Ariès traces Western man's attitudes toward mortality from the early medieval conception of death as the familiar collective destiny of the human race to the modern tendency, so pronounced in industrial societies, to hide death as if it were an embarrassing family secret.

This remarkable book--the fruit of almost two decades of study--traces in compelling fashion the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Aries shows how, (...) from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Aries identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Aries shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century--how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives--and points out what may be done to "re-tame" this secret terror. The richness of Aries's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history--indeed the pathology--of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death. (shrink)

"Tout en conservant et en perfectionnant son outillage scientifique de recherche, l'Histoire se conçoit comme un dialogue où le présent n'est jamais absent. Elle abandonne cette indifférence que les maîtres d'autrefois s'efforçaient de lui imposer.L'historien d'aujourd'hui reconnaît sans honte qu'il appartient au monde moderne et qu'il travaille à sa manière à répondre aux inquiétudes - qu'il partage - de ses contemporains. Son optique du passé demeure liée à son présent - un présent qui n'est pas seulement une référence de méthode. (...) Désormais, l'Histoire cesse d'être une science sereine et indifférente. Elle s'ouvre au souci contemporain dont elle devient une manière d'être dans le temps de l'homme moderne. A une civilisation qui élimine les différences, l'Histoire doit restituer le sens perdu des particularités."Philippe Ariès.Philippe Ariès (1914-1984) a écrit notamment L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien régime et L'Homme devant la mort. L'amitié de l'histoire Chapitre I. Un enfant découvre l'histoire Chapitre II. L'histoire marxiste et l'histoire conservatrice Chapitre III. L'engagement de l'homme moderne dans l'histoire Chapitre IV. L'attitude devant l'histoire : au Moyen Âge Chapitre V. L'attitude devant l'histoire : le XVIIIe siècle Chapitre VI. L'histoire « scientifique » Chapitre VII. L'histoireexistentielle Chapitre VIII. L'histoire dans la civilisation moderne Annexes. (shrink)

In his essay ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin subjects violence to a critique in order to establish the criterion for violence itself as a principle. His starting point is the distinction between law-positing and law-preserving violence. However, these are for him inseparable and subjected to the law of historical change: the history of the law is nothing but the dialectical rising and falling of legal orders. Benjamin’s analysis of legal violence and his criticism of parliamentary democracies, this article advances, should (...) be related to the critical analysis of the possibilities for alternative politics in contemporary democratic rule of law states, as those advanced by Bernard Noël, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. For Benjamin, it is only law-destroying divine violence, whose principle is justice, not power, that is able to break this circle and open up a new era. Divine violence is, however, not only a provocative but also an extremely problematic, even dangerous, concept, as Jacques Derrida, among others, has claimed. This article considers, therefore, whether the concept of divine violence has any real political relevance in the contemporary era. (shrink)

Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa al-Thānī al-Maḥbūbī (d. 747/1346) was the last major Māturīdī theologian of Transoxania. As he left no work of rational theology (kalām) proper, one of the chief sources of his theological thought is his book on legal theory, al-Tawḍīḥ fī ḥall ghawāmiḍ al-Tanqīḥ. Because the work served as a prominent reference for both legal theory and rational theol­ogy, an extensive commentary tradition on it emerged as it was transmitted from Transoxania to South Asia, Anatolia, and the Arab world. A (...) distinctive subfield of this commentary tradition consisted of glosses devoted exclusively to one specific section of al-Tawḍīḥ. Revolving around the nature of good and evil, and intimately linked to the question of human free will, this part of Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa’s text came to be treated as a separate work, commonly referred to as al-Muqaddimāt al-arbaʿ (“The four pro­legomena”). Due to its role as a highly sophisticated refutation of late Ashʿarī doctrine on human volition, al-Muqaddimāt al-arbaʿ eventually developed into a prime source for later Māturīdī scholars in their discussion of human volition and related topics. (shrink)

Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom has been interpreted as a general warning against state intervention in the economy.1 We review this argument in conjunction with Hayek’s later work and discern an institutional thesis about which forms of state intervention and economic institutions could threaten personal and political freedom. Economic institutions pose a threat if they allow for coercive interventions, as described by Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty: by giving someone the power to force others to serve one’s will by (...) threatening to inflict harm, in the absence of general rules of conduct. According to the logic of the argument, welfare-state provisions are not coercive insofar as they do not allow the identification and discriminatory treatment of individuals. By contrast, we claim that a structure of coercion is likely to emerge from the command-and-control nature of protectionist institutions and immigration restrictions currently advocated by the radical right. (shrink)

In Richard Bradley’s book, Decision Theory with a Human Face, we have selected two themes for discussion. The first is the Bolker-Jeffrey theory of decision, which the book uses throughout as a tool to reorganize the whole field of decision theory, and in particular to evaluate the extent to which expected utility theories may be normatively too demanding. The second theme is the redefinition strategy that can be used to defend EU theories against the Allais and Ellsberg paradoxes, a strategy (...) that the book by and large endorses, and even develops in an original way concerning the Ellsberg paradox. We argue that the BJ theory is too specific to fulfil Bradley’s foundational project and that the redefinition strategy fails in both the Allais and Ellsberg cases. Although we share Bradley’s conclusion that EU theories do not state universal rationality requirements, we reach it not by a comparison with BJ theory, but by a comparison with the non-EU theories that the paradoxes have heuristically suggested. (shrink)

This is the outline: 1. Introduction : organicisme et personnalisme 2. Un effort pour philosopher sur tout 3. La théologie et la question de l’infra-substantiel 3.1 Un schème de pensée qui pose problème 3.2 Le statut de l’immortalité 4. Substance, personne et cosmos.

This research investigates 3- and 5-year-olds' relative fairness in distributing small collections of even or odd numbers of more or less desirable candies, either with an adult experimenter or between two dolls. The authors compare more than 200 children from around the world, growing up in seven highly contrasted cultural and economic contexts, from rich and poor urban areas, to small-scale traditional and rural communities. Across cultures, young children tend to optimize their own gain, not showing many signs of self-sacrifice (...) or generosity. Already by 3 years of age, self-optimizing in distributive justice is based on perspective taking and rudiments of mind reading. By 5 years, overall, children tend to show more fairness in sharing. What varies across cultures is the magnitude of young children's self-interest. More fairness (less self-interest) in distributive justice is evident by children growing up in small-scale urban and traditional societies thought to promote more collective values. (shrink)

Developing tools is a crucial aspect of experimental practice, yet most discussions of scientific change traditionally emphasize theoretical over technological change. To elaborate on the role of tools in scientific change, I offer an account that shows how scientists use tools in exploratory experiments to form novel concepts. I apply this account to two cases in neuroscience and show how tool development and concept formation are often intertwined in episodes of tool-driven change. I support this view by proposing common normative (...) principles that specify when exploratory concept formation and tool development succeed to initiate scientific change. (shrink)

To what extent do early intuitions about ownership depend on cultural and socio-economic circumstances? We investigated the question by testing reasoning about third party ownership conflicts in various groups of three- and five-year-old children (N = 176), growing up in seven highly contrasted social, economic, and cultural circumstances (urban rich, poor, very poor, rural poor, and traditional) spanning three continents. Each child was presented with a series of scripts involving two identical dolls fighting over an object of possession. The child (...) had to decide who of the two dolls should own the object. Each script enacted various potential reasons for attributing ownership: creation, familiarity, first contact, equity, plus a control/neutral condition with no suggested reasons. Results show that across cultures, children are significantly more consistent and decisive in attributing ownership when one of the protagonists created the object. Development between three and five years is more or less pronounced depending on culture. The propensity to split the object in equal halves whenever possible was generally higher at certain locations (i.e., China) and quasi-inexistent in others (i.e., Vanuatu and street children of Recife). Overall, creation reasons appear to be more primordial and stable across cultures than familiarity, relative wealth or first contact. This trend does not correlate with the passing of false belief theory of mind. (shrink)

This paper has two goals. First, we develop frameworks for logical systems which are able to reflect not only non-monotonic patterns of reasoning, but also paraconsistent reasoning. Our second goal is to have a better understanding of the conditions that a useful relation for nonmonotonic reasoning should satisfy. For this we consider a sequence of generalizations of the pioneering works of Gabbay, Kraus, Lehmann, Magidor and Makinson. These generalizations allow the use of monotonic nonclassical logics as the underlying logic upon (...) which nonmonotonic reasoning may be based. Our sequence of frameworks culminates in what we call plausible, nonmonotonic, multiple-conclusion consequences relations . Our study yields intuitive justifications for conditions that have been proposed in previous frameworks and also clarifies the connections among some of these systems. In addition, we present a general method for constructing plausible nonmonotonic relations. This method is based on a multiple-valued semantics, and on Shoham's idea of preferential models. (shrink)

This is the outline: Introduction — La question de la cybernétique et de l'information — Une « pensée du milieu » — Cybernétique et homologie — Une théorie de l'apprentissage — L'information vue de l'autre côté — Champ et domaine unitaire — La thèse des « autres-je » — Le passage par l'axiologie — La rétroaction vraie — L'ontologie de Ruyer — Le bruissement de l'être même.

The notion of bilattice was introduced by Ginsberg, and further examined by Fitting, as a general framework for many applications. In the present paper we develop proof systems, which correspond to bilattices in an essential way. For this goal we introduce the notion of logical bilattices. We also show how they can be used for efficient inferences from possibly inconsistent data. For this we incorporate certain ideas of Kifer and Lozinskii, which happen to suit well the context of our work. (...) The outcome are paraconsistent logics with a lot of desirable properties.1. (shrink)

This work focuses on the conception of God of the medieval Jewish philosopher and legal scholar, Hasdai Crescas (1340-1410/11). It demonstrates that Crescas’ God is infinitely creative and good and explores the parallel that Crescas implicitly draws between God as creator and legislator.

Ce deuxième tome des Hommes de la fraternité s'achève avec le règne de Constantin et le concile de Nicée (325). Les quelques deux cent cinquante évêques qui participent à ce concile dit " œcuménique " représentent bien mal, par leur provenance, ce qu'on appelait alors l'oïkouméné (l'ensemble des terres habitées). Mais le concile est présidé par l'empereur, et une ère nouvelle commence pour les chrétiens au sein de l'Empire. Ils sont si bien traités par le prince, ces évêques conciliaires, qu'ils (...) " se demandent s'ils ne sont pas déjà dans le Royaume de Dieu ". Il semble loin le temps de l'épître à Diognète (vers 195) qui parlait des chrétiens en ces termes : " toute terre étrangère leur est une patrie, toute patrie une terre étrangère. " avec Constantin s'inaugure ce qu'on appellera plus tard l'alliance du trône et de l'autel. Ce deuxième tome est celui d'un tournant décisif pour la suite de l'histoire. Mais l'historien qu'est Michel Clévenot se garde bien d'illustrer une thèse, fût-elle éclairante. Il donne au contraire à voir et à entendre la diversité des situations aux quatre coins de l'Empire et au sein des classes sociales si peu homogènes : le lecteur fait connaissance avec le " directeur de conscience " de la bourgeoisie d'Alexandrie, mais il visite aussi les petits agriculteurs d'Italie, d'Afrique du Nord ou des bords du Nil. Les querelles commerciales, les tensions économiques, les controverses théologiques, les affrontements politiques et guerriers, rien de tout cela n'est négligeable pour celui qui entend " l'appel de Jésus à ne pas déserter l'Histoire ". (shrink)

_Violence: Probing the Boundaries around the World_ includes implicit and explicit contributions to the conceptualisation of violent processes across the world, the circumstances that enable them to exist and opens ways to think valuable interventions.

Constructions of Intersubjectivity shows that the meaning of grammatical constructions often has more to do with the human cognitive capacity for taking other peoples' points of view than with describing the world. Treating pragmatics, semantics, and syntax in parallel and integrating insights from linguistics, psychology, and animal communication, Arie Verhagen develops a new understanding of linguistic communication. In doing so he shows the continuity between language and animal communication and reveals the nature of human linguistic specialization. Professor Verhagen uses Dutch (...) and English data from a wide variety of sources and considers the contributions of grammar to the coherence of discourse. He argues that important problems in semantics and syntax may be resolved if language is understood as an instrument for exerting influence and coordinating different perspectives. The grammatical phenomena he discusses include negative expressions, the let alone construction, complementation constructions, and discourse connectives.This powerfully argued and original explanation of the nature and operation of communication will interest a wide range of scholars and advanced students in linguistics, cognitive science, and human evolution. (shrink)

Longer-term developments shape the present and endogenous futures of institutions and practices of science and technology in society and their governance. Understanding the patterns allows diagnosis and soft intervention, often linked to scenario exercises. The book collects six articles offering key examples of this perspective, addressing ongoing issues in the governance of science and technology, including nanotechnology and responsible research and innovation. And adds two more articles that address background philosophical issues.

Some people claim that evolution is "just a theory". Do you know what a scientific theory really is? Just a theory is an overview of the modern concepts of science. A clear understanding of the nature of science will enable you to distinguish science from pseudoscience (which illegitimately wraps itself in the mantle of science), and real social issues in science from the caricatures portrayed in postmodernist critiques. Prof. Ben-Ari's style is light (even humorous) and easy to read, bringing the (...) latest concepts of science to the general reader. Of particular interest is his analysis of the terminology of science (fact, law, proof, theory) in relation to the colloquial meaning of these terms. Between chapters are biographical vignettes of scientists — both familiar and unfamiliar — showing their common commitment to the enterprise of science, together with a diversity of backgrounds and personalities. This accessible, informative, and comprehensive work will give lay readers a good grasp of real science. (shrink)

The relations between rationality and optimization have been widely discussed in the wake of Herbert Simon's work, with the common conclusion that the rationality concept does not imply the optimization principle. The paper is partly concerned with adding evidence for this view, but its main, more challenging objective is to question the converse implication from optimization to rationality, which is accepted even by bounded rationality theorists. We discuss three topics in succession: (1) rationally defensible cyclical choices, (2) the revealed preference (...) theory of optimization, and (3) the infinite regress of optimization. We conclude that (1) and (2) provide evidence only for the weak thesis that rationality does not imply optimization. But (3) is seen to deliver a significant argument for the strong thesis that optimization does not imply rationality. (shrink)

The public sphere, be it the Greek agora or the New York Times op-ed page, is the realm of appearances - not citizenship. Its central event is spectacle - not dialogue. Public dialogue, the mantra of many intellectuals and political commentators, is but a contradiction in terms. Marked by an asymmetry between the few who act and the many who watch, the public sphere can undermine liberal democracy, law, and morality. Inauthenticity, superficiality, and objectification are the very essence of the (...) public sphere. But the public sphere also liberates us from the bondages of private life and fosters an existentially vital aesthetic experience. Reign of Appearances uses a variety of cases to reveal the logic of the public sphere, including homosexuality in Victorian England, the 2008 crash, antisemitism in Europe, confidence in American presidents, communications in social media, special prosecutor investigations, the visibility of African-Americans, violence during the French Revolution, the Islamic veil, and contemporary sexual politics. This unconventional account of the public sphere is critical reading for anyone who wants to understand the effects of visibility in urban life, politics, and the media. (shrink)

An ℵ1-Souslin tree is a complicated combinatorial object whose existence cannot be decided on the grounds of ZFC alone. But fifteen years after Tennenbaum and Jech independently devised notions of forcing for introducing such a tree, Shelah proved that already the simplest forcing notion—Cohen forcing—adds an ℵ1-Souslin tree. In this article, we identify a rather large class of notions of forcing that, assuming a GCH-type hypothesis, add a λ+-Souslin tree. This class includes Prikry, Magidor, and Radin forcing.

In Part I of this series, we presented the microscopic approach to Souslin-tree constructions, and argued that all known ⋄-based constructions of Souslin trees with various additional properties may be rendered as applications of our approach. In this paper, we show that constructions following the same approach may be carried out even in the absence of ⋄. In particular, we obtain a new weak sufficient condition for the existence of Souslin trees at the level of a strongly inaccessible cardinal. We (...) also present a new construction of a Souslin tree with an ascent path, thereby increasing the consistency strength of such a tree's nonexistence from a Mahlo cardinal to a weakly compact cardinal. Section 2 of this paper is targeted at newcomers with minimal background. It offers a comprehensive exposition of the subject of constructing Souslin trees and the challenges involved. (shrink)

In recent years, a plethora of high-profile scientific publications has been reporting about machine learning algorithms outperforming clinicians in medical diagnosis or treatment recommendations. This has spiked interest in deploying relevant algorithms with the aim of enhancing decision-making in healthcare. In this paper, we argue that instead of straightforwardly enhancing the decision-making capabilities of clinicians and healthcare institutions, deploying machines learning algorithms entails trade-offs at the epistemic and the normative level. Whereas involving machine learning might improve the accuracy of medical (...) diagnosis, it comes at the expense of opacity when trying to assess the reliability of given diagnosis. Drawing on literature in social epistemology and moral responsibility, we argue that the uncertainty in question potentially undermines the epistemic authority of clinicians. Furthermore, we elucidate potential pitfalls of involving machine learning in healthcare with respect to paternalism, moral responsibility and fairness. At last, we discuss how the deployment of machine learning algorithms might shift the evidentiary norms of medical diagnosis. In this regard, we hope to lay the grounds for further ethical reflection of the opportunities and pitfalls of machine learning for enhancing decision-making in healthcare. (shrink)

Within the space of a few years, the idea of Responsible Research and Innovation, and its acronym RRI, catapulted from an obscure phrase to the topic of conferences and attempts to specify and realize it. How did this come about, and against which backdrop? What are the dynamics at present, and what do these imply for the future of RRI as a discourse, and as a patchwork of practices? It is a social innovation which creates opening in existing divisions of (...) moral labour, a notion that is explained with the help of the history of responsibility language. It is filled in for the present situation and ongoing developments. Some elements may stabilize and this creates a path into the future. There will be reductions of the originally open-ended innovation, some productive, others less so. This is a reason to regularly inquire into the value of the reductions and the directions the path is taking. (shrink)

This study offers a fresh reappraisal of the philosopher, political thinker, and historian of ideas Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) from childhood to the height of his intellectual career. It provides the first historically contextualized study of Berlin's formative years and identifies different stages in his intellectual development, allowing a reappraisal of his theory of liberalism. Applying a 'double perspective' that examines Berlin both as an East European Jewish émigré; as well as a British Liberal intellectual, author Arie Dubnov stresses the (...) very ambivalent relation between Berlin's liberal philosophy and his pro-Zionist sentiments. (shrink)

The transcriptional profile of the entire Caulobacter crescentus genome over a synchronous cell cycle was recently described.(1) The analysis reveals a stunning 553 cell-cycle-regulated genes or orfs, nearly 19% of the genome, including putative functions in virtually all biological activities. Over a quarter of these genes/orfs respond to the Caulobacter master regulator, CtrA, most of them apparently indirectly. The analysis confirms and extends earlier observations showing that many proteins involved in cell cycle functions are expressed at the cell age when (...) they are needed. Conversely, the data suggest that proteins specifically expressed at a particular age may be involved in a process taking place then. BioEssays 23:563–565, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Qu'attendre des chercheurs en sciences sociales? Qu'ils fassent tout bonnement leur métier ou qu'à partir de leurs analyses ils s'impliquent dans les problèmes qui relèvent de leur compétence ou même qu'à partir de leur position de chercheur ils prennent publiquement position sur les grandes questions du jour? Ces alternatives sont loin d'épuiser le champ des possibles, mais les énoncer invite à s'interroger sur les rapports qu'entretiennent les travaux de recherche en sciences sociales avec les pratiques sociales qu'elles étudient. Ces questions (...) n'étaient pas étrangères à Philippe Lucas - et c'est peu dire. Elles sont aussi à l'origine de ce livre. Président de l'université Lumière-Lyon II avant d'être nommé recteur de l'Académie de Bordeaux puis de l'Académie de Caen, Philippe Lucas fut aussi et d'abord un chercheur qui concevait son travail de recherche comme un engagement. Sa " sociologie impliquée " supposait la confrontation des points de vue et le débat non seulement après coup, une fois le travail terminé, mais avant tout dès les premières investigations et tout au long de la recherche. Quel meilleur hommage rendre à Philippe Lucas que de reprendre aujourd'hui ces questions qui furent les siennes? Il les avait posées à sa manière mais leur actualité nous frappe, leur importance aussi. Ceux qui ont contribué à cet ouvrage collectif ont tenté d'y répondre et d'abord de les reformuler en proposant tantôt leur témoignage tantôt leurs réflexions de chercheurs sur l'implication et l'engagement : leur propre implication et celle de leurs disciplines, leur propre engagement et celui de leurs disciplines. (shrink)

Des premiers rites baptismaux à la confession moderne, les références au christianisme sont constantes dans l'œuvre de Michel Foucault. Cette constance s'inscrit dans un questionnement philosophique plus large sur notre actualité : comprendre le rapport que nous avons aujourd'hui à nous-mêmes demande de s'interroger sur les actes de vérité que l'Occident a instaurés depuis les premiers siècles chrétiens. Que faut-il dire et manifester de soi pour être transformé dans son être, pardonné, sauvé, jugé ou guéri)? Ce livre propose une étude (...) critique de l'ensemble des lectures chrétiennes de Foucault, avec une attention particulière portée au cours Du gouvernement des vivants. Ni chronologique ni thématique, le parcours suivi espère retrouver la logique d'un travail à la fois philosophique et historique : quand et comment le christianisme a-t-il été constitué par Foucault en objet de recherche, avec quelles pratiques de lecture et quelles conséquences sur l'interprétation)? (shrink)

Paradefinite logics are logics that can be used for handling contradictory or partial information. As such, paradefinite logics should be both paraconsistent and paracomplete. In this paper we consider the simplest semantic framework for introducing paradefinite logics. It consists of the four-valued matrices that expand the minimal matrix which is characteristic for first degree entailments: Dunn–Belnap matrix. We survey and study the expressive power and proof theory of the most important logics that can be developed in this framework.

This collection, published in 1988, brings an innovative perspective to research in social cognition.