Only rarely does Descartes deal with specifically political questions, and then when he does so, it is only by denial, to justify his refusal to “become involved” in politics. All the texts show that this attitude of rejecting politics is not dictated primarily by prudence, the rule in this century of intolerance, but by a concern for philosophical consistency. This denial, as we will be attempting to establish, seems conditioned by fundamental options of Cartesian philosophy. For the moment we will (...) only examine the theoretical effects of this refusal to write about politics other than by denial; such effects seem to us to consist in the exclusion of politics outside the realm of knowledge and its problematic inclusion into that of morality. And although it has been possible to speak of a “political Descartes”, it is completely against his stated intentions. This Descartes would be political in spite of himself. In fact, such an approach can only consist in a political interpretation of this denial, in a political reading of the texts that reject, or more often pass over in silence, politics as such. Although a reading of this kind can be at best a hazardous one, we will not attempt to challenge its legitimacy, for it is certainly possible to affirm that the work of Descartes is ridden and wrought by the question of politics (just as all philosophical thought, in one way or another, must of necessity confront political reality), but it is not without importance to begin by noting that it is never touched upon other than indirectly, obliquely, through the use of theoretical devices whose finality is not political. (shrink)

Anthony Feneuil : Une question concernant votre parcours : pourquoi avoir choisi l'incroyance comme thème de prédilection? Comment y êtes-vous venu et quels sont selon vous les enjeux d’une histoire de l’incroyance aujourd’hui? Est-ce qu'ils sont d'abord épistémologiques (parce que la question de l'incroyance pose des questions à l'historien sur les sources qu'il utilise et leurs biais, oblige à se poser la question des rapports de pouvoir etc.)? Sont-ils politiques? Il est vrai que l'inc...

Toute situation de persécution a des effets sur les actions, les discours et les écrits de ceux qui en sont les victimes. Ce postulat conduit à une lecture critique de quelques - uns des traits saillants et des présupposés de « art d ' écrire entre les lignes », dont traite Leo Strauss dans son fameux essai Writing and Persecution. Le double constat de la pertinence de la méthode de lecture proposée et de son caractère problématique, inhérent à l ' (...) anthropologie élitiste qui sous - tend la démarche, conduit à revenir sur l ' histoire de la notion de persécution, pour en mettre en évidence la forte connotation religieuse, mais aussi l ' importance philosophique, à condition d ' assumer clairement le jugement éthique qui s ' y trouve engagé. Une étude de l ' écriture en régime de persécution devient alors possible, qui ne renie pas l ' inspiration straussienne, mais va plutôt chercher ses outils dans les sciences sociales contemporaines. Any persecution situation has effects on the actions, discourses and writings of its victims. Such a postulate leads to a critical reading of a few features and assumptions of an « art of writing in - between the Unes » Leo Strauss deals with in his famous essay Writing and Persecution. The twofold report of the relevant reading method and of its problematic character, inherent to the elitist anthropology underlying such an approach, leads to resume to the history of the concept of persecution such as to stress its strong religious connotation, but also its philosophical importance, provided one should fully acknowledge the ethical judgment thus implied. A study of writing in persecution regime thus becomes possible not denying the Straussian inspiration but rather trying to find new tools in contemporary social sciences. (shrink)

Dans les années 1650, l’Angleterre fut le théâtre d’une longue série d’exhibitions prophétiques et protestataires, d’hommes et de femmes nues en des lieux publics (rues, églises, universités...), provoquant le scandale et l’incompréhension de la plus grande partie du public. Ces femmes et ces hommes allaient nus « as a sign », renouvelant ainsi un épisode de l’Ancien Testament (Ésaïe 20.2-3) pour dénoncer la « nudité » spirituelle de ceux devant lesquels ils s’exhibaient. Cette pratique visait à montrer ce que Dieu (...) était sur le point de leur infliger : une mise à nu, un dépouillement complet de tous leurs biens, pouvoirs et prérogatives sociales. Une approche genrée de ces exhibitions de nudité éclaire les enjeux théologico-politiques et sociaux d’un phénomène qui accompagna la naissance et le développement du mouvement quaker et se prolongea jusqu’en Nouvelle-Angleterre. (shrink)

Jean Cavaillès (15 mai 1903-17 février 1944) était un philosophe français, héros et l'un des organisateurs de la Résistance, avant d'être fusillé à 40 ans par les nazis. Une journée d'hommage lui a été consacrée le 17 février 2014 à l'Ecole normale supérieure de Paris. Pierre-Yves Canu, Tommy Murtagh, Hourya Benis Sinaceur, Paul Cortois, Alya Aglan, Baptiste Mélès, Gerhard Heinzmann et Jacques Lautman présentent un Cavaillès indissociablement philosophe et Résistant, explorent les racines de sa pensée, montrent l'actualité de (...) ses concepts. Jean-Jacques Szczeciniarz et Christian Houzel proposent une analyse du Mouvement de la jeunesse allemand, un historique de la société Les Amis de Jean Cavaillès, éditrice du présent recueil, et deux hommages à celui qui la présida de 1989 à 1995, le mathématicien Henri Cartan. (shrink)

Ce livre retrace le parcours d'enseignant et de résistant de Georges Canguilhem, ainsi que ceux de Jean Cavaillès et de Jean-Paul Sartre, entre la fin des années 1920 et 1945. Il reconstitue également la genèse de la philosophie médicale de Canguilhem sur fond de politique médicale nazie d'extermination des "anormaux.

Il s'agit de commenter les principaux écrits de Jean Cavaillès, d'expliciter son appareil conceptuel, mathématique et philosophique et de montrer la progression d'une réflexion originale qui, dans la première moitié du XXe siècle, voulait prendre la mesure des avancées et des controverses déterminant les mathématiques modernes.

This paper concerns the role of mathematical problems in the epistemology of Jean Cavaillès. Most occurrences of the term “problem” in his texts refer to mathematical problems, in the sense in which mathematicians themselves use the term: for an unsolved question which they hope to solve. Mathematical problems appear as breaking points in the succession of mathematical theories, both giving a continuity to the history of mathematics and illuminating the way in which the history of mathematics breaks up into (...) successive theories with different kinds of operations and, in a sense, different kinds of a prioris. We briefly compare mathematical becoming to the succession of episteme in Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses. We then come back to the necessity that Cavaillès attributes to mathematical becoming, and which the position of mathematical problems illustrates, in order to discuss its various consequences in Cavaillès’ later works but also in Canguilhem’s discussion of Cavaillès’ role in the Resistance. Finally, we study other types of problems, in Cavaillès’ writings: philosophical problems and what we will call “questions” rather than “problems,” and which contrary to mathematical problems, as Cavaillès uses the term, cannot be solved but pervade the whole of the history of mathematics. We will put these “questions” in relation to Lautman’s Ideas. (shrink)

Here Jean-Pierre Changeux elucidates our current knowledge of the human brain, taking an interdisciplinary approach and explaining in layman's terms the complex theories and scientific breakthroughs that have significantly improved our ...

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, prophet of what he calls "enlightened doomsaying," has long warned that modern society is on a path to self-destruction. In this book, he pleads for a subversion of this crisis from within, arguing that it is our lopsided view of religion and reason that has set us on this course. In denial of our sacred origins and hubristically convinced of the powers of human reason, we cease to know our own limits: our disenchanted world leaves us (...) defenseless against a headlong rush into the abyss of global warming, nuclear holocaust, and the other catastrophes that loom on our horizon. Reviving the religious anthropology of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss and in dialogue with the work of René Girard, Dupuy shows that we must remember the world's sacredness in order to keep human violence in check. A metaphysical and theological detective, he tracks the sacred in the very fields where human reason considers itself most free from everything it judges irrational: science, technology, economics, political and strategic thought. In making such claims, The Mark of the Sacred takes on religion bashers, secularists, and fundamentalists at once. Written by one of the deepest and most versatile thinkers of our time, it militates for a world where reason is no longer an enemy of faith. (shrink)

The development of a scientific theory of mind was thus significantly delayed."--BOOK JACKET.

Les grands paradigmes des sciences humaines ont été constitués, au fil de l’histoire, par l’éviction progressive de la dimension affective des objets et méthodes scientifiques. Après un long désintérêt, pour partie dû à la préoccupation de l’objectivation des phénomènes retenus par l’analyse sociologique, mais aussi à l’hypostase du social, qui a trouvé notamment chez Durkheim un accomplissement encore plus accentué que dans la plupart des conceptions holistes, la question des émotions est l’...

It is commonly assumed across the language sciences that some semantic participant information is lexically encoded in the representation of verbs and some is not. In this paper, we propose that semantic obligatoriness and verb class specificity are criteria which influence whether semantic information is lexically encoded. We present a comprehensive survey of the English verbal lexicon, a sentence continuation study, and an on-line sentence processing study which confirm that both factors play a role in the lexical encoding of participant (...) information. (shrink)

In a remarkable exchange between neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux and philosopher Paul Ricoeur, this book explores the vexed territory between these...

An examination of the fundamental role cybernetics played in the birth of cognitive science and the light this sheds on current controversies. The conceptual history of cognitive science remains for the most part unwritten. In this groundbreaking book, Jean-Pierre Dupuy—one of the principal architects of cognitive science in France—provides an important chapter: the legacy of cybernetics. Contrary to popular belief, Dupuy argues, cybernetics represented not the anthropomorphization of the machine but the mechanization of the human. The founding fathers (...) of cybernetics—some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts—intended to construct a materialist and mechanistic science of mental behavior that would make it possible at last to resolve the ancient philosophical problem of mind and matter. The importance of cybernetics to cognitive science, Dupuy argues, lies not in its daring conception of the human mind in terms of the functioning of a machine but in the way the strengths and weaknesses of the cybernetics approach can illuminate controversies that rage today—between cognitivists and connectionists, eliminative materialists and Wittgensteinians, functionalists and anti-reductionists. Dupuy brings to life the intellectual excitement that attended the birth of cognitive science sixty years ago. He separates the promise of cybernetic ideas from the disappointment that followed as cybernetics was rejected and consigned to intellectual oblivion. The mechanization of the mind has reemerged today as an all-encompassing paradigm in the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. The tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions Dupuy discerns in cybernetics offer a cautionary tale for future developments in cognitive science. (shrink)

If such a thing as nanoethics is possible, it can only develop by confronting the great questions of moral philosophy, thus avoiding the pitfalls so common to regional ethics. We identify and analyze some of these pitfalls: the restriction of ethics to prudence understood as rational risk management; the reduction of ethics to cost/benefit analysis; the confusion of technique with technology and of human nature with the human condition. Once these points have been clarified, it is possible to take up (...) some weighty philosophical and metaphysical questions which are not new, but which need to be raised anew with respect to nanotechnologies: the artificialization of nature; the question of limits; the role of religion; the finiteness of the human condition as something with a beginning and an end; the relationship between knowledge and know-how; the foundations of ethics. (shrink)

This paper argues for a largely unnoted distinction between relational and modal components in the lexical semantics of verbs. Wehypothesize that many verbs encode two kinds of semantic information:a relationship among participants in a situation and a subset ofcircumstances or time indices at which this relationship isevaluated. The latter we term sublexical modality.We show that linking regularities between semantic arguments andsyntactic functions provide corroborating evidence in favor of thissemantic distinction, noting cases in which the semantic groundingof linking through participant-role properties (...) apparently fails. Thissemantic grounding can be preserved, however, once we abstractaway from sublexical modality in lexical semantic representations.Semantically-based linking constraints are insensitive to the sublexicalmodality component of lexical entries and depend only on informationin a predicator's situational core. (shrink)

Cet article est une discussion de l’ouvrage de A. Badiou, L’être et l’événement, autour de la question du rapport de l’état (et de l’Etat) à la situation. Nous commençons par rappeler la place que donne A. Badiou aux mathématiques dans son dispositif. Nous parcourons ensuite L’être et l’événement en prenant comme fil directeur cette question, du rapport de l’état à la situation. La dernière partie compare la position de A. Badiou à la tradition « épistémologique » en France et, en (...) particulier, aux textes de Jean Cavaillès, dont A. Badiou se réclame à plusieurs reprises. L’originalité de A. Badiou dans cette tradition est sans doute sa rupture avec la perspective historique mais le problème, que cette confrontation pose, est de savoir s’il est en effet possible de couper les théories mathématiques de leur histoire, comme A. Badiou doit le faire. (shrink)

A Study of the History and Philosophy of Category Theory Jean-Pierre Marquis. to say that objects are dispensable in geometry. What is claimed is that the specific nature of the objects used is irrelevant. To use the terminology already ...

There were three such assumptions required, one explicitly stated, and two not made explicit until Bayle. The explicit one was a certain commonly accepted double understanding of ‘destruction’: a ‘natural’ version, which made it no more than a change in a particular arrangement or ‘organization’ of particles through which an aggregate was destroyed by losing its identity, and a metaphysical version, which entailed the actual annihilation of a substance. It was assumed that the latter could be accomplished only by miraculous (...) supra-natural means available only to God. Thus, if it could be shown that the soul was ‘without parts,’ it followed that the soul was ‘naturally’ indestructible and thus immortal. Bayle summarized the Cartesian argument to immortality as follows. (shrink)

Jean-Pierre Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece that takesus far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon, and reveals a culture ofslavery, of blood sacrifice, of perpetual and ritualized warfare, of ceremonial hunting andecstasies.In his provocative discussions of various institutions and practices including war,marriage, and the city state, Vernant unveils a complex and previously unexplored intersection ofthe religious, social, and political structures of ancient Greece. He concludes with a genealogy ofthe study (...) of myth from antiquity to the present, and offers a critique of structuralism.Jean-PierreVernant is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Study of Ancient Religions at the College de France inParis. (shrink)

The unprecedented prowess of measurement techniques provides a detailed, multi‐scale look into the depths of living systems. Understanding these avalanches of high‐dimensional data—by distilling underlying principles and mechanisms—necessitates dimensional reduction. We propose that living systems achieve exquisite dimensional reduction, originating from their capacity to learn, through evolution and phenotypic plasticity, the relevant aspects of a non‐random, smooth physical reality. We explain how geometric insights by mathematicians allow one to identify these genuine hallmarks of life and distinguish them from universal properties (...) of generic data sets. We illustrate these principles in a concrete example of protein evolution, suggesting a simple general recipe that can be applied to understand other biological systems. (shrink)

1 INSERM-CEA Unit 562, Cognitive Neuroimaging, Service Hospitalier Fre´de´ric Joliot, Orsay, France, 2 CNRS URA2182 Re´cepteurs and Cognition, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France.

Erst kommt das Leben, dann der Tod, denken viele. Doch schon das Verweilen vor einem Grab eröffnet einen Dialog, der das Band zwischen dem Vergangenen und Gegenwärtigen spürbar werden lässt: Das Band der Kommunikation zwischen den Toten und den Lebenden scheint unzerreißbar. Der Tod? der eigene und der der anderen - ist eine Kategorie des Lebens, die jeden von uns zur Auseinandersetzung zwingt.0Das Buch von Jean-Pierre Wils ist seit langer Zeit der erste, großangelegte Versuch einer Lehre vom Tod, (...) einer Thanatologie, die ein umfassendes Panorama entfaltet: Todesarten, Todesangst, Todeszeitpunkt werden zum Thema ebenso wie die Frage nach der Unsterblichkeit, dem angemessenen Trösten und den Riten der Bestattung. Angesichts des Todes kommt die Philosophie an ihre Grenze? darum holt der Autor der Philosophie eine?Weggefährtin auf der Erkundungsfahrt zum Tod? an die Seite, nämlich die Literatur. So wird das Buch zu einem einmaligen Grenzgang zwischen Philosophie und Literatur, zwischen Reflexion und Narration und beglaubigt den Satz von Saint-Exupéry:?Es wird aussehen, als wäre ich tot, und das wird nicht wahr sein.? (shrink)

Definition of the problem: Stem cell transplantations from umbilical cord blood, especially if from autologous origin, are often treated with distrust. Not only are the therapeutic effects controversial, but the question of ownership is also hard to answer from an ethical point of view. Furthermore, the extraction of umbilical cord blood is already related to information about the factual and potential health condition of the child and its parents. Arguments and conclusion: The three problems will be discussed separately. Despite certain (...) uncertainties, there are no weighty ethical arguments against the extraction of umbilical cord blood for autologous purposes. The owner of the umbilical cord blood should be the mother. The question of information is not at all typical for this problem area and does not carry more weight here than in other relevant medical situations. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung. Stammzellen-Transplantationen aus Nabelschnurblut, vor allem solchen aus autologer Quelle, wird oft mit Misstrauen begegnet. Die therapeutischen Effekte sind umstritten, aber auch die Eigentumsfrage lässt sich aus ethischer Sicht nicht leicht beantworten. Darüber hinaus ist bereits die Gewinnung von Nabelschnurblut mit Informationen über den faktischen und potentiellen Gesundheitszustand des Kindes und seiner Eltern verbunden. Die drei Problemgebiete werden einzeln gewichtet. Trotz bestehender Unsicherheiten stehen der Gewinnung von Nabelschnurblut zu autologen Zwecken keine gravierenden ethischen Argumente entgegen. Eigentümer des Nabelschnurblutes sollte die (...) Mutter sein. Die Informationsfrage ist keineswegs typisch für diesen Problembereich und wiegt hier nicht schwerer als in anderen relevanten medizinischen Situationen. (shrink)