Un des débats les plus intéressants et les plus passionnés qui traversent la période du XVIIè et XVIIIè siècle concerne la finalité et les causes finales. L'importance du sujet se conçoit aisément si l'on songe à l'étendue et à la profondeur de ses implications. Par ses enjeux, le problème concerne les domaines épistémologique, esthétique, métaphysique et théologique. Comment doit-on penser, comprendre et étudier la nature? La philosophie s'interroge alors sur la scientificité non seulement des explications qu'elle donne, mais aussi des (...) questions qu'elle pose. Peut-on encore faire une théodicée, c'est-à-dire justifier d'un ordre final et providentiel de l'univers? La question porte tout autant sur la nature et Dieu que sur les pouvoirs de la raison humaine. L'étude de ces deux siècles de débats permet de comprendre la genèse de nos conceptions contemporaines de la nature. (shrink)

Dès lors que la morale ne se fonde plus dans les commandements divins, la nature pourrait devenir un fondement, une norme et un principe de légitimation. Mais cette substitution d’un fondement à l’autre n’a rien d’une évidence car la nature du matérialiste n’est pas spontanément un principe de sens. Nous analyserons tout d’abord la manière dont se pose la question de l’articulation de la nature et de la morale chez Diderot, en montrant qu’elle peut être liée à des choix d’écriture (...) philosophique. Puis, nous nous demanderons ce qu’est la nature pour Diderot et en quoi on peut dire à la fois qu’il est difficile d’en déduire des vérités morales et qu’elle doit être néanmoins pensée comme norme. Enfin, on s’attachera à montrer comment les textes dialogués et les fictions de Diderot permettent de mettre en scène l’immanence des normes morales et la difficulté de les formuler. (shrink)

La morale est un des sujets majeurs de la réflexion de Diderot, où se jouent l’originalité, la pertinence et la praticabilité de sa visée matérialiste. Les questions de morale traversent tous ses textes, des ouvrages philosophiques aux lettres, des récits aux pièces de théâtre, des pamphlets politiques aux Salons, mais, comme le suggèrent les articles rassemblés dans ce dossier, paradoxalement, elles ne font l’objet d’aucun texte synthétique et eles trouvent leurs apparitions les plus consist...

L’ère du divertissement n’est pas celle du triomphe, mais bien celle de la misère du jeu. Le jeu est partout, mais la pauvreté spirituelle qui accompagne la dilution du jeu dans n’importe quoi a pour rançon l’appauvrissement ludique maximal. Quand on considère avec attention ce qu’est le jeu dans le monde contemporain, du bingo des marques des supermarchés, aux tuez-les-tous informatiques..

Un des résultats anthropologiques importants du matérialisme de Diderot et de sa critique du finalisme est la description du moi comme irréductiblement multiple. Nous analysons dans cet article les raisons et les conséquences d’une des formulations que Diderot a donnée de cette idée de moi-multiple : « C’est le rapport constant, invariable de toutes les impressions à cette origine commune qui constitue l’unité de l’animal. […] C’est la mémoire de toutes ces impressions successives qui fait pour chaque animal l’histoire de (...) sa vie et de son soi ».One of the most important anthropological results of Diderot’s materialism and his critique of finalism is the description of the self as multiple. This paper attempts to understand the causes and consequences of one of the author’s expressions of this idea of a multiple self : « It is the unvarying constant relation of all impressions to this common origin which constitutes the animal’s unity […]. The memory of all these successive impressions is for every animal the story of his life and his self. ». (shrink)

En 1748, Diderot publie son premier roman, Les Bijoux indiscrets, s’inscrivant dans la veine du conte oriental parodique et libertin à la manière de Crébillon fils. Mais il y a un autre modèle de fiction orientale, celui des Lettres persanes, qui se sert de la trame romanesque pour aborder les débats intellectuels de son temps et mettre en scène les questions philosophiques les plus fondamentales. Trois ans avant la parution du premier volume de l’ Encyclopédie, Diderot expérimente à son tour (...) les possibilités philosophiques de la fiction en inventant une nouvelle forme de philosophie narrative. (shrink)

Un des résultats anthropologiques importants du matérialisme de Diderot et de sa critique du finalisme est la description du moi comme irréductiblement multiple. Nous analysons dans cet article les raisons et les conséquences d’une des formulations que Diderot a donnée de cette idée de moi-multiple: « C’est le rapport constant, invariable de toutes les impressions à cette origine commune qui constitue l’unité de l’animal. [...] C’est la mémoire de toutes ces impressions successives qui fait pour chaque animal l’histoire de sa (...) vie et de son soi ». (shrink)

Le titre de ce recueil indique trois fonctions et une période. Heureux complément au très beau volume, plus historique, dirigé par Ran Halévi (Le savoir du Prince du Moyen Age aux Lumières, Paris, Fayard, 2002), son intérêt repose sur le jeu permis par cette triade problématique. Du conseiller professionnel au pur littéraire, de nombreux auteurs et textes aux statuts différents sont examinés. Au-delà de la question classique de l’engagement du philosophe dans un domaine qui n’est pas pour lui..

How can an incomplete and uncertain model of the environment be used to perceive, infer, decide and act efficiently? This is the challenge that both living and artificial cognitive systems have to face. Symbolic logic is, by its nature, unable to deal with this question. The subjectivist approach to probability is an extension to logic that is designed specifically to face this challenge. In this paper, we review a number of frequently encountered cognitive issues and cast them into a common (...) Bayesian formalism. The concepts we review are ambiguities, fusion, multimodality, conflicts, modularity, hierarchies and loops. First, each of these concepts is introduced briefly using some examples from the neuroscience, psychophysics or robotics literature. Then, the concept is formalized using a template Bayesian model. The assumptions and common features of these models, as well as their major differences, are outlined and discussed. (shrink)

Compared with the Greek and Latin fields, the systematic study of the concept of textual criticism in classical India has made little progress, despite the quality of work produced by specialists. And yet research of this nature would probably lead, paradoxically, to a clearer formulation of the aims and methods of modern critical editions of Indian texts.

En el presente ensayo intentaremos exponer algunos aspectos de la crítica de Graeber al capitalismo financiarizado. En el primer apartado introduciremos su concepto de alienación, clave para entender el sentido de su obra. En los apartados posteriores presentaremos las ideas principales que se pueden encontrar en Bullshit Jobs, su último libro. En él expone una teoría de los trabajos basura o inútiles, que considera uno de los pilares fundamentales de la ideología neoliberal, junto con la omnipresencia de la burocracia y (...) la moralidad de la deuda. El fenómeno social de los trabajos basura es estudiado desde diversos niveles: qué son, cómo afectan a los que los realizan, cuáles son las causas económicas y por qué nadie hace nada para acabar con ellos.In the present paper I try to delve into some of Graeber’s critiques of the financialised capitalism. In the first section, I will introduce his idea of alienation, key to understand the sense of his work. In the rest of the paper I will present the main ideas of his last book, Bullshit Jobs. There Graeber presents a theory of bullshit jobs, which he believes to be an important base of the neoliberal system, along with the bureaucracy and the debt. He analyses the social phenomenon of bullshit jobs from different perspectives: what they are, how they affect the people doing them, which are the economic causes and why nothing is done. (shrink)

Decision making in any brain is imperfect and costly in terms of time and energy. Operating under such constraints, an organism could be in a position to improve performance if an opportunity arose to exploit informative patterns in the environment being searched. Such an improvement of performance could entail both faster and more accurate (i.e., reward-maximizing) decisions. The present study investigated the extent to which human participants could learn to take advantage of immediate patterns in the spatial arrangement of serially (...) presented foods such that a region of space would consistently be associated with greater subjective value. Eye movements leading up to choices demonstrated rapidly induced biases in the selective allocation of visual fixation and attention that were accompanied by both faster and more accurate choices of desired goods as implicit learning occurred. However, for the control condition with its spatially balanced reward environment, these subjects exhibited preexisting lateralized biases for eye and hand movements (i.e., leftward and rightward, respectively) that could act in opposition not only to each other but also to the orienting biases elicited by the experimental manipulation, producing an asymmetry between the left and right hemifields with respect to performance. Potentially owing at least in part to learned cultural conventions (e.g., reading from left to right), the findings herein particularly revealed an intrinsic leftward bias underlying initial saccades in the midst of more immediate feedback-directed processes for which spatial biases can be learned flexibly to optimize oculomotor and manual control in value-based decision making. The present study thus replicates general findings of learned attentional biases in a novel context with inherently rewarding stimuli and goes on to further elucidate the interactions between endogenous and exogenous biases. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Résumé Ce compte rendu de Formes de vie de Jacques Fontanille cherche à montrer que l’ouvrage s’inscrit dans une certaine continuité, notamment par rapport à Pratiques sémiotiques, mais qu’il constitue aussi un nouveau tournant, qui fait évoluer la sémiotique et la positionne dans le champ des sciences humaines et sociales. D’abord, nous discutons le fait que, selon Jacques Fontanille, les formes de vie font « vaciller » la frontière entre la nature et la culture. Nous soulignons le fait que Jacques (...) Fontanille développe après Descola, Latour et Lotman les notions de régimes de croyance d’identification, de mode d’existence social et de sémiosphère. Ensuite, l’accent est mis sur le « vivre-avec » comme macro-expérience. Il s’agit de mesurer les conséquences d’un double choix qui permet de dépasser le stade de l’auto-organisation : d’une part, le rapport au monde est médié par l’actant-corps ; d’autre part, l’activité sémiotique consciente d’elle-même est une activité méta-sémiotique. Enfin, il importe d’évaluer la part du culturel dans la constitution des formes de vie. Nous nous interrogeons sur l’« instanciation » des formes de vie dans un lieu et dans un temps déterminés. (shrink)

Estudio sobre la ironía, como modo de entender la vida y la filosofía. Ùltimo texto de Richard J. Bernstein.

The Pauṣkara briefly discusses the meaning-expressing nature of śabda (constituted of phonemes, varṇa) and the means to the cognition of word and sentence meaning. According to this dualistic Śaiva Tantra, meaning is denoted by nāda, a capacity of varṇas. Varṇas also are the means to the cognition of meaning through a capacity (saṃskāra) manifested in them. Although the meaning-denoting capacity is natural to varṇas, the relation of words (which are nothing but groups of varṇas) with objects is fixed by convention. (...) This article translates and analyzes the relevant passages from the sixth and eighth chapters. Certain arguments of plagiarism levelled against the eighth chapter of the Pauṣkara are examined in the concluding part of the article. (shrink)

The dualist Śaiva doctrine considers that mala is that which obstructs the true nature of the self and sets in motion the operation of bondage. Though many dualist Śaiva tantras discuss the concept of mala, only the Pauṣkara presents a detailed exposition supported by numerous arguments. This article aims to closely report those arguments and to search within the Pauṣkara for answers to certain questions that the concept provokes.

Cross-cultural comparisons face several methodological challenges. In an attempt at resolving some such challenges, Nathan Sivin has developed the framework of “cultural manifolds.” This framework includes all the pertinent dimensions of a complex phenomenon and the interactions that make all of these aspects into a single whole. In engaging with this framework, Anna Akasoy illustrates that the phenomena used in comparative approaches to cultural and intellectual history need to be subjected to a continuous change of perspectives. Writing about comparative history, (...) Warwick Anderson directs attention to an articulation between synchronic and diachronic modes of inquiry. In addition, he asks: If comparative studies require a number of collaborators, how does one coordinate the various contributors? And how does one ensure that the comparison is between separate entities, without mutual historical entanglement? Finally, how does comparative history stack up against more dynamic approaches, such as connected, transnational, and postcolonial histories? Gérard Colas, for his part, claims that comparisons cannot allow one to move away from the dominant Euroamerican conceptual framework. Should this indeed be the case, we should search for better ways of facilitating a “mutual pollination” between philosophies. Finally, Edmond Eh first asserts that Sivin fails to recognize the difference between comparisons within cultures and comparisons between cultures. He then argues that the application of generalism is limited to comparisons of historical nature. (shrink)

El aumento en la producción y consumo de frutas y hortalizas mínimamente procesadas de los últimos años ha con­tribuido a incrementar las toxiinfecciones alimentarias asociadas al consumo de productos vegetales frescos. Esto es debido a que los tratamientos desinfectantes llevados a cabo actualmente por industria de IV gama son insuficientes para garantizar la seguridad microbiológica de los productos finales, y además estos no reciben ningún tratamiento capaz de eliminar todos los patógenos antes de su consumo. Por lo tanto, es necesario (...) utilizar estrategias al­ternativas para reducir los microorganismos patógenos y alteran­tes en frutas y hortalizas. La bioconservación, mediante el uso de microorganismos o sus metabolitos, es una alternativa que, en combinación con las prácticas habituales, puede reducir o prevenir el crecimiento de patógenos en productos mínimamente procesa­dos, mejorando su calidad microbiológica. En este artículo se pre­sentan los resultados más relevantes sobre la bioconservación de frutas y hortalizas mínimamente procesadas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Diderot philosopheTimo KaitaroColas Duflo. Diderot philosophe. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003. Pp. 543. Cloth, € 85,00.Diderot's thought has often been believed to be full of incoherencies and paradoxes, lacking the unity characteristic of philosophical systems. It is true that he preferred the form of a dialogue to that of a systematic treatise and that his ideas on a specific subject tend to be dispersed in a variety of (...) philosophical, literary or epistolary texts. However, the different pieces fit together nicely, if one has the patience to put them together. In his new monograph Colas Duflo manages to show the coherence and unity of Diderot's philosophy, not only by showing the consistency of the philosopher's thought on epistemological, aesthetical and moral subjects separately, but also by showing the close interdependence of different aspects of his philosophical inquiry and their grounding in his biological materialism.Before the author examines Diderot's philosophy proper, he introduces the reader to Diderot's manner of writing and shows how the literary forms in which the encyclopedist presented his philosophy are indistinguishable from its content. Diderot did not write dialogues just in order to present in a palatable and entertaining form a philosophy that could well have been presented in erudite treatises. Dialogue was the original form of Diderot's thought. It helped him to distance himself from his thoughts and to put his ideas in a dialogue with each other, instead of systematizing them. In his dialogues the truth is approached by multiplying perspectives instead of being viewed from a central perspective which unifies the various points of view in one vision. Reminding the reader of this aspect of Diderot's philosophy is important. One would look in vain for the traditional mouthpiece of the truth among the protagonists of his dialogues; and this is true even in cases when he stages himself among them.Colas Duflo starts his discussion of Diderot's philosophy by examining the philosopher's complex and changing relation to metaphysical finalism in his first philosophical works. Duflo also lets this theme of finalism run through the book as the main thread, which provides a coherent framework for the treatement of the different aspects of Diderot's philosophy. The presentation of Diderot's early writings situates these works in their contemporary context and manages to reveal the internal logic of Diderot's development from a finalist deist to an antifinalist atheist in a convincing manner. The chapter dealing with Le rêve de d'Alembert provides a careful and well-thought-out reading of this work and shows the originality of Diderot's biological materialism, which has really nothing to do with the mechanism sometimes falsely attributed to him (and to La Mettrie). Diderot's thought was not so much rooted in the mechanical world-view as it was in the sciences of life of his time. In relation to the problem of unity vs. multiplicity in Diderot's organicistic materialism, Duflo tends to emphasize multiplicity. One could, in fact, with as much reason, argue the opposite and put the emphasis on unity. But this is perhaps a matter of taste, since Diderot's originality lies in fact in his ability to take into account both aspects of the organisms by describing the continuing tensions between unifying and disrupting forces at work within them.The part of the book dealing with aesthetics places the encyclopedist's theory of taste in the context of his materialism. The interpretations proposed are convincing although one has to take account of the fact that Duflo uses the word "spontaneous," not in its usual sense referring to immediate and unreflected reactions, but rather as a synonym of innate [End Page 498] (see 303). Diderot emphasized the former but denied the latter. The juxtaposition of Diderot's aesthetics with that of Kant provides some enlightening insights into both. From taste one passes fluently to Diderot's moral philosophy: according to Diderot moral judgements resemble those of taste in so far as they are often as spontaneous as the latter. And despite this they are not innate but based on experience.The chapters dealing with the moral and political philosophy of... (shrink)