continent. 2.3 (2012): 224–228 Introduction Jamie Allen Thierry Geoffroy’s conceptual, event- and environment-based art practice has generated over two-decades of definitional activity around what he terms “format art.” The works re-galvanize the energies of a syndicatable, open and atmospheric arrangement, of varying specifics dependent on context, participants and environment. With formats like the Emergency Room, Biennalist, and the Critical Run, Geoffroy endeavors to imbricate art and artist in the most exigent and current of social, political and mediatised (...) spectacles. The result seems to plant us at a triangulation of the configurations proposed by Alan Kaprow, Andrea Fraser and Alan Abel. Geoffroy plays up a guileless innocence (at times sporting the “Naive Blue Helmet”) as he interviews spectactors at the 2012 dOCUMENTA13 exhibitions in Kassel, Germany. What he evokes is a declamation of the appropriative, unenthusiastic, cool inclinations of the mainstream art festival, the profligate biennial (triennial, quadrennial, etc.) circuit and national and global ideological cultural-engines. In propositional artifacts, definitional articles and direct transmissions from Geoffroy’s Emergency Room field office at dOCUMENTA13, the masking of an emergency is here questioned: Can an art show like dOCUMENTA be dangerous? —JA Is dOCUMENTA designed to make people cry about something and not make them see something else? Is the contemporary a distraction from the present? Can art in delay have any impact with today? Do we learn anything by seeing art shows reflecting on history? Could 860,000 visitors have been intoxicated by an apathic gaze than keep them away from reacting? Why is dOCUMENTA proud of having recieve no critic? Why is proximity less important? Why was dOCUMENTA in Kabul? Can weapons designed to kill protesters sold to a repressing regime be contradictory to the support of the Arab Spring? Is the contemporary like a flea market to avoid to debating the important topics of today? Can art be in advance of the broken arm, and avoid accident? Is the goal of dOCUMENTA to create a revolution or to entertain? Is dOCUMENTA betterly done than Disney Land? Is it better to watch Fox News for two years or to go to dOCUMENTA for two days? If a curator, curating a contemporary art show about war, forgets to debate about the weapons factories next door, should it be considered as a professional mistake? Is it OK to employ philosophers to promote vodka? Is navigation a threat? Can an art show like dOCUMENTA be dangerous? Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel author of the month Global Art and the Museum @ZKM: " THE NEXT DOCUMENTA SHOULD BE CURATED BY A TANK " Link to Emergency Room Dictionary < /a> "COOLNESS" from the EMERGENCY ROOM DICTIONARY by COLONEL MUSIC Biennalist at dOCUMENTA 13 "TIRED" from the EMERGENCY ROOM DICTIONARY by COLONEL MUSIC Link to " APATHY " (from the Emergency Room Dictionary ) AWARENESS MUSCLE [fr. muscle de la conscience ] In the same sense memory can be trained, an awareness muscle can be developed by an effort. To develop the awareness muscle, the artist has to reduce his gesticulations. When an artist is busy the artist is not very aware the artist is occupied. A daily training is necessary But how to train? Scanning the news in a critical way could be one exercise. Daily debating politics with others could be another. Looking at other point of views usually produces significant improvements. Fighting prejudice is an excellent exercise. Many other forms of training could also produce beneficial effects for the awareness muscle. Continuous and daily training is important. For instance rewinding and slow motioning what has been absorbed getting away the sugar from the propaganda machines talking to everyone excercise comparatif critical run. If not daily trained the awareness muscle can degrade into atrophy To develop the awareness muscle requires will-power Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel. (shrink)

L’Introduction à l’analyse des lignes courbes algébriques de Gabriel Cramer, paru en 1750, a tout de suite bénéficié du soutien de D’Alembert qui l’a inclus dans les références bibliographiques de ses articles de mathématiques de l’Encyclopédie portant sur les courbes. Ainsi choisi et légitimé par l’entreprise encyclopédique et ses reprises, l’ouvrage de Cramer devient objet patrimonial au tournant du xixe siècle pour les mathématiciens, amateurs, professionnels ou enseignants qui travaillent sur les courbes algébriques. Le suivi sur le temps long des (...) mentions de l’Introduction dans les encyclopédies, dictionnaires ou histoires des mathématiques en langue française, ainsi que dans quelques textes d’enseignement, nous permettra de comprendre que ce processus de patrimonialisation n’induit pas sa conservation, sa protection, sa valorisation à de seules fins mémorielles, en figeant l’ouvrage dans un passé immuable. Au contraire, il permet une historicisation critique de la part des acteurs qui les met en position d’interroger et de réactualiser les connaissances et les pratiques que l’œuvre contient, au gré des mouvements d’émergence, de réorganisation et des spécialisations des savoirs mathématiques, quitte à en oublier certains aspects pour en mettre de nouveaux en valeur. (shrink)

Valorising the biocultural heritage of common goods could enable peasant farmers to achieve socially and economically inclusive sustainability. Increasingly appreciated by consumers, peasant heritage products offer small farmers promising opportunities for economic, social and territorial development. Identifying the obstacles and levers of this complex, multi-scale and multi-stakeholder objective requires an integrative framework. We applied the panarchy conceptual framework to two cases of participatory research with small quinoa producers: a local fair in Chile and quinoa export production in Bolivia. In both (...) cases, the “commoning” process was crucial both to bring stakeholders together inside their communities and to gain outside recognition for their production and thus achieve social and economic inclusion. Despite the differences in scale, the local fair and the export market shared a similar marketing strategy based on short value chains promoting quality products with high identity value. In these dynamics of biocultural heritage valorisation, the panarchical approach revealed the central place as well as the vulnerability of the community territory. As a place of both anchoring and opening, the community territory is the privileged space where autonomous and consensual control over the governance of common biocultural resources can be exercised. (shrink)

Thierry Meynard examines how the Jesuits in China came to understand the Confucian tradition, and how they offered the first complete translation of the Lunyu in the West, in the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus.

Averroès, musulman andalou du XIIe siècle, discute le " De anima " d'Aristote dans une approche rationalisante du rapport entre religion et philosophie, entre étude de la vérité révélée et surnaturelle, et étude démonstrative de l'univers. La béatitude spirituelle de l'homme est décrite dans le Coran. En philosophie, elle serait l'union de son intellect à l'intellect agent universel.

English summary: This Arabic edition and French translation of Avicennas commentary on Aristotles Lambda offers a clear opportunity to better understand the Greek philosophers influence on medieval Arabic philosophy, especially concerning the hierarchy of the universe. French description: Ce texte d'Avicenne est l'un des seuls commentaires sur Aristote laisses par le philosophe persan. Il s'attaque au noyau theologique de la Metaphysique du Stagirite, les chapitres 6 a 10 du livre Lambda. Avicenne depend d'une tradition greco-arabe (Alexandre d'Aphrodise, Themistius, l'ecole "peripateticienne" (...) de Bagdad). La tradition arabe a aussi attribue a Aristote plusieurs oeuvres d'origine neoplatonicienne, notamment une Theologie adaptee de Plotin, et un Livre du Bien pur, adaptation des Elements de Theologie de Proclus. Le Dieu d'Aristote est ainsi pour Avicenne la Cause premiere efficiente de l'etre. La structure hierarchique de l'univers resulte de l'emanation produite par l'autointelligence du premier Principe. Il ne fait pas de doute, pour Avicenne, que ces doctrines aient ete celles du Stagirite. (shrink)

This article compares four ways of thinking corporate responsibility. When corporate responsibility is defined by its function, firm’s moral obligations are limited to obligations imposed on it by its function, whatever its capacity (strict functionalism), or as far as it is compatible with its effective capacity (compatibilist functionalism). When corporate responsibility is defined by its capacity, firms’ moral obligations are limited to obligations which its power imposes on it, whatever its function (strict capacitarism), or insofar as it is compatible with (...) the respect of its specific function (compatibilist capacitarism). Due to the impossibility of perfectly aligning moral tasks with social tasks and of reducing all general obligations to specific obligations, capacitarism seems more convincing than functionalism. Because of the indispensability of a division of (moral) labor, compatibilist capacitarism seems more robust than strict capacitarism. (shrink)

Cette étude analyse les réponses orales de 63 élèves français de 9-11 ans lors d’une tâche de vocabulaire du type définition de mots. La performance globale, mais aussi l’organisation et l’accessibilité des informations catégorielles, fonctionnelles ou perceptives sont examinées en considérant l’origine sociale des enfants. Les résultats quantitatifs de l’étude confirment ceux obtenus par les recherches sur la relation entre milieu socio-économique et étendue du vocabulaire. Les données qualitatives, tirées de l’analyse de la structure de 567 définitions, mettent en évidence (...) des différences modérées de l’évolution vers la forme canonique de la définition, selon la classe sociale. Ceci interroge nos manières de penser l’enseignement-apprentissage du vocabulaire et invite à explorer plus avant les mécanismes en jeu dans l’inégal accès à la connaissance de la signification des mots. (shrink)

De Platon à Pierre Bourdieu en passant par Marcel Mauss, Joseph Jacotot, Jules Michelet et Karl Marx, l'écriture du présent ouvrage a été motivée par la volonté de faire retour sur les termes exacts de la critique développée par Jacques Rancière contre la sociologie de Pierre Bourdieu et de remettre sur le métier la vieille question de l'écart entre le philosophe et le politique.

The critique of the dogmatism of a-priorism from the Popperians suffered from the fact that Popper, too, was moving towards a certain dogmatic derivation. According to the a-priorists, in wanting to protect himself from any would-be-critics who would argue against the dogmatism of his approach, Popper left his philosophical foundation free to the critics. In fighting against German essentialism, he found himself in a position that necessitated the abandonment of either his presupposed anti-essentialism, or his critique of the positivists. Popper's (...) success stems less from his ability to rally the anti-historicist positivists towards the search for scientific foundations, than the fact that he was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, theoreticians of the scientific method, and critic of ideological simplicity. (shrink)

Le texte de la plus ancienne traduction arabe de la Métaphysique, faite au IXe siècle par le nestorien Usṭāṯ à l’époque et dans le cercle du «philosophe des Arabes», al-Kindī , est connu principalement par l’utilisation qu’en fit Averroès dans le Grand Commentaire de la Métaphysique, édité par le Père Bouyges d’après le manuscrit unique de Leyde. Elle comprenait la majeure partie du texte d’Aristote, à l’exception des livres Α, Κ , Μ et Ν. L’attribution à Usṭāṯ de la traduction (...) de Δ a en outre été récemment mise en doute. (shrink)

Sex is determined by non‐Mendelian genetic elements overriding the sex factors carried by the heterochromosomes in some species of terrestrial isopods. A bacterium Wolbachia and a non‐bacterial feminizing factor (f) can both force chromosomal males of Armadillidium vulgare to become phenotypic functional females. The f factor is believed to be a genetic element derived from the Wolbachia genome that becomes inserted into the host nuclear genome. The feminizing factors can be considered to be selfish genetic elements because they bias their (...) host's sex ratio to increase their own transmission. New sex‐determining genes are selected (genes resisting the feminizing effects, or the transmission of feminizing elements) as a consequence of the conflict between these elements and the rest of the host's genome. These events drive the sex‐determining mechanisms to evolve, and may explain the polymorphism of sex factors and the poor differentiation of the heterochromosomes in isopods. (shrink)

Presenting a series of historical portraits of Bantu, Thierry Secretan recounts his investigation into the compounds that housed the black labor of the gold mines of the Rand, around Johannesburg. The use of a « pass » to control the black miners prefigured the apartheid system. From 1904 to 1939,Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, an Irish guard at one of the compounds, began to photograph the different kind of people doing the hard labor in the mines. The results were some 7200 (...) exposures and working prints, on 13 /18 cm negatives. Hundreds of enlargements were exhibited from 1925 onward in a gallery in his own home in Kimberley. These photographs were rediscovered in 1998 by Thierry Secretan, who is still attempting to save them front slow destruction: they constitute an extraordinary catalogue of the Bantu cultures. (shrink)

Formal topology aims at developing general topology in intuitionistic and predicative mathematics. Many classical results of general topology have been already brought into the realm of constructive mathematics by using formal topology and also new light on basic topological notions was gained with this approach which allows distinction which are not expressible in classical topology. Here we give a systematic exposition of one of the main tools in formal topology: inductive generation. In fact, many formal topologies can be presented in (...) a predicative way by an inductive generation and thus their properties can be proved inductively. We show however that some natural complete Heyting algebra cannot be inductively defined. (shrink)

In chemistry one observes different relationships [rapports] between different bodies, which act such that they unite easily with one another. These relationships have their degrees and their laws. One observes their different insofar as, among several materials are confounded and that have some disposition to unite together, one perceives that one of these substances always unites constantly with a certain other [substance] preferably to all others.

When town planning emerged at the end of the 19th century, its proponents did not envisage the city without nature. Some, such as Ebenezer Howard, believed the garden city would become the new face of the urban landscape, bringing together only the positive aspects of both city and country. Others, health experts and rationalists, advocated functional planning, where the ‘green space’ was part of the overall plan. And so nature was not forgotten. But what ‘nature’? A ‘nature’ external to the (...) town-dweller, like an ornament or decoration? Something that enhanced the built environment and not the very condition of our existence as human beings? Behind the planners’ inclusion of ‘nature’ lie very different intentions, from one period to another and one culture to another. The globalized, standardized ‘nature’ that was subsequently part of marketing the city is just an image; whether wild or tamed, it is no longer localized, no longer a partner in our condition as denizens of the earth. Thierry Paquot examines these continuing processes of change. (shrink)

Etudier le probleme de la personne, c'est s'interesser a un probleme qui traverse a peu pres tous les domaines de la philosophie, depuis la psychologie jusqu'a la theologie en passant par l'ethique et par le droit, mais dont le denominateur commun est la definition du soi-meme. Etudier ce probleme chez Maimonide, c'est voir comment un philosophe juif du Moyen-Age pouvait elaborer une representation coherente de l'homme en s'appuyant a la fois sur la pensee greco-arabe et sur la tradition hebraique. Ce (...) livre espere contribuer a une meilleure comprehension d'un philosophe dont on a trop souvent fragmente la pensee, apparemment dechiree entre des sources contradictoires. En fait, Maimonide a su developper un dialogue critique entre deux heritages qui demeurent aux fondements de la civilisation occidentale. C'est ce qui donne a sa pensee son caractere eminemment actuel. (shrink)

L'idéal universaliste, qui a traversé les siècles jusqu'à aujourd'hui en surplombant les traditions intellectuelles tant chinoise qu'européenne, a façonné un certain nombre de nos représentations et imposé l'idée d'une antinomie entre ce qui relève de l'universel et ce qui renvoie à l'existence du particulier. Outre ce que, à bien y regarder, cette incompatibilité supposée peut avoir de paradoxal, divers épisodes chinois ou européens montrent que, au cours de sa très longue histoire, l'universalisme a aussi entretenu des relations équivoques avec des (...) créations historiques instituant des communautés particulières, telle la nation. Et ce sont ses rapports, tantôt connivents, tantôt antagoniques avec un ensemble de constructions mentales ou historiques particularisantes que l'auteure envisage en première partie. A partir du XVIIe siècle, les deux universalismes évoluent dans une certaine interaction, au gré des rencontres de leurs divers représentants ou de moments de proximité intellectuelle : c'est cette histoire de leurs relations, longue de plus de quatre siècles, que retrace la seconde partie. Le dialogue né de cette interaction, marqué par des méprises et incompréhensions, aura été quelque peu tortueux, mais néanmoins fructueux, dans la mesure où il aura favorisé une prise de conscience par chacun des deux universalismes... d'eux-mêmes. (shrink)

In order to implement cost-benefit analysis of protective actions to reduce radiological exposures, one needs to attribute a monetary value to the avoided exposure. Recently, the International Commission on Radiological Protection has stressed the need to take into consideration not only the collective exposure to ionising radiation but also its dispersion in the population. In this paper, by using some well known and some recent results in the economics of uncertainty, we discuss how to integrate these recommendations in the valuation (...) of the benefit of protection. (shrink)

"Based on the reading of the only twelfth-century manuscript of the Enigma extant, Charleville MS. 114, and an examination of the fifteenth-century manuscript Uppsala C. 79." Revision of the editor's thesis, Catholic University of America, 1971, presented under title: The enigma fidei of William of Saint Thierry, a translation and commentary. Bibliography: p. 119-120.

Pauchant's book emerges from a forum on International Management, Ethics, and Spirituality, the first of its kind to be held at an internationally recognized business school, and represents the thinking of six CEOs and six scholars of ethics and spirituality from Australia, Canada, the United States, and Switzerland.

'The Matrix Project' comprises two contexts, namely photographic work of architect Thierry Lagrange and the self-reflective trajectory that he developed during his doctorate at KULeuven. Lagrange's practice-based research developed to an autonomous artistic project, in which he studied the signification and nature of observation within a creative process. Through his multifaceted practice as an architect, photographer and researcher, Lagrange developed 'The Matrix Method'; a method that stimulates creativity within different contexts and can be implemented for example in art education. (...) For the Matrix Project, 25 years' worth of photographs was entered into a context of research and presents a new perspective on different ways of seeing in our present visual culture. (shrink)

The primary method by which science endeavors to order the world is the analytic approach, consistent with Cartesian principles of dividing the problem in as many sections as required for an optimal solution, and progressing from the simplest to the most complex reasoning. When the interactions among the various elements of the system being studied are minimal, such a procedure indeed makes it possible to formulate laws that describe chains of causality. However, when the variables are interdependent and linked by (...) non-linear equations, the atomistic method cannot account for the phenomenon in its entirety. Spurred by this inadequacy, scientists sought to discover synthetic methods which, early in the twentieth century, led to the conceptualization of holistic theories in a number of disciplines. The most highly developed fields are the psychology of form, structural anthropology (1), and the various systems theories (2). More recently, the development of epigenetic concepts in biology has corresponded to the appearance of different theories of pattern in physics and mathematics (3, 4) and to the progressive emergence of the concept of self-organization (5, 6, 7). The objective is to explain the production of complex structures on the basis of interacting elements, none of which contains a guiding scheme that dictates these structures. In biology, the challenge is to locate the constraints that are expressed in a space of possibilities (8) in order to develop a theory of organization that is capable of predicting the finite number of forms that living creatures can assume (9). This school of thought can be described as structuralist, emergentist, self-organizational, or epigeneticist, depending on the theoretical version that is emphasized. (shrink)

Starting from research on biotechnology and its applications to living organisms, this paper presents the key features of modern-day synthetic biology, as well as its main ethical implications. The analysis of the paradox of the concept of robustness in the creation of microorganisms through synthetic biology leads us to address the topic of vulnerability, applied to man, but also to all other living beings. The concept of “enhanced human being” will strengthen the link between complexity and vulnerability as inherent features (...) of living beings. Reflecting upon the importance of considering vulnerability applied to man’s three-fold dimensions - physical, psycho-social and spiritual - and their interaction with their environment, we will define a type of anthropology which may constitute the basis of the study on the ethical implications of synthetic biology. This will lead to present the purpose of an ethical limit to the temptation of « allmightiness », which the concept of enhanced human being could entail, and vulnerability as a defining feature of all living beings. (shrink)

In this paper, we present set theories based upon the paraconsistent logic Pac. We describe two different techniques to construct models of such set theories. The first of these is an adaptation of one used to construct classical models of positive comprehension. The properties of the models obtained in that way give rise to a natural paraconsistent set theory which is presented here. The status of the axiom of choice in that theory is also discussed. The second leads to show (...) that any classical universe of set theory (e.g. a model of ZF) can be extended to a paraconsistent one, via a term model construction using an adapted bisimulation technique. (shrink)