Sectio 1. Indices,--Sectio 2. Concordantia prima,.

L’agence d’expertise indépendante INDEX, constituée d’architectes, d’artistes et de chercheurs, enquête sur les violences d’État en France et depuis la France. Dans cet entretien, iels expliquent comment iels réinvestissent politiquement la notion d’expertise dans les enquêtes policières, racontent leurs liens avec le collectif Forensic Architecture, explicitent ce qu’iels entendent par « vérité » dans les enquêtes en sources ouvertes et ce qu’iels mettent en place pour permettre une plus grande dissémination des outils de l’OSINT.

Fr. Roberto Busa was an Italian Jesuit. In this article his biography will briefly be presented, and some issues raised by his philosophy analyzed. Busa was known as a pioneer of computerized research in the humanities. With the support of IBM he constructed the Index Thomisticus, containing all the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. He believed that expressions of the human can be mathematically modeled. He was the originator of a specific conception of hypertext, in which logically structured (...) programs are able to challenge the general linguistic mode of thinking, in order to make better communication and understanding possible. However, Busa was also con- scious of the general ethical problems involved (Babel), and he hoped that the basic logic of objects could progress towards the truth of being. (shrink)

A review of the achievements of Fr. Busa over the course of his 60 years of work in the area of computational linguistics: internal hypertexts, the systematization of allographs, lemmatization, homographs and typologies; the lexical system; the laws of economy for graphemes, for semantic typology, for heterogeneity among terms, and of the two lexical hemispheres. Finally, the project of disciplined languages is mentioned, a response to the linguistic challenge resulting from informational globalization.

The Corpus Thomisticum proyect aims to provide scholars with a set of instruments of research on Thomas Aquinas, freely available via Internet. Among the contents already published are an edition of Aquina's Opera omnia, a bibliography presently covering some 6.000 references, and two collections of historical sources. In the next months a new edition of the Index Thomisticus, the digital edition of the Parisian exemplar manuscript of Super III Sent., and other tools and documents will be published.

This paper reports a procedure which I employed with two computational research instruments, the Index Thomisticus and its companion St. Thomas CD-ROM, in order to research the Thomistic axiom, ‘whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.’ My procedure extends to the lexicological methods developed by the pioneering creator of the Index, Roberto Busa, from single terms to a proposition. More importantly, the paper shows how the emerging results of the lexicological searches guided (...) my formation of a philosophical thesis about the axiom’s import for Aquinas’s existential metaphysics. (shrink)

In Summa theologiae, Ia, 75.5, Aquinas writes, "It is evident that all that is received in anything is received in it according to the mode of the receiver." Aquinas employs this principle throughout his career and across the full range of philosophical topics. Beginning with Quaestianes de veritate 2.5, he employs a more universal formulation which he applies even to divine being: "All that is in anything is in it according to the mode of that in which it is." As (...) modus is the term common to the principle's two formulations, I call it the modus principle. ;The dissertation is a comprehensive study of Thomas's use of the principle, based on computer research done with the Index Thomisticus and the St. Thomas CD-ROM. The 200 texts located are considered according to applications in the order of knowing, the order of being, and the order of predicating. In brief, Aquinas employs the modus principle and the term modus to give account of the intelligible coenactment in knowledge of the knower and the known; to give account of the entitative contrariety evident among beings; and to frame an analogy of being based on a primacy of existence. The principal conclusions drawn from the textual survey are that the modus principle belongs among the most basic axioms of Thomas's metaphysics, that it pertains directly to the metaphysical ultimate of his thought, namely esse, and that at the heart of the principle is a concept central to his metaphysics, namely modes of existence. ;When Aquinas subordinates formal contrariety to an actuality more ultimate than form, namely existence, a new concept of existential distinction emerges. Modus is a term of entitative contrariety that becomes necessary when a real duality of essence and existence is seen as necessary to all finite being. As Thomas traces this entitative composition to a participation in ipsum esse commune, and ultimately to a participation in ipsum esse per se subsistens, the term modus and the modus principle are seen to be in the service of his creationist metaphysics. (shrink)

L'Index scolastico-cartesien elabore par Etienne Gilson se concoit avant tout comme un instrument de travail apportant des materiaux pour l'application d'une these audacieuse qui sera plus tard developpee dans les Etudes sur le role de la pensee medievale dans la formation du systeme cartesien, et que Gilson inaugure en ces termes : On a longtemps considere que le principal titre de gloire de Bacon et Descartes avait ete de constituer une philosophie radicalement detachee de toutes les philosophies anterieures, et (...) d'en construire l'edifice entier a nouveaux frais. [...] Une pareille conception du cartesianisme peut a la limite se soutenir en ce qui concerne la physique, mais la psychologie, la doctrine de la connaissance, la morale et la metaphysique de Descartes sont remplies d'elements empruntes a la scolastique. La doctrine du temps, des elements et qualites des corps, de Dieu et de ses attributs, des preuves de son existence, de la creation et conservation du monde, de la substance et de son rapport aux accidents, des idees innees et de notre mode de connaissance, des etats actifs et passifs de l'ame, du rapport de la volonte a l'entendement, enfin les vues de Descartes sur la religion et ses rapports avec la philosophie temoignent que sa pensee n'est pas sans devoir quelque chose a la philosophie de l'Ecole. (shrink)

In this paper a close look is taken at van Fraassen's use of the concept of truth. It is shown that the rather deflationist understanding of the term in his more recent publications differs considerably from the one referred to in his earlier writings, where the truth of a scientific theory is construed as its correspondence to the world. As will be argued, his more recent remarks call for a reevaluation of the difference between scientific realism and constructive empiricism and (...) force him - for the sake of consistency - to give up his realist commitments regarding the world and the observable. (shrink)

Call a thought whose expression involves the utterance of an indexical an indexical thought. Thus, my thoughts that I’m annoyed, that now is not the right time, that this is not acceptable, are all indexical thoughts. Such thoughts present a prima facie problem for the thesis that thought contents are phenomenally individuated -- i.e., that each distinct thought type has a proprietarily cognitive phenomenology such that its having that phenomenology makes it the thought that it is -- given the assumption (...) that phenomenology is intrinsically determined. My concern in this paper is to blunt standard intuitions concerning the external individuation of indexical thought contents, and to defend a conception of indexical thought content that is entirely phenomenal and internalist. (shrink)

Self-awareness is commonly expressed by means of indexical expressions, primarily, first- person pronouns like.

Our universe seems to be miraculously fine-tuned for life. Multiverse theories have been proposed as an explanation for this on the basis of probabilistic arguments, but various authors have objected that we should consider our total evidence that this universe in particular has life in our inference, which would block the argument. The debate thus crucially hinges on how Bayesian background and evidence are distinguished and on how indexical or demonstrative terms are analysed. The aim of this article is to (...) take a step back and examine these various aspects of Bayesian reasoning and how they affect the arguments. The upshot is that there are reasons to resist the fine-tuning argument for the multiverse, but the "this-universe-objection" is not one of them. (shrink)

Reichenbachian approaches to indexicality contend that indexicals are "token-reflexives": semantic rules associated with any given indexical-type determine the truth-conditional import of properly produced tokens of that type relative to certain relational properties of those tokens. Such a view may be understood as sharing the main tenets of Kaplan's well-known theory regarding content, or truth-conditions, but differs from it regarding the nature of the linguistic meaning of indexicals and also regarding the bearers of truth-conditional import and truth-conditions. Kaplan has criticized these (...) approaches on different counts, the most damaging of which is that they make impossible a "logic of demonstratives". The reason for this is that the token-reflexive approach entails that not two tokens of the same sentential type including indexicals are guaranteed to have the same truth-conditions. In this paper I rebut this and other criticisms of the Reichenbachian approach. Additionally, I point out that Kaplan's original theory of "true demonstratives" is empirically inadequate, and claim that any modification capable of accurately handling the linguistic data would have similar problems to those attributed to the Reichenbachian approach. This is intended to show that the difficulties, no matter how real, are not caused by idiosincracies of the "token-reflexive" view, but by deep facts about indexicality. (shrink)

L'auteur a l'intuition que Descartes avait directement lu, autant, voire plus que les thomistes, saint Augustin ; mieux, malgré ou en vertu de sa réticence à l'avouer, il en avait aussi subi l'influence indirecte, sous le poids des débats théologiques et philosophiques de son temps. Une série de rapprochements entre les textes canoniques de Descartes et certains passages de saint Augustin.