Le problème de la vérité a toujours préoccupé l'esprit humain; il hante pour ainsi dire l'homme d'aujourd'hui. Dans les brèves réflexions qui vont suivre, nous nous proposons de présenter une approximation tres limitée de ce problème tel qu'il se pose à la philosophic traditionnelle, à savoir: Le caractère historique et relatifde la connaissance humaine est-il conciliable avec I'affirmation de vérites immuables?

This paper shows that Aristotle's De Interpretatione does not separate syntax from semantics. Linguistic sentences are not syntactic entities, and non-linguistic meanings are not semantic propositions expressed by linguistic sentences. In fact, Aristotle resorts to a mental conception of meaning, distinguishing linguistic meanings in a given language from non-linguistic mental contents in relation to actual things: while the former are not the same for all, the latter are shared by everyone. Aristotle is not a modern logician, like Boole, Frege, or (...) Russell, in so far as a mental conception of meaning does not reveal an abstract semantics for a syntactic language. (shrink)

Dans nos sociétés complexes et pluralistes, les interrogations sur le droit sont de plus en plus nombreuses et il est difficile de comprendre les débats qu'elles suscitent - a fortiori d'y prendre part - sans être muni des repères intellectuels permettant de prendre la mesure de leurs enjeux théoriques. Le but de ce Dictionnaire est d'apporter de tels repères forgés par la pensée juridique, en présentant une analyse des grandes œuvres fondamentales qu'elle a produites. Mais ce Dictionnaire entend rendre compte (...) des principaux " moments " de cette pensée juridique en adoptant la démarche la plus ouverte possible, selon les deux principes directeurs suivants. Veiller d'abord à présenter les œuvres majeures qui relèvent de traditions juridiques plurielles. Cela implique de renvoyer autant au monde antique et médiéval qu'au monde moderne ou à l'époque contemporaine, mais aussi à la culture juridique de langue française autant qu'à celles de langue anglaise, allemande, italienne ou espagnole, à l'aire américaine autant qu'européenne ou non occidentale, en marquant un intérêt particulier aux grandes traditions juridiques juive, musulmane, chinoise et indienne. Ensuite, admettre qu'une œuvre ne doit pas nécessairement procéder de la plume du seul juriste - de l'Ecole ou du Palais - pour être identifiable comme une " grande œuvre juridique ". Pour ce Dictionnaire, celle-ci est présente dès lors qu'elle féconde la pensée juridique, même si son auteur est philosophe, sociologue, anthropologue, historien ou linguiste. Et c'est avec le même souci d'ouverture qu'il a aussi été fait appel, pour la rédaction des entrées, aux contributions des plus éminents spécialistes de sciences sociales autant que des disciplines juridiques proprement dites. (shrink)

La médecine change de visage. Le progrès dans les sciences médicales a modifié l’aspect des maladies. La relation médecin-malade se désagrège. Le phalanstère médical est agité par la contestation. Tous ses membres, malades, médecins et non-médecins sont assujettis aux contraintes de l’Economie de la Santé. Les paradoxes qui obscurcissent la vie médicale appellent des solutions nouvelles. L’enseignement n’est plus réservé aux futurs médecins mais aussi, à travers l’Education sanitaire, aux futurs malades que sont les gens bien portants. La part qui (...) se déroule en Faculté n’est plus qu’une préparation à la Formation permanente. La recherche n’est plus réservée seulement à un étroit sérail, mais s’inscrit dans les préoccupations de tous au service de tous. L’informatique offre au médecin le moyen le plus sûr de faire rayonner le savoir et de mieux organiser le service public qu’est aujourd’hui la médecine. L’hôpital enfin est appelé à devenir le foyer de toutes les activités médicales, la « Maison » du malade aussi bien que celle du médecin. Le paradoxe du médecin est celui de la médecine tout entière. Il est l’occasion de faire naître un autre malade, un autre médecin pour une autre médecine et d’assurer le passage de l’éthique médicale vers une éthique de santé. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Prior Analytics identifies deductions simpliciter with inferential necessity, so that a deduced conclusion is necessarily inferred from some premises. Modern logical reconstructions claim that inferential necessity in Aristotle corresponds to logical validity. However, this logical reconstruction fails on two accounts. First, logical validity does not highlight Aristotle’s distinction between inferential necessity and predicative necessity, meaning that the inferential necessity of a deduction is not of the same kind as the predicative necessity of a non‑deductive argument. Second, logical validity does (...) not explain the relevance of Aristotle’s distinction between complete and incomplete deductions. Logicians speak of complete deduction by adding the term “obvious” or “transparent” to logical validity, and then criticize Aristotle’s view for being unclear. However, Aristotle’s position is not confronted with this difficulty. There is nothing to add to inferential necessity, which already means complete deducibility, as opposed to incomplete deducibility, deemed to be potentially complete. Accordingly, the Prior Analytics reduces the incomplete deductions to the complete deductions in order to prove the potential, inferential necessity of the incomplete deductions. Logical validity would have been faithful to Aristotle’s text, if it had been possible to coin a notion of potential validity, distinct from both validity and invalidity. (shrink)

Véronique Adam : Les neurosciences ne s’intéressent que depuis très récemment à l’olfaction. Pourriez‑vous expliquer pourquoi ce sens est devenu un objet d’étude plus prégnant? Jean-Louis Millot : En fait, l’olfaction demeure encore peu étudiée comparée à d’autres modalités sensorielles. De manière générale, les neurosciences cognitives actuelles, comme d’autres investigations scientifiques chez l’homme par le passé, se focalisent davantage sur les compétences cognitives complexes, telles qu...

Contrairement à une idée reçue, les religions fabriquent de nombreuses différences : c’est une façon de donner sens au monde. La difficulté vient de ce qu’elles ne coïncident pas avec les différenciations et les séparations modernes. Du coup, les différences religieuses du passé peuvent s’effacer, mais aussi s’exacerber dans des formes identitaires. Mais elles peuvent aussi rappeler à la modernité que le franchissement de certaines limites en certains domaines l’expose au risque de « déraillements » .Contrary to a received idea, (...) religions create a great many differences in their attempts to give meaning to the world. The difficulty arises from the fact that these differences do not coincide with the differentiations and separations of modern times. As a result, the religious differences of the past can fade away, but they can also become exacerbated through forms of identity-building. Nevertheless, they can also be a reminder to modern times that crossing over certain boundaries in certain areas can create risks of “derailment”. (shrink)

When it was first published in French in 1980, The Ordinary Man of Cinema signaled a shift from the French film criticism of the 1960s to a new breed of film philosophy that disregarded the semiotics and post-structuralism of the preceding decades. Schefer describes the schizophrenic subjectivity the cinema offers us: the film as a work projected without memory, viewed by (and thereby lived by) a subject scarred and shaped by memory. The Ordinary Man of Cinema delineates the phenomenology of (...) movie-going and the fleeting, impalpable zone in which an individuals personal memory confronts the cinemas ideological images to create a new way of thinking. It is also a book replete with mummies and vampires, tyrants and prostitutes, murderers and freaksfigures that are fundamental to Schefers conception of the cinema, because the worlds that cinema traverses (our worlds, interior and exterior) are worlds of pain, unconscious desire, decay, repressed violence, and the endless mystery of the body. Fear and pleasure breed monsters, and such are what Schefers emblematic "ordinary man" seeks and encounters when engaging in the disordering of the ordinary that the movie theater offers him. Among other things, Schefer considers "The Gods" in 31 brief essays on film stills and "The Criminal Life" with reflections on spectatorship and autobiography. While Schefers book has long been standard reading in French film scholarship, until now it has been something of a missing link to the field (and more broadly, French theory) in English. It is one of the building blocks of more widely known and read translations of Gilles Deleuze (who cited this book as an influence on his own cinema books) and Jacques Rancière. (shrink)

Au sein de la science politique les approches sociologiques sont les plus réceptives à la psychologie sociale entendue comme cognition sociale. L'étude du politique a longtemps privilégié des objets institutionnels et l'influence des concepts de la psychologie sociale y est ancienne . Aujourd'hui de nouvelles questions de société et formes de mobilisation, comme l'intégration des minorités ou les rapports de genre, apparaissent. L'analyse des institutions et des objets classiques est renouvelée. Les problématiques font une grande place à la dynamique des (...) représentations, aux modes de raisonnement et d'inférences, aux formes de connaissance, à l'utilisation de l'information par les acteurs. Ainsi la science politique utilise de plus en plus les concepts et méthodes des approches cognitives.Within the field of political science, sociological approaches are more and more akin to social psychology understood as social cognition. The study of politics has long been focused on institutional subjects and influenced by concepts derived from social psychology . Today, new questions about society and new forms of mobilization such as the integration of minorities or gender relationships are emerging. As a result, a renewed analysis of institutions and traditional objects is required. Current problems are more and more centred on the dynamics of representations, on ways of reasoning, on forms of knowledge and on the use of information. Political science is increasingly using the concepts and methods of cognitive approaches. (shrink)

, which uses the intuitionistic propositional calculus, with the only connective →. It is very important, because the well known Curry-Howard correspondence between proofs and programs was originally discovered with it, and because it enjoys the normalization property: every typed term is strongly normalizable. It was extended to second order intuitionistic logic, in 1970, by J.-Y. Girard [4], under the name of system F, still with the normalization property.More recently, in 1990, the Curry-Howard correspondence was extended to classical logic, following (...) Felleisen and Griffin [6] who discovered that the law of Peirce corresponds to control instructions in functional programming languages. It is interesting to notice that, as early as 1972, Clint and Hoare [1] had made an analogous remark for the law of excluded middle and controlled jump instructions in imperative languages.There are now many type systems which are based on classical logic; among the best known are the system LC of J.-Y. Girard [5] and the λμ-calculus of M. Parigot [11]. We shall use below a system closely related to the latter, called the λ c -calculus [8, 9]. Both systems use classical second order logic and have the normalization property.In the sequel, we shall extend the λ c -calculus to the Zermelo-Frænkel set theory. The main problem is due to the axiom of extensionality. To overcome this difficulty, we first give the axioms of ZF in a suitable (equivalent) form, which we call ZF ɛ. (shrink)

Inλ-calculus, the strategy of leftmost reduction (“call-by-name”) is known to have good mathematical properties; in particular, it always terminates when applied to a normalizable term. On the other hand, with this strategy, the argument of a function is re-evaluated at each time it is used.To avoid this drawback, we define the notion of “storage operator”, for each data type. IfT is a storage operator for integers, for example, let us replace the evaluation, by leftmost reduction, ofϕτ (whereτ is an integer, (...) andϕ anyλ-term) by the evaluation oftτϕ. Then, this computation is the same as the following: first computeτ up to some reduced formτ 0, and then applyϕ toτ 0. So, we have simulated “call-by-value” evaluation within the strategy of leftmost reduction.The main theorem of the paper (Corollary of Theorem 4.1) shows that, in a second orderλ-calculus, using Gödel's translation of classical intuitionistic logic, we can find a very simple type (or specification) for storage operators. Thus, it gives a way to get such operators, which is to prove this type in second order intuitionistic predicate calculus. (shrink)

We describe here a simple method in order to obtain programs from proofs in second-order classical logic. Then we extend to classical logic the results about storage operators proved by Krivine for intuitionistic logic. This work generalizes previous results of Parigot.

Christianism often mentions perfumes. Its liturgy based on Scripture uses incense and balm. A reading from the Bible and the lives of saints reveals many extraordinary perfumes (“odours of sanctity”). The Virgin Mary holds extreme importance among saints and it is quite common to see her spreading miraculous fragrances. These are subtle, discrete but pleasant signals from Heaven. They are sent to everyone in order to convert non‑believers or turn back believers to the faith in God. The divine origin of (...) perfumes is tied up with the memories and hopes from Paradise. It marks bodies escaping from death and entering into eternal life. (shrink)

Many logicians have tried to formalize a modal logic from the Prior Analytics, but the general view is that Aristotle has failed to offer a consistent modal logic there. This paper explains that Aristotle is not interested in modal logic as such. Modalities for him pertain to the relations of predication, without challenging the assertoric system of deductions simpliciter. Thus, demonstrations or dialectical deductions have modal predicates and yet are still deductions simpliciter. It is a matter of distinguishing inferential necessity (...) that applies to every deduction from the modal predicates in the two premises and conclusion. The modality of demonstrations can be either necessary or possible. The necessity is predicative, i.e., independent of inferential necessity. While the possible demonstration challenges the predicative necessity of the necessary demonstration, it preserves the inferential necessity of the deduction simpliciter. (shrink)