La philosophie de Souriau a pour objet ce qu’il appelle les existences virtuelles, un mode d’existence fragile et précaire qui concerne tout processus d’instauration. Ces virtualités sont en état d’abaliété, elles existent « en et par autre chose », de manière relationnelle et indéterminée. Ces particularités ontologiques posent un problème de connaissance : celui de connaître de telles singularités, aussi appelées « âmes ». De nouveaux outils, issus de l’esthétique, accompagnent la connaissance. La fiction et la dramatisation viennent jouer un (...) rôle épistémique. Les êtres de fiction, qui existent selon un mode spécifique d’existence, font naître un sentiment esthétique, qui devient la base créatrice de la philosophie et de la connaissance. (shrink)

Depuis son retour, j’étais rongé. J’abrégeais les conversations, évitais son regard. Malgré tous mes efforts pour paraître naturel, pour faire comme si de rien n’était, je sentais bien, piètre comédien, que chaque phrase sonnait faux, que chaque geste suintait la culpabilité. Dans ses yeux, la perplexité initiale fit bien vite place au soupçon, et ma feinte bonne humeur fut démantelée sans coup férir par d’éloquents silences, froids appels à cesser toute mascarade. Enferré comme je l’étais, a..

La liberté a été assez largement réduite, dans la modernité occidentale, à une occurrence individualiste. C’est la liberté de l’individu « face au monde » et eu égard aux autres dont il s’agit surtout. Notre propos consistera en une critique de cette idée, au profit d’une compréhension relationnelle de la liberté. Il apparaîtra que nous avons besoin de soutien mutuel pour être et rester libre et que, à l’heure de l’Anthropocène, c’est la Terre qui nous soutient qui a elle aussi (...) besoin de toute notre attention, sans quoi les conditions de la liberté pourraient être très compromises. (shrink)

À quelles conditions la distribution d’un revenu universel pourrait-elle être émancipatrice pour les femmes? Les présentations du revenu universel par ses promoteurs en font un moyen de choix de ses activités, sans tenir compte des contraintes sociales auxquelles les femmes sont soumises. Ce n’est pas parce qu’une mesure est prise en théorie en faveur de tout le monde qu’elle touche tout le monde de la même manière. On manque encore de recherches sur ces questions. Comment éviter que le revenu universel (...) ne soit qu’un accompagnement vers l’ubérisation? (shrink)

Outil de gouvernance à toutes les échelles – globale, nationale, locale – la transparence s’est imposée comme une norme à la fois morale, économique et politique. L’intimité n’y échappe pas. La reproduction, les origines, les identités, les sexualités, qui en seraient un pan important, se trouvent ainsi à l’avant-garde d’une transparence quasi managériale, qui s’épanouit dans une exposition numérique sans limite. Cet article questionne différents aspects de ce phénomène.

Ce que la postérité a retenu de Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel tient en une formule simple et cependant énigmatique : Hegel aurait prétendu achever la métaphysique en instituant un "idéalisme absolu", qui ne serait autre que l'expression éhontée d'un subjectivisme sans limite. Or, dans son oeuvre publiée (pour ne rien dire de ses cours), Hegel consacre des développements très détaillés à l'objectivité et à la connaissance empirique. Cela est vrai de la Logique, de la Philosophie de la Nature et de (...) la Philosophie de l'Esprit. Il s'en suit une série de questions. Que signifie l'expression "objectivité de la pensée" chez Hegel? S'agit-il de l'objectivité visée par la pensée ou de la réalité objective de la pensée elle-même? Le génitif est-il objectif ou subjectif? Et s'il était à la fois l'un et l'autre? A partir de ces questions, il s'agit de comprendre l'idéalisme hégélien dans son rapport au monde et d'interroger son actualité. Tels sont les enjeux qui sont au centre de ce recueil, qui réunit les contributions de spécialistes internationalement reconnus. (shrink)

La phénoménologie de Sartre peut être comprise comme une tentative de fonder radicalement l'intuition husserlienne de l'intentionnalité. " Toute conscience est conscience de quelque chose " : la conscience naît portée sur un être qui n'est pas elle, elle n'est pas constituante mais révélante et c'est en tant quelle est Néant qu'elle peut s'ouvrir à l'Être sans cesser de s'en distinguer. Or, définir la conscience par la néantisation revient à mettre au cœur de l'existence humaine une liberté qui, tout en (...) s'appuyant sur la facticité du pour-soi, demeure absolue et inconditionnée. Cependant, ce mouvement de néantisation est fondé sur une théorie du désir qui constitue la clé de voûte de L'Être et le Néant et rend compte des différentes modalités d'existence du pour-soi. Le pour-soi ne peut en effet sortir de lui-même vers le monde que parce qu'il est traversé par un désir insatiable, un manque qui ne peut être comblé : celui de réaliser l'impossible synthèse de l'en-soi et du pour-soi, bref le désir d'être Dieu. Tous les textes réunis ici tentent d'aborder la philosophie phénoménologique de Sartre à la lumière de cette articulation fondamentale entre la liberté et le désir. (shrink)

L’originalité de la métaphysique de Ruyer tient à ceci que le problème de l’incarnation de la conscience, décrite par la phénoménologie comme condition de possibilité de la perception, est résolu par le biais d’une identification de la conscience et du corps. Cette identification repose sur la découverte du concept fondamental de « surface absolue » ou « domaine de survol » : présence à soi sans distance d’une réalité étendue. Ce mode d’être convient également à la vie et à la (...) conscience vécue et il fonde par conséquent leur unité originaire. La conscience sensible, ou secondaire, doit alors être décrite comme l’autosurvol des aires cérébrales. Cependant, cette identification de la vie et de la conscience a pour contrepartie la perte de la dimension intentionnelle de la conscience et, par conséquent, l’impossibilité de rendre compte de la perception. La philosophie de Ruyer pose donc le problème suivant : cette conséquence est-elle nécessaire ou bien peut-on envisager au contraire une philosophie de la vie qui ne compromette pas mais fonde la conscience intentionnelle ?— The originality of Ruyer’s metaphysics is due to the fact that the problem of the incarnation of consciousness, described by phenomenology as a condition of possibility of perception, is solved by means of an identification between consciousness and body. This identification rests on the discovery of the basic concept of « absolute surface » or « flying-over domain » : self-presence without distance of a spatial reality. This mode of being is appropriate both to life and lived consciousness and, accordingly, grounds their originary unity. Then, sensible, or secondary consciousness is to be described as self flying-over of the cerebral areas. However, this identification between life and consciousness has as counterpart the lost of the intentional feature of consciousness and, consequently, the impossibility to account for perception. Thus, Ruyer’s philosophy poses the following problem : is that conclusion necessary or is it possible, on the contrary, to plan a philosophy of life that does not compromise but grounds intentional consciousness ? (shrink)

Cet article propose une confrontation inédite entre les dispositifs théoriques de deux philosophes contemporains, Renaud Barbaras et Nicolas Grimaldi, que l’auteur envisage en tant qu’ontologies de la vie. La singularité, dans le champ philosophique, de leur conception du désir conduit à un rapprochement, en dépit d’une différence dans les références philosophiques mobilisées. Le sujet vivant est en effet pensé par tous deux comme « désir », et il est par là interprété comme un certain manque, bien que celui-ci ne (...) soit relatif à aucun objet ni, plus généralement, à rien qui se donne sur le mode de l’objet. Or, les options philosophiques de Barbaras et de Grimaldi divergent néanmoins quant à la réponse apportée au problème de l’articulation entre vie et désir, et plus précisément quant au sens accordé à la négativité. Alors que le premier envisage les êtres vivants à partir d’une négation-privation qui affecte l’archi-vie du monde sans avoir sa source en elle, le second comprend la vie, sous toutes ses modalités, à partir d’une négativité qui lui est intrinsèque. Autrement dit, si, pour Grimaldi, la vie est essentiellement désir, pour Barbaras le désir caractérise seulement la modalité d’être des vivants, non l’archi-vie du monde. Il en découle des différences importantes quant au statut de la temporalité et de l’affectivité chez les deux philosophes. C’est, d’après l’auteur, dans le sort que chacun réserve à l’hypothèse finaliste — écartée par Barbaras; étayée sur une analyse de la notion de tendance chez Grimaldi — que le différend philosophique prend sa source. (shrink)

I argue—contra moderate grounding pluralists such as Kit Fine and more extreme grounding pluralists such as Jessica Wilson—that there is fundamentally only one grounding/in-virtue-of relation. I also argue that this single relation is indispensable for normative theorizing—that we can’t make sense of, for example, the debate over consequentialism without it. It follows from what I argue that there is no metaethically-pure normative ethics.

When it comes to epistemic normativity, should we take the good to be prior to the right? That is, should we ground facts about what we ought and ought not believe on a given occasion in facts about the value of being in certain cognitive states (such as, for example, the value of having true beliefs)? The overwhelming answer among contemporary epistemologists is “Yes, we should.” This essay argues to the contrary. Just as taking the good to be prior to (...) the right in ethics often leads one to sanction implausible trade-offs when determining what an agent should do, so too, this essay argues, taking the good to be prior to the right in epistemology leads one to sanction implausible trade-offs when determining what a subject should believe. Epistemic value—and, by extension, epistemic goals—are not the explanatory foundation upon which all other normative notions in epistemology rest. (shrink)

It has been claimed that the recent wave of neuroscientific research into the physiological underpinnings of our moral intuitions has normative implications. In particular, it has been claimed that this research discredits our deontological intuitions about cases, without discrediting our consequentialist intuitions about cases. In this paper I demur. I argue that such attempts to extract normative conclusions from neuroscientific research face a fundamental dilemma: either they focus on the emotional or evolved nature of the psychological processes underlying deontological intuitions, (...) in which case the arguments rely on a blatantly fallacious inference, or they appeal to the (alleged) moral irrelevance of the factors to which deontological intuitions respond, in which case the neuroscientific results end up playing no role in the overall argument. (shrink)

A quasi-sequel to "Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Propositions." Covers some of the same ground, but also extends the basic argument in an important way.

Suppose we grant that evolutionary forces have had a profound effect on the contours of our normative judgments and intuitions. Can we conclude anything from this about the correct metaethical theory? I argue that, for the most part, we cannot. Focusing my attention on Sharon Street’s justly famous argument that the evolutionary origins of our normative judgments and intuitions cause insuperable epistemological difficulties for a metaethical view she calls "normative realism," I argue that there are two largely independent lines of (...) argument in Street’s work which need to be teased apart. The first of these involves a genuine appeal to evolutionary considerations, but it can fairly easily be met by her opponents. The second line of argument is more troubling; it raises a significant problem, one of the most difficult in all of philosophy, namely how to justify our reliance on our most basic cognitive faculties without relying on those same faculties in a question-begging manner. However, evolutionary considerations add little to this old problem, and rejecting normative realism is not a way to solve it. (shrink)

Are there practical reasons for and against belief? For example, do the practical benefits to oneself or others of holding a certain belief count in favor of that belief? I argue "No." My argument involves considering how practical reasons for belief, if there were such things, would combine with other reasons for belief in order to determine all-things-considered verdicts, especially in cases involving equally balanced reasons of either a practical or an epistemic sort.

Moral properties are explained by other properties. And moral principles tell us about moral properties. How are these two ideas related? In particular, is the truth of a given moral principle part of what explains why a given action has a given moral property? I argue “No.” If moral principles are merely concerned with the extension of moral properties across all possible worlds, then they cannot be partial explainers of facts about the instantiation of those properties, since in general necessitation (...) does not suffice for explanation. And if moral principles are themselves about what explains the moral properties under their purview, then by their own lights they are not needed in order to explain those moral properties’ instantiation—unless, that is, the principles exhibit an objectionable form of metaphysical circularity. So moral principles cannot explain why individual actions have moral properties. Nor, I also argue, can they explain why certain other factors explain why those actions have the moral properties that they do, or in some other way govern or mediate such first-order explanations of particular moral facts. When it comes to the explanation of an individual action’s specific moral features, moral principles are explanatorily idle. (shrink)

Guilt and fear today have developed an unexpected quality: they contribute powerfully to the survival of humanity. The feeling of guilt proceeds from an elementary awareness: although the unequaled progress of science and technology in the twentieth century has undoubtedly ameliorated the conditions of human life, it also has given rise to an infernal logic of genocide and crimes against humanity, in which almost all nations, directly or indirectly, have participated and participate still. This awareness is joined to another, which (...) is itself accompanied by a primordial fear: for the first time in history, science and technology have endowed humanity with the power to destroy itself and the planet, without furnishing humans with the means of escaping their destined role as sorcerer's apprentice, for no science can tell us what to do with science. It is this double feeling of guilt and fear that pushes contemporary man to search feverishly for ethical foundations capable of furnishing discreet regulatory principles to underpin decisions and actions. From the point of view of contemporary humanity, ethics must be able to confer meaning and perspective on an existence which apparently has neither: “Now,” writes Hans Jonas, “we shiver in the nakedness of nihilism in which near-omnipotence is paired with near-emptiness, greatest capacity with knowing least for what ends to use it.”. (shrink)

Ten years ago, an issue of the journal L'Homme et la Société was entitled “La Mode des identités.” Most of the articles were about cultural identity, but the basic thrust of the work was “a critique of the ‘fashion’ of identity calling into question the validity of a notion as striking as it is uncertain.” Recently, a special issue of the journal Sciences Humaines, entitled “Identité et identités,” dealt with personal, familial, social, professional identities and only spoke of cultural identity (...) marginally and in a roundabout way. Finally, in a manual of Sociologie politique published by the Presses Universitaires de France, the author takes to task the notion of ethnicity inherent to cultural identity and pushes the critique of the ethnic group to the point of negating its objective existence. Must we think then that the notion of cultural identity is henceforth obsolete, that it has lost all pertinence? (shrink)

The linchpin of Williamson (2000)'s radically externalist epistemological program is an argument for the claim that no non-trivial condition is luminous—that no non-trivial condition is such that whenever it obtains, one is in a position to know that it obtains. I argue that Williamson's anti-luminosity argument succeeds only if one assumes that, even in the limit of ideal reflection, the obtaining of the condition in question and one's beliefs about that condition can be radically disjoint from one another. However, no (...) self-respecting defender of the luminosity of the mental would ever make such an assumption. Thus Williamson can only secure his controversial claims in epistemology by taking for granted certain equally controversial claims in the philosophy of mind. What emerges is that the best bet for defending an internalist epistemology against Williamson's attack is to take there to be a tight, intimate connection between (to take one example) our experiences and our beliefs upon reflection about the obtaining of those experiences, or between (to take another example) the rationality of our beliefs and our beliefs upon reflection about the rationality of those beliefs. (shrink)

Quasi-realists aim to account for many of the trappings of metanormative realism within an expressivist framework. Chief among these is the realist way of responding to the Euthyphro dilemma: quasi-realists want to join realists in being able to say, "It’s not the case that kicking dogs is wrong because we disapprove of it. Rather, we disapprove of kicking dogs because it’s wrong." However, the standard quasi-realist way of explaining what we are up to when we assert the first of these (...) two sentences rests on a mistaken identification of metaphysical dependence (or grounding) with counterfactual covariation. This chapter proposes a better way for expressivists to understand such sentences, on which they serve to express complex states of mind in which an attitude bears a relation of psychological dependence (or basing) to another state of mind. It is argued that this proposal is a natural, versatile, and fruitful approach for expressivists to take that helps them secure the first half of the Euthyphro contrast—but at the cost of making it difficult to see how expressivists can make sense of that contrast’s second half. (shrink)

Once upon a time, coherentism was the dominant response to the regress problem in epistemology, but in recent decades the view has fallen into disrepute: now almost everyone is a foundationalist (with a few infinitists sprinkled here and there). In this paper, I sketch a new way of thinking about coherentism, and show how it avoids many of the problems often thought fatal for the view, including the isolation objection, worries over circularity, and concerns that the concept of coherence is (...) too vague or metaphorical for serious theoretical use. The key to my approach is to take a familiar tool from discussions of the regress problem -- namely, directed graphs depicting the support relations between beliefs -- and to use that tool in a more sophisticated manner than it is standardly employed. (shrink)

Moral particularists argue that because reasons for action are irreducibly context-dependent, the traditional quest in ethics for true and exceptionless moral principles is hopelessly misguided. In making this claim, particularists assume a general framework according to which reasons are the ground floor normative units undergirding all other normative properties and relations. They then argue that there is no cashing out in finite terms either (i) when a given non-normative feature gives rise to a reason for or against action, or (ii) (...) how the reasons that are present in a given context play off each other to determine one’s overall duties. However, the conjunction of these two theses leaves particularists without a coherent notion of a reason for action: posit too much irreducible context-dependence in the behavior of reasons, and the reasons-based framework breaks down. One upshot is that the particularists’ challenge to principle-based approaches to ethics has not, at present, been successfully made out; another upshot is that perhaps the best way to formulate that challenge involves renouncing the reasons-based framework all together. (shrink)

I argue that Alvin Goldman has failed to save process reliabilism from my critique in earlier work of consequentialist or teleological epistemic theories. First, Goldman misconstrues the nature of my challenge: two of the cases he discusses I never claimed to be counterexamples to process reliabilism. Second, Goldman’s reply to the type of case I actually claimed to be a counterexample to process reliabilism is unsuccessful. He proposes a variety of responses, but all of them either feature an implausible restriction (...) on process types, or fail to rule out cases with the sort of structure that generates the worry, or both. (shrink)

The work described in this report is motivated by the desire to test the expressive possibilities of action language C+. The Causal Calculator (CCalc) is a system that answers queries about action domains described in a fragment of that language. The Zoo World and the Traffic World have been proposed by Erik Sandewall in his Logic Modelling Workshop—an environment for communicating axiomatizations of action domains of nontrivial size. -/- The Zoo World consists of several cages and the exterior, gates between (...) them, and animals of several species, including humans. Actions in this domain include moving within and between cages, opening and closing gates, and mounting and riding animals. The Traffic World includes vehicles moving continuously between road crossings subject to a number of restrictions, such as speed limits and keeping a fixed safety distance away from other vehicles on the road. We show how to represent the two domains in the input language of CCalc, and how to use CCalc to test these representations. (shrink)

Un nouveau discours politique prétend restaurer le peuple dans sa dignité en s’attaquant aux timides réformes multiculturalistes de ces dernières années. Une nouvelle séparation sociale est revendiquée en termes ethnoculturels, notamment dans le domaine scolaire, pour faire réapparaître les distances sociales qui ne peuvent plus être parlées en termes de classes.

ObjectiveTo identify the ethical challenges associated with the development and implementation of new tuberculosis drugs and diagnostics.MethodsTwenty-three semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted between December 2015 and September 2016 with programme administrators, healthcare workers, advocates, policymakers, and funders based in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Interviews were analysed using thematic analysis.ResultsDivergent interests and responsibilities, coupled with power imbalances, are a primary source of ethical challenges; the uncertain risk profiles of new drugs present an additional one. Although this challenge can be partially mitigated (...) through stringent pharmacovigilance, respondents highlighted that high-burden countries tend to lack the resources to facilitate safe implementation. Increased advocacy and community engagement are considered an ethical imperative for future TB development and implementation.ConclusionsThis project helps identify some of the ethical challenges of new TB technologies. It demonstrates that investigating ethical challenges through qualitative research is one way to apprehend the difficulty of implementing new TB technologies. Addressing this difficulty will require that those in positions of power reconsider their interests in relation to disempowered communities.Policy implicationsEfforts to build consensus regarding what values should underpin the global governance of TB research, prevention, and care are essential to facilitate the ethical implementation of new TB technologies. (shrink)

After summarizing the essential details of Anil Gupta’s account of perceptual justification in his book _Empiricism and Experience_, I argue for three claims: (1) Gupta’s proposal is closer to rationalism than advertised; (2) there is a major lacuna in Gupta’s account of how convergence in light of experience yields absolute entitlements to form beliefs; and (3) Gupta has not adequately explained how ordinary courses of experience can lead to convergence on a commonsense view of the world.

This paper investigates how and when pairs of terms such as “local–global” and “im Kleinen–im Grossen” began to be used by mathematicians as explicit reflexive categories. A first phase of automatic search led to the delineation of the relevant corpus, and to the identification of the period from 1898 to 1918 as that of emergence. The emergence appears to have been, from the very start, both transdisciplinary (function theory, calculus of variations, differential geometry) and international, although the AMS-Göttingen connection played (...) a specific part. First used as an expository and didactic tool (e.g. by Osgood), it soon played a crucial part in the creation of new mathematical concepts (e.g. in Hahn’s work), in the shaping of research agendas (e.g. Blaschke’s global differential geometry), and in Weyl’s axiomatic foundation of the manifold concept. We finally turn to France, where in the 1910s, in the wake of Poincaré’s work, Hadamard began to promote a research agenda in terms of “passage du local au general.”. (shrink)

This paper delves into the work of Clive L. Spash, a British radical ecological economist well-known in his field who currently holds a professorship at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. We start with an examination of the principles of his “social ecological economics.” We then critically evaluate his attack on economic growth and his perspective on the standard economic models of climate change. Lastly, we explore his approach to science as a theoretical pursuit and his policy recommendations. The (...) first version of this paper was given as a keynote lecture at the 7th Austrian Economics Meeting Europe, May 12-13, 2023, Université Catholique de l’Ouest, Angers, France, and a second version at the Summer University in Political Economy, July 20-22, 2023, Aix-Marseille University, France. I wish to thank the organizers of these conferences, and also the anonymous referees whose remarks have been taken into account to improve the paper. (shrink)

Peu à peu, tandis que Virgile achève la description ethnographique de la ruche, un glissement s’opère dans son propos : il célèbre d’abord la chasteté des abeilles, et le renouvellement de l’espèce par une miraculeuse génération spontanée ; il explique ensuite leur admirable organisation sociale par un lien privilégié avec la divinité, puisque les abeilles posséderaient une « parcelle d’intelligence divine » ; après ce bref aperçu d’une mystique panthéiste, i...

In this article, I seek to make sense of the oft-invoked idea of 'public emergency' and of some of its (supposedly) radical moral implications. I challenge controversial claims by Tom Sorell, Michael Walzer, and Giorgio Agamben, and argue for a more discriminating understanding of the category and its moral force.

In this article, I seek to make sense of the oft-invoked idea of ‘public emergency’ and of some of its radical moral implications. I challenge controversial claims by Tom Sorell, Michael Walzer, and Giorgio Agamben, and argue for a more discriminating understanding of the category and its moral force.

One might think that if the majority of virtue signallers judge that a proposition is true, then there is significant evidence for the truth of that proposition. Given the Condorcet Jury Theorem, individual virtue signallers need not be very reliable for the majority judgment to be very likely to be correct. Thus, even people who are skeptical of the judgments of individual virtue signallers should think that if a majority of them judge that a proposition is true, then that provides (...) significant evidence that the proposition is true. We argue that this is mistaken. Various empirical studies converge on the following point: humans are very conformist in the contexts in which virtue signalling occurs. And stereotypical virtue signallers are even more conformist in such contexts. So we should be skeptical of the claim that virtue signallers are sufficiently independent for the Condorcet Jury Theorem to apply. We do not seek to decisively rule out the relevant application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem. But we do show that careful consideration of the available evidence should make us very skeptical of that application. Consequently, a defense of virtue signalling would need to engage with these findings and show that despite our strong tendencies for conformism, our judgements are sufficiently independent for the Condorcet Jury Theorem to apply. This suggests new directions for the debate about the epistemology of virtue signalling. (shrink)