The recent book from Marc Le Glatin Internet, un séisme dans la culture?, performs three intellectual acts. First, it resumes the main facts concerning the evolution of cultural practices on the Internet, particularly the multiplication of « free » downloading of works that are in principle protected by intellectual property. Second, it interrogates the notions of intellectual property and cultural diversity in relation to the new possibilities opened up by the Net. Third, it proposes some tentative solutions for legal and (...) economic problems, mainly the artists remuneration, related to current media transformations. Facts are correctly outlined and questions are worth asking. But the proposed solutions – inspired by a mix of centralizing jacobinism, socialism and post-modernism – sound deceptive because they are based on philosophical and political presuppositions that are quite contrary to the current stream of cultural mutation. I discuss the author’s thesis from the standpoint of a philosophy of collective intelligence and proposes some solutions oriented toward the best exploitation of the new technical possibilities in the service of human development and emancipation. (shrink)

Collective Intelligence, the book in French, that Pierre Levy wrote before the existence of the worldwide web, when only the Internet existed, it's a philosophical vision of the future, a philosophical vision of what could be a global civilization based on the digital and the general interconnection of all the computers. In the interview, Levy addresses the creation o the WWW by Tim Berners Lee as a form of collective intelligence. He then discusses Berners Lee's proposal for (...) a reform of the WWW to avoid its confiscation by the big platforms, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Then, he introduces his most recent project the IELM as a tool for semantic metadata and a code between the natural languages and the algorithms, and all the apparatus of computations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bishop Berkeley Exorcises the Infinite: Fuzzy Consequences of Strict Finitism1 David M. Levy Introduction It all began simply enough when Molyneux asked the wonderful question whether a person born blind, now able to see, would recognize by sight what he knew by touch (Davis 1960). After George Berkeley elaborated an answer, that we learn to perceive by heuristics, the foundations ofcontemporarymathematics wereinruin. Contemporary mathematicians waved their hands and (...) changed the subject.2 Berkeley's answer received a much more positive response from economists. Adam Smith,in particular, seizedupon Berkeley's doctrine that welearn to perceive distance tobuild anelaborate system in which one learns to perceive one's self-interest.3 Perhaps because older histories of mathematics are a positive hindrance in helping us understand the importance of Berkeley's argument against infinitesimals,4 its consequences for economics have passed unnoticed. If infinitesimal numbers are ruled out, and we wish to maintain an algebra, then we rule out infinite numbers. This implication of Berkeley's argumenthas a dramatic implication for our understanding ofthe history ofideas about rule-directed action. Let me motivate this claim with a well-known historical problem. The social doctrine set forth by John Locke outside the Two Treatises depends critically upon individual belief about possible states of infinite pain or pleasure. The critical issue for the intolerance of atheism in Locke's system is his claim that without beUefin the infinite bliss of heaven forgone by a criminal, there is no reason to think a calculating individual will avoid crime.5 Locke's discussion is so different from the discussion of religion by David Hume and Smith. Here, questions of the substance of belief—the infinite worth of Heaven—have largely vanished.6 What happened between Locke and Hume-Smith? One answer is Pierre Bayle and Bernard Mandeville. Berkeley's doctrine that only the finite is perceived is, I think, a better answer. Out of sight, out ofmind. In this paper I propose to give a close look at the content and consequences ofBishop Berkeley's once famous Towards a New Theory ofVision. While there are other aspects ofBerkeley's work that attract Volume XVIII Number 2 511 DAVID M. LEVY attention from historians ofeconomics,7 1 shall claim that Berkeley's insight into human perception in the Theory of Vision is central to Adam Smith's attempt to found economic behaviour on the self-awareness of systematic illusion. There is no doubt that Smith finds that much ofhuman behaviour is characterized by illusion.8 The difficulty arises, or so it seems to me, from modern unwilUngness to beheve that illusion can be systematic. There are four pieces to my argument. First, we consider Berkeley's statementofwhat we shall call his doctrine ofstrict finitism in perception.9 Berkeley puts forward two postulates: 1) there exists some minimum perceptible quantity, and 2) distance is not perceived directly but by experience. Second, we define strict finitism and demonstrate that it translates into the claim that perception is fuzzy in a technical sense. If Berkeleian perception is fuzzy, then some modern criticism of Berkeley's strict finitism is based upon a simple misunderstandingofthe propertiesoffuzzyrelations. Thisis quite easy to set right. (Getting right the doctrine of those who implicitly take perception to be fuzzy—Adam Smith is my prime candidate—will be muchharder.)Third, wereconsiderBerkeley's dispute withMandeville on the role ofinfinite gain in choice. Here, we find Mandeville putting forward the Berkeleian position that if infinite amounts mattered, people would not behave as they do. Berkeley's position against Mandeville, however, seems to depend upon the supposition that infinite distance is sensible.10 Earlier, however, the position that Mandeville argued for was defended by Berkeley. Fourth, we ask why all this isn't well known. The debate between Berkeley and Mandeville has been well studied, as has been the link between Berkeley and the Scots. In fact, our work focuses on one aspect of Berkeley's work that led to his challenge of the contemporary foundations of the calculus. If sense is a matter of perception, and infinitesimals cannot be perceived, then they are quite literally nonsense. Armed with this insight, Berkeley refuted contemporary mathematics. Nevertheless, the calculus was too... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bishop Berkeley Exorcises the Infinite: Fuzzy Consequences of Strict Finitism1 David M. Levy Introduction It all began simply enough when Molyneux asked the wonderful question whether a person born blind, now able to see, would recognize by sight what he knew by touch (Davis 1960). After George Berkeley elaborated an answer, that we learn to perceive by heuristics, the foundations ofcontemporarymathematics wereinruin. Contemporary mathematicians waved their hands and (...) changed the subject.2 Berkeley's answer received a much more positive response from economists. Adam Smith,in particular, seizedupon Berkeley's doctrine that welearn to perceive distance tobuild anelaborate system in which one learns to perceive one's self-interest.3 Perhaps because older histories of mathematics are a positive hindrance in helping us understand the importance of Berkeley's argument against infinitesimals,4 its consequences for economics have passed unnoticed. If infinitesimal numbers are ruled out, and we wish to maintain an algebra, then we rule out infinite numbers. This implication of Berkeley's argumenthas a dramatic implication for our understanding ofthe history ofideas about rule-directed action. Let me motivate this claim with a well-known historical problem. The social doctrine set forth by John Locke outside the Two Treatises depends critically upon individual belief about possible states of infinite pain or pleasure. The critical issue for the intolerance of atheism in Locke's system is his claim that without beUefin the infinite bliss of heaven forgone by a criminal, there is no reason to think a calculating individual will avoid crime.5 Locke's discussion is so different from the discussion of religion by David Hume and Smith. Here, questions of the substance of belief—the infinite worth of Heaven—have largely vanished.6 What happened between Locke and Hume-Smith? One answer is Pierre Bayle and Bernard Mandeville. Berkeley's doctrine that only the finite is perceived is, I think, a better answer. Out of sight, out ofmind. In this paper I propose to give a close look at the content and consequences ofBishop Berkeley's once famous Towards a New Theory ofVision. While there are other aspects ofBerkeley's work that attract Volume XVIII Number 2 511 DAVID M. LEVY attention from historians ofeconomics,7 1 shall claim that Berkeley's insight into human perception in the Theory of Vision is central to Adam Smith's attempt to found economic behaviour on the self-awareness of systematic illusion. There is no doubt that Smith finds that much ofhuman behaviour is characterized by illusion.8 The difficulty arises, or so it seems to me, from modern unwilUngness to beheve that illusion can be systematic. There are four pieces to my argument. First, we consider Berkeley's statementofwhat we shall call his doctrine ofstrict finitism in perception.9 Berkeley puts forward two postulates: 1) there exists some minimum perceptible quantity, and 2) distance is not perceived directly but by experience. Second, we define strict finitism and demonstrate that it translates into the claim that perception is fuzzy in a technical sense. If Berkeleian perception is fuzzy, then some modern criticism of Berkeley's strict finitism is based upon a simple misunderstandingofthe propertiesoffuzzyrelations. Thisis quite easy to set right. (Getting right the doctrine of those who implicitly take perception to be fuzzy—Adam Smith is my prime candidate—will be muchharder.)Third, wereconsiderBerkeley's dispute withMandeville on the role ofinfinite gain in choice. Here, we find Mandeville putting forward the Berkeleian position that if infinite amounts mattered, people would not behave as they do. Berkeley's position against Mandeville, however, seems to depend upon the supposition that infinite distance is sensible.10 Earlier, however, the position that Mandeville argued for was defended by Berkeley. Fourth, we ask why all this isn't well known. The debate between Berkeley and Mandeville has been well studied, as has been the link between Berkeley and the Scots. In fact, our work focuses on one aspect of Berkeley's work that led to his challenge of the contemporary foundations of the calculus. If sense is a matter of perception, and infinitesimals cannot be perceived, then they are quite literally nonsense. Armed with this insight, Berkeley refuted contemporary mathematics. Nevertheless, the calculus was too... (shrink)

_Democracy Past and Future_ is the first English-language collection of Pierre Rosanvallon's most important essays on the historical origins, contemporary difficulties, and future prospects of democratic life. One of Europe's leading political thinkers, Rosanvallon proposes in these essays new readings of the history, aims, and possibilities of democratic theory and practice, and provides unique theoretical understandings of key moments in democracy's trajectory, from the French Revolution and the struggles for universal suffrage to European unification and the crises of the (...) present. In so doing, he lays out an influential new theory of how to write the history of politics. Rosanvallon's historical and philosophical approach examines the "pathologies" that have curtailed democracy's potential and challenges the antitotalitarian liberalism that has dominated recent political thought. All in all, he adroitly combines historical and theoretical analysis with an insistence on the need for a new form of democracy. Above all, he asks what democracy means when the people rule but are nowhere to be found. Throughout his career, Rosanvallon has resisted simple categorization. Rosanvallon was originally known as a primary theorist of the "second left", which hoped to stake out a non-Marxist progressive alternative to the irresistible appeal of revolutionary politics. In fact, Rosanvallon revived the theory of "civil society" even before its usage by East European dissidents made it globally popular as a non-statist politics of freedom and pluralism. His ideas have been shaped by a variety of influences, ranging from his work with an influential French union to his teachers François Furet and Claude Lefort. Well known throughout Europe as a historian, political theorist, social critic, and public intellectual, Pierre Rosanvallon was recently elected to a professorship at the Collège de France, Paris, a position held at various times by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu. _Democracy Past and Future_ begins with Rosanvallon's groundbreaking and synthetic lecture that he delivered upon joining this institution. Throughout the volume, Rosanvallon illuminates and invigorates contemporary political and democratic thought. (shrink)

The present volume consists of diverse individual texts, produced between 1980 and 1986, which take two forms: interviews in which Bourdieu confronts a series of probing and intelligent interviewers, and conference papers that clarify and extend specific areas of his research. Now that Bourdieu's work has achieved wide diffusion and celebrity, this is an appropriate time for this volume, a pause for retrospection and resynthesis, for corrections of misreadings and extension of previous insights, and for projection of the next stages (...) of his work. For this English edition, Bourdieu's celebrated inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Leçon sur la Leçon, has been added. The texts fall into two fundamental areas. The first area provides an overview of Bourdieu's central concepts, never before clearly explained. The second area clarifies the philosophical presuppositions of Bourdieu's studies and gives an account of his relations with the series of thinkers who formulated the problems in social and cultural theory that still preoccupy us: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Wittgenstein, Weber, Parsons, and Lévi-Strauss. Bourdieu's visions of these figures is personal and penetrating, and in his vivacious, spontaneous responses one sees at work a mode of thought that can in itself be a liberating tool of social analysis. Bourdieu applies to himself the method of analyzing cultural works that he expounds, evoking the space of theoretical possibilities presented to him at different moments of his intellectual itinerary. (shrink)

« Toute activité se laisse discerner et définir dans la mesure où elle prend forme, où elle inscrit sa courbe dans l’espace et le temps. La vie agit essentiellement comme créatrice de formes. La vie est forme, et la forme est le mode de la vie » (Henri Focillon). Formes de la géométrie et du cosmos, formes de la vie et de la pensée, formes architecturales, musicales et littéraires, formes fixes ou métamorphoses : le concept de forme est omniprésent dans (...) les sciences et dans les arts. C’est à une exploration de cette notion de forme que le Collège de France a consacré en octobre 2011 son colloque multidisciplinaire de rentrée : sa définition en philosophie chez Platon et Aristote, ses applications en mathématiques et en astrophysique, en chimie et en biologie, ses conséquences en psychologie et en linguistique, en anthropologie, en droit et dans les arts. Ces débats ont été aussi l’occasion de se tourner vers des pensées où elle joue un rôle particulièrement important, comme le structuralisme de Claude Lévi-Strauss ou l’histoire de l’art d’André Chastel. Jean-Pierre Changeux est professeur honoraire au Collège de France, chaire de Communications cellulaires. Il a dirigé la publication de trois colloques précédents du Collège de France : La Vérité dans les sciences (2003), Gènes et culture (2003) et L’Homme artificiel(2007). Contributions de Antoine Compagnon, Claude Debru, Stanislas Dehaene, Mireille Delmas-Marty, Philippe Descola, Anne Fagot-Largeault, Marcel Hénaff, Michel Hochmann, Jean-Jacques Hublin, François-Bernard Mâche, Jean-François Mangin, Jean-Claude Pecker, Jacques Reisse, John Scheid, Jesper Svenbro. (shrink)

Comment devient-on philosophe? Par quel sursaut un Aristoclès se fait-il Platon, jusqu'à s'imposer dans la liste des " auteurs philo " Il faut enquêter, non pas sur la vie privée, mais sur la vie intime : rumination intellectuelle, ton sur lequel on parle, motivations amoureuses... Ce qui fait un philosophe, c'est un immense travail sur soi, et la rencontre d'autres philosophes, vivants, de leurs problématiques. Mémoire sémantique + obsession métaphysique, voilà le code génétique du philosophe. Il débute par un attentat (...) religieux, puisqu'il commence sa carrière en niant tel ou tel sacré. Bien sûr, il vaut mieux être mâle, communiquer par les livres adopter la langue dominante, écrire quand on est célibataire. Comment gagner sa vie? Pas forcément en étant enseignant, comme c'est le cas aujourd'hui. Le profil du philosophe nous le révèle orphelin, vivant à l'étranger, souvent laid, jamais fou, et serial thinker, prêt à changer de philosophie pourvu qu'il reste, lui, à menacer le monde donnera ou donnera pas du sens à notre vie? Le philosophe est l'être inquiet qui pense inquiéter l'Être par deux trois mots bien aiguisés. (shrink)

À travers une suite d’œuvres qui cherchaient toujours un autre but, Lévi-Strauss dessine tout de même les contours d’une éthique qui prend acte d’un certain nihilisme - la vie humaine n’a pas un sens qu’elle pourrait « découvrir » et elle ne saurait non plus donner son sens au monde -. Il détermine, en particulier, quelques caractéristiques d’une éthique qui veille à la protection de toutes les cultures et à la préservation de la terre qui abrite tous les vivants et (...) qui verra la fin de l’homme comme elle a connu la fin de tant d’espèces. Le lecteur de Lévi-Strauss s’étonne de constater que le structuralisme que l’auteur met en œuvre par méthode dans son travail anthropologique s’associe à un usage de fictions quand il s’agit de tracer une éthique. Notre enquête consiste à examiner cette association un peu étrange qui fait ressortir que, sans adhérer à l’utilitarisme, qui use d’une théorie des fictions, l’auteur se sert de cette dernière sur des points stratégiques pour éviter les dialectiques de style kantien et hégélien, c’est-à-dire pour que les oppositions se fassent contrepoids entre elles et pour que les contradictions puissent se résoudre en plis plutôt que se déchirer entre elles. (shrink)

La crise du socialisme est devenue un lieu commun de la pensée politique et s’explique par la conjonction de plusieurs évolutions contemporaines. À écouter certains discours qui, il n’y a pas si longtemps, décrivaient, à l’image de Bernard-Henry Lévy, le socialisme, comme un « grand cadavre à la renverse », être socialiste aujourd’hui, c’est d’abord être le représentant..

À la différence du sermon chrétien, le sermon juif n’est pas essentiel à la vie religieuse et le prédicateur n’a guère de statut. Il est pourtant une réalité sociale et littéraire de premier plan en Espagne. Que la philosophie ait place dans ce genre qui s’adresse à tous s’éclaire par trois choses : les textes que la liturgie amène à prendre pour occasions de la prédication ; la « reconfiguration rationaliste du judaïsme » par Maïmonide ; la résistance au prosélytisme. (...) D’où des sujets spéculatifs (création, libre arbitre, justice absolue ou dans l’intérêt public, service par crainte ou par amour, etc.), des références aux auteurs philosophiques, juifs ou non, un lexique et un type d’argumentation. Les conversions nombreuses lors des persécutions de 1391 firent apparaître la nécessité d’une prédication adaptée aux besoins du peuple. Les perspectives ouvertes par l’ Éthique à Nicomaque traduite en hébreu vers 1400 et l’exemple de la prédication chrétienne donnèrent lieu au milieu du xv e s. au programme de Joseph Ibn Shem Tov regardant le rôle du prédicateur, qui exprimait l’emprise de la philosophie sur les penseurs juifs les plus soucieux de sauvegarder la foi. La spécificité du judaïsme se désignait comme un savoir, selon deux modèles : celui, non avoué, de la scolastique chrétienne, avec une théologie au-dessus de la philosophie, et celui d’un niveau inaccessible aux autres hommes. Mais ce savoir spécifique ne se laisse guère cerner. Après 1492, des réfugiés d’Espagne dans l’Empire Ottoman tendirent à l’identifier au corpus des homélies des rabbins anciens : Jacob Ibn Ḥabib en procura le recueil, Salomon ha-Lévi en fit la théorie. L’avantage définitif pris par la kabbale de Safed à la fin du xvi e s. a-t-il pour cause l’échec de cette recherche, ou bien en va-t-il autrement? (shrink)

Some concepts that are now part and parcel of mathematics used to be, at least until the beginning of the twentieth century, a central preoccupation of mathematicians and philosophers. The concept of continuity, or the continuous, is one of them. Nowadays, many philosophers of mathematics take it for granted that mathematicians of the last quarter of the nineteenth century found an adequate conceptual analysis of the continuous in terms of limits and that serious philosophical thinking is no longer required, except (...) perhaps when the question of the continuum is transferred to the arena of set theory where it takes the form of the infamous continuum hypothesis. As Philip Ehrlich has recently shown, this conviction goes back to the early writings of Russell who, in 1903 and then again in later writings, forcefully and eloquently pushed the view that mathematicians had given the final answer to immemorial conundrums arising from the continuous and infinitesimals . This proclamation of victory came with what was announced as the necessary defeat of the notion of the infinitesimal, despite the fact that mathematicians like Thomae, Du Bois-Reymond, Stolz, Bettazi, Veronese, Levi-Civita, and Hahn were investigating mathematical structures containing infinitesimals in a mathematically rigorous and logically consistent manner. In this respect Russell was merely walking in the footsteps of Cantor, and many of Russell's contemporaries were only too keen to keep infinitesimals out of Cantor's paradise. However, although Cantor certainly wanted to send the notion of infinitesimal to Hell, the notion kept a low profile in the mathematical purgatory, making its way in the study of non-Archimedean ordered algebraic systems. Of course, nowadays everyone has heard of Robinson's attempt at resurrecting infinitesimals in analysis in the form of non-standard analysis, but Robinson's work, despite the fact that it had, in …. (shrink)

Est-il aujourd’hui possible d’expliquer le mental à partir du cerveau? Où est le problème, diront les uns, puisque la mécanique neuronale est celle qui le crée? Comment seulement espérer, rétorqueront les autres, que la complexité de l’esprit puisse être fondée sur le seul fonctionnement cérébral? S’appuyant sur des siècles d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences, et surtout sur un examen des données expérimentales récentes, Pierre Buser établit ici une sorte de bilan, dégageant plusieurs problématiques distinctes et bien actuelles : (...) comment définir la conscience, ce site supposé abriter notre vécu subjectif, à nouveau reconnu comme instance fondamentale de l’esprit chez l’homme et aussi chez l’animal? Que sait-on aujourd’hui de l’inconscient, ce domaine où se trouvent amassés tant d’acquis de notre intellect, de notre vie cognitive et affective? Et que nous apprennent, par exemple, l’hypnose ou la méditation sur le fonctionnement de notre esprit? Pierre Buser est professeur émérite de neurosciences de l’université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie de Paris. Il est membre de l’Académie des sciences. Il a notamment publié Cerveau de soi, cerveau de l’autre, L’Inconscient aux mille visages et Le Temps, instant et durée (en collaboration avec Claude Debru). (shrink)

Trust and Governance asks several important questions: Is trust really essential to good governance, or are strong laws more important? What leads people either to trust or to distrust government, and what makes officials decide to be trustworthy? Can too much trust render the public vulnerable to government corruption, and if so what safeguards are necessary? In approaching these questions, the contributors draw upon an abundance of resources to offer different perspectives on the role of trust in government. Enriched by (...) perspectives from political science, sociology, psychology, economics, history, and philosophy, Trust and Governance opens a new dialogue on the role of trust in the vital relationship between citizenry and government. (shrink)

La philosophie est comme un casse-noix : certaines personnes ne réussissent qu'à se pincer les doigts avec, les professionnels le retournent dans tous les sens, et puis - quand même - il se trouve des gens qui s'en servent pour ouvrir ces merveilleuses noix qu'on appelle les pensées. Philosopher, c'est bien ; philosopher soi-même, c'est mieux. Philosopher soi-même chaque jour sur le quotidien, sur du banal, c'est le mieux, quand on ne compte plus sur la religion ou l'idéologie politique. Le (...) maître à penser, c'est toi. A quoi ressemble un petit-déjeuner? As-tu assez de courage pour te reconnaître dans le miroir et te reconnaître sur le " trône "? Que se passe-t-il quand tu es tenté au bureau? Une fois réveillé, vas-tu interpréter et utiliser tes rêves? Finalement, rien de tel qu'un simplissime " Où, quand, comment, pourquoi? " devant un gros problème. Chaque jour est un beau jour pour philosopher... (shrink)

Determining the semantic role of sentence constituents is a key task in determining sentence meanings lying behind a veneer of variant syntactic expression. We present a model of natural language generation from semantics using the FrameNet semantic role and frame ontology. We train the model using the FrameNet corpus and apply it to the task of automatic semantic role and frame identification, producing results competitive with previous work (about 70% role labeling accuracy). Unlike previous models used for this task, our (...) model does not assume that the frame of a sentence is known, and is able to identify null- instantiated roles, which commonly occur in our corpus and whose identification is crucial to natural language interpretation. (shrink)

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as (...) on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing with Mountains1Paul A. Harris (bio)For Sydney Levy, who brought me on board.Geologic AspirationsStone breathes within nature's time cycle…. It begins before you and continues through you and goes on. Working with stone is not resisting time but touching it.—Isamu NoguchiUnder the suffocating circumstances of lockdown, COVID conditions inevitably wafted their way into the stoned thinking of Pierre Jardin.2 The pandemic atmosphere made air apparent, and breathing (...) became personal, political, and planetary. People sought perspective in sometimes surprising ways. While many turned to the Stoics, Jardin turned to stone. Suspending his disbelief in "The Hammock of Relaxation" (fig. 1), Jardin stretched his imagination, and set himself adrift in diffuse reveries of rocky respiration. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.The Hammock of Relaxation. Pebble on book cover.Photo by author.Jardin composes a life centered in absorbing stone(s), encompassing both a physical process of soaking in a substance slowly and psychological experience of becoming engrossed in it. He feels alive with stone and stone alive in him; literally and metaphorically, he has spent hours looking at stone, listening to stone, and touching/being touched by stone. But he had never seriously considered breathing stone. Immediately, a slew of questions arose: Do rocks breathe? Do mountains? Does the Earth? What would it mean to breathe with a stone, or with the planet? Jardin's pursuit of lithic and lithospheric respirations came to comprise his geologic aspirations, which are set out here. [End Page 261]Aerial ImaginationPierre Jardin's geologic aspirations took inspiration from Gaston Bachelard's aerial imagination, as described in Air and Dreams. Accepting Bachelard's invitation to "listen to nothing but our own breathing…, to become as aerial as our breath…" (Bachelard, Air 241), Jardin set about inventing a regimen of contemplative breathing exercises. To do so, he took up what Bachelard terms the "search for a thought hidden under expressive sedimen,ts, [in which] a geology of silence is developed" (Bachelard Air, 251). The question was, what "expressive sediments" should Jardin mine in this quixotic quest? What materials and mental modalities would precipitate a "geology of silence"?In order to meld minds with Bachelard, Jardin placed a pebble on Robert Lapoujade's pencil portrait that graces the book's cover (fig. 2). The results were alchemical: the cobble transmuted into a philosopher's stone, opening Bachelard's third eye; the rock launched a basalt on Jardin's senses that produced an "intoxication of aerial imagination raised to its cosmic role" (Bachelard, Air 241). A gesture as simple as placing a rock on a book crystallized new quartz-veins of thought. What follows are Jardin's experiments with a variety of "expressive sediments," a series of multi-scalar meditations and various instantiations of lithic respiration. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Aerial Basalt on the Senses. Pebble on book cover.Photo by author.Atmospheric CompositionsPierre Jardin's geologic aspirations began with a Composition of Place, a meditative technique deployed in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Loyola stipulates that "for contemplation or meditation about visible things… the 'composition' will consist in seeing through the gaze of the imagination the material place where the object I want to contemplate is situated" (Ganss 47). Taking "Breathing with Mountains" as the "object" of contemplation stretches Jardin's imagination to a geologic scale; its "material place" is the Earth's atmosphere, or more specifically, its lowest layer, the troposphere. [End Page 262]To facilitate his meditation, Jardin scales Earth down to a stunning serpentine stone, which he has mounted like a globe. Holding the stone and breathing slowly, Jardin can visualize the troposphere as the thinnest of films on the rock's surface. In his active imagination, the bumps, furrows, and ridges in the rough rock texture evoke the constant crumpling of the lithosphere caused by drifting and crashing tectonic plates.With the stone standing in for Earth, Jardin suddenly becomes a geologic giant representing Anthropocene humanity. As his exhalations cloud the stone, Jardin considers how Anthropogenic expirations are changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. An index of human impact is provided... (shrink)

Livro em homenagem ao filósofo brasileiro Luiz Henrique Lopes, um dos maiores expoentes da filosofia analítica. Neste livro grandes nomes da filosofia brasileira discorrem sobre a filosofia analítica e vários assuntos da filosofia contemporânea.

In Community Matters: Challenges to Civic Engagement in the 21st Century, six distinguished scholars address three perennial challenges of civic life: the making of a citizen, how citizens are to agree , and how to define the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. These essays will encourage students, academics, and interested citizens outside the academy to go farther and dig deeper into these vital issues.

The Politics of Belonging represents an innovative collaboration between political theorists and political scientists for the purposes of investigating the liberal and pluralistic traditions of nationalism. Alain Dieckhoff introduces an indispensable collection of work for anyone dealing with questions of identity, ethnicity, and nationalism.

The present study investigated whether individual differences between psychologists in thinking styles are associated with accuracy in diagnostic classification. We asked novice and experienced clinicians to classify two clinical cases of clients with two co-occurring psychological disorders. No significant difference in diagnostic accuracy was found between the two groups, but when combining the data from novices and experienced psychologists accuracy was found to be negatively associated with certain decision making strategies and with a higher self-assessed ability and preference for a (...) rational thinking style. Our results underscore the idea that it might be fruitful to look for explanations of differences in the accuracy of diagnostic judgments in individual differences between psychologists (such as in thinking styles or decision making strategies used), rather than in experience level. (shrink)

Mental disorders such as depression and anxiety are increasingly common. Yet there are too few specialists to offer help to everyone, and negative attitudes to psychological problems and their treatment discourage people from seeking it. As a result, many people never receive help for these problems. The Oxford Guide to Low Intensity CBT Interventions marks a turning point in the delivery of psychological treatments for people with depression and anxiety. Until recently, the only form of psychological intervention available for patients (...) with depression and anxiety was traditional one-to-one 60 minute session therapy - usually with private practitioners for those patients who could afford it. Now Low Intensity CBT Interventions are starting to revolutionize mental health care by providing cost effective psychological therapies which can reach the vast numbers of people with depression and anxiety who did not previously have access to effective psychological treatment. The Oxford Guide to Low Intensity CBT Interventions is the first book to provide a comprehensive guide to Low Intensity CBT interventions. It brings together researchers and clinicians from around the world who have led the way in developing evidence-based low intensity CBT treatments. It charts the plethora of new ways that evidence-based low intensity CBT can be delivered: for instance, guided self-help, groups, advice clinics, brief GP interventions, internet-based or book-based treatment and prevention programs, with supported provided by phone, email, internet, sms or face-to-face. These new treatments require new forms of service delivery, new ways of communicating, new forms of training and supervision, and the development of new workforces. They involve changing systems and routine practice, and adapting interventions to particular community contexts. The Oxford Guide to Low Intensity CBT Interventions is a state-of-the-art handbook, providing low intensity practitioners, supervisors, managers commissioners of services and politicians with a practical, easy-to-read guide - indispensible reading for those who wish to understand and anticipate future directions in health service provision and to broaden access to cost-effective evidence-based psychological therapies. (shrink)