Ecriture, art et pensée seront au coeur de notre cheminement. En interrogeant Rouault à partir de Pascal, nous tenterons d'élucider, en tissant un vaste parallélisme, l'oeuvre d'un artiste par celle d'un philosophe biblique. Et, en même temps, comme par réverbération, nous aurons peut-être l'occasion d'apporter, à partir de la traduction picturale, des angles de vue nouveaux sur l'univers pascalien. Les sources enseignent sur ceux qui y puisent mais aussi, d'une certaine manière, les héritiers sur ceux dont ils proviennent. Les siècles (...) passent mais l'esprit et le coeur ménagent des rencontres dans les profondeurs du mystère. (shrink)

For Louis Lavelle who wanted to write De la sagesse as a crowning of his work, the question of wisdom stands in the very centre of philosophy. The wise questions the meaning of existence. Thanks to wisdom, man, a free and temporal being, chooses the possible realities that bring him closer to Being. Wisdom in Lavelle’s sense is a wisdom of love, of mind and of being. The friend of wisdom, a man of reason and interiority, discovers in love the (...) summit and the essence of values. Lavelle’s thought on wisdom, gravitating around the notion of mind, brings together biblical, spiritual, mystic sources and purely philosophical sources. Both theoretical and practical, cultivating a Greek ideal of moderation and measure, wisdom aspires to the light of presence. (shrink)

Il s’agit de mettre en regard les domaines à la fois proches et différents de la poésie, de la philosophie et de la mystique, en conjuguant démarche diachronique et synchronique. Après avoir exploré les sources grecques et patristiques, l’analyse essaie de montrer, à partir d’auteurs comme Jean de la Croix, Pascal, Péguy, R. Tagore…, comment la philosophie s’approfondit à la rencontre de la poésie, comment la poésie s’élève à la rencontre de la pensée. Réunies l’une à l’autre par l’esprit, philosophie (...) et poésie s’accomplissent dans la mystique. La fidélité au mystère incline la pensée vers le poème et le poème vers la sagesse. The attempt is made here to confront the fields at once close and different of poetry, philosophy and mysticism, joining together a diachronic and a synchronic approach. Having explored Greek and Patristic sources, the analysis tries to show, starting from authors such as John of the Cross, Pascal, Péguy, R. Tagore…, how philosophy acquires greater depth through contact with poetry, and how poetry reaches in turn greater heights thanks to its contact with thought. Brought together by spirit, philosophy and poetry culminate in mysticism. Faithfulness to mystery draws thought to the poem and the poem to wisdom. (shrink)

Que dire de l’art dans ses rapports avec l’esprit et le mystère à partir de la Bible, de la philosophie, de la poésie? Dans l’Écriture, la beauté se révèle comme indissociable de la bonté, l’amour. Dans la perspective d’une philosophie, comme d’une poésie, de l’esprit et de l’existence, la beauté nous arrache au règne de l’avoir, de l’intérêt, de la puissance, pour nous rapprocher du mystère de l’être. Si pour Nietzsche l’esthétique est étrangère à l’éthique comme à la vérité, l’esthétique (...) de Pascal apparaît indissociable d’une éthique de la charité et d’une recherche de la vérité. L’enjeu d’un art de l’esprit et du mystère se situe, par-delà l’agrément, dans l’ordre de la profondeur. (shrink)

Esprit, l’un des mots clés des Pensées, reçoit chez Pascal deux significations : la raison et le souffle intérieur. Si l’esprit en tant que mens rationalis appartient au deuxième ordre, l’esprit en tant que mens spiritualis relève du troisième ordre. Deux dualismes se croisent dans la distinction pascalienne des trois ordres : le premier de nature philosophique, cartésienne, oppose le premier ordre, voué au corps, et les deuxième et troisième ordres, voués à la mens ; le second, de nature éthico-religieuse, (...) oppose le premier et le deuxième ordres, ordres de la cupidité, au troisième ordre, celui de la charité. Au-dessus de l’esprit/raison se tient l’esprit/amour. Pascal tisse, au sein du troisième ordre, un lien entre l’esprit et le cœur. Dans la notion de spiritus cordialis, d’esprit cordial, se situe l’apport essentiel de l’auteur des Pensées.« Esprit », one of the key-words of Pascal’s Pensées, has two meanings according to Pascal : i.e. reason and interior creative inspiration. If esprit as mens rationalis belongs to the second order, esprit as mens spiritualis refers to the third order. Two dualisms cross themselves within the Pascalian distinction of three orders. The former – of a philosophical nature, i.e. Cartesian – opposes the first order, devoted to the body and the second and third order devoted to the mens ; the latter – of an ethico-religious nature – opposes both the first and second order, i.e. the orders of cupidity to the third order, i.e. that of charity. The esprit as love rests above the esprit as reason. Pascal weaves, amid the third order a link between the esprit and the heart. The major contribution of the author of the Pensées rests in the concept of spiritus cordialis. (shrink)

From Bernard Boxill, professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and editor of Race and Racism, comes a tightly-argued, very illuminating book that will be essential reading for anyone interested in ...

Paradoxes of the Infinite presents one of the most insightful, yet strangely unacknowledged, mathematical treatises of the 19 th century: Dr Bernard Bolzano’s Paradoxien . This volume contains an adept translation of the work itself by Donald A. Steele S.J., and in addition an historical introduction, which includes a brief biography as well as an evaluation of Bolzano the mathematician, logician and physicist.

Autistic-spectrum conditions and psychotic-spectrum conditions (mainly schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression) represent two major suites of disorders of human cognition, affect, and behavior that involve altered development and function of the social brain. We describe evidence that a large set of phenotypic traits exhibit diametrically opposite phenotypes in autistic-spectrum versus psychotic-spectrum conditions, with a focus on schizophrenia. This suite of traits is inter-correlated, in that autism involves a general pattern of constrained overgrowth, whereas schizophrenia involves undergrowth. These disorders also (...) exhibit diametric patterns for traits related to social brain development, including aspects of gaze, agency, social cognition, local versus global processing, language, and behavior. Social cognition is thus underdeveloped in autistic-spectrum conditions and hyper-developed on the psychotic spectrum.;>We propose and evaluate a novel hypothesis that may help to explain these diametric phenotypes: that the development of these two sets of conditions is mediated in part by alterations of genomic imprinting. Evidence regarding the genetic, physiological, neurological, and psychological underpinnings of psychotic-spectrum conditions supports the hypothesis that the etiologies of these conditions involve biases towards increased relative effects from imprinted genes with maternal expression, which engender a general pattern of undergrowth. By contrast, autistic-spectrum conditions appear to involve increased relative bias towards effects of paternally expressed genes, which mediate overgrowth. This hypothesis provides a simple yet comprehensive theory, grounded in evolutionary biology and genetics, for understanding the causes and phenotypes of autistic-spectrum and psychotic-spectrum conditions. (shrink)

Philosophy should not try to assimilate itself to the aims of the sciences. Scientism stems from the false assumption that a representation of the world minimally based on local perspectives is what best serves self-understanding. Philosophy must concern itself with the history of our conceptions, and we must overcome the need to think that this history should ideally be vindicatory. There is no basic conflict between arguing within the framework of our ideas, reflectively making better sense of them, and understanding (...) their highly contingent history. The third of these activities is an inescapable part of the second. (shrink)

Ethical aspects of management control systems are attracting increasing attention among scholars and practitioners. Much of the work centers on their aims. We complement this scholarship by applying the ethical principle of “no harm,” i.e., non-maleficence, to examine how those aims are achieved. We illustrate this approach by exploring the effects of four MCS designs on job-related stress drawing on the differentiation of stress into two dimensions: a challenge and a threat dimension. Results from a lagged field-survey with 471 managers (...) and employees from the UK and the U.S. support key predictions and offer first insights into designing MCS based on a “no harm” ethics. Our study highlights the benefits of interdisciplinary research in business ethics and hopefully encourages more work on MCS from a perspective based on the non-maleficence principle. (shrink)

Bernard Boxill has bought together eighteen contemporary articles to explore the nature of race and racism, and their far-reaching social and political implications. Both highly contested ideas, this new book covers a wide variety of viewpoints that make clear that the way we resolve them will determine whether we judge controversial social policies like affirmative action, racial profiling for potential criminals and current immigration policies to be justified and wise.

An old question, still much discussed in moral philosophy, is whether there is any ethical knowledge. It is closely related, by simple etymology, to the question of cognitivism in ethics. Despite the fact that the terms ‘cognitivism’ and ‘objectivism’ seem sometimes to be used interchangeably, I take it that the question whether there can be ethical knowledge is not the same as the question whether ethical outlooks can be objective. A sufficient reason for this is that an ethical outlook might (...) be taken to consist of rules or principles, which do not admit of truth or falsehood and so cannot be objects of knowledge, but which can be seen as having an objective basis. (shrink)

The justification of Bayes' rule by cognitive rationality principles is undertaken by extending the propositional axiom systems usually proposed in two contexts of belief change: revising and updating. Probabilistic belief change axioms are introduced, either by direct transcription of the set-theoretic ones, or in a stronger way but nevertheless in the spirit of the underlying propositional principles. Weak revising axioms are shown to be satisfied by a General Conditioning rule, extending Bayes' rule but also compatible with others, and weak updating (...) axioms by a General Imaging rule, extending Lewis' rule. Strong axioms (equivalent to the Miller–Popper axiom system) are necessary to justify Bayes' rule in a revising context, and justify in fact an extended Bayes' rule which applies, even if the message has zero probability. (shrink)

I outline some of my work and results on my matter-gravity entanglement hypothesis, according to which the entropy of a closed quantum gravitational system is equal to the system’s matter-gravity entanglement entropy. The main arguments presented are: that this hypothesis is capable of resolving what I call the second-law puzzle, i.e. the puzzle as to how the entropy increase of a closed system can be reconciled with the asssumption of unitary time-evolution; that the black hole information loss puzzle may be (...) regarded as a special case of this second law puzzle and that therefore the same resolution applies to it; that the black hole thermal atmosphere puzzle can be resolved by adopting a radically different-from-usual description of quantum black hole equilibrium states, according to which they are total pure states, entangled between matter and gravity in such a way that the partial states of matter and gravity are each approximately thermal equilibrium states ; that the Susskind–Horowitz–Polchinski string-theoretic understanding of black hole entropy as the logarithm of the degeneracy of a long string cannot be quite correct but should be replaced by a modified understanding according to which it is the entanglement entropy between a long string and its stringy atmosphere, when in a total pure equilibrium state in a suitable box, which ) goes over, at strong-coupling, to a black hole in equilibrium with its thermal atmosphere. The modified understanding in is based on a general result, which I also describe, which concerns the likely state of a quantum system when it is weakly coupled to an energy-bath and the total state is a random pure state with a given energy. This result generalizes Goldstein et al.’s ‘canonical typicality’ result to systems which are not necessarily small. (shrink)

The scholastic philosopher is interested in definition for a different reason than the lexicographer and linguist. The philosopher is trying to learn things. Fe defines, after investigating reality, in an attempt to describe reality clearly and to sum up some aspect of his understanding of reality. Hence, we find our scholastic philosophers adopting as a main feature of their method this insistence on defining, on precise and detailed explanation of their definitions, and on proving that their definitions da correctly express (...) what a nature or activity is. A dictionary of the language of scholastic philosophy fitted to the needs of beginners and of undergraduate students of the subject is not available in English. (shrink)

It has long been believed that if man had a special function appropriate to him, and that if we could discover what it was, then we would be in a perfect position to solve all of the basic problems of ethics. For if we were, for example, shovels, and knew ourselves to be shovels, then we would also know that to spend our lives in digging would best serve our fundamental interests, realize our highest aspirations, and be in every respect (...) the correct thing to do. Or so the theory goes; a theory which is shared, interestingly enough, by Aristotle and Sartre, even though they share little else, and even though one of them believes that man has a function and the other does not. (shrink)