The review article reconstructs the reception of Gramsci's writings in Italy from the postwar-period to the present. Compared to the Italian debate that has given little attention to Gramsci's writings, except for in some periods such as the 1970s, Gramsci's fortune has continued to grow internationally. Recent Italian contributions, such as the book of Alberto Bugio, Grasmci storico, criticised in this review, remain indebted to an historicist approach that does not allow a use of Gramscian categories as an optic for (...) interpreting and enacting the transformation of the present. The analysis concentrates on concepts such as 'passive revolution', 'fascism', 'Taylorism' and 'bureaucracy'. (shrink)

Through a reading of all the articles collected in the monographic section of «Scienza & Politica», this introduction shows how "cooperation" is a multifaceted concept, crisscrossed by contradictions and ambivalences. The author provides a brief historical and political analysis of the concept of cooperation, stressing its importance in contemporary debates and pointing out both the most productive and problematic aspects of the recent development of a political theory of cooperation.

The essay reconstructs the contradictory nature of the concept of cooperation, highlighting historically some of the antinomies that remain latent even in the modern usage of this concept. Through the analysis and comparison of the texts of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim and Alfred Marshall two problematic axes of the concept are particularly stressed: cooperation as an extension of the human potential in opposition to cooperation as objectification and exploitation; cooperation as social norm in opposition to the cooperation of (...) the cooperative movement. These antinomies are not exceeded in a harmonious and all-encompassing concept of cooperation, but instead are brought into play to return the complexity and the internal contradictions of a concept that runs through the sociological, economic and political contemporary debate. (shrink)

‘68 in Italy, compared to the same movement in other European countries, is characterized by its long duration and its particular intensity. It is in fact a movement that has produced powerful and lasting effects on the Italian society for at least a decade, as it is visible in its central presence in the historical memory of the country, still today. But the outbreak of ‘68, like the social and legislative achievements of the 70s, owe their conditions of possibility to (...) a break – a political break but above all a theoretical break – which occurred earlier, at the beginning of the 1960s. Going back to the genesis of the breakdown of the conservative imagery of the 1950s, while being an operation of intellectual history, can be useful to investigate how the “theoretical novelty” emerges, in this case through a break with its own tradition, albeit aiming to its reactivation. (shrink)

L’articolo ricostruisce la genealogia del concetto di ideologia nei Quaderni del carcere di Antonio Gramsci, mostrando come esso sia centrale nell’elaborazione del marxista sardo e come sia funzionale a una lettura materialista ma non riduzionista dei fenomeni “sovrastrutturali”. L’ideologia viene analizzata attraverso la costellazione concettuale di cui fa parte, insieme ai concetti di blocco storico, senso comune, religione, scienza e filosofia. All’interno di questo quadro emerge un concetto di ideologia peculiare ed “eterodosso” per un marxista della prima metà del XX (...) secolo, che anticipa teorizzazioni successive e acquisizioni scientifiche in altri campi del sapere. La teoria dell’ideologia in Gramsci, per come è qui ricostruita, rappresenta la premessa necessaria alla sua teoria dell’egemonia. (shrink)

There is a tendency to take mounted dinosaur skeletons at face value, as the raw data on which the science of paleontology is founded. But the truth is that mounted dinosaur skeletons are substantially intention-dependent—they are artifacts. More importantly, I argue, they are also substantially imagination-dependent: their production is substantially causally reliant on preparators’ creative imaginations, and their proper reception is predicated on audiences’ recreative imaginations. My main goal here is to show that dinosaur skeletal mounts are plausible candidates for (...) art-status. But, what is more, I think they are artworks—specifically, sculptures. (shrink)

In this provocative analysis of historical narrative, Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrates how power operates, often invisibly, at all stages in the making of history to silence certain voices. From the West's failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in history, to the continued debate over denials of the Holocaust, and the meaning of Columbus's arrival in the Americas, Trouillot shows us that history is not simply the recording of facts and events, but a process of actively enforced (...) silences, some unconscious, others quite deliberate. (shrink)

On a pu croire ou espérer, un temps, que les monstruosités de la Seconde Guerre mondiale étaient derrière nous. Définitivement. Or partout, à nouveau, on massacre, on torture, on extermine. Comment comprendre cette facilité des hommes entrer dans le mal? La réponse à cette question devient chaque jour plus urgente. Michel Terestchenko rouvre ici le débat. D'abord, en complétant la démonstration de Hannah Arendt : de même que ce ne sont pas seulement des monstres qui basculent dans l'horreur mais des (...) hommes ordinaires, trop ordinaires, de même, montre-t-il, il n'est pas besoin d'être un saint pour accomplir le juste et secourir des victimes au risque de sa vie. Héros ou salaud? C'est toujours une petite décision initiale, à peine perceptible, qui décide du côté dans lequel, une fois engagé, on se retrouvera in fine. Mais qu'est-ce qui explique cette décision? C'est là où l'enquête de M. Terestchenko prend toute son ampleur. En procédant à une reconstitution critique du débat central de la philosophie morale depuis le XVIIe siècle, aujourd'hui relayé par la majorité des sociologues et des économistes, elle montre combien est stérile l'opposition entre tenants de la thèse de l'égoïsme psychologique et défenseurs de l'hypothèse d'un altruisme sacrificiel. Ce n'est pas par " intérêt " qu'on tue ou qu'on torture. Ni par pur altruisme qu'on se refuse à l'abjection. Les travaux qui analysent les phénomènes de soumission à l'autorité, de conformisme de groupe ou de passivité face à des situations de détresse, invitent à comprendre tout autrement les conduites de destructivité. Tirant les conclusions philosophiques de recherches récentes entreprises en psychologie sociale et s'appuyant sur certains exemples historiques particulièrement éclairants - tel le cas de Franz Stangl, le commandant de Treblinka, ou, à l'opposé, les actions héroïques du pasteur André Trocmé et de sa femme Magda au Chambon-sur-Lignon -, l'auteur propose de penser les conduites humaines face au mal selon un nouveau paradigme celui de l'absence ou de la présence à soi. (shrink)

À propos des vénérables malentendus philosophiques et de l'inévitable transition culturelle.

Souvent, la science est associée à l'idée de progrès et d'émancipation des peuples. Il en fut ainsi au temps des Lumières, puis sous la Révolution française. Elle est parfois aussi contestée en raison même du progrès et de ses conséquences: destruction de la nature, productivisme à outrance... Les scientifiques sont alors considérés comme indifférents aux valeurs humanistes, acteurs d'une " science sans conscience " au service des pires projets, totalitaires, racistes, brutalement colonisateurs. A quelles conditions la science peut-elle aujourd'hui avancer (...) et faire avancer l'homme? Faut-il généraliser le principe de précaution? Dans un monde où la science est financée, organisée ou stimulée d'une part par la puissance publique et d'autre part par le marché, qui décide in fine? Comment faire vivre le lien entre liberté des scientifiques et progrès social? Quels sont les rapports entre démocratie et science? Et, si la science a encore un avenir, quel est-il? (shrink)

There is one question that any potential reader who suspects that Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) might be important for past, contemporary, and future philosophy inevitably raises: how should I read Whitehead? How can I make sense of this incredibly dense tissue of imaginative systematizing, spread over decades of work in disciplines so different and specialized as algebra, geometry, logic, relativistic physics and philosophy of science? Accordingly, this monograph has two main complementary objectives. The first one is to propose a set (...) of efficient hermeneutical tools to get the reader started. These straightforward tools provide answers that are highly coherent and probably the most applicable to Whitehead's entire corpus. The second objective is to illustrate how the several parts of Process and Reality are interconnected, something that all commentators have either failed to recognise or only incompletely acknowledged. (shrink)

We analyse two foundational social problems regarding early childhood education. The first, in the late nineteenth century, is infant mortality, a social problem that constituted the historical legitimation for the first crèches. The second, the prevention of school failure, is very topical today. By analysing these examples in their historicity, taking into account social, political, economical and scientific contexts, it becomes clear that early childhood education can contribute to the individualisation and decontextualisation of social problems. Yet acknowledging this also means (...) opening windows of new opportunities, as far as the construction of social problems remains an open debate in which disagreement rather than consensus is fostered. (shrink)

Whitehead's Pancreativism: The Basics has provided tools to understand Whitehead secundum Whitehead. We now seek to bring him in dialogue with James. It will be a pragmatic dialogue looking for two types of synergy: to establish the relevance of a Jamesian background to read Whitehead, and to adumbrate how Whitehead can help us understand the stakes of James's works. After one hundred years of scholarship, it appears that James's legacy has mainly been studied from the perspective of his own blend (...) of pragmatism and that this blend has moreover chiefly been put into dialogue with Peirce and analytic philosophy at large. This double interpretational shift has allowed James to keep a fair amount of visibility on the academic scene but, over the years, it has significantly obliterated his vision. It is time to rediscover James from the perspective of his radical empiricism. (shrink)

In an age of internet scrolling and skimming, where concentration and attention are fast becoming endangered skills, it is timely to think about the act of reading and the many forms that it can take. Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution makes the case for thinking about reading in philosophical terms. Boulous Walker argues that philosophy involves the patient work of thought; in this it resembles the work of art, which invites and implores us to take our time and to (...) engage with the world. At its best, philosophy teaches us to read slowly; in fact, philosophy is the art of reading slowly – and this inevitably clashes with many of our current institutional practices and demands. Slow reading shares something in common with contemporary social movements, such as that devoted to slow food; it offers us ways to engage the complexity of the world. With the help of writers as diverse as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Woolf, Adorno, Levinas, Critchley, Beauvoir, Le Dœuff, Irigaray, Cixous, Weil, and others, Boulous Walker offers a foundational text in the emerging field of slow philosophy, one that explores the importance of unhurried time in establishing our institutional encounters with complex and demanding works. (shrink)

La 4e de couv. indique: "Dans un contexte de massification des élèves et de réforme de l'enseignement philosophique en France, cet ouvrage, qui s'adresse aux étudiants et professeurs de philosophie, à leurs formateurs et plus généralement à tous eux qui s'intéressent aux Nouvelles Pratiques Philosophiques (NPP), voudrait rendre compte des recherches menées ces trente dernières années sur la question de la didactique de la philosophie, et proposer un certain nombre de pistes pratiques pour développer l'apprentissage du philosopher tant chez les (...) élèves que chez les adultes.". (shrink)

Il y a des questions concernant le droit auxquelles il n'est pas possible de répondre par la simple analyse du droit en vigueur et que pourtant ni les juristes, ni les philosophes ne peuvent éviter. Ce sont celles qui font l'objet de la philosophie du droit. Elles concernent notamment la définition du droit et d'abord celle du droit en vigueur lui-même, des rapports que le droit entretien avec d'autres phénomènes, comme le pouvoir, la force ou la morale, la possibilité d'une (...) science du droit, la structure du système juridique ou encore la spécificité du raisonnement juridique et des concepts employés par les juristes. (shrink)

Sex, Gender, Ethics, and the Darwinian Evolution of Humanity examines the impact of Darwin's 'Descent of Man' on contemporary biology and the humanities. Its publication in 1871 was a founding event in anthropology. Its content was primarily concerned with the development of sexual life, social life, and intellectual life, not only as outcomes of evolution, but as components that have actively intermixed over time with the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection. The stamp of Darwinism on modern thought is still very (...) important and brings novelties to academic studies. Several fields influenced by Darwinian anthropology developed in recent decades, including evolutionary ethics, the evolution of sociality and sexual communication in animal and plant species. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are topics that draw heavily on Darwin's 'Descent of Man'. The understanding of Darwin's thought has also progressed greatly in recent decades, following the systematic study of Darwin's correspondence and notebooks, leading to a reassessment of the development of his thought on humans, social groups, and heredity, and how they come together in his theory of evolution. The book combines a historical perspective on Darwin's achievement and his legacy. It will be of interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields, from experimental biology to the social and historical sciences. (shrink)

Most organized religions have indicated a level of support for organ donation including the diagnosis of death by the brain criterion. Organ donation is seen as a gift of love and fits within a communitarian ethos that most religions embrace. The acceptance of the determination of death by the brain criterion, where it has been explained, is reconciled with religious views of soul and body by using a notion of integration. Because the soul may be seen as that which integrates (...) the human body, in the absence of any other signs of human functioning, loss of integration is considered to be an indication that soul and body have separated. To some extent this view would seem to be informed by an Aristotelian notion of the soul, but it fits well enough with religious notions of the person continuing after death. There have been several developments internationally that indicate that the acceptance of so-called ‘brain death’ by organized religions has been challenged by new developments including the acceptance of a lesser standard than loss of all brain function and a rejection by the US President's Council on Bioethics of the notion of loss of integration as an explanation of death by the brain criterion. (shrink)

In an age of internet scrolling and skimming, where concentration and attention are fast becoming endangered skills, it is timely to think about the act of reading and the many forms that it can take. Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution makes the case for thinking about reading in philosophical terms. Boulous Walker argues that philosophy involves the patient work of thought; in this it resembles the work of art, which invites and implores us to take our time and to (...) engage with the world. At its best, philosophy teaches us to read slowly; in fact, philosophy is the art of reading slowly – and this inevitably clashes with many of our current institutional practices and demands. Slow reading shares something in common with contemporary social movements, such as that devoted to slow food; it offers us ways to engage the complexity of the world. With the help of writers as diverse as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Woolf, Adorno, Levinas, Critchley, Beauvoir, Le Dœuff, Irigaray, Cixous, Weil, and others, Boulous Walker offers a foundational text in the emerging field of slow philosophy, one that explores the importance of unhurried time in establishing our institutional encounters with complex and demanding works. (shrink)

Mettre en faisceau, dans un même argument, anarchie, gnose et sagesse pourra sembler peu académique. On trouvera ici des raisons de penser qu'il n'en est rien: une communauté de vues s'atteste non seulement historiquement, mais aussi conceptuellement. En un mot, elle se nomme volonté d'authenticité, qui est exigence d'autonomie. Il faut donc faire prévaloir l'autorité sur le pouvoir, la connaissance sur la foi, et la vie sur la mort."--Page 4 of cover.

Comment repenser la sexualité et le « genre »? Relire la Genèse et le Prologue de l'évangile de Jean à partir de prémisses féministes donne une idée très vive de la chape idéologique et conceptuelle qui a été coulée sur l’inconscient collectif par les monothéismes, finalement assistés par les catégories philosophiques platoniciennes.

This seminal, multidisciplinary book shows how mathematics can be used to study the first principles of DNA. Most importantly, it enriches the so-called "Chargaff's grammar of biology" by providing the conceptual theoretical framework necessary to generalize Chargaff's rules. Starting with a simple example of DNA mathematical modeling where human nucleotide frequencies are associated to the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio through an optimization problem, its breakthrough is showing that the reverse, complement and reverse-complement operators defined over oligonucleotides induce a (...) natural set partition of DNA words of fixed-size. These equivalence classes, when organized into a matrix form, reveal hidden patterns within the DNA sequence of every living organism. Intended for undergraduate and graduate students both in mathematics and in life sciences, it is also a valuable resource for researchers interested in studying invariant genomic properties. (shrink)

Charles Eisenmann, dans un compte-rendu critique de la Pensée juridique, publié dans la Revue de droit public en 1961, écrivait : " On voudrait proclamer d'abord sans réserves, les rares qualités de l'ouvrage, qui en rendent la lecture très recommandable, en particulier pour ceux qui, jeunes ou juristes déjà formés, n'ont pas encore ou n'ont plus commerce très assidu avec la théorie ou la philosophie du droit. Ils prendront contact avec une pensée vivante et chaude, qui cherche avec ardeur, souplesse (...) et agilité." Les qualités qui ont conduit la Pensée juridique à être un des ouvrages de base de la formation théorique de toute une génération de juristes, celle des décennies 60-70, demeurent encore aujourd'hui intactes. C'est pourquoi il nous a paru souhaitable d'ouvrir la nouvelle collection des introuvables des éditions Panthéon- Assas par une réédition de l'ouvrage de Michel Virally. (shrink)

Quel est le secret de Pythagore? On pourrait avancer que, par défi nition, s'il y a secret, il est caché et n’est pas dévoilable, ou ne sera pas dévoilé. Le vrai secret est celui dont on ne soupçonne même pas l’existence. On peut toutefois approcher tangentiellement le coeur du pythagorisme à partir d’un idéal qui a traversé les âges.

1. La recherche de la vérité chez Simone Weil.--2. Essai de bibliographie des écrits de Simone Weil.

La crise covidienne se poursuit depuis plus d'un an, laissant un sentiment d'inquiétante étrangeté chez chacun.

Philosopher à l'école maternelle, primaire, en collège, en lycée professionnel, dans des médiathèques, des maisons des jeunes, des foyers de jeunes travailleurs..., ou philosopher dans un café philo, banquet philo, ciné philo, théâtre philo; au cours d'une rando philo, avec une BD philo, par une consultation philo privée ou en entreprise..., ou philosopher en prison, en maison de retraite, à l'hôpital, etc. Dans chaque cas, de Nouvelles pratiques philosophiques (NPP) se mettent place. Cet ouvrage vise, pour un public très large, (...) à : décrire et analyser l'émergence de ces pratiques philosophiques sociales et scolaires souvent inédites ; dresser un panorama de la diversité des publics, des lieux d'exercices et des méthodes utilisées ; inventorier les genres qui se cherchent puis se stabilisent, autour des tenants et aboutissants philosophiques ; préciser les objectifs et les présupposés philosophiques, politiques ou didactiques impliqués, les méthodologies, dispositifs et supports privilégiés ; exposer quelques-unes des controverses souvent passionnées soulevées par ces nouvelles pratiques philosophiques. (shrink)