We are printing, by kind permission of the Law Commission, two sections of the report of the Law Commission on injuries to unborn children. This report was the result of a request to the Law Commission by the Lord Chancellor at the time (Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone) to advise on `what the nature and extent of civil liability for antenatal injury should be'. The Law Commission followed its usual practice in such circumstances of consulting various bodies and obtaining expert (...) advice on the subject and then embodying the results in a working paper (Working Paper No. 47 - injuries to unborn children) published on 19 January 1973, which preceded their report (Cmnd 5709). Meanwhile a Royal Commission is considering much wider issues of civil liability for injury (including antenatal injury) but the terms of reference for the Law Commission were much narrower and confined to the position of children injured before birth. In the section relating to the present law the report makes it clear that it is probable that liability under the common law already exists. The Scottish Law Commission has also issued a report (Cmnd 5371). They were given different terms of reference and came to somewhat different conclusions. We are printing from this long report the paragraphs discussing the medical background and the summary of recommendations. As will be evident on reading the paragraphs on the medical background to injuries to the unborn child, events are moving very rapidly, particularly in the study of congenital defects and the effects of drugs but the problems of proof present great difficulty. Other causes of injury to the unborn child are better known to the general public: for example, those following the illness, infection and disease of the mother during pregnancy, injury caused in attempted termination of pregnancy and the risks resulting from the mother's condition. The summary of the recommendations sets out very clearly the legal position of the unborn child, as the Law Commission sees it, arising from injury before birth, the final conclusion being that `legislation is desirable'. These extracts from the report, apart from their intrinsic interest, lead on to the paper by Mr Kennedy and Dr Edwards in which they set out their criticisms of it, and provide quick references to the original document. (shrink)

This collection of newly published essays examines our relationship to physical objects that invoke, commemorate, and honor the past. The recent destruction of cultural heritage in war and controversies over Civil War monuments in the US have foregrounded the importance of artifacts that embody history. The book invites us to ask: How do memorials convey their meanings? What is our responsibility for the preservation or reconstruction of historically significant structures? How should we respond when the public display of a monument (...) divides a community? This anthology includes coverage of the destruction of Palmyra and the Bamiyan Buddhas, the loss of cultural heritage through war and natural disasters, the explosive controversies surrounding Confederate-era monuments, and the decay of industry in the U.S. Rust Belt. The authors consider issues of preservation and reconstruction, the nature of ruins, the aesthetic and ethical values of memorials, and the relationship of cultural memory to material artifacts that remain from the past. Written by a leading group of philosophers, art historians, and archeologists, the 23 chapters cover monuments and memorials from Dubai to Detroit, from the instant destruction of Hiroshima to the gradual sinking of Venice. (shrink)

Nous proposons dans ce volume une approche pluridisciplinaire du sens commun. Fruit d'un travail collectif organisé au CURAPP et dans le cadre du programme scientifique ASC, les articles ici présentés, par la diversité de leurs orientations théoriques et disciplinaires, contribuent à faire un état des lieux de la question. L'idée de sens commun est fréquemment utilisée et citée en sociologie, philosophie, linguistique, psychologie, sans qu'il en soit toujours proposé de définition ou d'analyse critique. Elle demandait un travail de définition et (...) de requalification historique et théorique, et de mise en rapport à des corrélats : la norme, le sens moral, le sens social, le sens critique. L'ouvrage vise donc la description, aussi précise que possible des formes et des normes du sens commun en tant qu'elles enveloppent des dimensions cognitives, perceptives, linguistiques, sociales et morales. Il apparaît vite que cette notion résiste à la simple analyse et que seule la superposition de différents points de vue permet d'en percevoir quelques contours. On ne sera pas étonné de la diversité des figures convoquées et de la variété des objets à partir desquels elle est manifestée et interprétée. L'intérêt du sens commun comme objet d'investigation philosophique est alors d'apparaître comme ce qui permet de reprendre de manière oblique certains questionnements classiques qu'il déplace. Ainsi de la question topique des formes affectives, linguistiques et sociales d'expression du sentiment, de l'ancrage de la moralité dans une nature humaine et dans une sensibilité partagée ou encore de la manière dont le sens commun permet de réinterpréter, dans l'histoire des sciences sociales, la question des liens entre action et critique. (shrink)

Much work on the sense of agency has focused either on abnormal cases, such as delusions of control, or on simple action tasks in the laboratory. Few studies address the nature of the sense of agency in complex natural settings, or the effect of skill on the sense of agency. Working from 2 case studies of mountain bike riding, we argue that the sense of agency in high-skill individuals incorporates awareness of multiple causal influences on action outcomes. This allows fine-grained (...) differentiation of the contributions of self and external factors to action outcomes. We further argue that the sense of agency incorporates prospective awareness of actions that are possible in a situation and awareness of the limits of control. These forms of sense of agency enable highly flexible, context-sensitive strategic control, and are likely to contribute to high interindividual variability in responses to complex tasks. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn keeping with the dominant view that skills are largely automatic, the standard view of memory systems distinguishes between a representational declarative system associated with cognitive processes and a performance-based procedural system. The procedural system is thought to be largely responsible for the performance of well-learned skilled actions. Here we argue that most skills do not fully automate, which entails that the declarative system should make a substantial contribution to skilled performance. To support this view, we review evidence showing that (...) the declarative system does indeed play a number of roles in skilled action. (shrink)

When we read, we do not fixate on each word! How does that work? By deep theory those sorts of decisions must be the result of complex decisions involving the specific “word,” the linguistic context in which it appears, and visual information. But is reading really all that difficult? After all, simple heuristics models of reading seem to do sort of okay by only considering the additive effects of word and context. Entropy measures do well at predicting word “skipping” and (...) suggest that “word frequency” may play the dominant role in the “decision” to skip or not skip! (shrink)

The basic principles of scientific research from the great French physiologist whose contributions in the 19th century included the discovery of vasomotor nerves; nature of curare and other poisons in human body; more.

Claude Lefort is one of the leading social and political theorists in France today. This anthology of his most important work published over the last four decades makes his writing widely accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time. With exceptional skill Lefort combines the analysis of contemporary political events with a sensitivity to the history of political thought. His critical account of the development of bureaucracy and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is a timely contribution (...) to current debates about the nature and shortcomings of these societies. His incisive analyses of Marx's theory of history and concept of ideology provide the backdrop for a highly original account of the role of symbolism in modern societies. While critical of many traditional assumptions and doctrines, Lefort develops a political position based on a reappraisal of the idea of human rights and a reconsideration of what "democracy" means today. The Political Forms of Modern Society is a major contribution to contemporary social and political theory. The volume includes a substantial introduction that describes the context of Lefort's writings and highlights the central themes of his work. (shrink)

We investigate flexibility and problem solving in skilled action. We conducted a field study of mountain bike riding that required a learner rider to cope with major changes in technique and equipment. Our results indicate that relatively inexperienced individuals can be capable of fairly complex 'on-the-fly' problem solving which allows them to cope with new conditions. This problem solving is hard to explain for classical theories of skill because the adjustments are too large to be achieved by automatic mechanisms and (...) too complex and rapid to be achieved by cognitive processes as they are usually understood. A recent theory, Mesh, can explain these results because it posits that skill-specific cognitive abilities develop during skill learning and that control typically involves an interplay between cognitive and automatic mechanisms. Here we develop Mesh further, providing a detailed explanation for these problem solving abilities. We argue that causal representation, metacognitive awareness and other forms of performance awareness combine in the formulation and control of action strategies. We also argue that the structure of control present in this case is inconsistent with Bratman's model of intentions, and that, in the face of high uncertainty and risk, intentions can be much more labile than Bratman recognises. In addition, we found limitations and flaws in problem solving which illuminate the representations involved. Finally, we highlight the crucial role of social and cultural learning in the development of complex skills. (shrink)

If philosophers held popularity contests, David Hume would be a perennial winner. Witty, a bon vivant, and champion of reason over bigotry and superstition, it is not surprising that many contemporary thinkers want to recruit him as an ally or claim his views as precursors to their own. In the debate over the moral content of artworks and its possible relevance for artistic and aesthetic value, the group whose views are known variously as “ethicism,” “moralism,” or “moderate moralism” has claimed (...) Hume as one of its own.1 Very briefly, “moderate moralism” is the view that sometimes the moral content of artworks must be taken into account when assessing artistic or aesthetic value. The moralists’ presumed . (shrink)

Beliefs about hypothetical situations need to be 'quarantined' from factual representations, so that our inference processes do not make false conclusions about the real world. Nichols argued for the existence of a place where these special beliefs are kept: the pretence box. We show that this theory has a number of drawbacks, including its inability to account for simultaneously keeping track of multiple imagined worlds. We offer an explanation that remedies these problems: beliefs of content imagination each belong to some (...) number of microtheories; systems of ideas tagged as being true or false only in certain contexts. (shrink)

In the latest years of the 6th/12th century, two chains of affiliation of a distinctive kind make their appearance in the Muslim world, in the East on one hand, and in the West on the other: the first is referred to in the sources as silsilat al-muṣāfaḥa, the second as silsilat al-mushābaka. These ‘chains’, mentioned mostly in works pertaining to the genre of prosopographic literature in the largest sense, experienced a broad and rapid expansion throughout the dār al-islām. They are (...) linked to a specific ritual aimed at perpetuating, across generations, a physical contact with the Prophet. Widespread among the ʿulamāʾ, they become conflated with the musalsalāt ḥadīths, or ‘chained traditions’, during the Ottoman era. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Master and the Disciple The Light and the Shadow Conclusion.

Writing involves risks—the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of inadvertently supporting a reader’s prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must “clear a passage within the agitated world of passions,” an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their own speech. In _Writing: (...) The Political Test, _France’s leading political philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the ideological and contextual traps that would doom their attempts to articulate a new vision. Lefort examines writers whose works provide special insights into this problem of risk, both literary artists and political philosophers. Among them are Salman Rushdie, Sade, Tocqueville,m Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Orwell, Kant, Robespierre, Guizot, and Pierre Clastres. In Tocqueville, for example, Lefort finds that the author’s improvisatory and open-ended expression represents the character of the democratic experience. Orwell’s work on totalitarianism shows up the totalitarian subject’s complicity in this political regime. And Rushdie is remarkable for his solid attack on relativism. With the character and fate of the political forms of modernity, democracy, and totalitarianism a central theme, Lefort concludes with some reflections on the collapse of the Soviet Union. This intriguing and accessible exploration of literature’s political aspects and political philosophy’s literary ones will be welcomed by those who have been stymied by current efforts to bridge these two fields. Taken together, the essays in this volume also stand as an intellectual autobiography of Lefort, making it an excellent introduction to his work for less experience students of political theory or philosophy. (shrink)

This article examines whether and how the participation of women in the firm’s board of directors and senior management enhances financial performance. We use the Fama and French (1992, 1993) valuation framework to take the level of risk into consideration, when comparing firm performances, whereas previous studies used either raw stock returns or accounting ratios. Our results indicate that firms operating in complex environments do generate positive and significant abnormal returns when they have a high proportion of women officers. Although (...) the participation of women as directors does not seem to make a difference in this regard, firms with a high proportion of women in both their management and governance systems generate enough value to keep up with normal stock-market returns. These findings tend to support the policies currently being discussed or implemented in some countries and organizations to foster the advancement of women in business. (shrink)

This study critically examines the concept of benefit‐sharing in the context of health research involving human participants in South Africa, identifying a significant gap in the precision and application of terminology. It introduces a new terminological framework designed to provide clarity and facilitate standardisation in both national and international discourse on benefit‐sharing. The analysis extends to the complex legal landscape in South Africa, highlighting the nuances of mandated, permitted, and prohibited practices of benefit‐sharing across various statutes. This reveals substantial implications (...) for ethics committees, researchers, and participants, emphasising the need for a legal and ethical recalibration. Furthermore, the manuscript critiques South Africa's main ethics instruments for their inadequate guidance on benefit‐sharing and proposes recommendations for enhancing the Department of Health's ethics guidelines. By advocating for a coherent, legally informed approach to ethical decision‐making, the study underscores the need for integrating the proposed framework and legal insights into ethics guidelines. This comprehensive strategy aims not only to advance ethical practices within South Africa but also to contribute significantly to the global discourse on benefit‐sharing in health research. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce qu'un enseignement? Une pensée? Qu'autorisent-ils? À la suite de Claire Brunet, Sandra Laugier et Frédérique Ildefonse qui dirigent ce volume, d'anciens étudiants, aujourd'hui chercheurs renommés ou plus discrets, creusent à travers le sillon de leur discipline ce que leur a permis l'enseignement de leur maître commune à l'École normale supérieure. Les amitiés intellectuelles s'y joignent. Ce que l'on appelle communément communication dans le monde académique devient texte. Tous, en creux, décrivent l'influence d'un enseignement, la liberté qu'il permet à des (...) esprits pour s'épanouir et nous laissent découvrir un portrait intellectuel d'une grande originalité. La pensée de Claude Imbert, philosophe, logicienne, longtemps directrice du département de philosophie de la rue d'Ulm, n'a pas les honneurs médiatiques français en sus des "académiques" d'usage. S'y prêterait-elle? Pourtant, la philosophe française est depuis plus de vingt ans lue, reçue et écoutée dans les universités du monde entier, des Etats-Unis à la Chine en passant par l'Amérique du Sud. Tous les textes rassemblés ici, comme autant de variations, sans jamais le dire, souhaitent contribuer à la reconnaissance de l'oeuvre. Un inédit "Ne rien oublier et tout apprendre" de la philosophe et un texte de Pascalle Monnier, écrivain, accompagnent le volume."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Il est urgent de ménager dans l'homme un espace pour Dieu, c'est-à-dire un espace d'interrogation où la Parole de Dieu puisse retentir à nouveau comme une Bonne Nouvelle. De plus en plus, le Dieu de la foi doit être cherché pour lui-même, comme une nouvelle gratuité, au-delà de l'utile et de l'inutile. Mais cette gratuité n'évoque aucune évasion. L'une des formes de la responsabilité historique du chrétien, c'est de créer des espaces pour Dieu dans le monde, en ayant la certitude (...) que c'est aussi le meilleur moyen de travailler à la guérison de tout l'homme. (shrink)

In this article, I intend to show, first of all, that the metaphysical neutrality of the Logical Investigations leads to untenable consequences and even threatens the coherence of Husserl's project. In truth, Husserl's distinction between phenomenology and metaphysics and its corollary, the pure and simple exclusion of metaphysical problems - such as that of the reality of the so-called external world - from the field of nascent phenomenology, make it impossible to give a satisfactory form to a problem as central (...) to this new discipline as that of perception. However, my final word will not be on the indis-soluble link between the problems that phenomenology poses for itself and those that Husserl would like to be able to "purify" it from the outset. However permeable the boundaries between these two general directions of research may be, phenomenology and metaphysics are not equivalent. Phenomenology can even be said to contribute to formulating and solving certain metaphysical problems, starting with the idealism/realism antithesis. It is to this contribution that I will devote the second part of these reflections. (shrink)

Does Heidegger really have a “theory of the self ” in the same way as, say, Descartes, Locke or Husserl? This is what has often been concluded bymany interpreters of Being and Time, and it is that view that this paper challenges. Heidegger not only rejects the supposition of a substantial ego, along the lines of Descartes’ conception, but he also repudiates, more generally, any “self ” understood as a present-at-hand being, an inner core of Dasein, as he insists on (...) the intrinsic connection between the “egologies,” from Descartes to Husserl, and “traditional ontology”. The fundamental-ontological approach of Selbstheit and Selbstsein, that is, ipseity and Beingoneself, constitutes rather a complete paradigm-shift in the history of Modern philosophy, and a complete break with the egologies as a whole, since both concepts refer only to “ways of being” or “ways of existing” of Dasein. Insofar as its novelty is acknowledged, the concept of ipseity may thus also be taken as an heuristic tool to investigate the history of philosophy, and especially to reformulate in slightly different terms the problem that was at the centre of the courses on « subjectivity and truth » of the late Foucault. (shrink)

This article aims at answering the following problem: since for Heidegger the historicity of Being presupposes the withdrawal of the transcendental source of such a historicity, then does Heidegger’s perspective lead to a form of relativism of the kind of an epochal historicism? If on the contrary one judges that for Heidegger there is after all, beyond the ordered unfolding of epochs in the history of Being, an ultimate transcendental or at least trans-epochal dimension, does Heidegger’s thinking lead back to (...) an ahistorical Absolute beyond historicity? In order to answer these questions, I propose to divide Heidegger’s philosophy in three stages, rather than the two stages that have usually been retained by commentators ever since the works of Richardson, in conformity with Heidegger’s own indications regarding the Turning (Kehre) of his philosophy. Indeed, Heidegger in the 1930’s develops the notion of machination (Machenschaft) and thus gives historicity a hegemonic function in Being’s essential occurrence (Wesung), itself understood as the intensification of the program of machination starting in the Greek inceptual thinking and developing itself until today’s planetary technological era. However, after 1945 Heidegger does not think anymore that the truth of Being is entirely determined by historicity and that Being essentially abandons Dasein to machination and to its gradual historical unfolding, because there is now according to him, beyond the epochs that are destined to Dasein, a trans-epochal giving (and perhaps generous) origin of presence that constitutes the supreme cause for thinking (Sache des Denkens). (shrink)

v. 1. From the Upanishads to the British empiricists.--v. 2. From Kant to the situation in 1963.--v. 3. Related readings.

Infinite regress arguments are part of a philosopher's tool kit of argumentation. But how sharp or strong is this tool? How effectively is it used? The typical presentation of infinite regress arguments throughout history is so succinct and has so many gaps that it is often unclear how an infinite regress is derived, and why an infinite regress is logically problematic, and as a result, it is often difficult to evaluate infinite regress arguments. These consequences of our customary way of (...) using this tool indicate that there is a need for a theory to re-orient our practice. My general approach to contribute to such a theory, consists of collecting and evaluating as many infinite regress arguments as possible, comparing and contrasting many of the formal and non-formal properties, looking for recurring patterns, and identifying the properties that appeared essential to those patterns. Two very general questions guided this work: How are infinite regresses generated in infinite regress arguments? How do infinite regresses logically function as premises in an argument? In answering these questions I clarify the notion of an infinite regress; identify different logical forms of infinite regresses; describe different kinds of infinite regress arguments; distinguish the rhetoric from the logic in infinite regress arguments; and suggest ways of improving our discussion and our practice of constructing and evaluating these arguments. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 214 Seiten: 249-257.

Cette édition numérique a été réalisée à partir d'un support physique, parfois ancien, conservé au sein du dépôt légal de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, conformément à la loi n° 2012-287 du 1er mars 2012 relative à l'exploitation des Livres indisponibles du XXe siècle. Quelle sera la fonction d'une logique si le formalisme l'oblitère? On l'a caractérisée sur deux états disjoints : la phénoménologie catégoriale, dont Kant avait épuisé les ressources, et le formulaire quantificationnel. « Copyright Electre » Pages de (...) début Avant-propos - Des dimensions intelligibles Première partie - La seconde navigation Présentation Chapitre premier - Le prix de l'expérience Chapitre II - Logique, histoire formalisation Chapitre III - La logique stoïcienne et la construction du récit Chapitre IV - La dissidence des preuves Deuxième partie - Mises au point Chapitre V - Catégories, apophantique, énonciation Chapitre VI - La vérité d'Aristote et la vérité de Tarski Chapitre VII - Port-Royal et la géométrie des modalités subjectives Chapitre VIII - La philosophie critique et l'énigme du jugement de gout Troisième partie - Perspectives Chapitre IX - De l'expression et de ses recommencements Chapitre X - Le roman grec. Du protreptique à l'éducation sentimentale Chapitre XI - Ce que dit le « menteur crétois », cet agent double Chapitre XII - Entre logique naturelle et intelligence artificielleChapitre XIII - Logique, grammaire, style Index nominum Pages de fin. (shrink)