Les travaux d'Alexandre Matheron sur Spinoza et sur la philosophie de l'âge classique représentent un des points forts de l'école française d'histoire de la philosophie. Après Individu et Communauté chez Spinoza et Le Christ et le salut des ignorants, ces études complètent la vision du spinozisme et de son contexte, de ses racines et de sa signification historique. Elles traitent de tous les domaines du rationalisme classique : métaphysique, théorie de la connaissance, analyse des passions, éthique, politique et (...) religion. La méthode qui anime ces textes est celle d'une analyse structurale de la pensée philosophique : il s'agit de prendre au sérieux le caractère conceptuel des doctrines, leurs enchaînements argumentatifs, la rigueur et la cohérence de leurs catégories. Mais la considération de l'architecture d'un monument théorique ne se conçoit pas sans la biographie non de l'auteur mais de l'oeuvre : comment Spinoza est devenu Spinoza ; en d'autres termes, comment il a forgé sa pensée en traversant les arguments et les concepts de Machiavel, de Hobbes ou de Descartes pour arriver à des formulations de plus en plus spinozistes de son ontologie de la puissance. Le rationalisme absolu apparaît ainsi non seulement comme contenu des pensées étudiées mais aussi comme méthode d'histoire de la philosophie. Une démarche qui a donné des outils intellectuels à plusieurs générations de chercheurs et qui indique aujourd'hui le chemin pour pénétrer dans l'univers de la pensée classique. La seule façon rigoureuse de nous demander ce qui pour nous, de ces philosophies, est vrai. (shrink)

Spinoza, according to common opinion, could only have written lamentable platitudes on sexual love, narrowly inspired by the prejudices of his time and without serious philosophical foundation: that for which, in the past, he has been congratulated,1 he is now reproached; or, at best, excused. He would even have, some believe to be able to add, increased the pervading puritanism: sexuality, as such, would give rise in him to a deep repulsion and women would horrify him. The second of these (...) two assertions, if one sticks to the manifest content of the texts, actually rests on nothing; if one calls upon their latent content, it would require, to be established with a minimum of rigor, a study of which we will not dispute the theoretical possibility, but which, in fact, has not yet been undertaken. The first, on the other hand, has all the appearance of the obvious: that men love women for their beauty and do not support their attachment to someone else,2 that they desire them more the more admirers they have,3 that the jealousy of the male is exacerbated by the representation of the pudenda and of the excrementa of his rival,4 that sensual attachment is unstable and conflictual,5 that it often turns to obsession,6 that Adam loved Eve because of their similarity of nature,7 that he who remains insensitive to the generosity of a courtesan does not offend by ingratitude,8 that only free men and free women can marry one another and only if they want children,9 well, it seems, that isn’t anything sensational; now these eight passages, if the two definitions of the libido are added to them,10 are the only, if I’m not mistaken, that Spinoza expressly devoted to the question! He would therefore, apparently, only have drawn up a report of deficiency. (shrink)

"Alexandre Matheron is considered one of the most important interpreters of Spinoza's philosophy in the 20th century. These 20 essays, translated into English for the first time, focus on ontology, knowledge, politics and ethics in Spinoza, his predecessors and his contemporaries."--Publisher description.

Al tener Dios derecho soberano y un poder soberano sobre todas las cosas, al ser cada individuo Dios mismo en tanto que afectado por una modificación determinada, cada individuo tiene tanto derecho como fuerza (TTP, XVI; TP, II, 3): esta tesis «escandalosa» es el único punto de partida de toda la doctrina política de Spinoza. Basta desarrollar todo lo que ella implica para observar cómo se resuelve el problema de la legitimidad del poder estatal, así como de su óptimo funcionamiento. (...) Pero este punto de partida es, así mismo, la culminación de toda una historia. (shrink)

In a discussion of Victor Delbos, the doyen of early twentieth-century French Spinozism, Alexandre Matheron recalls with fondness a remark once made by his former doctoral sponsor, and fellow Spino...

In a discussion of Victor Delbos, the doyen of early twentieth-century French Spinozism, Alexandre Matheron recalls with fondness a remark once made by his former doctoral sponsor, and fellow Spino...

What proper role should considerations of risk, particularly to research subjects, play when it comes to conducting research on human enhancement in the military context? We introduce the currently visible military enhancement techniques (1) and the standard discussion of risk for these (2), in particular what we refer to as the ‘Assumption’, which states that the demands for risk-avoidance are higher for enhancement than for therapy. We challenge the Assumption through the introduction of three categories of enhancements (3): therapeutic, preventive, (...) and pure enhancements. This demands a revision of the Assumption (4), alongside which we propose some further general principles bearing on how to balance risks and benefits in the context of military enhancement research. We identify a particular type of therapeutic enhancements as providing a more responsible path to human trials of the relevant interventions than pure enhancement applications. Finally, we discuss some possible objections to our line of thought (5). While acknowledging their potential insights, we ultimately find them to be unpersuasive, at least provided that our proposal is understood as fully non-coercive towards the candidates for such therapeutic enhancement trials. (shrink)

According to a common philosophical intuition, the deep nature of things is hidden from us, and the world as we know it through perception and science is, just like a dream, shadows, or a computer simulation, somehow shallow and lacking in reality. This “intuition of unreality” clashes with a strong, but perhaps more naive, intuition to the effect that the world as we know it seems perfectly real. Shadows, dreams, or informational structures appear too unreal to be identical to the (...) world as we know it! This clash between the two intuitions forms the basis of the “problem of reality.” In the late nineteenth century psychiatrists encountered patients they referred to as “metaphysician doubters” who constantly questioned the reality of the world. This essay draws on studies of these patients in order to reject, and indeed diagnose, the intuition of unreality and recent metaphysical doctrines drawing on it, such as structuralism, digitalism, and virtual realism. (shrink)

Depersonalization is a pathological condition consisting in a deep modification of the way things appear to a subject, leading him to feel estranged from his body, his actions, his thoughts, his mind and even from himself. In this article, I argue that the study of depersonalization raises three challenges for recent theories of the sense of bodily ownership. These challenges—which I call the centrality challenge, the dissociation challenge and the grounding challenge— thwart most of these theories and suggest that the (...) sense of bodily ownership hinges on a phenomenal mark of mineness that can not be accounted for in terms of our sensory, interoceptive, agentive, cognitive or affective dispositions and that is psychologically primitive. In short: that mineness is first. (shrink)

This collection of six essays centers on Professor Koyre's great theme: the relative importance of metaphysics and observation, with controlled experiment a kind of marriage between the two. Professor Koyre's thesis might be summed up as a claim that when one is seeking to explain the scientific revolution, attention must be concentrated on the philosophical outlook of the scientist and away from speculative theories. At the time of his death, Alexandre Koyre was a professor at the Ecole Pratique des (...) Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) and a memeber of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. (shrink)

In a previous article on cosmological arguments, I have put forward a few examples of complete infinite and circular explanations, and argued that complete non-wellfounded explanations such as these might explain the present state of the world better than their well-founded theistic counterparts (Billon, 2021). Although my aim was broader, the examples I gave there implied merely causal explanations. In this article, I would like to do three things: • Specify some general informative conditions for complete and incomplete non-wellfounded causal (...) explanations that can be used to assess candidate explanations and to generate new examples of complete non-wellfounded explanations. • Show that these conditions, which concern chains of causal explanations, easily generalize to chains of metaphysical, grounding explanations and even to chains involving other “determination relations” such as supervenience. • Apply these general conditions to the recent debates against the existence of nonwellfounded chains of grounds and show, with a couple of precise examples, that the latter can be complete, and that just like in the case of causal explanations, non-wellfoundedness can in fact be an aset rather than a liability. (shrink)

Computational reproducibility possesses its own dynamics and narratives of crisis. Alongside the difficulties of computing as an ubiquitous yet complex scientific activity, computational reproducibility suffers from a naive expectancy of total reproducibility and a moral imperative to embrace the principles of free software as a non-negotiable epistemic virtue. We argue that the epistemic issues at stake in actual practices of computational reproducibility are best unveiled by focusing on software as a pivotal concept, one that is surprisingly often overlooked in accounts (...) of reproducibility issues. Software is not only about designing and coding but also about maintaining, supporting, distributing, licensing, and governance; it is not only about developers but also about users. We focus on openness debates among computational chemists involved in molecular modeling software packages as empirical grounding for our argument. We then identify and analyse four epistemic characteristics as key to the role of software in computational reproducibility. (shrink)

. Computational chemistry grew in a new era of “desktop modeling,” which coincided with a growing demand for modeling software, especially from the pharmaceutical industry. Parameterization of models in computational chemistry is an arduous enterprise, and we argue that this activity leads, in this specific context, to tensions among scientists regarding the epistemic opacity transparency of parameterized methods and the software implementing them. We relate one flame war from the Computational Chemistry mailing List in order to assess in detail the (...) relationships between modeling methods, parameterization, software and the various forms of their enclosure or disclosure. Our claim is that parameterization issues are an important and often neglected source of epistemic opacity and that this opacity is entangled in methods and software alike. Models and software must be addressed together to understand the epistemological tensions at stake. (shrink)

Patients suffering from depersonalization complain of feeling detached from their body, their mental states, and actions or even from themselves. In this chapter, I argue that depersonalization consists in the lack of a phenomenal feature that marks my experiences as mine, which is usually called “mineness,” and that the study of depersonalization constitutes a neglected yet incomparable probe to assess empirically the scope, role, and even the nature of mineness. Here is how I will proceed. After describing depersonalization (§2) and (...) arguing that it involves a lack of mineness (§3) I will confront a series of objections (§4). I will then spell out what depersonalization can teach us about the scope of mineness (§5), about its role and psychological function (§6) and even about its nature (§7). (shrink)

Precisely as he was repoliticizing his philosophy and criticizing his “theorist deviation”, Althusser wrote in 1967 that he did not know, after all, what was politics. In 1978, in Marx in his limits, he wrote that the classic Marxism “has never yet provided the beginning of an analysis answering the question : what can politics be about ?”. This article attempts to reconstruct the positivity of such remarks, on the basis of a sketch devoted in 1961 to the “Marxist conception (...) of politics”. In asking the question of what politics would look like in a communist regime, the “mature” Althusser undermines all Marxist conceptions of politics, starting with that of class struggles aiming at seizing State power - and even of class struggle per se. Moreover, he shakes Althusserianism even as it is barely taking shape. In his mention of “a zone which is not located in theoretical concepts, and which will be precisely the zone liberated by the end of classically conceived politics”, Althusser shows that politics can only take place when it is not located in any predetermined space. This non-situationability of politics takes its positive dimension when Althusser studies the “strange shaking of theory” operated in Machiavelli’s work. (shrink)

Today, Louis Althusser’s work knows a singular destiny. Relatively unknown until the 1992 publication of his autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, his work has since been enriched by several volumes of previously unpublished texts, and the re-edition of works that have long been unavailable. All the conditions therefore, as suggested by the numerous works, articles and conferences dedicated to Althusser, seem to be in place for a critical reexamination of his thought. For many reasons, however, this has not been the (...) result at all. Beyond the slightly sterile polemics concerning the respective status of the “legitimate work” and the posthumous work, beyond the particularly sensitive question of the relation between biography and theory, beyond the quarrels of inheritance and the resentment towards both the man and the master, beyond the detours of a psychiatric commentary as little indifferent to the reality of the texts as of the “case,” we must admit a well-established fact: today, the field of Althusserian studies has not yet been constituted. Within the field of French philosophy, one cannot find a single profound study on the place of Althusser in the history of Marxism, the history of philosophy or epistemology. This is because this type of study more or less implicitly supposes a certain global evaluation of the kind that the work of Althusser seems particularly designed to discourage. How do we evaluate works that have not ceased to destroy themselves? How do we evaluate works so heterogeneous, in which flashes of brilliance inhabit the same space as shocking theoretical indignities? How do we bring together texts as stimulating as the celebrated, “Ideology and the Ideological Apparatus of the State,” with the rather unsettling, “On the Reproduction of the Relations of Production,” of which it is in certain details but a fragment? If the form of academic commentary seems impossible from the start, perhaps one can say the same of the project of separating the wheat from the chaff, of distinguishing “what is living and what is dead” in the work of Louis Althusser. Difficult to inscribe within the continuity of history, Althusser’s work is, in fact, irremediably enigmatic. All that passes this way, behind such fiercely proclaimed revelations, has itself formed a profoundly aporetic structure marked by the general uncertainty of any attempt at reading. For Althusser progressively destroys the theories that he could have advanced. Already troubling by itself, this phenomenon hides another even more disturbing one: there is without a doubt not a single Althusserian concept that, in its foundation, is not immediately affected by its opposite. Here we seek to show, through several limited examples, that such is the fundamental gesture of Althusser, and that it is in principle indistinguishable from his grandeur and misery. (shrink)

Using emotional film clips is one of the most popular and effective methods of emotion elicitation. The main goal of the present study was to develop and test the effectiveness of a new and comprehensive set of emotional film excerpts. Fifty film experts were asked to remember specific film scenes that elicited fear, anger, sadness, disgust, amusement, tenderness, as well as emotionally neutral scenes. For each emotion, the 10 most frequently mentioned scenes were selected and cut into film clips. Next, (...) 364 participants viewed the film clips in individual laboratory sessions and rated each film on multiple dimensions. Results showed that the film clips were effective with regard to several criteria such as emotional discreteness, arousal, positive and negative affect. Finally, ranking scores were computed for 24 classification criteria: Subjective arousal, positive and negative affect (derived from the PANAS; Watson & Tellegen, 1988), a positive and a negative affect scores derived from the Differential Emotions Scale (DES; Izard et al., 1974), six emotional discreteness scores (for anger, disgust, sadness, fear, amusement and tenderness), and 15 “mixed feelings” scores assessing the effectiveness of each film excerpt to produce blends of specific emotions. In addition, a number of emotionally neutral film clips were also validated. The database and editing instructions to construct the film clips have been made freely available in a website. (shrink)

According to what we will call subjectivity theories of consciousness, there is a constitutive connection between phenomenal consciousness and subjectivity: there is something it is like for a subject to have mental state M only if M is characterized by a certain mine-ness or for-me-ness. Such theories appear to face certain psychopathological counterexamples: patients appear to report conscious experiences that lack this subjective element. A subsidiary goal of this chapter is to articulate with greater precision both subjectivity theories and the (...) psychopathological challenge they face. The chapter’s central goal is to present two new approaches to defending subjectivity theories in the face of this challenge. What distinguishes these two approaches is that they go to great lengths to interpret patients’ reports at face value – greater length, at any rate, than more widespread approaches in the extant literature. (shrink)

This paper focuses on one particular case that connects climate justice and climate economics. Its contribution is twofold. First, it aims at providing a sound normative foundation for carbon pricing mechanisms around the notions of a ‘right to energy’, the ‘duty not-to-harm’ and an argument for ‘restricted compensation’. Second, it identifies the normative elements from theories of climate justice that should guide the design of market-based instruments for climate change mitigation. This will cast light on the particular moral relevance of (...) the act of internalizing a negative externality and of the funds generated by putting a price on carbon. (shrink)

This is a survey paper on the descriptive set theory of hereditary families of closed sets in Polish spaces. Most of the paper is devoted to ideals and σ-ideals of closed or compact sets.

We prove several trichotomy results for ideals of compact sets. Typically, we show that a "sufficiently rich" universally Baire ideal is either $\Pi _{3}^{0}$-hard, or $\Sigma _{3}^{0}$-hard, or else a σ-ideal.

Depersonalization consists in a deep modification of the way things appear to a subject, leading him to feel estranged from his body, his actions, his thoughts, and his mind, and even from himself. Even though, when it was discovered at the end of the 19th century, this psychiatric condition was widely used to probe certain aspects of bodily awareness, and more specifically the sense of bodily ownership (SBO), it has been strangely neglected in contemporary debates. In this chapter, I argue (...) that because of three specific features, depersonalization raises some important challenges for current theories of the SBO. The first feature — call it “generality” — is that depersonalization does not only affect the sense of bodily ownership but also, typically, the sense of ``mental ownership’’ (SMO), the sense of agency or ``action ownership’’ (SOA), and the subject’s core sense of herself (CSS), that is, her awareness of herself as an I. The second feature is that except for the symptoms of depersonalization, depersonalized patients are hard to distinguish, psychologically, from normal subjects. This makes it hard to find psychological features that might explain their condition. The last feature, call it “fundamentality” is that the psychological features that do seem abnormal among depersonalized patients seem more likely to be explained by depersonalization than to explain it. These three features raise three challenges — the centrality challenge, the dissociation challenge, and the grounding challenge. Taken together, I will argue, these challenges suggest that the SBO depends on a form of phenomenal “mineness” that would mark my mental states as mine and that cannot be accounted for in sensorimotor, cognitive, or even affective terms. A phenomenal mineness that indeed seems to be psychologically primitive, and only accountable in neurophysiological terms. (shrink)

Natural modalities are often analysed from an abstract point of view where they are associated with putative laws of nature. However, the way possibilities are represented in physics is more complex. Lagrangian mechanics, for instance, involves two different layers of modalities: kinematical and dynamical possibilities. This paper examines the status of these two layers, both in the classical and quantum case. The quantum case is particularly problematic: we identify four possible interpretive options. The upshot is that a close inspection of (...) the way possibilities are represented in physics could lead to new ways of thinking about natural modalities. (shrink)

Several advocates of the lively field of “metaphysics of science” have recently argued that a naturalistic metaphysics should be based solely on current science, and that it should replace more traditional, intuition-based, forms of metaphysics. The aim of the present paper is to assess that claim by examining the relations between metaphysics of science and general metaphysics. We show that the current metaphysical battlefield is richer and more complex than a simple dichotomy between “metaphysics of science” and “traditional metaphysics”, and (...) that it should instead be understood as a three dimensional “box”, with one axis distinguishing “descriptive metaphysics” from “revisionary metaphysics”, a second axis distinguishing a priori from a posteriori metaphysics, and a third axis distinguishing “commonsense metaphysics”, “traditional metaphysics” and “metaphysics of science”. We use this three-dimensional figure to shed light on the project of current metaphysics of science, and to demonstrate that, in many instances, the target of that project is not defined with enough precision and clarity. (shrink)

In this paper, we put forward a new account of emergence called “transformational emergence”. Such an account captures a variety of emergence that can be considered as being diachronic and weakly ontological. The fact that transformational emergence actually constitutes a genuine form of emergence is motivated. Besides, the account is free of traditional problems surrounding more usual, synchronic versions of emergence, and it can find a strong empirical support in a specific physical phenomenon, the fractional quantum Hall effect, which has (...) long been touted as a paradigmatic case of emergence. (shrink)

This article discusses the acquisition of a physical impairment/disability through voluntary body modification, or transability. From the perspectives of critical genealogy and feminist intersectional analysis, the article considers the ability and cis*/trans* axes in order to question the boundaries between trans and transabled experience and examines two assumptions impeding the conceptualization of their placement on the same continuum: 1) trans studies assumes an able-bodied trans identity and able-bodied trans subject of analysis; and 2) disability studies assumes a cis* disabled identity. (...) The perception of transsexuality and transability as mutually exclusive phenomena results from a nonintersectional analysis of transsexuality as an issue of sex/gender, but not of ability, and of transability as an issue of ability, but not of sex/gender. Difficulty recognizing continuities between these phenomena thus stems from an ableist interpretation of sex/gender and a cisnormative* interpretation of ability. This article aims to: 1) enrich intersectional analysis in trans and disability studies and transability scholarship; 2) complicate disability studies, in which disabilities are often presumed to be “involuntary,” and encourage the decentering of a cis* subject; 3) encourage trans studies to decenter an able-bodied subject; and 4) advocate for increased dialogue and the creation of alliances between trans and disability studies and movements. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the claim that, as new types of neurointervention get developed allowing us to enhance various aspects of our mental functioning, we should work to prevent the use of such interventions from ever becoming the “new normal,” that is, a practice expected—even if not directly required—by employers. The author’s response to that claim is that, unlike compulsion or most cases of direct coercion, indirect coercion to use such neurointerventions is, per se, no more problematic than the pressure people (...) all find themselves under to use modern technological devices like computers or mobile phones. Few people seem to believe that special protections should be introduced to protect contemporary Neo-Luddites from such pressures. That being said, the author acknowledges that separate factors, when present, can indeed render indirect coercion to enhance problematic. The factors in question include lack of safety, fostering adaptation to oppressive circumstances, and having negative side effects that go beyond health. Nonetheless, the chapter stresses that these factors do not seem to be necessary correlates of neuroenhancement. (shrink)

Cet article propose une analyse croisée du discours médical sur la masturbation et sur la lecture en France au XVIIIe siècle. Son but est d’interroger la construction de la définition « naturalisante » des qualités attribuées à l’un et l’autre sexe. A partir de traités physiologiques sur les maladies des femmes, la réflexion porte sur trois points principaux. Pourquoi la lecture et la masturbation sont-ils devenus des problèmes médicaux? Comment un médecin neutralise-t-il le danger, pour une femme, de lire un (...) traité sur un sujet tel que la masturbation? Comment le discours sur la lecture et la masturbation fonctionne-t-il comme système discriminant entre les sexes? (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper puts forward a normative framework to differentiate between the climate-related responsibilities of different countries in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement. It offers reasons for applying the chief moral principles of ‘historical responsibility’ and ‘capacity’ to climate finance instead of climate change mitigation targets. This will provide a normative basis to realize the goal of climate change mitigation while allowing for developing and newly industrialized countries to develop economically and offer an account of the distributive principles that can (...) regulate climate finance. This is a real-world interpretation of the 1992 UNFCCC principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ that takes into account the progress accomplished at the COP21 in Paris and offers a solution to the still unsolved problem of differentiated responsibilities. This paper offers an application of this proposal to the Green Climate Fund. (shrink)

Patients suffering from the Cotard syndrome can deny being alive, having guts, thinking or even existing. They can also complain that the world or time have ceased to exist. In this article, I argue that even though the leading neurocognitive accounts have difficulties meeting that task, we should, and we can, make sense of these bizarre delusions. To that effect, I draw on the close connection between the Cotard syndrome and a more common condition known as depersonalisation. Even though they (...) are not delusional, depersonalised patients seem to have experiences that are quite similar to those of Cotard patients. I argue that these experiences are essentially characterised by a lack of subjective character and of two other structural features of experience, which I call ‘the present character’ and ‘the actual character’. Cotard's nihilistic delusions simply consist in taking these anomalous experiences at face value. (shrink)