La 4e de couv. indique : "Les deux notions n'ont pas toujours été associées. La citoyenneté dans le monde gréco-romain a de multiples sens, allant du cosmopolitisme critique de Diogène à la soumission aux lois d'Athènes, incarnée par Socrate. La démocratie, née en Grèce, longuement stipendiée par Platon, se métamorphosera jusqu'à s'imposer comme évidence politique avec Tocqueville. Mais depuis le XIXe siècle, ce modèle montre ses limites, avec la mondialisation. Elle se transforme sans cesse, avec la montée du populisme, le (...) rejet des élites ou des partis politiques. Soulignant de nouveaux enjeux contemporains, les nouvelles revendications citoyennes vont-elles bouleverser la démocratie actuelle?". (shrink)

Les discours sur la fin de l'histoire, dominants à la fin du siècle dernier, ont laissé place aux discours marquants la fin de la géographie, à l'urgence climatique et à l'effondrement. Ces considérations s'enracient dans l'histoire de la philosophie, chez Montesquieu en particulier. La mondialisation et les multiples crises (économique, sociale, politique et sanitaire) que nous traversons, nous imposent un nouveau questionnement pour nous resituer historiquement et géographiquement ; ces deux dimensions étant, de plus, inséparables. La géographie conceptualisant l'espace rend (...) intelligible la temporalité historique. Peut-on pour autant entériner la fin de l'histoire ou de la géographie, la contraction d'un monde englouti par les nouvellles technologies et les moyens de communication instantanés? (shrink)

Le cosmopolitisme, concept antique, n'appartient pas à l'origine à la philosophie de l'histoire. Il subit différentes métamorphoses ; présent chez les Cyniques et chez les Stoïciens, mis en réserve par l'humanisme de la Renaissance, il réapparaîtra en force à l'époque des Lumières. Critiqué par Rousseau, soutenu par Kant, il ne cesse d'être actuel dans la globalisation ou la mondialisation à travers diverses instances, dont l'ONU. Sur la scène européenne, il inspire les débats actuels contradictoires des eurosceptiques et des eurofédéralistes. La (...) liaison du cosmopolitisme et de la philosophie de l'histoire s'impose cependant indéniablement dans notre horizon au-delà des idéologies et des faillites du siècle dernier : totalitarismes et fascisme. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) à travers son itinéraire semé d'embûches, a dû affronter l'arrivée au pouvoir des nazis. Amené à sillonner l'Europe il développe une activité de critique littéraire et une philosophie de l'histoire, notamment dans ses ultimes « thèses » de 1940. Ce testament philosophique est influencé par le messianisme juif et le marxisme. Décrit comme sentinelle messianique, l'œuvre de Walter Benjamin se déploie aux confins de la sociologie, de l'esthétique et de la théologie. Sa philosophie de l'histoire contraste avec (...) celle de Nietzsche, mais le rapproche de Simone Weil. Analyste privilégié des tourments de l'Europe, il participera indirectement à l'Ecole de Francfort. (shrink)

ABSTRACTObjective: This study was designed to improve our understanding of prospective memory changes in ageing, and to identify the cognitive correlates of PM decline, using a virtual environment, to provide a more realistic assessment than traditional laboratory tasks.Design: Thirty-five young and 29 older individuals exposed to a virtual town were asked to recall three event-based intentions with a strong link between prospective and retrospective components, three event-based intentions with a weak link, and three time-based intentions. They also underwent retrospective episodic (...) memory, executive functions, binding in working memory, processing speed, and time estimation assessments.Results: Older individuals recalled fewer intentions than young adults. While age-related PM decline affected the recall of both prospective and retrospective components, the recall of the latter seemed more challenging for older individuals when the link was weak. This PM decline was linked to an age-related decline... (shrink)

Newly edited by Konrad Koerner (University of Ottawa), with an introduction by Clemens Knobloch (Universitat Siegen)The importance of Wegener's Untersuchungen uber die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens can only be compared to that of Karl Buhler's Sprachtheorie. Even now, however, Wegener's work remains virtually unknown to the English speaking world. Wegener's main work was published in 1885. It has its origin in two lectures given in 1883 and 1884 at school teacher meetings held in the Magdeburg area and it still recalls those (...) original occasions and maintains much of the oral style. Part of the volume treats the subject in a systematic and theoretical manner; other sections contain vivid examples and are characterized by a considerable didactic effort. The book is held together by leitmotif-questions, such as 'How do we understand language?' and 'How does language function as a means of everyday communication?'. We witness the experiences of the talented school teacher and the observations of the innovative dialect researcher combined, condensed, and conceptually ordered.In spite of the relatively unsystematic form of presentation, the book remains thoroughly consistent in thought and argument. In the Untersuchungen we have before us the outline of a communicative and functional view of language structure, of the analysis of speech, and of semantics. (shrink)

Maria mediatrix represents a paradigm of mediality in the Middle Ages. Mary′s power consists in bridging the gap between the celestial sphere and the world, the Christ and mankind. She is full of grace and conveying grace, participating in humanity and divinity by these characteristics. Her influence is based on having given birth to the Christ, accompanied his life until his death on the cross, having suffered and died in her soul with him in love. She incites the individual to (...) follow her on her paths, to love and suffer as she did, to follow the Christ. Her path – if followed – offers the perspective to reach redemption and salvation. But she is also interceding for the sinners. Ascended to heaven and crowned as queen, she is able to change the severity of judgements of her son into mercy. The present article outlines a “mediologic” approach, presenting some developments from the bible to the Middle Ages and giving examples of different ways of Mary′s mediation. The latter are mainly focussed on homilies written by Bernhard de Clairvaux (1090–1153) on the occasion of the feasts of the birth and ascension of Mary and five chapters of the ‘Büchlein der Ewigen Weisheit’ by Heinrich Seuse (1295–1366). (shrink)

In the past decade, research on the dark triad of personality (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) has demonstrated a strong relationship to a number of socially aversive moral judgments such as sacrificial utilitarian decisions in moral dilemmas. This study widens the scope of this research program and investigates the association between dark triad personality traits and anti-natalist views, i.e., views holding that procreation is morally wrong. The results of this study indicate that the dark triad personality traits of Machiavellianism and psychopathy (...) are strongly associated with anti-natalist views. Further, depression is found to be both standing independently in a relationship with anti-natalist views as well as functioning as a mediator in the relationships between Machiavellianism/psychopathy and anti-natalist views. This pattern was replicated in a follow-up study. These findings add to the literature on dark triad personality traits and their relationship to moral judgments, suggesting that personality and mood play a substantive part in variation in anti-natalist views in a lay population. (shrink)

1. Signification de la métaphysique.--2. Significations de l'être.

Dumézil’s trifunctional theory applied to the only grail plot in Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal proves to be neither faithful nor worthy of credit. Philological, historical, cultural, cognitive and narratological arguments raise critical objections and question its artificial character. In fact, the incidental episode of the grail functions as a narrative drawer in a plot belonging to the global tale ATU 910B (Good precepts) relating to the part of the work regarding Perceval.

La naissance du CRI à Grenoble doit être replacée dans le contexte intellectuel de la nouvelle critique des années 1960. Les trois courants dominants du matérialisme historique, de la psychanalyse freudienne et du structuralisme ont alors été dépassés par le CRI au profit d’un « nouvel esprit anthropologique » qui privilégiait la réalité sensible des images au détriment des idéologies réductrices. Les intellectuels des villes ont perdu le lien charnel avec une civilisation rurale et un mode de vie ayant façonné (...) notre langue, nos croyances et nos fêtes, ainsi que des artisanats séculaires. Le médiéviste peut encore retrouver le lien avec cette mémoire du temps. Mais s’il n’a pas conservé une âme païenne et un esprit paysan, il est condamné à la posture post-moderne. Penser la culture occidentale en contournant ou ignorant le Moyen Âge n’est qu’une imposture. Un exemple de longue vie des images montre l’importance des relais culturels qui relativise toute théorie préconçue des archétypes. The birth of the CRI in Grenoble is replaced in the intellectual context of new criticism of the 1960s. The three mainstream have been overtaken by the CRI in favour of a “new anthropological spirit” that emphasizes the sensible reality of images at the expense of reducing ideologies. The modern scholars of the cities have lost the carnal connection with a rural civilization and a way of life that have shaped our language, our ancient beliefs and feasts and also centuries-old handicrafts. The medievalist can find the link with this memory of time. But if he has lost a pagan soul and a spirit of peasant, he is sentenced to a post-modern posture. Thinking Western culture in bypassing or ignoring the middle ages appears like a mere sham. An example of long-life images stresses the importance of cultural relays against all preconceived theory of the archetypes. (shrink)

This article investigates the predictors of coping willingness among citizens exposed to coastal flooding. We focus especially on how place identity, perceived self-efficacy, anxiety-state and coastal flooding risk perception shape both active and passive coping willingness. Data were obtained from different areas at risk of coastal flooding located in France. The sample is composed of 315 adult participants (mean age = 47; SD = 15). We observe a direct relation between risk perception and active coping willingness. The model did not (...) confirm our expectations that a higher perceived self-efficacy would increase active coping willingness. Concerning passive coping strategies, the model reflects our expectations that a higher anxiety-state increases passive coping willingness, and that place identity acts as a mediator and reinforce the relation between anxiety-state and passive coping willingness. To our knowledge this is an unprecedented model that suggests the importance of anxiety-state and place identity in the study of coastal risks. Moreover, it suggests that place identity is reinforced when the living place is threatened and encourages the willingness to use passive coping strategies. Model fit indices suggest the good fit of our model and Bayesian model comparison reveals a very strong evidence of the better fit of this model compared to its saturated and independent equivalents. (shrink)

A l'heure de l'inflation normative, une réflexion sur la fin du droit peut paraître paradoxale, voire aller à contre-courant des mutations contemporaines du droit. En outre, les nombreux travaux relatifs à ces mêmes mutations et aux transformations du droit ces dernières années laissent penser que le droit ne peut connaître de fin, se renouvelant en permanence pour ne jamais laisser d'espace de non droit. Sans à coup, sans coupe nette, le droit poursuivrait sa progression sans heurt. Le droit n'aurait-il donc (...) jamais de fin? L'adage "ubi societas ibi jus" plaide, à l'évidence, pour une réponse négative. Cependant, de multiples questions se posent. Est-ce qu'une norme peut vraiment cesser d'exister et si oui, à partir de quand? Le droit connaît-il un terme? Peut-il disparaître? Issu d'un colloque qui s'est tenu à l'Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, composé de contributions de spécialistes reconnus des diverses branches du droit public, cet ouvrage offre à travers l'examen de la fin du droit un regard sur sa définition même. (shrink)

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.

The Cambrian explosion is characterized by the sudden outburst of organized animal plans, which occurred circa 530 M years ago. Around that time, many forms of animal life appeared, including several which have since disappeared. There is no general consensus about “why” this happened, and why it had any form of suddenness. However, all organized animal plans share a common feature: they are triploblastic, i.e., composed of 3 layers of tissue, endoderm, ectoderm and mesoderm. I show here that, within simple (...) hypotheses, the formation of the mesoderm has intrinsically a physical exponential dynamics, leading rapidly to triploblastism, and eventually, to animal formation. A novel physico-mathematical framework including epithelium-mesenchyme transition, visco-elastic constitutive equations, and conservation laws, is presented which allows one to describe gastrulation as a self-wetting phenomenon of a soft solid onto itself. This phenomenon couples differentiation and migration during gastrulation, and leads in a closed form to an exponential scaling law for the formation of the mesoderm. Therefore, the Cambrian explosion might have started, actually, by a true visco-elastic “explosion”: the exponential run-away of mesenchymal cells. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to define a λ-calculus typed in aMixed (commutative and non-commutative) Intuitionistic Linear Logic. The terms of such a calculus are the labelling of proofs of a linear intuitionistic mixed natural deduction NILL, which is based on the non-commutative linear multiplicative sequent calculus MNL [RuetAbrusci 99]. This linear λ-calculus involves three linear arrows: two directional arrows and a nondirectional one (the usual linear arrow). Moreover, the -terms are provided with seriesparallel orders on free variables. We (...) prove a normalization theorem which explicitly gives the behaviour of the order during the normalization procedure. (shrink)

Prism Adaptation is a useful method to study the mechanisms of sensorimotor adaptation. After-effects following adaptation to the prismatic deviation constitute the probe that adaptive mechanisms occurred, and current evidence suggests an involvement of the cerebellum at this level. Whether after-effects are transferable to another task is of great interest both for understanding the nature of sensorimotor transformations and for clinical purposes. However, the processes of transfer and their underlying neural substrates remain poorly understood. Transfer from throwing to pointing is (...) known to occur only in individuals who had previously reached a good level of expertise in throwing, not in novices. The aim of this study was to ascertain whether anodal stimulation of the cerebellum could boost after-effects transfer from throwing to pointing in novice participants. Healthy participants received anodal or sham transcranial direction current stimulation of the right cerebellum during a PA procedure involving a throwing task and were tested for transfer on a pointing task. Terminal errors and kinematic parameters were in the dependent variables for statistical analyses. Results showed that active stimulation had no significant beneficial effects on error reduction or throwing after-effects. Moreover, the overall magnitude of transfer to pointing did not change. Interestingly, we found a significant effect of the stimulation on the longitudinal evolution of pointing errors and on pointing kinematic parameters during transfer assessment. These results provide new insights on the implication of the cerebellum in transfer and on the possibility to use anodal tDCS to enhance cerebellar contribution during PA in further investigations. From a network approach, we suggest that cerebellum is part of a more complex circuitry responsible for the development of transfer which is likely embracing the primary motor cortex due to its role in motor memories consolidation. This paves the way for further work entailing multiple-sites stimulation to explore the role of M1-cerebellum dynamic interplay in transfer. (shrink)

The population of older adults worldwide is growing, with an urgent need for approaches that develop and maintain intrinsic capacity consistent with healthy aging. Theory and empirical research converge on feeling safe as central to healthy aging. However, there has been limited attention to resources that cultivate feeling safe to support healthy aging. Nostalgia, “a sentimental longing for one’s past,” is established as a source of comfort in response to social threat, existential threat, and self-threat. Drawing from extant theory and (...) research, we build on these findings to position nostalgia as a regulatory resource that cultivates feeling safe and contributes to intrinsic capacity to support healthy aging. Using a narrative review method, we: characterize feeling safe as a distinct affective dimension, summarize the character of nostalgia in alignment with feeling safe, propose a theoretical account of the mechanisms through which nostalgia cultivates feeling safe, highlight the contribution of nostalgia to feeling safe and emotional, physiological, and behavioral regulatory capabilities in healthy aging, and offer conclusions and direction for research. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the methodological foundations of the law and economics movement, with a special emphasis on the role and place of individuals in law and economics. Reviewing the works of the main contributors—the founders, indeed—to the law and economics movement, we show that all of them considered that the analysis of legal phenomena had to start from individual behavior, even as these very behaviors were embedded, to various degrees, though not determined, in legal and (...) institutional frameworks. They all use social, systemic, institutional, and anti-reductionist individualistic methodology. This is not inconsistent or contradictory. Indeed, methodological individualism does not imply to conceive human beings as (isolated) atoms living as if they were suspended in a social vacuum. (shrink)

(2011). Playing with Fire, or the Stuffing of Dead Animals: Freire, Dewey, and the Dilemma of Social Studies Reform. Educational Studies: Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 71-91.

This article presents the Arabic text of al-Q's short geometric treatise, The Book of the centres of the tangent circles on lines, by the method of analysis, with translation and a mathematical commentary. In this treatise al-Q solves by analysis an ordered set of eight problems where the goal is to locate, on a given line, the centre of a circle which is tangent to two given elements, which may be points, straight lines or circles. For example, in the first (...) problem he wanted to find the centre of a circle which contains two given points. In fact, al-Q establishes the locus of the solutions, and this locus can be a straight line or a conic. The treatise is reminiscent of one of the purposes of al-Q's work on the perfect compass, namely to assign to the conics the status of regular lines. (shrink)

The question of how inequality is generated and how it reproduces over time has been a major concern for social scientists for more than a century. Yet the relationship between inequality and the process of economic development is far from being well understood. These Raffaele Mattioli Lectures have brought together two of the world's leading economists, Professors Philippe Aghion and Jeffrey Williamson, to question the conventional wisdom on inequality and growth, and address its inability to explain recent economic experience. (...) Professor Aghion assesses the affects of inequality on growth, and asks whether inequality matters: if so why is excessive inequality bad for growth, and is it possible to reconcile aggregate findings with macroeconomic theories of incentives? In the second part Jeffrey Williamson discusses the Kuznets hypothesis, and focuses on the causes of the rise of wage and income inequality in developed economies. (shrink)

Welche Rolle spielt die Moral für unser wirtschaftliches Handeln und überhaupt in der Wirtschaft? Steht sie uns vielleicht sogar im Weg? Durch Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrisen ist das Misstrauen zwischen Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft weiter gestiegen. In Anbetracht dessen stellen die Herausgeber dieses Bandes die Frage, ob wir eine neue Wirtschaftsethik brauchen: eine Wirtschaftsethik, die den in der Wirtschaft tätigen Menschen eine wirkliche Orientierung gibt, statt sie dem Dilemma von leerem Moralismus und praktischen Zwängen der ökonomischen Welt zu überlassen; eine Wirtschaftsethik, die (...) dem Anspruch, einen realistischen ethischen Rahmen für das wirtschaftliche Handeln zu bieten, tatsächlich gerecht wird. Die Beiträge dieses Buches behandeln interdisziplinär und aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven die Schwierigkeiten mit der Moral und münden in der provokanten These, dass sich Wirtschaftsethik auch ausgezeichnet als Warnung vor der Moral eignet. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that productivity growth and the business cycle are closely interrelated. Yet, until recently, the two phenomena have been investigated separately in the economics literature. This book provides the first consistent attempt to analyze the effects of macroeconomic volatility on productivity growth, and also the reverse causality from growth to business cycles. The authors show that by looking at the economy through the lens of private entrepreneurs, who invest under credit constraints, one can go some way (...) towards explaining persistent macroeconomic volatility and the effects of volatility on growth. Beginning with an analysis of the effects of volatility on growth, the authors argue that the lower the level of financial development in a country the more detrimental the effect of volatility on growth. This prediction is confirmed by cross-country panel regressions. The data also suggests that a fixed exchange rate regime or more countercyclical budgetary policies are growth-enhancing in countries with a lower level of financial development. The former reduce aggregate volatility whereas the latter reduce the negative effects of volatility on long-term productivity-enhancing investment by firms. The book concludes with an investigation into how the interplay between credit constraints and pecuniary externalities is sufficient to generate persistent business cycles and to explain the occurrence of currency crises. (shrink)

Les fouilles de Pompéi ont permis la découverte d’un vaste ensemble d’inscriptions électorales, les programmata, peintes sur les murs extérieurs des maisons, et par lesquelles un individu, le rogator (ou plusieurs), appelle à voter pour un ou des candidats aux élections locales. Une soixantaine de ces inscriptions comprend le nom d’une femme comme rogator. Qui furent ces femmes? Leur engagement obéissait-il à des modalités particulières? Peut-on déterminer quelles furent leurs raisons pour soutenir ces candidats? Comment expliquer, alors qu’elles n’avaient officiellement (...) aucun rôle politique, qu’elles prirent la parole publiquement pour s’adresser aux électeurs? Enfin, que nous disent en creux ces inscriptions sur les nécessités morales et narratives auxquelles se pliaient les sources littéraires et normatives du début de l’Empire? (shrink)

This paper concerns Aristotle's kind‐crossing prohibition. My aim is twofold. I argue that the traditional accounts of the prohibition are subject to serious internal difficulties and should be questioned. According to these accounts, Aristotle's prohibition is based on the individuation of scientific disciplines and the general kind that a discipline is about, and it says that scientific demonstrations must not cross from one discipline, and corresponding kind, to another. I propose a very different account of the prohibition. The prohibition is (...) based on Aristotle's scientific and metaphysical essentialism, according to which a scientific demonstration must take as its starting point a set of per se properties of a subject, if these make up a single, unitary definition. The subject of demonstration here is a kind, although not the general kind associated with a discipline, but rather the particular kind that the particular demonstration is about. (shrink)

This article discusses Sven Ove Hansson’s corpus model for the influence of values (in particular, non-epistemic ones) in the hypothesis acceptance/rejection phase of scientific inquiry. This corpus model is based on Hansson’s concepts of scientific corpus and science ‘in the large sense’. I first present Hansson’s corpus model of value influence with some introductory comments about its origins, a detailed presentation of the model with a new terminology, an analysis of its limits, and an appreciation of its handling of controversial (...) non-epistemic values. I conclude that it is a very good candidate for managing value influence, because contrary to other models in the literature it is fairly simple, it provides a universal and systematic procedure for dealing with values, and it syste- matically preserves the epistemic integrity of science. I then study some difficulties associated with the model’s central feature of taking the maximum level of evidence required by the applications of a claim in order for the latter to enter the scientific corpus: the difficulty to identify this maximum requirement; the non-optimality of this requirement with respect to other less demanding requirements; the potentially detrimental consequences of the preference for false negatives over false positives on which it relies; and the issue of whether there can nevertheless be requirements higher than this maximum. I show that these issues may potentially challenge the corpus model. Finally, I call for empirical work (in particular, an investigation of scientists’ and engineers’ own normative views) in order to better assess these issues. (shrink)

According to one productive and influential approach to cognition, categorization, object recognition, and higher level cognitive processes operate on a set of fixed features, which are the output of lower level perceptual processes. In many situations, however, it is the higher level cognitive process being executed that influences the lower level features that are created. Rather than viewing the repertoire of features as being fixed by low-level processes, we present a theory in which people create features to subserve the representation (...) and categorization of objects. Two types of category learning should be distinguished. Fixed space category learning occurs when new categorizations are representable with the available feature set. Flexible space category learning occurs when new categorizations cannot be represented with the features available. Whether fixed or flexible, learning depends on the featural contrasts and similarities between the new category to be represented and the individual's existing concepts. Fixed feature approaches face one of two problems with tasks that call for new features: If the fixed features are fairly high level and directly useful for categorization, then they will not be flexible enough to represent all objects that might be relevant for a new task. If the fixed features are small, subsymbolic fragments (such as pixels), then regularities at the level of the functional features required to accomplish categorizations will not be captured by these primitives. We present evidence of flexible perceptual changes arising from category learning and theoretical arguments for the importance of this flexibility. We describe conditions that promote feature creation and argue against interpreting them in terms of fixed features. Finally, we discuss the implications of functional features for object categorization, conceptual development, chunking, constructive induction, and formal models of dimensionality reduction. Key Words: concept learning; conceptual development; features; perceptual learning; stimulus encoding. (shrink)

William Alston’s argument against the deontological conception of epistemic justification is a classic—and much debated—piece of contemporary epistemology. At the heart of Alston’s argument, however, lies a very simple mistake which, surprisingly, appears to have gone unnoticed in the vast literature now devoted to the argument. After having shown why some of the standard responses to Alston’s argument don’t work, we elucidate the mistake and offer a hypothesis as to why it has escaped attention.