Compilation of the most important documents and speeches by Pierre de Coubertin on Olympism and the Olympic Games.

In the countries with a strong muslim immigration, the practice and the organization of Islam represent a national and international politica! stake. The Belgian state, which recognizes and supports the most important cults financially, recognized Islam in 1974. But this cult doesn't still obtain this state support and the questions concerning its organization are more complex than ever. Thelegislation is insufficient and its application almost non-existent. The debates on 'integrism' and hijab have confronted us with the problem of the integrating (...) role of Islam. The Belgian political world seems today to fear the influence of foreign countries on immigrants. All these factors throw light on the history and the present state of the Belgian legislation on the organization of the islamic cult, which this article analyses. (shrink)

The proposal of this article is to present and discuss the methodology applied in the frame of a socio-anthropological research held in Bolivia and Peru on child development and growth. The objectives of the investigation were to study the mother?s perceptions (and those of other related caretakers..

Two populations are subdivided into two categories of individuals (hawks and doves). Individuals fight to have access to a resource which is necessary for their survival. Conflicts occur between individuals belonging to the same population and to different populations. We investigate the long term effects of the conflicts on the stability of the community. The modelis a set of ODE's with four variables corresponding to hawk and dove individuals of the two populations. Two time scales are considered. A fast time (...) scale is used to describe frequent encounters and fightings between individuals trying to monopolize the resource. A slow time scale is used for the demography and the long term effects of encounters. We use aggregation methods in order to reduce this model into a system of two ODE's only for the total densities of the two populations which is found to be a classical Lotka-Volterra competition model. We study different cases of proportions of hawks and doves in both populations on the global coexistence and the mutal exclusion of the two populations. Pure dove tactics in both populations are unstable. In cases of mixed hawk and dove in both populations, there is coexistence. Pure dove or mixed hawk-dove tactics in one population can coexist with pure hawks in the other one when the costs of fightings between hawks are large enough. (shrink)

This is the first part of Raymond Aron's landmark two-volume study of the sociological tradition¿arguably the definitive work of its kind. More than a work of reconstruction, Aron's study is, at its deepest level, an engagement with the very question of modernity: How did the intellectual currents which emerged in the eighteenth century shape the modern political and philosophical order? With scrupulous fairness, Aron examines the thought and arguments of the major social thinkers to discern how they answered this question. (...) Volume One explores three traditions: the French liberal school of political sociology, represented by Montesquieu and Tocqueville; the Comtean tradition, anticipating Durkheim in its elevation of social unity and consensus; and the Marxists, who posited the struggle between classes and placed their faith in historical necessity. In his customary clear and penetrating prose, Aron argues that each of these schools offers its own theory of the diversity of societies and that ¿each is inspired both by moral convictions and by scientific hypotheses.¿ This Routledge Classics edition includes an introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson. (shrink)

Ce recueil d'articles montre en quoi le retour des idées de Platon dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle soutient la philosophie de la Renaissance : l'homme au centre du monde minéral, végétal et animal, et au centre de l'humanité. Pour Plotin, le platonisme est à la source des grandes théologies.

_Le langage de la morale_ est la traduction d’un livre écrit en 1952 sous le titre _The Language of Morals_ ; sous ce titre en anglais, il précède d’une trentaine d’années _Moral Thinking_ (1981), tandis que sous le titre français et traduit par Jean-Baptiste Le Bohec et Frédéric Naudin, il suit de deux ans _Penser en morale_, traduit récemment pour les éditions Hermann (en 2021) par Claire Wrobel, Malik Bozzo-Rey et moi-même (qui l’ai aussi préfacé). Hare est au début de (...) sa carrière quand il rédige _Le langage de la morale_ et il semble que, s’il n’est ni kantien, ni anti-kantien, il procède néanmoins par un réexamen de nombreuses catégories sans lesquelles il ne saurait être question de faire de l’éthique : le devoir, les impératifs, la distinction du prescriptif et du descriptif, de la description et de l’évaluation, le « bon », le « juste » et quelques autres encore, qui constituent le vocabulaire fondamental de l’éthique. De plus, Hare nous apprend à être attentifs à la grammaire, aux pe... (shrink)

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French authors did not ignore the word “éthique,” but neither did they make it play a specific role in their works like they did with “morale,” their preferred term. By contrast, English writers were more likely than their counterparts to distinguish “Ethicks” from “Morals.” Consequently, it is mainly in English-language writings that the separation of the two terms can be found. The key authors invested in refining these distinctions are Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and (...) Bentham—the last one being the philosopher who enacted the splitting of these two terms. From their meditations gradually emerges a belief in the conditions for a common moral platform and position; in those authors’ estimation, this foundation could properly take the place of mathematical ethical inquiry. Among those exposing utilitarianism, ethics are a matter of calculation, ethical action achievable through mathematical rules. If calculation is still limited with Hutcheson, it becomes subtler still with Bentham, even if the first utilitarian author stays within the parameters of this moral philosophy. Bentham seems to be inspired by Bayesian–Pricean probability calculus, and his main and seminal ideas are developed in “The Axioms of Pathology” at the end of the “Pannomial Fragments.”. (shrink)

Si Bentham s’oppose explicitement plus souvent à Hobbes qu’il ne lui donne raison, la dette qu’il contracte à son égard est beaucoup plus étendue qu’il ne le laisse paraître. Sans doute le primat des affaires civiles sur les affaires religieuses est incontestable chez les deux auteurs. Toutefois, si les ouvrages de Hobbes sont directement en prise sur la guerre civile qui sévit en Angleterre, l’œuvre de Bentham affronte un autre problème : est-il possible de rendre le christianisme compatible avec l’utilitarisme? (...) Malgré ces différences importantes, l’articulation du religieux et du politique repose étonnamment, chez l’un comme chez l’autre, sur la théorie des fictions, entendue plutôt comme dépendante de l’imagination chez Hobbes, et du langage chez Bentham, mais dans les deux cas comme technique pour problématiser les inversions que permet la distinction de ce qui doit être pris tantôt comme entité réelle, tantôt comme entité fictive. (shrink)