections that was sufficiently rigorous to dispel the main objections that could be advanced in antiquity. (shrink)

The central claim of this book is that I is a deictic term, like the other singular personal pronouns You and He/She. This is true of the logical character, inferential role, referential function, expressive use, and communicative role of all and only expressions used to formulate first-personal reference in any language. The first part of the book shows why the standard account of I as a ‘pure indexical’ (‘purism’) should be rejected. Purism requires three mutually supportive doctrines which turn out (...) to be myths: a) that a simple rule is sufficient to give the meaning of I (‘rule theory’); b) that one can use I to express thoughts without having to identify what is being referred to (‘independence’); and c) that as a matter of the meaning of I, any use of the term is logically guaranteed against failure to refer (‘the guarantee’). The second part of the book shows why the radically new account of I should be endorsed as a deictic term. Substitution instances and the behaviour of I in inference reveal that it has an obligatorily deictic logical character and inferential role. I fulfils its referential function in the deictic way, providing determinacy of reference by making an individual referentially salient in the extra-sentential context. The discriminability of the referent of an I-use depends on recognizing the referentially salient individual. This is true of its discriminability both to the reference-maker and to the audience. So I has the expressive use and communicative role of a deictic term. The conclusion of the book directs research towards the next step, showing how the meaning of I may be used to elucidate the thoughts expressed by the term, and from there questions relating to self-knowledge, practical reasoning, belief-acquisition, and belief-ascription. (shrink)

In 1996, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro chose a sentence by Gilles Deleuze as the epigraph for an article, published in the Brazilian journal Mana, on Amerindian perspectivism. (A modified version of the article appeared in English two years later, in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.) Since then, Deleuze's name has appeared often in works about perspectivism, but Chamois's new book is the first monograph to focus on perspectivism and Deleuze. Among the most important contributions of Chamois's (...) analysis is to draw our attention to a little-known passage in a course, “Truth and Time,” that Deleuze taught in 1983 (and that is available for listening online). In it, he criticizes the example of the cube used as a paradigm, at least since Edmund Husserl's day, to conceptualize what a perspective is. It is impossible to see all six faces of a cube at the same time; thus, to “intuit” the cube as a cube, we must add to our own perception of a profile of the cube more possible points of view on it. The problem with this example and description is that it takes for granted that the subject already knows what she needs to see (a cube).Inspired, however, by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Deleuze holds that each perception is an invitation to other perceptions: “To perceive is to become capable of perceiving more and more things that were initially not perceived” (percevoir, c'est devenir apte à percevoir de plus en plus de choses qui d'abord n’étaient pas perçues). Deleuze contrasts the “spatial” or “frozen” notion of perspective to the “temporal perspective” that he seeks to emphasize: “It's time that acts as perspective” (C'est le temps qui agit comme perspective). The question, therefore, at the heart of Deleuze's perspectivism is how a perspective changes over time. Chamois goes through the early texts of Deleuze to show how the idea of the temporal perspective emerged from the concept of the structure Autrui. The “structure-Other” is best exemplified by someone else's emotive face—the frightened face of my friend, for instance. If I perceive that face while, say, I am laughing, another possible world would slip into my own: a frightening world penetrates my humorous one, and perhaps I should turn my head to see what danger may be en route. As in the case of the cube, my own limited perception is supplemented by others’ limited perceptions. The object of perception in this case, however, is not presupposed to be stable (the world is changing), and what I am about to see is not known in advance.But what, precisely, in the face of the other must I notice to become aware of the world she perceives? Deleuze does not explore that question in any detail, but Chamois reviews recent anthropological and psychological research that supplies some elements of a response. To confront the writings of Deleuze with relevant scientific data is fruitful. I must admit, though, that I was a bit embarrassed by the framing of the discussion: Chamois presents Deleuze's concepts as hypotheses demanding verification that they are “corroborated by the facts.” For Deleuze, concepts are inseparable from percepts and affects; as opposed to a hypothesis, a concept is true not because it correlates to a set of relevant facts but because it helps us to perceive other aspects of the world (percept) and induces us to act better (affect). Thus, the minute and rewarding analysis of Chamois should be complemented with an assessment of what we learn to focus on and of how we change our actions thanks to the perspectivism of Deleuze—in contrast to other forms of perspectivism (or indeed to other cosmologies). (shrink)

Second person social cognition cannot be restricted to dyadic interactions between two persons (the and the ). Many instances of social communication are triadic, and involve a third person (the ), which is the object of the interaction. We discuss neuropsychological and brain imaging data showing that triadic interactions involve dedicated brain networks distinct from those of dyadic interactions.