L’automne 2009 vit de violentes pluies s’abattre sur l’Eubée. À Érétrie, plusieurs tombes et stèles funéraires apparurent dans le lit du ruisseau bordant le site à l’Ouest. Ces découvertes apportent un éclairage bienvenu sur les nécropoles érétriennes, encore mal connues. Par ailleurs, plusieurs murs antiques furent documentés : si certains s’apparentent aux murs du canal archaïque déjà relevés à la Porte de l’Ouest, d’autres datent de l’époque classique-hellénistique et ouvrent de nouvelles pistes de recherche concernant l’étude de l’enceinte et la (...) topographie de ce secteur. L’étude des stèles funéraires, dont la date va de l’extrême fin du ve à la seconde moitié du iiie s., donne lieu à des observations nouvelles sur des sujets aussi variés que les techniques de taille, la typologie et l’iconographie des monuments, l’onomastique et les composantes de la population érétrienne. (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)

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)

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.

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)

Le droit court derrière la "révolution numérique". Les algorithmes nous espionnent et restreignent les libertés publiques, ils calculent les indemnités au service des compagnies d'assurance. La diminution lente et continue des services chargés de veiller à l'application du droit affaiblit et parfois anéantit l'efficacité de ces lois. L'échec de la loi Hadopi est significatif à cet égard. Le mal est en fait bien plus profond et ne date pas d'hier. Nous vivons une époque de démolition des codes établis. Si le (...) droit est partout, en définitive il n'est nulle part... (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)

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)

Thierry Patrice, 57 ans, médecin, nommé professeur à 32 ans, Lauréat de la Faculté, est internationalement connu pour ses travaux concernant l'action de la lumière sur les tissus vivant en cancérologie. Il a reçu plusieurs Prix pour l'étude du rôle de l'oxygène dans différentes maladies, dont le diabète, mais aussi lors du vieillissement.

The review adresses the relationship between sport expertise (i.e., sport competition level), postural performance (amount of motion of the centre of mass/of pressure of foot or ability to preserve body balance) and postural strategy (geometric organization of different body segments as well as neurobiological involvement of organism). Since the conditions of postural evaluation are likely to influence results, the aim is to compare athletes at different competition levels in ecological postural conditions (specific postural conditions related to the sport practiced) and (...) non-ecological postural conditions (decontextualized postural conditions in relation to the sport practiced). Evidence suggests that the most successful athletes in terms of sport competition level have the best postural performance both in ecological and non-ecological postural conditions. However, in non-ecological conditions the postural tasks should be preferentially challenging or relatively close to the sport practice stance. Moreover, the most successful athletes also have more elaborate postural strategies compared with athletes at lower competition level. Mechanistic explanations as well as conceptual models are proposed to explain the role of different factors influencing the relationship between sport expertise and postural performance and strategy. (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)

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)

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)

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)

The present paper examines how discursive representations and emotive constructions underpin an argumentative dynamic that emerges from apparently non-argumentative statements, like those found in newspaper headlines. Our data comes from Greek broadsheet newspapers in the polarized context of the Greek crisis. First, we outline an analytic synergy that scrutinizes representational meaning and the semiotization of emotions in headlines. We then move towards the reconstruction of the inferential passage, contained in the headlines, that unites the implicit standpoint with its supporting argument.

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)

In the wake of recent attempts at alternate history (Bowler 2013), this paper suggests several avenues for a pluralistic approach to Charles Darwin and his role in the history of evolutionary theory. We examine in what sense Darwin could be described as a major driver of theoretical change in the history of biology. First, this paper examines how Darwin influenced the future of biological science: not merely by stating the fact of evolution or by bringing evidence for it; but by (...) discovering natural selection, and giving it pre-eminence over any other mechanism for evolution; and also by proposing a masterful and quite unique synthesis of many scientific fields. Contrasting Darwin’s views with those of A.R. Wallace, I conclude that “natural selection” is clearly an original contribution, that it had no forerunners or co-discoverers, and could barely have appeared after Darwin conceived of it. This specificity of Darwin’s contribution is an invitation to be strongly presentist (Loison 2016) and to adopt only weak counter-factuals. In contrast, there are possible ways to use strong counter-factuals as attempts to “pluralize” the history of biological theory: i.e. imagine new possible avenues for the development of evolutionary biology. The idea that evolution was a theory “in the air” suggests that evolutionary theory could have developed in a world without Darwin, especially if we accept to delete not only “Darwin” but “England”. France and Germany are examined as possible countries where evolutionary ideas would have thrived even with no contribution from the English scientists. Finally, the paper suggests another counter-factual hypothesis: deleting not Darwin and his Origin but the Darwin Industry itself. This may allow us to read the Origin of Species with fresh eyes and to discover Darwin’s life-long interest in variation and its laws, as many of his early readers did. (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)

"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.

This paper revisits Fleeming Jenkin’s anonymous review of Charles Darwin’s _Origin of Species_, published in the _North British Review_ in June 1867. This review is usually revered for its impact on Darwin’s theory of descent with modification. Its classical interpretation states that Jenkin, a Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, made a compelling case against natural selection based on the fact of “blending inheritance” and the “swamping” of advantageous variations. Those themes, however, are strikingly absent from Jenkin’s text. (...) They were later read into Jenkin’s text by scholars trying to explain how Darwinian selection was reconciled with Mendelian genes and the birth of the Modern Synthesis. While many scholars have tried to measure Jenkin’s effect on Darwin, the value of the 1867 review remains unclear. This paper re-examines its content and concludes that Jenkin’s “able review” was in fact written by an engineer whose competencies in biology were very low. Focusing on the figure of the shipwrecked white sailor isolated on an island inhabited by Black people, this paper also underlines the racial assumptions behind Jenkin’s review. “Blending inheritance” is thus a theme linked to theoretical reworkings on the question of race and skin colors, taking its root in Galton’s typology of heredity. Darwin was probably mostly unimpressed by Jenkin’s review. The problems raised by the review were not so much “blending inheritance” and “swamping” but a conundrum of problems related to the effects of intercrossing on variation and reversion. (shrink)

Semantical arguments, based on the completeness theorem for first-order logic, give elegant proofs of purely syntactical results. For instance, for proving a conservativity theorem between two theories, one shows instead that any model of one theory can be extended to a model of the other theory. This method of proof, because of its use of the completeness theorem, is a priori not valid constructively. We show here how to give similar arguments, valid constructively, by using Boolean models. These models are (...) a slight variation of ordinary first-order models, where truth values are now regular ideals of a given Boolean algebra. Two examples are presented: a simple conservativity result and Herbrand's theorem. (shrink)

Pour Thomas d’Aquin, la Trinité n’est pas d’ordre philosophique mais théologique, dépendant de la révélation biblique. Les controverses trinitaires sont déjà loin, les résolutions conciliaires aussi, mais Thomas, à plusieurs reprises et à chaque fois de manière différente, expose un traité des plus délicats. Il s’agit de poser trois personnes dans une seule substance. L’un de ses principaux apports est d’enrichir les relations d’origine qui distinguent les trois personnes en relations substantielles. Thomas tire les concepts au-delà de leur acception ordinaire, (...) manifestant ainsi la manière qui est la sienne d’entrecroiser philosophie et théologie. (shrink)

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.

Gabriel Tarde propose une représentation originale de la statistique, soulignant son aptitude à révéler et mesurer la dynamique des phénomènes sociaux, plus qu’à en décrire les états. Ce n’est pas la technique mathématique qui intéresse Tarde, mais il développe, de 1880 à 1900, une réflexion épistémologique et méthodologique sur la portée et les limites de l’analyse statistique qui s’articule à sa théorie sociologique. Le présent article se propose d’étudier cette représentation, en analysant la place et la fonction de la statistique (...) dans l’œuvre de Tarde et sa relation essentielle à sa théorie sociologique de l’imitation. (shrink)

. The effort in providing constructive and predicative meaning to non-constructive modes of reasoning has almost without exception been applied to theories with full classical logic [4]. In this paper we show how to combine unrestricted countable choice, induction on infinite well-founded trees and restricted classical logic in constructively given models. These models are sheaf models over a $\sigma$ -complete Boolean algebra, whose topologies are generated by finite or countable covering relations. By a judicious choice of the Boolean algebra we (...) can directly extract effective content from $\Pi_2^0$ -statements true in the model. All the arguments of the present paper can be formalised in Martin-Löf's constructive type theory with generalised inductive definitions. (shrink)

'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)

Comment Descartes a-t-il pu nier l'évidence de sa dette à l'égard du cogito d'Augustin, et Jacques Hadamard s'accuser, à l'inverse, de ne pas avoir découvert la relativité avant Einstein? Qu'est-ce qui pouvait bien justifier Lacan, lorsqu'il osait affirmer que l'inconscient n'est pas de Freud, mais de lui... De même, côté art : on se demande pourquoi Borges a voulu faire de Ménard l'auteur du Quichotte ou Duchamp devenir celui d'un urinoir. Thierry Marchaisse prouve ici que l'on peut devenir le (...) véritable auteur de l'idée d'un autre, et que ce paradoxe, avancé par Pascal voilà plus de trois siècles, est à la fois le verrou et la clé de la logique de la créativité. (shrink)