We provide partial answers to the following problem: Is the class of Borel linear orders well-quasi-ordered under embeddability? We show that it is indeed the case for those Borel orders which are embeddable in R ω , with the lexicographic ordering. For Borel orders embeddable in R 2 , our proof works in ZFC, but it uses projective determinacy for Borel orders embeddable in some $\mathbf{R}^n, n , and hyperprojective determinacy for the general case.

We prove two results about the embeddability relation between Borel linear orders: For $\eta$ a countable ordinal, let $2^\eta$ (resp. $2^{<\eta}$) be the set of sequences of zeros and ones of length $\eta$ (resp. $<\eta$), equipped with the lexicographic ordering. Given a Borel linear order $X$ and a countable ordinal $\xi$, we prove the following two facts. (a) Either $X$ can be embedded (in a $\triangle^1_1(X,\xi)$ way) in $2^{\omega\xi}$, or $2^{\omega\xi + 1}$ continuously embeds in $X$. (b) Either $X$ can (...) embedded (in a $\triangle^1_1(X,\xi)$ way) in $2^{\omega\xi}$, or $2^{\omega\xi}$ continuously embeds in $X$. These results extend previous work of Harrington, Shelah and Marker. (shrink)

We consider Borel equivalence relations E induced by actions of the infinite symmetric group, or equivalently the isomorphism relation on classes of countable models of bounded Scott rank. We relate the descriptive complexity of the equivalence relation to the nature of its complete invariants. A typical theorem is that E is potentially Π03 iff the invariants are countable sets of reals, it is potentially Π04 iff the invariants are countable sets of countable sets of reals, and so on. The proofs (...) use various techniques, including Vaught transforms, changing topologies, and the Scott analysis of countable models. (shrink)

The 2005 Avignon Theatre Festival sparked a vast controversy about the insistent presence of bodies (whether wounded, broken, or humiliated) on stage. Without subscribing to the reactionary critical response to the Festival, it is legitimate to return to the debate in order to question the ubiquity of the “victim body” in contemporary theatre. Such representations, far from being heterodox, are in fact part of the massive ideology of “the ethical”, as diagnosed by Alain Badiou. The oppressed body thus tends (...) to be assimilated to the body of the victim. The result is the obliteration of the resistance of subjects to their oppression, or of their active response to it, theatre being reduced to the maxims of a democratic materialism: “there are only bodies and languages”. (shrink)

Louveau, A., S. Shelah and B. Velikovi, Borel partitions of infinite subtrees of a perfect tree, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 63 271–281. We define a notion of type of a perfect tree and show that, for any given type τ, if the set of all subtrees of a given perfect tree T which have type τ is partitioned into two Borel classes then there is a perfect subtree S of T such that all subtrees of S of (...) type τ belong to the same class. This result simultaneously generalizes the partition theorems of Galvin-Prikry and Galvin-Blass. The key ingredient of the proof is the theorem of Halpern-Laüchli on partitions of products of perfect trees. (shrink)

Depuis le XIXe siècle et jusqu’à nos jours, l’expansion des activités physiques et sportives s’est accompagnée de différences et d’inégalités sociales. A fortiori parmi l’ensemble des femmes, rarement pensé comme étant un ensemble lui-même divisé et hiérarchisé. S’agissant de l’accès aux loisirs sportifs puis au sport, les rapports au temps et à toutes les formes de travail, les rapports au corps sont particulièrement différenciateurs pour elles. Jusqu’à la moitié du XXe siècle environ, le sport ne concerne, au regard des millions (...) de femmes paysannes, ouvrières et petites employées, qu’une minorité d’aristocrates, de mondaines puis de jeunes femmes cultivées. Nombre d’institutions (le mouvement olympique, le sport ouvrier, les fédérations existantes) s’opposeront au développement de ces activités pour celles qui demeurent avant tout des mères destinées au foyer. La massification du sport ces dernières décennies s’accompagne d’une persistance des inégalités parmi les femmes, y compris parmi les plus jeunes. (shrink)

Against "political philosophy" -- Politics as thought -- Althusser -- Politics unbound -- A speculative disquisition on the concept of democracy -- Truths and justice -- Rancière and the community of equals -- Rancière and apolitics -- What is a thermidorean? -- Politics as truth procedure.

Sport makes it possible to (re)invest certain forms of capital which have been forged in and through professional work. Certain men thus manage to transfer their labour potential and their « pain threshold» to boxing or to rugby, while others invest their cultural capital in sports which involve forms of scientific knowledge. Bodies are not however gender-neutral. Men and women are thus set apart in the work of sport, both in its practice and in its normative representation. « Femininity » (...) has the prerogative of grace and beauty, in gymnastics or in skating, while masculinity and virility are signified in terms of broad shoulders, courage, the willingness to fight on. The cult of the body, which has remained in vogue since the 1980s, has to some extent blurred the boundaries between the sexes. Muscles have thus become emblematic of an all-purpose fitness. Despite this, the indifference of the media to numerous leading women athletes, along with the suspicions hanging over them of a blurred gender identity demonstrate that the muscular woman has failed to become an ideal of feminine beauty. While there are many different spaces within which fit bodies can be made profitable, those of women cyclists and football players, who stir up a certain gender trouble, do not occupy such spaces. (shrink)

Discusses Locke's life and views and their impact on American philosophy, as well as his role in the Harlem Renaissance.

Self-awareness represents the capacity of becoming the object of one’s own attention. In this state one actively identifies, processes, and stores information about the self. This paper surveys the self-awareness literature by emphasizing definition issues, measurement techniques, effects and functions of self-attention, and antecedents of self-awareness. Key self-related concepts (e.g., minimal, reflective consciousness) are distinguished from the central notion of self-awareness. Reviewed measures include questionnaires, implicit tasks, and self-recognition. Main effects and functions of self-attention consist in selfevaluation, escape from the (...) self, amplification of one's subjective experience, increased self-knowledge, self-regulation, and inferences about others' mental states (Theory-of-Mind). A neurocognitive and socioecological model of self-awareness is described in which the role of face-to-face interactions, reflected appraisals, mirrors, media, inner speech, imagery, autobiographical knowledge, and neurological structures is underlined. (shrink)

Quite a few recent models are rapidly introducing new concepts describing different levels of consciousness. This situation is getting confusing because some theorists formulate their models without making reference to existing views, redundantly adding complexity to an already difficult problem. In this paper, I present and compare nine neurocognitive models to highlight points of convergence and divergence. Two aspects of consciousness seem especially important: perception of self in time and complexity of self-representations. To this I add frequency of self-focus, amount (...) of self-related information, and accuracy of self-knowledge. Overall, I conclude that many novel concepts (e.g., reflective, primary, core, extended, recursive, and minimal consciousness) are useful in helping us distinguish between delicate variations in consciousness and in clarifying theoretical issues that have been intensely debated in the scientific literature—e.g., consciousness in relation to mirror self-recognition and language. Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

been recently proposed (Morin, 2003; 2004). The model takes into account most known mechanisms and processes leading to self-awareness, and examines their multiple and complex interactions. Inner speech is postulated to play a key-role in this model, as it establishes important connections between many of its ele- ments. This paper first reviews past and current references to a link between self-awareness and inner speech. It then presents an analysis of the nature of the relation between these two concepts. It is (...) suggested that inner speech can inter- nally reproduce and expand social and physical (ecological) sources of self- awareness. Inner speech can also create a psychological distance between the self and mental events it experiences (thus facilitating self-observation) it can act as a problem-solving device where the self represents the problem and self-information the solution, and can label aspects of one’s inner life that would otherwise be difficult to objectively perceive. Empirical evidence supporting the role of inner speech in self-awareness is also presented. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking work, French legal scholar Alain Supiot examines the relationship of society to legal discourse. He argues that the law is how justice is implmented in secular society, but it is not simply a technique to be manipulated at will: it is also an expression of the core beliefs of the West. We must recognize its universalizing, dogmatic nature and become receptive to other interpretations from non-Western cultures to help us avoid the clash of civilizations. In Homo (...) Juridicus, Supiot deconstructs the illusion of a world that has become flat and undifferentiated, regulated only by supposed "laws" of science and the economy, and peopled by contract-makers driven only by the calculation of their individual interests. Such a liberal perspective is nothing but the flipside of the notion of the withering away of law and the state, promoted this time not under the banner of the struggle between classes, but rather in the name of the free competition between sovereign individuals. Supiot's exploration of the development of the legal subject-the individual as formed through a dense web of contracts and laws-is set to become a classic work of social theory. (shrink)

Pacifism is routinely criticized as sectarian, incoherent, and preoccupied with moral purity at the expense of responsibility. The author contends that the pacifism of John Howard Yoder is vulnerable to none of these charges and defends this claim by establishing parallels between Yoder's analysis of killing and Augustine's analysis of lying. Although, within the terms of his own argument, Augustine's rejection of all lying as unjust is consistent with his condoning of some killing as just, the author shows that given (...) a different conception of the defining characteristic of God , Augustine's theological argument against lying would become an argument against violence. The author therefore suggests that Yoder's rejection of killing is no more sectarian, incoherent, or irresponsible than Augustine's rejection of lying. (shrink)

Quite a few recent models are rapidly introducing new concepts describing different levels of consciousness. This situ- ation is getting confusing because some theorists formulate their models without making reference to existing views, redun- dantly adding complexity to an already difficult problem. In this paper, I present and compare nine neurocognitive models to highlight points of convergence and divergence. Two aspects of consciousness seem especially important: perception of self in time and complexity of self-representations. To this I add frequency of (...) self-focus, amount of self-related informa- tion, and accuracy of self-knowledge. Overall, I conclude that many novel concepts (e.g., reflective, primary, core, extend- ed, recursive, and minimal consciousness) are useful in helping us distinguish between delicate variations in consciousness and in clarifying theoretical issues that have been intensely debated in the scientific literature—e.g., consciousness in rela- tion to mirror self-recognition and language. (shrink)

In her 2006 book ‘‘My Stroke of Insight” Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor relates her experience of suffering from a left hemispheric stroke caused by a congenital arteriovenous malformation which led to a loss of inner speech. Her phenomenological account strongly suggests that this impairment produced a global self-awareness deficit as well as more specific dysfunctions related to corporeal awareness, sense of individuality, retrieval of autobiographical memories, and self-conscious emotions. These are examined in details and corroborated by numerous excerpts from Taylor’s (...) book. Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Little is known with regard to the precise cognitive tools the self uses in acquiring and processing information about itself. In this article, we underline the possibility that inner speech might just represent one such cognitive process. Duval and Wicklund’s theory of self-awareness and the selfconsciousness, and self-knowledge body of work that was inspired by it are reviewed, and the suggestion is put forward that inner speech parallels the state of self-awareness, is more frequently used among highly self-conscious persons, and (...) represents an effective, if not indispensable, tool involved in the formation of the self-concept. The possibility is also raised that the extent to which one uses inner speech could partially explain individual differences in self-consciousness and self-knowledge. A selective review of the private and inner speech literature is presented, and some possible ways of testing the hypothesis by using pre-existing techniques are proposed in the hope of stimulating empirical investigations. Some implications are outlined in conclusion. (shrink)

Volume 10, Issue 2, June 2019, Page 281-288.

It is widely acknowledged that human rights law and international criminal law share core normative features. Yet, the literature has not yet reconstructed this underlying basis in a systematic way. In this contribution, I lay down the basis of such an account. I first identify a similar tension between a “moral” and a “political” approach to the normative foundations of those norms and to the legitimate role of international courts and tribunals adjudicating those norms. With a view to bring the (...) debate forward, I then turn to the practices of HRL and international criminal law to examine which of those approaches best illuminates some salient aspects of the adjudication of ICs. Finally, I argue that the political approach best explains the practice. While each preserves a distinct role, HRL and ICL both establish the basic conditions for the primary subject of international law, namely the state, to legitimately govern its own subjects constructed as free and equal moral agents. (shrink)

Legal scholars and theorists have recently drawn a more sustained attention to the link between international human rights law (hereafter IHRL) and international criminal law (hereafter ICL). This concerns both positive and more normative accounts of the link. Whether positive or normative, the predominant approach to constructing the link is substantive. This overlap is normatively justified in similar terms by reference to a subset of moral human rights. In this paper, I offer an alternative to the substantive approach. After identifying (...) two flaws in the substantive approach (the problem of threshold and the problem of ethical neutrality), I defend what I call a structural account by focusing on duty‐holders. I start by reconstructing two structural characteristics common to IHRL and ICL qua international legal regimes: who has the authority to address violations of IHRL and ICL, and who can be liable for those violations. I then infer that public authority (functionally construed) constitutes the common structural core of IHRL and ICL. I rely on the extraterritorial application of IHRL and on the collective dimension of ICL violations to further support the argument. I finally offer an argument explaining the normative point of those structural features. I hold that IHRL and ICL (their adjudicative and liability regimes) are both necessary (but clearly not sufficient) to render this exercise of public authority legitimate to its subjects. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an analytical and normative framework to re-visit the question of whether state parties should derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in order to combat the COVID-19 pandemic via harsh ‘lockdown’ measures. It is three-pronged. First, I show that the predominant debate on the (non-)derogation question is informed by a textual approach to adjudication, which severely limits the analytical and evaluative horizon for addressing the issue. Most importantly, it cannot address one salient fact (...) about the effects of lockdown measures, namely their highly disproportionate effects on vulnerable groups and minorities. Second, I argue that proportionality assessment should be the basis for determining whether state parties ought to derogate or not. This is because proportionality’s very purpose is in part to track the effects of state interferences on minorities and vulnerable groups by measuring the disproportionate burden imposed on them. It is also because proportionality assessment has very different requirements between limitation clauses built into the relevant Convention articles (e.g. Article 5, Articles 8–11) and the derogation clause (Article 15) under the ECHR. Surprisingly, while the emerging literature almost always mentions proportionality as an important component of the analysis, it does not investigate the extent to which each regime (derogation or limitation) better performs it, and why. Third, I draw from the philosophical literature on the ‘right to justification’ to clarify the egalitarian and justificatory function of proportionality. Unlike derogation, limitation clauses have a much higher and systematic requirement of justification, which makes the case for non-derogation clearer and stronger. (shrink)

Deleuze calls Spinoza the “Prince” of philosophers. He devotes two books to him, Spinoza et le probleme de l'expression and Spinoza. Philosophie pratique But Deleuze's entire body of work also gives him an opportunity to work on Spinoza's conceptuality. Deleuze does not arrive at Spinoza by making a leap from the principle of reason to reconquer an original and forgotten past. The immanence of Spinoza is more like an arrow found inadvertently and shot again into the immensity of the universe. (...) We propose to define this timelessness by highlighting the main points of convergence between Deleuze's thought and that of Spinoza. These convergences will be examined using excerpts selected from the five parts of the Ethics in which the following themes will be broached: the principle of reason, panpsychism, experimentation of the body, notion of power, and liberty. We will see how Deleuze gives a new and yet strangely faithful spin to Spinozist thought on which he establishes his notions of pluricosmism, non-human becomings, ethology, deterritorialization, and escape lines. (shrink)

My article in this issue of PPP is based on a lengthy book, La Société du malaise, in which I examine the shift from Oedipal neurosis to narcissistic pathologies in France and in the United States, viewing this shift in connection with changes in social ideals regarding autonomy that I summarize as autonomy–aspiration and autonomy–condition. Using the notion of social pathology, I consider sociological/anthropological dimensions of so-called mental health problems by viewing them as individualistic ways of dealing with adversity or (...) misfortune in a form of life permeated with the autonomy–ideal. Changes in ways of acting in society go together with changes in forms of being.. (shrink)

The notions of subjectivity, affect, emotion, and moral feelings today impregnate the whole of society, and they are becoming increasingly perceptible in the area of scientific knowledge as well.1 This preoccupation with emotions developed initially in the wake of the advent of a more permissive society in the 1970s, and then with changes in the organization of capitalism, where flexible work has replaced the Taylorist and Fordist models of divided labor, and also with the crisis of the social welfare system (...) in the 1980s. In both Europe and North America, mental suffering and mental health problems have gradually come to occupy a prominent position in daily life in developed societies. Indeed, a vast and varied.. (shrink)

In this commentaryI evaluate the claim made byKeenan, Nelson, OÕConnor, and Pascual-Leone (2001) that since self-recognition results from right hemispheric activity, self-awareness too is likely to be produced by the activity of the same hemisphere. This reasoning is based on the assumption that self-recognition represents a valid operationalization of self-awareness; I present two views that challenge this rationale. Keenan et al. also support their claim with published evidence relating brain activityand self-awareness; I closelyexamine their analysis of one specific review of (...) literature and conclude that it appears to be biased. Finally, recent research suggests that inner speech (which is associated with left hemispheric activity) is linked to self-awareness—an observation that further casts doubt on the existence of a right hemispheric self-awareness. Ó 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved. (shrink)