La multiplication des contrats à durée déterminée constitue une caractéristique importante des marchés académiques contemporains. Ce phénomène de précarisation, observable dans plusieurs contextes disciplinaires et nationaux, se manifeste notamment par l’augmentation marquée, depuis les années 1990, du nombre d’emplois postdoctoraux, proportionnellement au nombre de postes stabilisés. Parallèlement, les chercheur⋅e⋅s en début de carrière sont largement confronté⋅e⋅s à des discours institutionnels faisant la promotion des mobilités académiques et des collaborations internationales. L’abondance des discours autour de la mobilité des jeunes chercheur⋅e⋅s tend (...) cependant à masquer la pérennité des modèles de carrières nationaux, très variables d’un pays à l’autre du fait de l’histoire particulière des espaces concernés. À partir des données quantitatives et qualitatives sur les expériences de début de carrière académique en Suisse, notre article vise à pointer comment l’impératif de mobilité internationale – particulièrement fort dans le contexte helvétique contemporain – s’hybride avec le modèle de carrière en vigueur depuis le début du xxe siècle. L’analyse croisée des déterminants structurels des débuts de carrières académiques et des récits des « postdocs » permet de comprendre les différentes manières « d’être » postdoctorant⋅e⋅s et les potentielles illusions qui les accompagnent, tout en pointant le caractère socialement situé de ces expériences – notamment en termes de genre. Elle offre également un éclairage plus général sur les tensions qui structurent l’espace académique suisse à l’heure de son internationalisation. (shrink)

La multiplication des contrats à durée déterminée constitue une caractéristique importante des marchés académiques contemporains. Ce phénomène de précarisation, observable dans plusieurs contextes disciplinaires et nationaux, se manifeste notamment par l’augmentation marquée, depuis les années 1990, du nombre d’emplois postdoctoraux, proportionnellement au nombre de postes stabilisés. Parallèlement, les chercheur⋅e⋅s en début de carrière sont largement confronté⋅e⋅s à des discours institutionnels faisant la promotion des mobilités académiques et des collaborations internationales. L’abondance des discours autour de la mobilité des jeunes chercheur⋅e⋅s tend (...) cependant à masquer la pérennité des modèles de carrières nationaux, très variables d’un pays à l’autre du fait de l’histoire particulière des espaces concernés. À partir des données quantitatives et qualitatives sur les expériences de début de carrière académique en Suisse, notre article vise à pointer comment l’impératif de mobilité internationale – particulièrement fort dans le contexte helvétique contemporain – s’hybride avec le modèle de carrière en vigueur depuis le début du xxe siècle. L’analyse croisée des déterminants structurels des débuts de carrières académiques et des récits des « postdocs » permet de comprendre les différentes manières « d’être » postdoctorant⋅e⋅s et les potentielles (dés)illusions qui les accompagnent, tout en pointant le caractère socialement situé de ces expériences – notamment en termes de genre. Elle offre également un éclairage plus général sur les tensions qui structurent l’espace académique suisse à l’heure de son internationalisation. (shrink)

Philosophia Scientiae 23-3, p. 35-66, doi : 10.4000/philosophiascientiae.2048 Dans les échanges de fichiers durant les corrections des épreuves de notre article, nous avons transmis nos figures avec une notation erronée. Par ailleurs une des figures a sauté au cours des mêmes échanges, du fait d’une inattention de notre part. Elle est reproduite ci-dessous. Dans l’article publié dans la version p...

Philosophia Scientiae 23-3, p. 35-66, doi : 10.4000/philosophiascientiae.2048 Dans les échanges de fichiers durant les corrections des épreuves de notre article (« Ce “qu’être postdoc” veut dire»), nous avons transmis nos figures avec une notation erronée. Par ailleurs une des figures (la 2, présentant schématiquement notre approche analytique) a sauté au cours des mêmes échanges, du fait d’une inattention de notre part. Elle est reproduite ci-dessous. Dans l’article publié dans la version p...

Philosophia Scientiae 23-3, p. 35-66, doi : 10.4000/philosophiascientiae.2048 Dans les échanges de fichiers durant les corrections des épreuves de notre article (« Ce “qu’être postdoc” veut dire»), nous avons transmis nos figures avec une notation erronée. Par ailleurs une des figures (la 2, présentant schématiquement notre approche analytique) a sauté au cours des mêmes échanges, du fait d’une inattention de notre part. Elle est reproduite ci-dessous. Dans l’article publié dans la version p...

El autor se propone, en Sartre-Foucault (una oposición tergiversada) , resolver el enigma planteado por el rechazo foucaultiano de la filosofía contemporánea . Rechazo casi endógeno y no exógeno, rechazo por conocimiento interiorizado y no desconocimiento exterior. Se analizan las dos fuentes de hostilidades flagrantes. 1) El rechazo foucaultiano de los privilegios del Cogito en beneficio de una consideración de la especialización del pensamiento. 2) La evidencia que posee de la normatividad, sin moral teorizada , de esta filosofía contemporánea y (...) particularmente en el caso de Sartre, el más existencialistamente moralista de entre todos los contemporáneos citados por Foucault: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille. «El pensamiento desde su forma más temprana es una acción – un acto peligroso» (Les Mots et les Choses , p. 339). También lo sabían Hegel, Marx, Freud, nos dice. El enigma surge precisamente del poder totalizante de comprensión que manifiesta con relación a este gran cuadro de la filosofía contemporánea. En general una oposición procede, en efecto, de una incomprensión del autor criticado o de una comprensión tergiversada. (shrink)

The thought of Pierre Klossowski, praised by Foucault, Blanchot, Deleuze, has been scarcely addressed by the philosophical community. We argue in this article that this is largely due to the frequent difficulty of understanding his work as a whole: both his artistic and literary production and his interpretations of Nietzsche or Sade form a coherent whole, whose significance has a deeply critical political scope. The notion of unproductive spending, which occupies a central place in Bataille's work, will be (...) rearticulated in Klossowski's reflections through the concepts of drive, phantasm, simulacrum, value and consumption. In The Living Currency, the political dimension of these terms appears clearly: relying on a rereading of Fourier and Sade, the author shows the extreme degree of deformation of what we assume as a reality in modern industrial society. In this sense, his thinking takes on special relevance today, as a revelation of the excess and unhingedness of a society in which production and consumption are reproduced without limit through the infinite reflections produced by the game between drives, ghosts and simulacra. (shrink)

What happens when philosophy and literature meet? This pioneering study of the essays and fiction of Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Maurice Blanchot examines the relationship between the literary and the philosophical dimension of their work and throws new light on the radical singularity of their writing.

Reviled and fetishized, the work of Georges Bataille has been most often reduced to his outrageous, erotic, and libertine fiction and essays. But increasingly, readers are finding his insights into politics, economics, sexuality, and performance revealing and timely. Focusing on Bataille’s most extensive work, The Accursed Share, Shannon Winnubst and the contributors to this volume present contemporary interpretations that read Bataille in a new light. These essays situate Bataille in French and European intellectual traditions, bring forward (...) key concepts for understanding the challenges posed by his important work, and draw out his philosophy. Established voices and younger scholars cover a range of topics and themes, including ethics, politics, economy, psychology, and performance so readers can think with and through Bataille. While focusing attention on Bataille and his provocative work, this book offers a sympathetic, yet critical, reappraisal and rehabilitation. Contributors are Alison Leigh Brown, Andrew Cutrofello, Zeynep Direk, Jesse Goldhammer, Dorothy Holland, Pierre Lamarche, Richard A. Lee, Jr., Alphonso Lingis, Ladelle McWhorter, Lucio A. Privitello, Allan Stoekl, Amy Wendling, and Shannon Winnubst. (shrink)

This article examines how Georges Bataille, one of the celebrated precursors of the postmodern death of a linguistic subject, is also a Nietzschean, pre-Freudian thinker who offers us an account of the birth of an affective subject. If critics still tend to recuperate Bataille within a “metaphysics of the subject,” the present article shows that the central concept of his thought needs to be reconsidered in the light of his debt to Pierre Janet’s “psychology of the socius,” (...) an interpersonal psychology that transgresses precisely this metaphysics. In line with contemporary theoretical developments, Bataille’s account of the birth of the subject out of the laughter of the socius offers us a theoretical model to rethink the foundations of subjectivity in relational, mimetic terms. (shrink)

Shocking, brilliant, and eccentric, the French author, translator, and artist Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) exerted a profound effect on French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century. The older brother of the painter Balthus, secretary to the novelist Andre Gide, friend to Geroges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and heralded as one of the most important voices in the French "return to Nietzsche" by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Klossowski pursued his singular vision of mortal embodiment through a variety of scholarly (...) manifestations. In Such a Deathly Desire, Klossowski's original interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return is developed around the enigmatic figure of the "demon," then deepened with provocative readings of Gide's correspondence; Barbey d'Aurevilly's novel A Married Proest; and the intertwining of language and death in the work of Bataille, Blanchot, and Brice Parain. The book concludes with the powerful essay "Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody," in which Klossowski articulates the consequences of the eternal return and the meaning of Nietzsche's genealogy of the fabulation of the world. Intersecting with and confounding a range of disciplines - including psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and philosophy - Klossowski's critical writings on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment remain powerful and original contributions to contemporary concerns in the theoretical humanities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 3-6MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Whispers of the Flesh Essays in Memory of Pierre KlossowskiIan JamesRussell Ford Pierre Klossowski—novelist, essayist, painter, and translator—was one of the most startling, original, and influential figures in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. The older brother of the well-known painter Balthus and a close associate of Georges Bataille, Klossowski's diverse oeuvre includes novels, philosophical essays, and translations, as well as (...) paintings and films. Confined thus far to an undeserved but somehow fitting shadow existence in the margins and notes of theorists who have become mainstays of Anglo-American criticism, Klossowski's own work has increasingly become a focus of critical interest for its decisive contribution to the development of thought and aesthetics in France from the 1950s onward. Born in 1905, the eldest son of Polish émigrés, Klossowski spent his first ten years in Paris in an artistic milieu, heavily influenced by the neoimpressionism of figures such as Bonnard and Derain. His father, Erich Klossowski de Rola, was a painter and art historian, the author of an important monograph on Daumier. His mother, Baladine, was also a painter and trained under Bonnard. While still a teenager Klossowski was introduced to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom he became close and who in turn introduced him to the novelist André Gide. At eighteen he became Gide's secretary and assisted him with the drafts of his famous novel Les faux-monnayeurs.Not until 1930, however, did Klossowski's own career properly begin, when he translated with Jean-Pierre Jouve a collection of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. Throughout his life Klossowski was a prolific and influential translator from both German and Latin into French, translating amongst others Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein from the German, and Suetonius, Virgil, Augustine, and Tertullian from the Latin. While working for the prominent Parisian psychoanalyst René Laforgue, Klossowski published his first philosophical essay on the Marquis de Sade in 1933 in the Revue française de la psychanalyse. Scandalized by Klossowski's Nietzschean-inflected psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade's writing, Laforgue dismissed Klossowski immediately. Throughout the 1930s Klossowski made a number of key friendships and acquaintances, most importantly with Georges Bataille, but also many others, including Walter Benjamin, André Masson, Jean Wahl, and Maurice Heine. During this period he published several articles and collaborated with Bataille on the review Acéphale and in the avant-garde experiment of the Collège de Sociologie (where, it is said, he would attend meetings dressed in a soutane). During the war years Klossowski trained in a number of Catholic seminaries, a vocation which ultimately failed and led to the writing of his first novel, La vocation suspendue. In the postwar period he married [End Page 3] a war widow, Denise Morin Sinclair, who had been interned in Ravensbrück for her activities in the Resistance and who became the model for Roberte, a key figure in much of Klossowski's fiction and painting. After the war Klossowski began to publish the influential works for which he will chiefly be remembered: literary-philosophical essays on Sade and Nietzsche (among others), as well as six important novels written between 1950 and 1965, La vocation suspendue (1950), the three works, originally published separately, which went on to form the Lois de l'hospitalité trilogy—Roberte ce soir (1954), La révocation de l'Édit de Nantes (1959) and Le souffleur ou le théâtre de société (1960)‚—and, finally, Le Baphomet (1965).Klossowski's seminal 1947 work, Sade mon prochain, was one of the first full-length literary and philosophical studies of Sade's work to be published in France and marked a decisive break from earlier accounts. Whereas earlier treatments of Sade had focused either on biographical detail or on the medical and psychosexual import of his life and writing, Klossowski's reading was concerned with the intertwined figures of law and transgression in Sade's work. After Sade mon prochain French intellectuals and writers... (shrink)

This review of the long-awaited English translation and edition of Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency starts with a comparison of its historical context and our own in order to consider why this book remains important today. I support this comparison by examining its account of the “moral power” of industrial society to elicit the participation of the very people it exploits in their own exploitation. In short, Klossowski understands that this regime is based upon an affective arrangement that makes us, (...) even those of us who protest against it, into its ever-renewed source. Despite the apparent inescapability of this regime that is us, I suggest that Klossowski’s parodic utopia, in which the body becomes living currency, follows Georges Bataille to offer an ethics of the general economy that might, perhaps, enable us to subvert it and develop new ways of relating to ourselves and others. Careful consideration of the difficulties this translation encounters in a letter Michel Foucault sent to Klossowski, allows me to conclude by questioning how we are to interpret his book and this new edition. (shrink)

Pierre Klossowski's career in philosophy is a brief but significant intervention into the manner in which the connections between desire, identity, and meaning are thought. Although Klossowski's influence on much of what is called French “post-structuralism” or “post-modernism” is frequently noted, Klossowski's development of the motif of the simulacrum is rarely traced in its proper context. Through readings of the texts of the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as his own ruminations on the (...) polytheism of the ancient Roman cult of Diana, Klossowski constructs a critique not only of the identity of the self but also of the supposed unity of reason and rational signs. Klossowski's critique demonstrates how meaningful discourse is produced from the basis of incommunicable affects, which project images in consciousness that, only then, are able to take the form of iterable simulacra. Our “gregarious” discourse in language is, thus, formed only indirectly from the affects and acquires its supposed unity only as it fails to express those affects. (shrink)

The translation of Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle finally provides an English-speaking audience with access to one of the most influential texts in the French Nietzsche tradition. First published in France in 1969, Klossowski's text consummated over three decades of intense work and discussion on Nietzsche's most enigmatic and original ideas. Working with Bataille and the famous College de Sociologie, Klossowski published a series of important studies of Nietzsche culminating in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle which (...) Foucault described in a letter to Klossowski as "the greatest book of philosophy I have read" in addition to Nietzsche himself. Deeply influencing Deleuze, Lyotard, and other major Nietzscheans, Klossowski's work remains a seminal text of the contemporary French reading of Nietzsche. (shrink)

Prehistory is an invention of the later nineteenth century. It was in this moment of technological progress and the acceleration of production and circulation, that three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to reckon the age of the Earth; second, to find a point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki's Transfixed by Prehistory considers (...) the inseparability of these accounts of temporality from the disruptive forces of modernity. She asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if it was considered through these three, at once consecutive and interwoven, inventions of the longue durée? This book attempts to articulate such a history, which turns out to be more complex than that of an inevitable march of progress leading up to the "Anthropocene." Rather, it's a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration and incessant invention, since the "new" was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed as much of speed as of slowness, as much of change as of deep time, as much of confidence as of skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be thought again. This book focuses on this intrinsic tension through major artistic practices (Cézanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and Jünger) and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology. (shrink)

Le philosophe doit fournir au législateur les moyens théoriques d'établir dans les cités des constitutions droites, seules à même de rendre les citoyens vertueux, et donc heureux, en les faisant obéir à de bonnes lois. Plutôt que d'instaurer une fois pour toutes une cité "parfaite", il faut, le plus souvent, réformer les institutions existantes et notamment mélanger les aspects positifs des différentes constitutions déviées. Même s'il entend promouvoir la concorde entre les citoyens, Aristote reconnaît le caractère à la fois naturel (...) et parfois bénéfique de la lutte des classes qui empêche une faction de devenir hégémonique. En permettant au législateur d'analyser la réalité sur laquelle il doit travailler, Les Politiques sont le premier traité de science politique."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Non-cognitive gadgets are fancy tools shaped to meet specific, local needs. Cecilia Heyes defines cognitive gadgets as dedicated psychological mechanisms created through social interactions and culturally, not genetically, inherited by humans. She has boldly proposed that many human cognitive mechanisms are gadgets. If true, these claims would have far-reaching implications for our scientific understanding of human social cognition. Here we assess Heyes’s cognitive gadget approach as it applies to mindreading. We do not think that the evidence supports Heyes’s thought-provoking thesis (...) that human children are taught to read minds the way they are taught to read words. We highlight a potential circularity lurking behind this analogy, and we explain why we are unpersuaded by Heyes’s anti-mentalistic proposal for handling data inconsistent with the gadget view, which others take to be evidence for mindreading in human infancy. We conclude that while human minds may well be filled with gadgets, mindreading is unlikely to be one of them. (shrink)

We defend, from a contractarian perspective, that the fair price of an insurance policy is the amount that the contracting parties agree when they are both equally uncertain about the insured event. Drawing on the approach developed by R. Sugden in _The Community of Advantage_, we answer two standard objections raised against contractarianism in the actuarial sciences: (1) people are not wise enough to assess their actuarial risks; (2) they are not rational enough to decide which insurance policy suits them (...) better. We show under which circumstances people can make fair actuarial agreements, without presupposing any objective risk or rationality benchmarks. (shrink)

Highlighting the social tensions that confront the liberal tradition, Pierre Manent draws a portrait of what we, citizens of modern liberal democracies, have become. For Manent, a discussion of liberalism encompasses the foundations of modern society, its secularism, its individualism, and its conception of rights. The frequent incapacity of the morally neutral, democratic state to further social causes, he argues, derives from the liberal stance that political life does not serve a higher purpose. Through quick-moving, highly synthetic essays, he (...) explores the development of liberal thinking in terms of a single theme: the decline of theological politics. The author traces the liberal stance to Machiavelli, who, in seeking to divorce everyday life from the pervasive influence of the Catholic church, separated politics from all notions of a cosmological order. What followed, as Manent demonstrates in his analyses of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Guizot, and Constant, was the evolving concept of an individual with no goals outside the confines of the self and a state with no purpose but to prevent individuals from dominating one another. Weighing both the positive and negative effects of such a political arrangement, Manent raises important questions about the fundamental political issues of the day, among them the possibility of individual rights being reconciled with the necessary demands of political organization, and the desirability of a government system neutral about religion but not about public morals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE PLACE OF RENE GIRARD IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY Guy Vanheeswijck University ofAntwerp and ofLeuven Iwould like to start by quoting a text which is likely to be recognized by everyone, who is even on a superficial level familiar with the work of René Girard: Desire that bears on a natural object is only human to the extent that it is mediated by the desire of another bearing on the (...) same object: it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. Thus an object that is perfectly useless from a biological point of view (such as a medal, or the enemy's flag) can be desired because it is the object of other desires. Such a human desire, and human reality as it differs from animal reality, is only created by the action that satisfies such desires. Human history is the history of desires that are desired [Désirs désirés]. Undoubtedly, these could be words written by Girard. However, they are not. These words are quoted from the famous lectures given by Alexandre Kojève on Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes at the Ecole pratique des hautes études between 1933 and 1939. They were followed by what would become the crème ofpost-war French philosophy: Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Alexandre Koyré, Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre.' Kojève's interpretation ofHegel has, as generally known, become the point ofreference to the post-war twentieth ' Although Sartre himselfcould not attend the lectures (at that time he taught philosophy in Le Havre en Laon), he must have heard from it by way of Aron or Merleau-Ponty. 96Guy Vanheeswijck century philosophy in France. Before 1930 the word "dialectic" was burdened with an odium of sin, after 1930 it became a word—thanks to Kojève —radiant with prestige. Before 1930 there had been no talk of an Hegelian school whatsoever in France, after 1930 the situation changed so drastically that Merleau-Ponty was able to write these often quoted lines in 1946: Hegel is at the origin of everything that has been great in philosophy for over a century; for example Marxism, Nietzsche, phenomenology and German existentialism, psychoanalysis. He inaugurates the attempt to explore the irrational and to integrate it within a wider rationality that remains the philosophical task of our century. (Sens et non-sens 109-110) Half a century later, these words have lost their self-evident character. While the generation of French thinkers between 1930 and 1960 stresses its dependence on Hegel, the generation after 1960 heavily reacts against him. In 1970 Michel Foucault gave his inaugural speech at the Collège de France. On behalf of his generation he testified to a generalized antiHegelianism at that moment: "Our entire epoch, whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or Nietzsche, seeks to evade Hegel's Imperium [échapper à Hegel] (L'Ordre du discours 74). Obviously, René Girard belongs to the second generation, which, on the one hand, embroiders on the theme ofdesire, borrowed from Kojève's interpretation ofHegel, but, on the other, in its search for answers precisely wishes to get rid of Hegel. But, is it correct to call René Girard a philosopher? His schooling was that of an historian. In 1947 he graduated in Paris as an archivistepal éographe at the Ecole de Chartres: his thesis was "La vie privée à Avignon dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle." Three years later—in the meantime he had emigrated to the United States—he received his Ph.D. at the faculty of history of the University of Indiana. The topic of his dissertation was "American opinion ofFrance, 1940-1943." However, he has never worked as a professional historian. He owes his reputation first and foremost to his literary analyses, subsequently to his research in anthropology, finally to his exegesis ofthe Bible. Time and again, Girard has expressed his preference for literature to both humanities and philosophy. Human behavior is, in his view, much less elucidated by the conceptual structures of discursive philosophy than by the evocative force of a Greek tragedy, the Biblical passion story or a modern novel. One might retort that René Girard... (shrink)

Introduction: The quickened and the dead -- Ontology for philologists : Nietzsche, body, subject -- "Be your self!" : Nietzsche as educator -- The life of thought : Nietzsche's truth perspectivism and the will to power -- Of slaves and masters : the birth of good and evil -- Moments of excess : the making and unmaking of the subject -- Lacan, desire, and the originating function of loss -- The word that sees me : the nexus of image and (...) sign -- The nothing as the reverse side of Lacan's mirror -- Nietzsche is dead, long live Nietzsche : in memory of paternal ghosts -- The "insiders" : Nietzsche's secret teaching and the invention of "the philosopher of the future" -- Finding one's home in the nothingness of Nietzsche's text -- Nietzsche's excessive demand and the question of the adulterous queen's desire -- High and low : the hierarchical structure of Nietzsche's texts -- Inside and outside : Nietzsche "incorporated"; or, Who incorporates whom in the act of reading Nietzsche? -- The father's indulgence of the prodigal son : ambiguity and the limits of "the position" -- The contagion of affect in Netzsche : Klein, Krell, Bataille -- Doing time with Melanie Klein : renouncing "the bad breast," mourning the loss of "the good breast" -- "Motivating this writingéis a fear of going crazy" : how Klein might read Georges Bataille sur Nietzsche -- David Farrell Krell's "novel" approach to reading Nietzsche -- Family romances and textual encounters : Sarah Kofman reading Nietzsche -- Reading Nietzsche I : explosions -- Autobiography or autothanography : killing with words in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat -- Reading Nietzsche II : le pris des juifs; Nietzsche, les juifs, l'anti-semitisme -- The vision, the riddle, and the vicious circle : Pierre Klossowski's reading of Nietzsche's sick body -- On the continuity and disjunction between the body and language -- Exquisite delirium : the thought of eternal return -- The conspiracy of philosopher/villains : Nietzsche/Klossowski/Sade -- From cannibalism to voodoo : the creation and control of the subject of Nietzsche's writing. (shrink)

The dissertation seeks to gain a comprehensive understanding of Frege's watershed work of logic, the 1879 Begriffsschrift . The treatise is the first since Aristotle's instauration of the discipline to have succeeded in completely recasting logic. Very generally stated, the dissertation aims at making explicit the conceptual origins of modern logic. To do that will require that each of the achievements of Concept-script be examined from one or more vantage points: either within the perspective of Frege's larger and guiding ambition, (...) that of providing a logical justification of arithmetic; or with respect to the horizon of modernity; or in relation to later developments in logical theory and the philosophy of language, developments stimulated, albeit not exclusively, by Frege's very work. The vantage point adopted in each case will depend on the nature of the topic and the extent to which it requires to be made explicit. One perspective will have preponderance, that of Frege's relationship to his early modern ancestors, a group that includes philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians. Since modernity is constituted in a nearly constant critical, if not polemical, relationship to the Ancients, they will also at times be drawn into the discussion. The elucidation of Frege's breakthrough work will be guided by the following thesis: Frege's attempt to justify arithmetic logically and the fine work of clarification he produced in actualizing this project; his discovery of function-theoretic logic and his fashioning of a concept-script ; and his critique of natural language and the attendant semantics developed over the course of that critique constitute an unfolding and an extension of the primacy of universal method over ontology that is the signature of modern inquiry. (shrink)

Pour qui s’intéresse à la philosophie des mathématiques, Roger Apéry (1916-1994) incarne le défenseur de la mathématique constructive et l’adversaire résolu du formalisme et du bourbakisme. On sait moins qu’il est aussi l’un des premiers universitaires français à avoir fait la promotion de la théorie des catégories, pourtant hautement structuraliste et souvent jugée comme très formelle. L’objectif principal de notre étude est de préciser les conditions historiques et la teneur philosophique du double enthousiasme d’Apéry, afin de vérifier la cohérence d’une (...) pensée libre, originale et attachante. (shrink)

War has always been a problem that has plagued our existence, and begged for civility and restriction in its use. The idea behind engaging in war has often been based on assuring a place for peace in the not so distant future, whether the motivation was normative, as within the Just War Doctrine, or simply the hope that victory would lead to the end of organized violence. A group of scholars, intellectuals, and practitioners has been brought together in this volume (...) to posit an alternative route — through justice — to what has thus far been elusive for humankind: a durable peace among and between peoples. (shrink)

This chapter distinguishes Just Peace from its closest ‘moral’ neighbours — a stable peace and positive peace. Drawing on both consequentialist and deontological considerations, Allan develops an international ethical scale to evaluate different acts from a moral standpoint, with different levels of conflict as the baseline of ethical behavior. The more extreme the discord, the worse it is considered on the scale; the more harmonious, the better. Arguing that absolute unhappiness and absolute happiness are not of this world, Allan presents (...) eight intermediary moral situations, each being superseded by the next one in ethical terms: genocide, war, non-war, Just War, stable peace, Just Peace, positive peace, and Global Care. He develops an ethic of ‘global care’ based on feminist theories of care, religious and secular declarations on a global ethic, evolutionary theory arguments, and a critique of a liberal human rights approach. (shrink)

In this concluding chapter, Allan and Keller posit that Just Peace should be defined as a process resting on four necessary and sufficient conditions: thin recognition whereby the other is accepted as autonomous; thick recognition whereby identities need to be accounted for; renouncement, requiring significant sacrifices from all parties; and rule, the objectification of a Just Peace by a ‘text’ requiring a common language respecting the identities of each, and defining their rights and duties. This approach, based on a language-oriented (...) process amongst directly concerned parties, goes beyond liberal and culturalist perspectives. By moving beyond the idea of a peace founded on norms claiming universal scope, each side of a conflict has a place at the negotiating table to present their own perspective on what justice might entail. This inclusion into the decision-making process helps create the feeling of personal investment in the final negotiated product. In addition, negotiators need to work towards building a novel shared reality as well as a new common language to help foster an enduring harmony between previously clashing peoples. (shrink)

« Trouble dans la matière » : cette formule, à première vue énigmatique, prend sens une fois mise en résonance avec celle que Judith Butler avait utilisée pour intituler son ouvrage, Trouble dans le genre : la démarche d’Audrey Benoit adopte la même perspective critique, signalée par la référence à un « trouble » ou remise en question d’un certain nombre d’idées reçues ; simultanément, elle décale le point d’application de cette critique du problème spécifique du « genre », dont (...) les incidence... (shrink)

We prove a couple of results on NTP2 theories. First, we prove an amalgamation statement and deduce from it that the Lascar distance over extension bases is bounded by 2. This improves previous work of Ben Yaacov and Chernikov. We propose a line of investigation of NTP2 theories based on S1 ideals with amalgamation and ask some questions. We then define and study a class of groups with generically simple generics, generalizing NIP groups with generically stable generics.

In this 1999 book Pierre Keller examines the distinctive contributions, and the respective limitations, of Husserl's and Heidegger's approach to fundamental elements of human experience. He shows how their accounts of time, meaning, and personal identity are embedded in important alternative conceptions of how experience may be significant for us, and discusses both how these conceptions are related to each other and how they fit into a wider philosophical context. His sophisticated and accessible account of the phenomenological philosophy of (...) Husserl and the existential phenomenology of Heidegger will be of wide interest to students and specialists in these areas, while analytic philosophers of mind will be interested by the detailed parallels which he draws with a number of concerns of the analytic philosophical tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 136-146MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]The Christian Bain de Diane, or the Stakes of an Ambiguous ParatextPatrick AmstutzTranslated by Gerald MooreUpon its publication, Le bain de Diane elicited few reactions on the part of criticism. Klossowski's name was still a secret and, despite its note among writers such as Bataille, Beauvoir, Camus, Parain, and Sartre and their public following, the number of readers to have read (...) this fifth work remained confined to those already familiar with Klossow-ski the essayist (Sade mon prochain, Méditations bibliques de Hamann), or the novelist (La vocation suspendue, Roberte, ce soir). The discreet silence that characterized the first reception of Le bain de Diane would last until the end of the seventies, despite a reedition in 1972 by the same publisher. During this time three important moments made Le bain de Diane resurface at the heart of the literary world: first, in fictional form, thanks to a subtle but explicit homage paid by Henri Thomas [Le promontoire]; second, in the form of a penetrating commentary article by Michel Foucault ["La prose d'Actéon"], and finally, at the hands of René Micha and Catherine Backès-Clément, key contributors to the issue that the review L'Arc dedicated to the writer. The reedition of Le bain de Diane by Gallimard1 would significantly relaunch interest in this work which, one comes increasingly to realize, is a major text in the Klossowskian oeuvre: offering a reflection on the image and writing, it was Gilles Quinsat who would open this new period of critical reception.An Uncertain IdentityQuinsat emphasizes the "series of 'tableaux' that glazes Le Bain de Diane" in accordance with a "circular" descriptive movement, he says, "from vision to commentary, attributed to the deferral without end of signs, and which feeds the entire work of Pierre Klossowski" [95]. And if he borrows the term "exegesis" from Foucault to describe the genre of the work, he immediately associates it with that of "narrative." A quarter of a century earlier, a commentary in the new Nouvelle revue française had already underlined the "disconcerting" character of Klossowski's book, by accentuating not only the strangeness of its thematic, but also the difficulties posed by the uncertainty of its generic belonging (which is echoed by the absent mention of a paratext): the critic, hesitating, suggested somewhat confusedly a typological kinship with philosophical commentary, theological scholasticism, prose poetry, series of paintings, historical narrative and even the analysis of myths [Amer 144]. In fact, this mythological "reverie," neither an essay nor a narrative, is, from this point of view, a typically Klossowskian [End Page 136] book, as Ian James has more recently reminded us [143]. Le bain de Diane mixes erudite commentary and narrative discourse so well that it entices its commentators into the traps of scholarly, historical, and philological annotation. Yet this would be to forget, as Maurice Blanchot has observed [92–94], that the written oeuvre of Klossowski belongs fully to the field of literature, even more so than to those of philosophy, theology, or psychoanalysis.When it comes to discerning the literariness of this literary object, which the different paratextual and intertextual stakes and levels underline, the principal difficulty consists in not losing oneself in a mythological labyrinth and innumerable variants of the cult of Artemis, which was one of the most significant, oldest, and popular cults of the Greco-Roman era and which plunges into a world on whose complexity historians and philologists have insisted on many occasions. The study of Klossowski's sources could lead one through multiple disciplines (philology, mythography, psychoanalysis, the history of religions, history of art, French literature—all centuries cobbled together, and so on) to overly vast inquiries: the goddess "of a thousand names" assumes a properly vertiginous semiotic richness, and the cult of Artemis, before being linked to that of Apollo, stretches back to time immemorial where, behind Artemis, can be glimpsed the Asiatic figure of a Great Mother Goddess, whose... (shrink)

What, if anything, is wrong with high executive compensation? Is the common “lay reaction” of indignation and moral outrage justified? In this paper, my main goal is to articulate in a more systematic and philosophical manner the egalitarian responses to these questions. In order to do so, I suggest that we take some insights from recent debates on two versions of egalitarianism: a distributive one, according to which no one should be worse off than others because of unfair distributions of (...) goods and resources, especially ones based on matters of luck or arbitrary factors, and a relational one, which maintains that egalitarian justice requires members of a society to relate to one another as equals. Drawing on recent attempts to highlight the tricky nature of managerial authority, I argue that high inequalities in pay are not simply a distributional matter but should also be analyzed through a relational lens. I also attempt to show that relational egalitarians are well-equipped to question the now dominant “incentives” view of CEO compensation. (shrink)

We study invariant types in NIP theories. Amongst other things: we prove a definable version of the [Formula: see text]-theorem in theories of small or medium directionality; we construct a canonical retraction from the space of [Formula: see text]-invariant types to that of [Formula: see text]-finitely satisfiable types; we show some amalgamation results for invariant types and list a number of open questions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Somaesthetics and Racism:Toward an Embodied Pedagogy of DifferenceDavid A. Granger (bio)IntroductionThe philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that "The human body is the best picture of the human soul."1 There is a basic truth in this assertion that we recognize (I want to say) intuitively: the notion that human beings are parts both mental and physical, that these facets are ultimately interdependent, and that they are in some measure correlated (...) was a commonplace in the intellectual culture of ancient Athens, especially among Socratic thinkers. It can also be found as a central part of the basic ontology and ideals of self-cultivation espoused in much East Asian philosophy. In the West, however, this deep appreciation for the relationship between mind and body appears somewhat sporadically after the Socratics, only to be fervently reasserted as a main plank in the lived philosophy of the early American pragmatists, as when Henry David Thoreau proclaimed that "We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins to refine a mean's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them."2I use the word "sporadically" above because it is likewise a basic truism that canonical Western philosophy has a long and storied history of rejecting, ignoring, or degrading the human body—that most formative part of our being and connection to the world and to others. The position of the later, more metaphysical Plato is iconic in this regard, and it effectively set the tone for much Christian theology and the Cartesian philosophy of consciousness. For Plato and his adherents, the longing to escape our embodiedness, conceived as a necessary means to human (or perhaps superhuman) perfection [End Page 69] by achieving a godlike existence, requires effectively divorcing ourselves from the irrational brutes of terra firma. The body is conceived as a static constraint to human flourishing rather than a dynamic enabler. It is more or less an adversary, something that we must endeavor to be freed from or subdue.3 Its base senses and unruly passions deceive us epistemologically, while its inexorable power to situate us in space and time limits our objectivity. In its inevitable pains and infirmities, the body is also a constant reminder of the aging process and of our ultimate mortality. Deeming the body as at best a mere servant of the mind, philosophers typically have portrayed it as a veritable prison of deception, temptation, and suffering. Moreover, it is well-established that such thinking has been particularly pernicious in light of the historical identification of women and other marginalized groups with their variously enfeebled, depraved, or uncivilized bodies.4Against this disquieting backdrop, it is only relatively recently that the human body, and the significance of our existence as embodied beings, has received sustained positive attention by leading lights in Western philosophy and criticism. These luminaries include, among others, "feminist" thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and, of late, Susan Bordo and Judith Butler (with a nod to Michel Foucault, Pierre Bordeau, and others); pragmatists William James and John Dewey (with a nod to Emerson and Thoreau); phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (with a nod to Jean-Paul Sartre); analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (with a nod to James); and postmodernist Michel Foucault (with a nod to Friedrich Nietzsche, George Bataille, and the ancient Asian ars erotica tradition5). While these thinkers do not universally praise the body and its active, conscious cultivation for human flourishing (about which more later), they nonetheless acknowledge its necessity for all perception, action, and even thought.6 In short, they all seek to recognize and elucidate the significance—cognitive and affective, discursive and nondiscursive—of our full embodied intelligence.Looking specifically at the architectonics of the body espoused by the trio of Dewey, Foucault, and Wittgenstein, this article uses what philosopher Richard Shusterman terms "analytic somaesthetics" to examine some of the primary embodied dimensions of feeling, perception, action, and thought, particularly through the functioning of habit.7 In doing so, it seeks to expose the way various ideologies of domination (for example, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism, etc.) are covertly (and at times overtly) materialized... (shrink)

Manuscripts and notes by Michel Foucault on the visual arts recently deposited at the Bibliothèque Nationale reveal a reliance on canonical oil paintings by the ‘old masters’; a respect for the primary sources in the history of European art; an understanding of the necessity of research in both literary and visual sources, particularly self-portraits; and a sense of the value that a certain philosophical milieu – beginning with Sade and Nietzsche and expanding to his near contemporaries, Bataille, Blanchot, and (...) Klossowski – could offer to an understanding of paintings. The essay argues that Pierre Klossowski’s monumental drawing La Nef des fous (1990) provides an essential key for understanding the place of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of the same title in History of Madness and the centrality of theories of similitude to Foucault’s thinking about visuality ca. 1960–74. The later significance of the figure of the artist for Foucault can be traced to these earlier writings on painting and madness. (shrink)

Nosso estudo retoma contribuições de Georges Bataille, Pierre Verger, Edgar Morin, Ronilda Iyakemi Ribeiro, Stefania Capone, Monique Augras com vistas a discutir Exu, deus nagô e dos terreiros de umbanda, ambíguo e paradoxal, macho e fêmea, sagrado e profano. Responsável pela ordem do universo tem caráter virulento, atrevido e sem vergonha. Vindo ao mundo com um porrete mágico, metonímia de seu falo ereto, choca o decoro, a moral e a cristandade. Constrange os proscritos e as normas, embaralha as (...) dicotomias bem marcadas do Ocidente. Rompe com os tabus e estabelece nova ordem, ação erótico-sagrada que remete à árvore da vida e ao gozo fértil de Exu. Quem incita à Vida é Exu, deus trickster a convidar: vem. Trabalharemos com textos de gêneros diversos, a saber, conto, poema, tela, fotografia para que deles salte um perigoso ambivalente como Madame Satã, Maria Navalha, Zé Pelintra, faces de Exu: travesti, travesso, erótico-sagrado, híbrido, cujas metamorfoses continuas plagiam a si mesmo, podendo até ser visto em calendário trans. (shrink)

A experiência da conversão é habitualmente ligada ao contexto religioso.Contudo, autores como Pierre Hadot e Michel Foucault destacaram a presença de uma conversão filosófica, ao longo dos séculos. Se é possível verificar como nas tradições apocalípticas de caráter religioso se instaura uma conversão que visa alcançar uma manutenção do mundo em épocas de crise, também no contexto filosófico a diagnose nietzscheana do niilismo foi seguida por experiências filosóficas, como as de Simone Weil e de Georges Bataille, que visam (...) a definição de uma vida filosófica capaz de enfrentar o apocalipse. Através da abordagem do antropólogo Ernesto De Martino, tentarei mostrar, por um lado, o caráter apocalíptico-cultural do niilismo, e, por outro, como uma conversão filosófica, enquanto experiência interior, pode encarar este hóspede do nosso tempo. (shrink)

Long recognized as an important and abiding influence in the European artistic and intellectual circles of the last century, the work of Pierre Klossowski is slowly gaining recognition in the Anglo-American scholarly community. The older brother of the painter Balthus, a friend of Rilke and Gide among others, and a celebrated artist in his own right, Klossowski is a difficult if not impossible thinker to categorize. From quite early in his career, Nietzsche was an important influence on Klossowski’s work. (...) In addition to translating two volumes for Nietzsche’s Oeuvres Complètes (1967, 1976), as well as Heidegger’s four-volume work on Nietzsche (1976), Klossowski also wrote a number of essays on Nietzsche as well as a book, Nietzsche et le Cercle Vicieux (1969). In a note to Différence et Répétition, Gilles Deleuze, citing “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody” as well as “Forgetting and Anamnesis in the Lived Experience of the Eternal Return of the Same,” writes that Klossowski’s work has “renewed the interpretation of Nietzsche.” “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody” appeared as the final essay of Klossowski’s book, Un si funeste désir (Such a Deathly Desire), first published in 1963. It is one of two essays in the book that are devoted explicitly to Nietzsche; the second, “On Some Fundamental Themes of Nietzsche’s Gaya Scienza,” is the opening essay of the volume and had previously appeared as an introduction to Klossowski’s translation of The Gay Science. “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody” had not previously appeared in print, although Klossowski had presented it as a lecture at the Collège de Philosophie in Paris in 1957. Together, the two essays bound a series of reflections on Gide, Blanchot, Bataille, and others, all of which appeared previously – sometimes in a different form – and that taken together explicate Klossowski’s conception of “the demon.” The conception of the demon, drawn from The Gay Science, is for Klossowski a figuration of the double life of the existing human being: both conscious, rational, goal-directed, and vital, passionate, a victim of intensities. (shrink)

We study one way in which stable phenomena can exist in an NIP theory. We start by defining a notion of ‘pure instability’ that we call ‘distality’ in which no such phenomenon occurs. O-minimal theories and the p-adics for example are distal. Next, we try to understand what happens when distality fails. Given a type p over a sufficiently saturated model, we extract, in some sense, the stable part of p and define a notion of stable independence which is implied (...) by non-forking and has bounded weight. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Klossowski, Deleuze, and OrthodoxyEleanor Kaufman (bio)Among the many strange and wonderful things to be found there, Pierre Klossowski's oeuvre is a preeminent illustration of what divides univocity and equivocity and therefore serves as one of the twentieth century's most instructive models for thinking the complexity of the dialectic. Univocity and equivocity are significant both in their roots in Scholastic philosophy, as the idea that Being is expressed in (...) either one or several senses, and as belonging to a longstanding framework that helps demarcate the differences, nuanced yet significant, among members of the extraordinary generation of French intellectuals of which Klossowski was a part. Thus, these terms, apart from their theological and philosophical import, will serve as a heuristic for renarrating points of filiation and divergence among a series of prominent French thinkers, primarily Bataille, Klossowski, and Deleuze, but also extending backward to Sartre and forward to Badiou to frame the series. I will approach this in segmented fashion, first opposing Bataille's dialectic of transgression to Klossowski's more univocal method of disjunctive synthesis. When juxtaposed with Deleuze's Spinozist affirmation of univocity, however, Klossowski would seem to be more on the side of the equivocal. Whereas Deleuze criticizes the realm between the univocal and the equivocal as the lukewarm space of the analogical, my contention is that this middle realm allows for a space of movement and reversal that escapes the pitfalls Deleuze locates in the dialectic, and does so without a strict adherence to Spinozist univocity. Whereas Bataille and Deleuze remain closer to Klossowski in the tenor of their thought, I will nonetheless suggest in conclusion that Sartre and Badiou are actually closer to Klossowski on a formal level, in that each poses a similarly analogical challenge to the thought of the dialectic.For many reasons Bataille and Klossowski can be paired together. They were contemporaries, both born around the turn of the century, both writing in a variety of literary and philosophical genres, including pornographic or semi-pornographic fiction, and working outside the academy. Both wrote studies of Nietzsche, of Sade, and radical economic treatises. They were friends and fellow members in the late 1930s of the College of Sociology, which was modeled after a secret society, the members taking great interest in such topics as sacrifice and headlessness. Bataille and Klossowski wrote about each other. Both were at different points obsessed with Roman Catholicism, both at different points prepared to enter monastic orders, both in different fashions fell away. As might easily be imagined, their fiction is an outrageous mixture of the sacred and the profane, including sexual encounters and other desecrations staged at church alters and the like. Both work in that realm where pornography and theology come together. Yet while the more familiar Bataille uses pornography toward transgressive aims, the lesser-known Klossowski uses a more nuanced and interesting mechanism of boredom to elaborate an intrinsically disjunctive structure.Even boredom, for Bataille, partakes of the transgressive. In his novella The Story of the Eye, the narrator describes offhandedly how he and his companion Simone have just found their friend Marcelle's body. She has hung herself. The narrator and Simone [End Page 47] take the body down and have sex for the first time next to it. Then the narrator describes the boredom that ensues even in the face of death: "We were perfectly calm, all three of us, and that was the most hopeless part of it. Any boredom in the world is linked, for me, to that moment and, above all, to an obstacle as ridiculous as death. But that won't prevent me from thinking back to that time with no revulsion and even with a sense of complicity. Basically, the lack of excitement made everything far more absurd, and thus Marcelle was closer to me dead than in her lifetime, inasmuch as absurd existence, so I imagine, has all the prerogatives" [59–60]. This is actually an unusually meditative moment in Bataille's story of murder, priests, bullfights, and constant sex.1 Here his narrator links boredom to death, and to a reflection on the absurd boundary between life and death. But by commenting on boredom... (shrink)

As is often the case when scientific or engineering fields emerge, new concepts are forged or old ones are adapted. When this happens, various arguments rage over what ultimately turns out to be conceptual misunderstandings. At that critical time, there is a need for an explicit reflection on the meaning of the concepts that define the field. In this position paper, we aim to provide a reasoned framework in which to think about various issues in the field of distributed cognition. (...) We argue that both relevant concepts, distribution and cognition, must be understood as continuous. As it is used in the context of distributed cognition, the concept of distribution is essentially fuzzy, and we will link it to the notion of emergence of system-level properties. The concept of cognition must also be seen as fuzzy, but for a different reason: due to its origin as an anthropocentric concept, no one has a clear handle on its meaning in a distributed setting. As the proposed framework forms a space, we then explore its geography and visit famous landmarks. (shrink)

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are treasured today--as they have been over the centuries--as an inexhaustible source of wisdom. And as one of the three most important expressions of Stoicism, this is an essential text for everyone interested in ancient religion and philosophy. Yet the clarity and ease of the work's style are deceptive. Pierre Hadot, eminent historian of ancient thought, uncovers new levels of meaning and expands our understanding of its underlying philosophy. Written by the Roman emperor for (...) his own private guidance and self-admonition, the Meditations set forth principles for living a good and just life. Hadot probes Marcus Aurelius's guidelines and convictions and discerns the hitherto unperceived conceptual system that grounds them. Abundantly quoting the Meditations to illustrate his analysis, the author allows Marcus Aurelius to speak directly to the reader. And Hadot unfolds for us the philosophical context of the Meditations, commenting on the philosophers Marcus Aurelius read and giving special attention to the teachings of Epictetus, whose disciple he was. The soul, the guiding principle within us, is in Marcus Aurelius's Stoic philosophy an inviolable stronghold of freedom, the "inner citadel." This spirited and engaging study of his thought offers a fresh picture of the fascinating philosopher-emperor, a fuller understanding of the tradition and doctrines of Stoicism, and rich insight on the culture of the Roman empire in the second century. Pierre Hadot has been working on Marcus Aurelius for more than twenty years; in this book he distills his analysis and conclusions with extraordinary lucidity for the general reader. (shrink)

The first English-language translation of a classic work of French philosophy.

Ce texte a déjà paru le 23 août 2014 sur Langues de feu – les traducteurs et l'esprit des langues. Tours de Babel et glossolalies. Nous remercions Claire Placial de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. A paru au début 2013 une nouvelle traduction de l'Iliade par Jean-Louis Backès. Ce billet arrive, si dire se peut pour l'Iliade, après la bataille, et notamment après l'article de Jean-Yves Masson dans le Magazine littéraire, et la publication dans La République des (...) livres, le site de Pierre (...) - Études grecques et latines – Nouvel article. (shrink)

We show basic facts about dp-minimal ordered structures. The main results are: dp-minimal groups are abelian-by-finite-exponent, in a divisible ordered dp-minimal group, any infinite set has non-empty interior, and any theory of pure tree is dp-minimal.

Frederick Griffith was an English bacteriologist at the Pathological Laboratory of the Ministry of Health in London who believed that progress in the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases would come only with more precise knowledge of the identity of the causative microorganisms. Over the years, Griffith developed and expanded a serological technique for identifying pathogenic microorganisms, which allowed the tracing of the sources of infectious disease outbreaks: slide agglutination. Yet Griffith is not remembered for his contributions to the biology (...) and epidemiology of infectious diseases so much as for discovering the phenomenon known as ‘transformation’. Griffith’s discovery, for many, was a pure case of serendipity whose biological relevance had also largely escaped him. In this paper, I argue that the key to understanding the significance of bacterial transformation – and the scientific legacy of Fred Griffith – rests not only on it initiating a cascade of events leading to molecular genetics but also on its implications for epidemiology based on the biology of host–parasite interactions. Looking at Griffith’s entire career, instead of focusing only on the transformation study, we can better appreciate the place of the latter within Griffith’s overall contributions. Presented in this way, Griffith’s experiment on bacterial transformation also ceases to appear as an anomaly, which in turn leads us to rethink some of the most prevalent historical conceptions about his work. (shrink)