Cet article part du constat d’une contradiction entre les exigences actuelles de soutenabilité et le fonctionnement du système financier. Nous revenons en premier lieu sur les présupposés épistémologiques de la théorie financière pour montrer que celle-ci constitue une Idéologie de la financiarisation des économies et des sociétés. Nous nous ancrons alors dans l’analyse Ricœurienne de l’imaginaire culturel pour développer une Utopie en contrepoint, que nous intitulons la Finance Comme Commun. Par la réflexivité qu’elle permet, cette dernière fait apparaître les structures (...) mentales dans lesquelles sont imbriqués les acteurs financiers. Elle nous autorise également à tracer des perspectives utiles pour la refondation du système financier et le renouvellement des connaissances en finance. (shrink)

In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. "Nonsense," says the sensible Bernard Suits: "playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a (...) central part of the ideal of human existence, so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia. Originally published in 1978, The Grasshopper is now re-issued with a new introduction by Thomas Hurka and with additional material (much of it previously unpublished) by the author, in which he expands on the ideas put forward in The Grasshopper and answers some questions that have been raised by critics. (shrink)

The study of eye movements is a common way to non-invasively understand and analyze human behavior. However, eye-tracking techniques are very hard to scale, and require expensive equipment and extensive expertise. In the context of web browsing, these issues could be overcome by studying the link between the eye and the computer mouse. Here, we propose new analysis methods, and a more advanced characterization of this link. To this end, we recorded the eye, mouse, and scroll movements of 151 participants (...) exploring 18 dynamic web pages while performing free viewing and visual search tasks for 20 s. The data revealed significant differences of eye, mouse, and scroll parameters over time which stabilize at the end of exploration. This suggests the existence of a task-independent relationship between eye, mouse, and scroll parameters, which are characterized by two distinct patterns: one common pattern for movement parameters and a second for dwelling/fixation parameters. Within these patterns, mouse and eye movements remained consistent with each other, while the scrolling behaved the opposite way. (shrink)

Conscious perception, like the sight of a coffee cup, seems to involve the brain identifying a stimulus. But conscious input activates more brain regions than are needed to identify coffee cups and faces. It spreads beyond sensory cortex to frontoparietal association areas, which do not serve stimulus identification as such. What is the role of those regions? Parietal cortex support the ‘first person perspective’ on the visual world, unconsciously framing the visual object stream. Some prefrontal areas select and interpret conscious (...) events for executive control. Such functions can be viewed as properties of the subject, rather than the object, of experience – the ‘observing self’ that appears to be needed to maintain the conscious state. (shrink)

In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. “Nonsense,” said the sensible Bernard Suits: “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Through the jocular voice of Aesop's Grasshopper, a “shiftless but thoughtful practitioner of applied entomology,” Suits not only (...) argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a central part of the ideal of human existence, and so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia. This new edition of _The Grasshopper_ includes illustrations from Frank Newfeld created for the book’s original publication, as well as an introduction by Thomas Hurka and a new appendix on the meaning of ‘play.’. (shrink)

This study is based on the self-reporting by circus artists’ concerning their injuries. We refer to the theoretical framework of emersiology and argue that circus artists may be able to soothe their distress and pain by learning through their body. We will draw further on the comparison between our therapeutic approach and the techniques of self-care introduced by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality.

Toward A Sociological Imagination builds on the ideas C. Wright Mills expressed in The Sociological Imagination for an approach to the scientific method broad enough to open up to the full range of knowledge within the sociology discipline. In this book, nine sociologists and one philosopher provide detailed tests of the utility of the approach within diverse substantive sociological areas.

BackgroundWe assessed potential consent bias in a cohort of > 40,000 adult patients asked by mail after hospitalization to consent to the use of past, present and future clinical and biological data in an ongoing ‘general consent’ program at a large tertiary hospital in Switzerland.MethodsIn this retrospective cohort study, all adult patients hospitalized between April 2019 and March 2020 were invited to participate to the general consent program. Demographic and clinical characteristics were extracted from patients’ electronic health records (EHR). Data (...) of those who provided written consent (signatories) and non-responders were compared and analyzed with R studio.ResultsOf 44,819 patients approached, 10,299 (23%) signed the form. Signatories were older (median age 54 [IQR 38–72] vs. 44 years [IQR 32–60], p <.0001), more comorbid (2614/10,299 [25.4%] vs. 4912/28,676 [17.1%] with Charlson comorbidity index ≤ 4, p <.0001), and more often of Swiss nationality (6592/10,299 [64%] vs. 13,813/28,676 [48.2%], p <.0001).ConclusionsOur results suggest that actively seeking consent creates a bias and compromises the external validity of data obtained via ‘general consent’ programs. Other options, such as opt-out consent procedures, should be further assessed. (shrink)

This volume addresses a wide variety of moral concerns regarding slavery as an institutionalized social practice. By considering the slave's critical appropriation of the natural rights doctrine, the ambiguous implications of various notions of consent and liberty are examined. The authors assume that, although slavery is undoubtedly an evil social practice, its moral assessment stands in need of a more nuanced treatment. They address the question of what is wrong with slavery by critically examining, and in some cases endorsing, certain (...) principles derived from communitarianism, paternalism, utilitarianism, and jurisprudence. (shrink)

This paper presents a concept for pattern matching based on a parameter optimization system for approximative numerical calculation of some parameter combination under soft and hard constraints. The concept uses a non-linear parameter optimization method with an iterative variation of parameters. The paper focuses on the information modeling process to migrate problem-domain specific criteria into optimization-compatible objects suitable for a standardized parameter optimization procedure. A step-by-step transformation process is presented and implemented in object-oriented programming: classes and interfaces. The method is (...) applicable to a wide range of pattern-matching problems due to its flexibility and extensibility. (shrink)

The dissertation provides a critical comparison of the theories of John Rawls and Alasdair MacIntyre with particular attention to the question of identity. The theme of true persuasion as situated by the concepts of eros and logos in Plato's Phaedrus is developed and applied to two contemporary understandings of the person. I suggest explanations for the paradoxical way in which Rawls and MacIntyre tend to read their understandings of identity in terms of the understandings of citizenship. An idiom of Will (...) elaborated in each theorist's view of politics and rationality results in a conflation of person and citizen and the reduction of true persuasion to public philosophy. (shrink)

Reid's response to hume has traditionally been taken as begging all of hume's questions. One can, However, Find in reid an argument against hume's phenomenalistic skepticism. Reid's appeal to common sense is an attempt to call attention to the fact that we experience objects as external to us, Not as bundles of impressions. Still, Our access to these objects does arise out of sensations, Which are mental contents. Extending berkeley's idea of the "language of nature" reid suggests that language and (...) signification present apt theoretical models for explaining perception. Using this model, One can provide an answer to the argument from illusion. (shrink)

Developmental research suggests that young children tend to value dominant individuals over subordinates. This research, however, has nearly exclusively been carried out in Western cultures, and cross-cultural research among adults has revealed cultural differences in the valuing of dominance. In particular, it seems that Japanese culture, relative to many Western cultures, values dominance less. We conducted two experiments to test whether this difference would be observed in preschoolers. In Experiment 1, preschoolers in France and in Japan were asked to identify (...) with either a dominant or a subordinate. French preschoolers identified with the dominant, but Japanese preschoolers were at chance. Experiment 2 revealed that Japanese preschoolers were more likely to believe a subordinate than a dominant individual, both compared to chance and compared to previous findings among French preschoolers. The convergent results from both experiments thus reveal an early emerging cross-cultural difference in the valuing of dominance. (shrink)

Subsidiarity is often implicitly conceived as an organizational model or a Weberian ideal type. The purpose of this paper is to show that, in contrast, subsidiarity is a principle in the sense of the tradition originating from Thomas Aquinas. Considered as an ideal type, subsidiarity may be perceived as impossible to apply because of its ideal status, abstracted from the circumstances. Here, we will demonstrate the consequences of the fact that subsidiarity is one of the common principles of practical (...) moral reasoning of particular prudence. Because it is a principle, subsidiarity does not have a visualizable substance or prescribe an organizational model, unlike the ideal type. It thus avoids the indiscriminate application of organizational models to contexts that are not appropriate, and in the context of tension between external consultants and managers, it rehabilitates the prudence of leaders who know the circumstances of their organization. (shrink)

A discussion of egoism and altruism as related both to ethical theory and moral psychology. Williams considers and rejects various arguments for and against the existence of egoistic motives and the rationality of someone motivated by self-interest. He ultimately attempts to give a more Humean defense of altruism, as opposed to the more Kantian defenses found in Thomas Nagel, for example.

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

Seventeen years before Kant published The Critique of Pure Reason, there appeared another work designed to undercut Hume’s skepticism and the principles upon which that skepticism was based—Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. In this ambitious work, Reid hoped to show, against Hume, that there need be no quarrel between common sense and philosophical inquiry. “Philosophy,” proclaimed Reid, “has no other roots but the principles of Common Sense; it grows out of them, (...) and draws its nourishment from them.” Reid’s self-imposed task was thus two-fold—to expose the errors in philosophical method which had inexorably culminated in Hume’s phenomenalistic atomism, and correlatively to provide a more adequate metaphysical scheme which could avoid the pitfalls of skepticism while doing justice to our ordinary beliefs about the world. (shrink)

Although complex hallucinations are extremely vivid, painful symptoms in schizophrenia, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of multisensory integration in such a phenomenon. We investigated the neural basis of these altered states of consciousness in a patient with schizophrenia, by combining state of the art neuroscientific exploratory methods like functional MRI, diffusion tensor imaging, cortical thickness analysis, electrical source reconstruction and trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. The results shed light on the functional architecture of the hallucinatory processes, in which unimodal information (...) from different modalities is strongly functionally connected to higher-order integrative areas. (shrink)

Presents Bernard Lonergan's five "verbum" articles that originally appeared in Theological studies. For Thomist students and scholars this "verbum" study offers a careful appraisal of the Thomist theory of knowledge as well as an introduction to the concepts found in Father Lonergan's "Insight". Since the concept of "verbum" dynamically affects the thought of Aquinas, it is necessary to grasp this concept to understand Thomist metaphysics and rational psychology. Lonergan has carefully analyzed and explicitly outlined "verbum"--An integral part of the (...) Thomist theory of knowledge. "Verbum" is examined as a tool of definition and for its impact on understanding, logical thought procession and related ideas stemming from "verbum". Discusses "the word" and its relation to abstraction. Focusses on St. Thomas' immediate concern in finding in Aristotle the point of insertion for Augustinian thought and in fusing a phenomenology of the subject with a psychology of the soul. (shrink)