Data platforms represent a new paradigm for carrying out health research. In the platform model, datasets are pooled for remote access and analysis, so novel insights for developing better stratified and/or personalised medicine approaches can be derived from their integration. If the integration of diverse datasets enables development of more accurate risk indicators, prognostic factors, or better treatments and interventions, this obviates the need for the sharing and reuse of data; and a platform-based approach is an appropriate model for facilitating (...) this. Platform-based approaches thus require new thinking about consent. Here we defend an approach to meeting this challenge within the data platform model, grounded in: the notion of ‘reasonable expectations’ for the reuse of data; Waldron’s account of ‘integrity’ as a heuristic for managing disagreement about the ethical permissibility of the approach; and the element of the social contract that emphasises the importance of public engagement in embedding new norms of research consistent with changing technological realities. While a social contract approach may sound appealing, however, it is incoherent in the context at hand. We defend a way forward guided by that part of the social contract which requires public approval for the proposal and argue that we have moral reasons to endorse a wider presumption of data reuse. However, we show that the relationship in question is not recognisably contractual and that the social contract approach is therefore misleading in this context. We conclude stating four requirements on which the legitimacy of our proposal rests. (shrink)

We present the results of a field study led in 2009 and aiming at a better understanding of the activity of the mosquito control workers of the EID Atlantique in the wetlands of the French Atlantic seaboard (from Morbihan to Gironde). First, we endeavor to characterize their context of work, in ecological terms as well as in social ones. Then, we propose a modelling of their activity, which brings to light in an original way its important social component: their work (...) consists in maintaining, in the areas they take care of, an ecological equilibrium minimizing the proliferation of mosquitos; but it also consists in maintaining a social equilibrium, which aims at the satisfaction of all the users they are dealing with (salt workers, oyster farmers, cattle breeders, members of hunting associations and naturalist associations, hikers, and walkers). (shrink)

In Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, leading figures in the fields of virtue ethics and ethics come together to present the first ...

Preterm birth is defined as delivery occurring before 37 weeks gestation.1 Infants born prematurely have increased risks of morbidity and mortality throughout life, especially during the first year. These risks increase as the gestational age at birth decreases.2 Additionally, there are significant racial and ethnic differences in preterm birth rates. In 2022, the rate of preterm birth among non-Hispanic black women was approximately 50% higher than that observed in non-Hispanic white women.1 The outcomes for these infants are also disparate–preterm birth (...) and low birth weight are the second-leading causes of infant mortality (deaths before 1 year of age). Notably, among preterm neonates, infants born to non-Hispanic black women have a mortality rate more than double that of infants born to non-Hispanic white mothers.3 Importantly, there is a small but significant group of neonates that can be classified as severely premature (those born <28 weeks). Infants born before 28 weeks have varied and uncertain outcomes. While this group accounts for only 0.4% of preterm births, it also accounts for 40% of deaths among preterm neonates.4 As noted by Romanis and Adkins, the advent of artificial amnion and placenta technology (AAPT) holds promise for its potential to address the physiologic complications and mortality risks of extreme prematurity by introducing amniotic substitutes that mimic in vivo placental oxygenation and substrate delivery. In contrast …. (shrink)

William James famously tells us that there are two main goals for rational believers: believing truth and avoiding error. I argues that epistemic consequentialism—in particular its embodiment in epistemic utility theory—seems to be well positioned to explain how epistemic agents might permissibly weight these goals differently and adopt different credences as a result. After all, practical versions of consequentialism render it permissible for agents with different goals to act differently in the same situation. -/- Nevertheless, I argue that epistemic consequentialism (...) doesn’t allow for this kind of permissivism and goes on to argue that this reveals a deep disanalogy between decision theory and the formally similar epistemic utility theory. This raises the question whether epistemic utility theory is a genuinely consequentialist theory at all. (shrink)

The philosophical difficulties presented by self-deception are vexed and multifaceted. One such difficulty is what I call the ‘doxastic problem’ of self-deception. Solving the doxastic problem involves determining whether someone in a state of self-deception that ∼p both believes that p and believes that ∼p, simply holds one or the other belief, or, as I will argue, holds neither. This final option, which has been almost entirely overlooked to-date, is what I call ‘ nondoxasticism ’ about self-deception. In this article, (...) I present a negative case for nondoxasticism according to which, in the paradigm case of self-deception, there is no explanatory need to attribute the self-deceived person either their undesired belief that p, or their desired belief that ∼p. Folk psychology is replete with concepts other than belief, and if we bear this in mind, it becomes clear that the explanatory roles for which the self-deceived person's purported beliefs have traditionally been enlisted can be comfortably filled without recourse to belief. (shrink)

Proponents of the subset account of property realization commonly make the assumption that the summing of properties entails the summing of their forward-looking causal features. This paper seeks to establish that this assumption is false. Moreover, it aims to demonstrate that without this assumption the fact that the subset account captures an entailment relation—which it must if it is to be of any use to non-reductive physicalism—becomes questionable.

This article takes as its starting point the central place given to contradiction by Hermann Goldschmidt in his book Contradiction Set Free, and it compares his approach with that of the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch. At the same time as Goldschmidt, Jankélévitch also assigned a central role to contradiction in thought, so much so that he often referred to his own philosophical method as “paradoxology.” For him, as for Goldschmidt, paradox is the driving force behind thought that is always on the (...) move. This article presents the main features of Jankélévitch’s paradoxology and illustrates it with two themes: forgiveness and Jewish identity. By highlighting this proximity between Goldschmidt’s approach and that of Jankélévitch, I suggest that they are both part of a more general movement in continental philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, one of whose main challenges was to rethink philosophical rationality in depth. (shrink)

A rich literature has discussed what it is to respond to a reason, e.g., to believe or act on the basis of some consideration or another. In comparison, what it would be to respond to a second-order reason has been underexplored. Yet formulating an account of this is vital for maintaining the existence of second-order reasons in both the practical and epistemic domains. And indeed, there are reasons to doubt this is possible. For example, responding to second-order reasons is meant (...) to be different from simply coming to believe or act for a more richly described first-order reason but it's not clear what this would look like. This paper introduces an account of the second-order basing relation which meets these concerns. It therefore both develops our picture of second-order reasons and helps to defend their existence. (shrink)

This book sets out to generate new ways of reflecting ethically about the purposes and values of contemporary higher education in relation to agency, learning, public values and democratic life, and the pedagogies which support these.

Should monkeys be used in painful and often deadly infectious disease research that may save many human lives? This is the challenging question that Anne Barnhill, Steven Joffe, and Franklin G. Miller take on in their carefully argued and compelling article “The Ethics of Infection Challenges in Primates.” The authors offer a nuanced and even-handed position that takes philosophical worries about nonhuman primate moral status seriously and still appreciates the very real value of such research for human welfare. Overall, they (...) argue for an extension and revision of the recommendations regarding chimpanzee research offered by the Institute of Medicine in 2011; the practical upshot of their argument would allow for infection challenge research for promising interventions for Ebola and Marburg virus diseases but not for smallpox or the common cold. The IOM recommendations regarding chimpanzee research put in motion an exceptionalist policy for this great ape population. Barnhill and colleagues’ proposal would enlarge the scope of that exceptionalism to embrace NHPs other than great apes. But is such exceptionalism warranted? It is not obvious to me either that the more sophisticated capacities of a species as a whole give it greater ethical protections or that less intellectually or socially sophisticated animals ought to therefore receive less protection when it comes to painful experimental interventions. (shrink)

According to a grand narrative that long ago ceased to be told, there was a seventeenth century Scientific Revolution, during which a few heroes conquered nature thanks to mathematics. This grand narrative began with the exhibition of quantitative laws that these heroes, Galileo and Newton for example, had disclosed: the law of falling bodies, according to which the speed of a falling body is proportional to the square of the time that has elapsed since the beginning of its fall; the (...) law of gravitation, according to which two bodies are attracted to one another in proportion to the sum of their masses and in inverse proportion to the square of the distance separating them -- according to his own preferences, each narrator added one or two quantitative laws of this kind. The essential feature was not so much the examples that were chosen, but, rather, the more or less explicit theses that accompanied them. First, mathematization would be taken as the criterion for distinguishing between a qualitative Aristotelian philosophy and the new quantitative physics. Secondly, mathematization was founded on the metaphysical conviction that the world was created pondere, numero et mensura, or that the ultimate components of natural things are triangles, circles, and other geometrical objects. This metaphysical conviction had two immediate consequences: that all the phenomena of nature can be in principle submitted to mathematics and that mathematical language is transparent; it is the language of nature itself and has simply to be picked up at the surface of phenomena. Finally, it goes without saying that, from a social point of view, the evolution of the sciences was apprehended through what has been aptly called the "relay runner model," according to which science progresses as a result of individual discoveries. Grand narratives such as this are perhaps simply fictions doomed to ruin as soon as they are clearly expressed. In any case, the very assumption on which this grand narrative relies can be brought into question: even in the canonical domain of mechanics, the relevant epistemological units crucial to understanding the dynamics of the Scientific Revolution are perhaps not a few laws of motion, but a complex set of problems embodied in mundane objects. Moreover, each of the theses just mentioned was actually challenged during the long period of historiographical reappraisal, out of which we have probably not yet stepped. Against the sharp distinction between a qualitative Aristotelian philosophy and the new quantitative physics, numerous studies insist that Rome wasn't built in a day, so to speak. Since Antiquity, there have always been mixed sciences; the emergence of pre-classical mechanics depends on both medieval treatises and the practical challenges met by Renaissance engineers. It is indeed true that, for Aristotle, mathematics merely captures the superficial properties of things, but the Aristotelianisms were many during the Renaissance and the Early Modern period, with some of them being compatible with the introduction of mathematics in natural philosophy. In addition, the gap between the alleged program of mathematizing nature and its effective realization was underlined as most natural phenomena actually escaped mathematization; at best they were enrolled in what Thomas Kuhn began to rehabilitate under the appellation of the "Baconian sciences," i.e., empirical investigations aiming at establishing isolated facts, without relating them to any overarching theory. Hence, mathematization of nature cannot pretend to capture a historical fact: at most, it expresses an indeterminate task for generations to come. On top of these first two considerations, and against the thesis of the neutrality of the mathematical language, it was urged that mathematics is not "only a language" and that, exactly as other symbolic means or cognitive tools, it has its own constraints. For example, it has been thoroughly explained that the Euclidean theory of proportions both guides and frustrates the Galilean analysis of motion; its shortages were particularly clear with respect to the expression of continuity, which is crucial in the case of motion. Consequently, when calculus was invented and applied to the analysis of motion, it was not a transposition that left things as they stood. Even more clearly than in the case of a translation from one natural language to another, the shift from one symbolic language to another entails that certain possibilities are opened while others are closed. The cognitive constraints imposed by established mathematical theories, as seen in the theory of proportions or calculus, were not the only ones to be studied in relation to mathematization. Certain schemes dependent on the grammar of natural languages, e.g., the scheme of contrariety, or certain symbolic means of representation, e.g. geometrical diagrams and numerical tables, were also subject to such scrutiny. Lastly, it was insisted that, even if we concede the existence of scientific geniuses, mathematics is largely produced by intellectual communities and embedded within social practices. More attention was consequently paid to the forms of communication in given mathematical networks, or to the teaching of the discipline in, for example, Jesuit colleges and universities. The set of mathematical practices specific to specialized craftsmen, highly-qualified experts and engineers began to be studied in its own right. All these reflections may have helped us change our perspectives on the question of mathematization. It seems, however, that they were instead set aside, both because of a general distrust towards sweeping narratives that are always subject to the suspicion that they overlook the unyielding complexity of real history, and because of a shift in our interests. The more obscure and idiosyncratic they are, an alchemist, a patron of the sciences or a lunatic collector is nowadays honored in journals of the history of sciences. As for the general issues involved in the question of mathematization, they are rejected as obsolete, or reserved for specialized journals in the history of mathematics. Consequently, before presenting the essays of this fascicle, I would like to say a few words in favor of a renewed study of the forms of mathematization in the history of the early sciences. (shrink)

Many views rely on the idea that it can never be rational to have high confidence in something like, “P, but my evidence doesn’t support P.” Call this idea the “Non-Akrasia Constraint”. Just as an akratic agent acts in a way she believes she ought not act, an epistemically akratic agent believes something that she believes is unsupported by her evidence. The Non-Akrasia Constraint says that ideally rational agents will never be epistemically akratic. In a number of recent papers, the (...) Non-Akrasia Constraint has been called into question. The goal of this paper is to defend it... for the most part. (shrink)

We debate whether permissivism is true. We start off by assuming an accuracy-oriented framework, and then discuss metaepistemological questions about how our epistemic evaluations promote accuracy.

Philosophical discussion on control has largely centred around control over our actions and beliefs. Yet this overlooks the question of whether we also have control over the reasons for which we act and believe. To date, the overriding assumption appears to be that we do not, and with seemingly good reason. We cannot choose to act for a reason and acting-for-a-reason is not itself something we do. While some have challenged this in the case of reasons for action, these claims (...) seem especially untenable regarding believing for a reason. And extending the scope of control in this way also faces the threat of regress. In the face of this orthodoxy, the present paper argues that we do in fact have control over both believing and acting for a particular reason. It also starts to develop an account of the way in which this would be possible. Given the broad importance of understanding control and agency, this paper bears on a number of topics in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and ethics. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics X.7–8, Aristotle defends a striking view about the good for human beings. According to Aristotle, the single happiest way of life is organized around philosophical contemplation. According to the narrowness worry, however, Aristotle's contemplative ideal is unduly Procrustean, restrictive, inflexible, and oblivious of human diversity. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle has resources for responding to the narrowness worry, and that his contemplative ideal can take due account of human diversity.

Gregory Bateson’s career from anthropologist, through his development of cybernetics and systems theory, to developing ideas around ‘the sacred’, has parallels with Roy Bhaskar’s intellectual journey. This paper proposes that as well as Bateson’s theory of cybernetics and systemic thought making a contribution to basic and dialectic critical realism, his final and posthumously published Angels Fear: Towards and Epistemology of the Sacred adds to our understanding of Bhaskar’s metaReality. Similarities between the development of Bateson’s work from 1936 to 1987 and (...) Bhaskar’s work from 1975 to 2016 enable the development of theory that adds to both of their respective appreciations of metaReality and the sacred. Thus, by starting a conversation between Bateson and Bhaskar, we can develop a higher order understanding of the world than proposed by Bhaskar’s metaReality alone. (shrink)

On appelle « Affaire Sokal » l’ensemble de controverses que suscitèrent la publication en 1996 d’une parodie écrite par un physicien américain, Alan Sokal, puis, en 1997, de l’ouvrage Impostures intellectuelles, qu’il co-signa avec un physicien belge, Jean Bricmont. Dans Retours sur l’Affaire Sokal¸ des historiens des sciences reviennent sur cette affaire. Ils montrent qu’elle recouvre différentes controverses et qu’il faut distinguer ces dernières non seulement selon la nature des écrits qui les ont occasionnées, mais aussi en fonction des questions (...) abordées, et peut-être surtout des manières de concevoir et pratiquer les échanges intellectuels. Les auteurs analysent en particulier ces controverses en France, aux États-Unis et au Royaume-Uni ; ils examinent aussi la façon dont ont été traités la relation entre le domaine scientifique et le domaine littéraire ou l’usage des métaphores en sciences. (shrink)

Despite All Critique (2014) -- World Politics and Western Reason (1980) -- The Doubled Outsides of the Modern International (2005) -- The Subject of Security (1995) -- The Protection of Nature and the Nature of Protection (2005) -- Social Movements/World Politics (1994) -- Europe is Not Where It is Supposed to Be (2000) -- They Seek it Here, They Seek it There : Looking for Politics in Clayoquot Sound (2003) -- Violence, Modernity, Silence : From Weber to International Relations (1993) (...) -- Hobbes, Origins, Limits (2011) -- War, Terror, Judgement (2002) -- International, Imperial, Exceptional (2005) -- Which Democracy for Which Demos? (2013) -- The Political Theory of Boundaries and the Boundaries of Political Theory : Interview With Raia Prokhovnik (2012). (shrink)

On sait peu de choses d’Edme Mariotte, membre de l’Académie royale des sciences de 1668 à 1684. Une analyse de son Essai de logique montre cependant que, pour défendre ses pratiques expérimentales, il s’appropria des bribes venues de différentes traditions intellectuelles. Ainsi, ce livre examine ce qu’on entendait par « méthode » à la fin du XVIIe siècle, les épistémologies de la physique qui s’affrontaient alors, quelques débats ouverts par la gestion de l’héritage cartésien. Mais l’essentiel sera peut-être la question (...) suivante : comment reconstituer les idées d’un savant ordinaire, qui n’a ni bouleversé l’ordre des sciences, ni montré une perspicacité épistémologique exceptionnelle ? (shrink)

In fragments of the lost Protrepticus, preserved in Iamblichus, Aristotle responds to Isocrates’ worries about the excessive demandingness of theoretical philosophy. Contrary to Isocrates, Aristotle holds that such philosophy is generally feasible for human beings. In defense of this claim, Aristotle offers the progress argument, which appeals to early Greek philosophers’ rapid success in attaining exact understanding. In this paper, I explore and evaluate this argument. After making clarificatory exegetical points, I examine the argument’s premises in light of pressing worries (...) that the argument reasonably faces in its immediate intellectual context, the dispute between Isocrates and Aristotle. I also relate the argument to modern concerns about philosophical progress. I contend that the argument withstands these worries, and thereby constitutes a reasonable Aristotelian response to the Isocratean challenge. (shrink)

Believing rationally is epistemically valuable, or so we tend to think. It’s something we strive for in our own beliefs, and we criticize others for falling short of it. We theorize about rationality, in part, because we want to be rational. But why? I argue that how we answer this question depends on how permissive our theory of rationality is. Impermissive and extremely permissive views can give good answers; moderately permissive views cannot.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Die Überwindung des mathematischen Erkenntnisideals" verfügbar.

Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is widely regarded as one of the most important works of moral philosophy in the last fifty years. In this outstanding collection of new essays, fourteen internationally-recognised philosophers examine the enduring contribution that Williams's book continues to make to ethics. Required.

Discusses the moral and ethical aspects of euthanasia and related topics.

Epistemologists often assume that rationality bears an important connection to the truth. In this paper I examine the implications of this commitment for permissivism: if rationality is a guide to the truth, can it also allow some leeway in how we should respond to our evidence? I first discuss a particular strategy for connecting permissive rationality and the truth, developed in a recent paper by Miriam Schoenfield. I argue that this limited truth-connection is unsatisfying, and the version of permissivism that (...) supports it faces serious challenges; so, for mainstream permissivism, the truth problem is still unsolved. I then discuss a strategy available to impermissivists, according to which rationality bears a quite strong connection to truth. I argue that this second strategy is successful. (shrink)

Aristotle’s views on the choiceworthiness of friends might seem both internally inconsistent and objectionably instrumentalizing. On the one hand, Aristotle maintains that perfect friends or virtue friends are choiceworthy and lovable for their own sake, and not merely for the sake of further ends. On the other hand, in Nicomachean Ethics IX.9, Aristotle appears somehow to account for the choiceworthiness of such friends by reference to their utility as sources of a virtuous agent’s robust self-awareness. I examine Aristotle’s views on (...) the utility and choiceworthiness of friends, and offer a novel reading of Nicomachean Ethics IX.9. On this reading, Aristotle accepts a version of instrumental conditionalism about final value, that is, the thesis that goods (including friends) can be choiceworthy for their own sake (i.e., possess final or end value) at least partly on account of their instrumental properties. In articulating what sort of instrumental conditionalism it is reasonable to attribute to Aristotle, I argue that Aristotle appeals to the utility of perfect friends as part of a broadly material causal account of why such friends are choiceworthy for their own sake. On this reading, perfect friends are not choiceworthy for the sake of their utility in eliciting self-awareness; rather, their choiceworthiness for their own sake is (at least partly) realized in, or constituted by, their conduciveness to the virtuous agent’s self-awareness. This reading, I argue, frees Aristotle from the charge of inconsistency: Aristotle can appeal to the conduciveness of perfect friends to the virtuous agent’s self-awareness as a way of explaining why such friends are choiceworthy for their own sake. (shrink)

In Plato’s Symposium, the mysterious Apollodorus recounts to an unnamed comrade, and to us, Aristodemus’ story of just what happened at Agathon’s drinking party. Since Apollodorus did not attend the party, however, it is unclear what relevance he could have to our understanding of Socrates’ speech, or to the Alcibiadean “satyr and silenic drama” (222d) that follows. The strangeness of Apollodorus is accentuated by his recession into the background after only two Stephanus pages. What difference—if any—does Apollodorus make to the (...) Symposium? Does his inclusion call the dramatic and philosophical unity of the work into question? I argue that despite initial appearances, Plato has important philosophical reasons for including Apollodorus as a character. Far from being an odd appendage to an otherwise complete narrative, the figure of Apollodorus is useful for our understanding of Socrates’s conception of eros later in the work. (shrink)

This book urges educational institutions to contemplate the harm they have caused to individual and society by their tragic suppression of the energy essential to the flowering of the mind's full potential. No more strident and uncompromising a voice is to be found on this topic than Whitehead's, in _The Aims of Education and Other Essays_. Walker's interpretation of these essays is set in a story of the lives of several teachers, education students, parents, and a professor. Whitehead's presence (...) is conjured among them as an uncomfortable and challenging gadfly. The philosophic depth is made widely accessible through the conversational language of imaginary journals and dialogues. This strategy also enables Walker to demonstrate the neglected power of dialogic pedagogy, and to suggest its centrality in the realization of Whiteheadian aims. The dialogues show a group of people curiously energized by an inquiry in which their stereotypical foundations are crumbling under the combined impact of focused dialogue and the brilliance of Whitehead's counterpoint. Their creative vitality of mind is shaken out of the narcosis of ingrained routines and secondhand ideas, and they discover the forgotten power of revitalizing outlook and action with an individual discernment of meaning, importance, and truth. They have immediately experienced the very quality of mind and its manner of cultivation Whitehead insists upon. This is intelligence enriching life with its full and interweaving spectrum of intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual sensitivities. (shrink)

Credences, unlike full beliefs, can’t be true or false. So what makes credences more or less accurate? This chapter offers a new answer to this question: credences are accurate insofar as they license true educated guesses, and less accurate insofar as they license false educated guesses. This account is compatible with immodesty; : a rational agent will regard her own credences to be best for the purposes of making true educated guesses. The guessing account can also be used to justify (...) certain coherence constraints on rational credence, such as probabilism. The chapter concludes by discussing some advantages of the guessing account over rival accounts of accuracy. (shrink)

Recueil d'actes du SIRL (Bruxelles, septembre 1999-juin 2001) et d'autres contributions. Réflexions sur la dimension épistémique de l'oeuvre littéraire, l'oeuvre littéraire comme réorganisation du réel, les relations entre savoir littéraire et autres sciences humaines et l'originalité du savoir littéraire.

Fifteen original essays open up a novel area of inquiry: the distinctively ethical dimensions of women's experiences of and in aging. Contributors distinguished in the fields of feminist ethics and the ethics of aging explore assumptions, experiences, practices, and public policies that affect women's well-being and dignity in later life. The book brings to the study of women's aging a reflective dimension missing from the empirical work that has predominated to date. Ethical studies of aging have so far failed to (...) emphasize gender. And feminist ethics has neglected older women, even when emphasizing other dimensions of 'difference.' Finally work on aging in all fields has focused on the elderly, while this volume sees aging as an extended process of negotiating personal and social change. (shrink)

On the one hand, Hume accepts the view -- which he attributes primarily to Stoicism -- that there exists a determinate best and happiest life for human beings, a way of life led by a figure whom Hume calls "the true philosopher." On the other hand, Hume accepts that view -- which he attributes to Scepticism -- that there exists a vast plurality of good and happy lives, each potentially equally choiceworthy. In this paper, I reconcile Hume's apparently conflicting commitments: (...) I argue that Hume's "Sceptical" pluralism about the character of the happiest life need not conflict with his "Stoic" advocacy of the supreme happiness of the true philosopher, given Hume's flexible understanding of how one might live as a true philosopher. (shrink)

Moral epistemology investigates sources and patterns of moral understanding. Its questions include: To what extent does morality consist in or depend on knowledge, and of what kind(s)? What makes possible moral knowledge, and how is such knowledge grounded or justified? What is the relation between philosophical claims about morality and the moral understanding any of us has, that is, what has ethics – the philosophical representation of morality – to do with morality itself? Feminist moral epistemology asks how social divisions (...) of labor, opportunity, power, and recognition which reproduce gender and other hierarchies affect both the ways these questions have in fact been answered, and the ways they might be. (shrink)

The conventional view of Hobbes’s commonwealth is that it was inspired by contemporary theories of tyranny. This article explores the idea that a paradigm for Hobbes’s state could in fact be found in early modern readings of Aristotle on democracy, as found in Book Three of the Politics. It argues that by the late sixteenth century, these meditations on the democratic body politic had developed claims about unity, mythology, and personation that would become central to Hobbes’s own theory of the (...) commonwealth. Tracing the history of commentary on the relevant passages in Aristotle reveals new perspectives not only on the political theories of both Aristotle and Hobbes but also introduces modern readers to the richness of early modern commentaries on classical political texts. The article ends with some thoughts on why attention to traditions of commentary might be valuable for political theorists today. (shrink)

Le projet ANR Profiterole avait pour objectifs la constitution de ressources pour le français médiéval (9e-15e s.) : un corpus annoté en (morpho-)syntaxe et des lexiques, la conception d'analyseurs syntaxiques pour le français médiéval, le développement d’outils de diffusion et d’analyse textométrique de l’annotation syntaxique dans le contexte de la plateforme TXM, et, enfin, la modélisation de certains aspects syntaxiques de l’évolution du français. Nous commençons par décrire la constitution du corpus Profiterole en termes de choix de textes, genres et (...) périodes et de types d’annotation. Puis nous présentons les modèles d’analyse syntaxique développés conjointement à la constitution du corpus, ainsi que la manière dont leurs prédictions ont été combinées pour assister la correction manuelle de l’annotation du corpus. Enfin, nous abordons les modalités de diffusion des données et modèles produits dans le cadre du projet avec un accent particulier sur l’intégration du corpus annoté à TXM, tant dans sa version en ligne accessible depuis le portail de la Base de français médiéval (BFM) que dans sa version pour ordinateur personnel, avec des exemples de requêtes CQP et TIGER facilitant l’exploration et l’analyse du corpus. (shrink)

Most of the existing works that can be classified as African feminist literature today are mainly the result of pioneering researches into the conditions of African women both in the past and in contemporary times. Many scholars and writers working within sociohistorical disciplines have engaged in feminist criticism of a rigorous type. But when it comes to philosophy proper, it appears that the main figures in the discipline have almost, in a conspiratorial way, avoided feminist discussion.

Festa, E., Roux, S. (2008). The Enigma of the Inclined Plane from Heron to Galileo. In: Laird, W.R., Roux, S. (eds) Mechanics and Natural Philosophy Before the Scientific Revolution. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 254. Springer, Dordrecht.

According to one popular criterion of property identity, where X and Y are properties, X is identical with Y if and only if X and Y bestow the same conditional powers on their bearers. In this paper, I argue that this causal criterion of property identity is unsatisfactory, because it fails to provide a sufficient condition for the identification of properties. My argument for this claim is based on the observation that the summing of properties does not entail the summing (...) of the conditional powers that they bestow on an object, but, rather, in some cases their subtraction. If so, the following causal structure seems possible: There are two properties, A and B. Each bestows a different set of conditional powers on its bearer, but the conjunctive property A-and-B bestows exactly the same set of conditional powers as either A or B. If this causal structure is possible, then it creates a serious problem for the causal criterion of property identity. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans la revue Sociologie, N° 4, vol. 4 | 2014. Nous remercions Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier et Marie Plessz de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Résumé : La théorie des pratiques est un courant d'analyse qui s'est développé en Grande-Bretagne et dans les pays scandinaves dans les années 2000. L'analyse de pratiques de consommation est l'un de ses domaines de prédilection. Se réclamant de Bourdieu et de Giddens, elle s'oppose à la fois aux analyses (...) de la consommation reposant sur (...) - Sociologie – Nouvel article. (shrink)