L’auteur présente les résultats d’une recherche sur les violences conjugales menée auprès de cent femmes algériennes résidant dans une petite ville de l’intérieur du pays. L’objectif de la recherche est de cerner le vécu psychologique de ces femmes, leurs réactions, les conséquences des violences qu’elles subissent (psychiques et somatiques), le support dont elles peuvent bénéficier de la part de leur famille... et, ce faisant, de proposer des hypothèses visant à comprendre les raisons pour lesquelles des femmes ayant subi des violences (...) pendant de longues années demeurent toujours avec leur agresseur. Il semblerait que ces femmes soient aux prises d’une « guerre de basse intensité », celle menée contre les populations civiles faite de désinformation, de contrôle et de répression. (shrink)

Le petit de l’homme, jeté dans le monde dans un état d’immaturité et de dépendance totale, est entièrement livré aux soins maternels. Cet enfant peut, avec l’aide d’une mère suffisamment bonne, advenir en tant que sujet autonome, mais une mère toute-puissante peut exercer une véritable emprise sur le corps et la psyché de son enfant, surtout lorsque ce dernier est une fille et qu’elle apparaît comme une rivale de la mère. Tout ceci se trouve renforcé par la dimension culturelle qui, (...) en Algérie par exemple, édicte la surveillance des corps des filles par les parents. Une illustration clinique montre à quel point il peut être difficile de se déprendre de l’emprise maternelle. (shrink)

L’auteur présente les résultats d’une recherche sur les violences conjugales menée auprès de cent femmes algériennes résidant dans une petite ville de l’intérieur du pays. L’objectif de la recherche est de cerner le vécu psychologique de ces femmes, leurs réactions, les conséquences des violences qu’elles subissent (psychiques et somatiques), le support dont elles peuvent bénéficier de la part de leur famille... et, ce faisant, de proposer des hypothèses visant à comprendre les raisons pour lesquelles des femmes ayant subi des violences (...) pendant de longues années demeurent toujours avec leur agresseur. Il semblerait que ces femmes soient aux prises d’une « guerre de basse intensité », celle menée contre les populations civiles faite de désinformation, de contrôle et de répression. (shrink)

Le petit de l’homme, jeté dans le monde dans un état d’immaturité et de dépendance totale, est entièrement livré aux soins maternels. Cet enfant peut, avec l’aide d’une mère suffisamment bonne, advenir en tant que sujet autonome, mais une mère toute-puissante peut exercer une véritable emprise sur le corps et la psyché de son enfant, surtout lorsque ce dernier est une fille et qu’elle apparaît comme une rivale de la mère. Tout ceci se trouve renforcé par la dimension culturelle qui, (...) en Algérie par exemple, édicte la surveillance des corps des filles par les parents. Une illustration clinique montre à quel point il peut être difficile de se déprendre de l’emprise maternelle. (shrink)

Quantum field theories are notoriously difficult to understand, physically as well as philosophically. The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better conceptual understanding of gauge quantum field theories, such as quantum chromodynamics, by discussing a famous physical limit, the ’t Hooft limit, in which the theory concerned often simplifies. The idea of the limit is that the number N of colours goes to infinity. The simplifications that can happen in this limit, and that we will consider, are: (...) the theory’s Feynman diagrams can be drawn on a plane without lines intersecting ; and the theory, or a sector of it, becomes integrable, and indeed corresponds to a well-studied system, viz. a spin chain. Planarity is important because it shows how a quantum field theory can exhibit extended, in particular string-like, structures; in some cases, this gives a connection with string theory, and so with its representation of gravity. Previous philosophical literature about how one theory might be emergent from, and-or reduced to, another one has tended to emphasize cases, such as occur in statistical mechanics, where the system before the limit has finitely many degrees of freedom. But here, our quantum field theories, including those on the way to the ’t Hooft limit, will have infinitely many degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, we will show how a recent schema by Butterfield and taxonomy by Norton apply to the quantum field theories we consider; and we will classify three physical properties of our theories in these terms. These properties are planarity and integrability, as in and above; and the behaviour of the beta-function reflecting, for example, asymptotic freedom. Our discussion of these properties, especially the beta-function, will also relate to recent philosophical debate about the propriety of assessing quantum field theories, whose rigorous existence is not yet proven. (shrink)

It is understandable that, since the fall of the Berlin wall, researchers interested in the social and political upheavals brought about by this phase of history should have concentrated their attentions on what had been the immediate sphere of influence of the Soviet centre of power. However we are within our rights today to ask why our understanding of the structural (economic and social) transformations in what is conveniently called the ‘post-communist’ period and space, and of post-bipolarisation regional relationships, should (...) be confined to that region of the world corresponding to the ex-USSR and the Eastern countries. (shrink)

We have two aims. The main one is to expound the idea of renormalization in quantum field theory, with no technical prerequisites. Our motivation is that renormalization is undoubtedly one of the great ideas—and great successes--of twentieth-century physics. Also it has strongly influenced in diverse ways, how physicists conceive of physical theories. So it is of considerable philosophical interest. Second, we will briefly relate renormalization to Ernest Nagel's account of inter-theoretic relations, especially reduction. One theme will be a contrast between (...) two approaches to renormalization. The old approach, which prevailed from ca. 1945 to 1970, treated renormalizability as a necessary condition for being an acceptable quantum field theory. On this approach, it is a piece of great good fortune that high energy physicists can formulate renormalizable quantum field theories that are so empirically successful. But the new approach to renormalization explains why the phenomena we see, at the energies we can access in our particle accelerators, are described by a renormalizable quantum field theory. For whatever non-renormalizable interactions may occur at yet higher energies, they are insignificant at accessible energies. Thus the new approach explains why our best fundamental theories have a feature, viz. renormalizability, which the old approach treated as a selection principle for theories. That is worth saying since philosophers tend to think of scientific explanation as only explaining an individual event, or perhaps a single law, or at most deducing one theory as a special case of another. Here we see a framework in which there is a space of theories. And this framework is powerful enough to deduce that what seemed “manna from heaven” is to be expected: the good fortune is generic. We also maintain that universality, a concept stressed in renormalization theory, is essentially the familiar philosophical idea of multiple realizability; and that it causes no problems for reductions of a Nagelian kind. (shrink)

In another paper, one of us argued that emergence and reduction are compatible, and presented four examples illustrating both. The main purpose of this paper is to develop this position for the example of phase transitions. We take it that emergence involves behaviour that is novel compared with what is expected: often, what is expected from a theory of the system's microscopic constituents. We take reduction as deduction, aided by appropriate definitions. Then the main idea of our reconciliation of emergence (...) and reduction is that one makes the deduction after taking a limit of an appropriate parameter $N$. Thus our first main claim will be that in some situations, one can deduce a novel behaviour, by taking a limit $N\to\infty$. Our main illustration of this will be Lee-Yang theory. But on the other hand, this does not show that the $N=\infty$ limit is physically real. For our second main claim will be that in such situations, there is a logically weaker, yet still vivid, novel behaviour that occurs before the limit, i.e. for finite $N$. And it is this weaker behaviour which is physically real. Our main illustration of this will be the renormalization group description of cross-over phenomena. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a general framework for understanding renormalization by drawing on the distinction between effective and continuum Quantum Field Theories (QFTs), and offer a comprehensive account of perturbative renormalization on this basis. My central claim is that the effective approach to renormalization provides a more physically perspicuous, conceptually coherent and widely applicable framework to construct perturbative QFTs than the continuum approach. I also show how a careful comparison between the two approaches: (i) helps to dispel the mystery (...) surrounding the success of the renormalization procedure; (ii) clarifies the various notions of renormalizability; and (iii) gives reasons to temper Butterfield and Bouatta's claim that some continuum QFTs are ripe for metaphysical inquiry (Butterfield & Bouatta, 2014). (shrink)