Is it possible to interfere with individual decision-making while preserving freedom of choice? The purpose of this article is to assess whether ‘libertarian paternalism’, a set of political and ethical principles derived from the observations of behavioural sciences, can form the basis of a viable framework for the ethical analysis of public health interventions. First, the article situates libertarian libertarianism within the broader context of the law and economics movement. The main tenets of the approach are then presented and particular (...) attention is given to its operationalization through the notion of a ‘nudge’. Essentially, a ‘nudge’ consists in an intervention, which aims to suggest one choice over another by gently steering individual choices in welfare-enhancing directions yet without imposing any significant limit on available choices. Finally, the article concludes that, while it fails as an overreaching framework of ethical analysis, libertarian paternalism nonetheless constitutes a valuable addition to the conceptual toolbox of public health ethics. (shrink)

The just war tradition assumes that civil war is a possible site of justice. It has an uneasy relationship with liberalism, because the latter resists the idea that insurgency and counterinsurgency can be justified in moral terms. The paper suggests that, even if this is true, these two schools of thought are closer to each other than often appears to be the case. In particular, the paper argues that insurgency and counterinsurgency can be justified using the liberal assumptions that nonviolent (...) opposition is the proper non-institutional technique to fight oppressive regimes, and that law enforcement is the appropriate response to unjustified rebellions. Given these assumptions, insurgent warfare is limited to circumstances in which, firstly, nonviolent resistance is no longer a reasonable course of action; and secondly, insurgents have the intention to create the political conditions that are needed to make it a coherent option again.Counter insurgent warfare, in turn, is restrained to those situations in which, first, there is a rebellion or revolution even though the use of nonviolent strategies for conflict and change remains a reasonable choice; and second, police agencies lack the resources that arerequired for managing and suppressing rebel activities. Of course, these requirements should be taken as presumptions, and there may be cases when they do not hold. (shrink)

We prove some results on the polynomial hierarchies of infinite abelian groups. In particular, we show the polynomial hierarchy over an infinite group of exponent a prime number p collapse if and only if it is the case in the classical theory.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Objects, Exchanges, DiscourseMonique David-MénardPhilosophy is a reflection for which all unknown material is good, and we would gladly say, for which all good material must be unknown.—George Canguilhem, The Normal and the PathologicalThis paper may be presented in two ways: it is a matter of understanding, locally, how legal institutions or economic discourses, which propose models of exchange between agents in society, can take into account sexuality in the (...) way that it has been explored by psychoanalysis. It is thus a matter of following and transforming the efforts of Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents and of Lacan in his seminar, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, in order to consider how the field of unconscious sexuality manages or doesn’t manage to develop thanks to these institutions. Inversely, it is a matter of specifying how institutional creations such as the rituals of the gift, the juridical system, or economic laws put “values” into play that implicate sexual desires. But before developing this question, I will first give some clarification about the method I will employ, or rather, offer some remarks concerning the philosophical background that this apparently “local” question presupposes.Philosophical BackgroundThis project could perhaps be said to share the same philosophical approach as that of Michel Foucault: it is not a question of constructing a system in [End Page 88] the name of an idea of truth which would be the unifying foundation (in this case, sexual and political), but rather of intervening at a neurological point in “our” situation, which demands that one determine how this “our” comes into being. The point of departure for any theoretical project is always entangled in a situation that it subsequently problematizes. Instead of masking the situation that forces us to think by the means that are proper to the system’s own constitution, the strategy that I have called “local” allows for the concepts to take into account the very situation from out of which they are produced as a theoretical framework. Deleuze wrote that an event forces us to think that which, at first, can only be felt and, more precisely, felt as a fact impossible to integrate into a ready-made set of concepts. Foucault redefined critique as the diagnosis of a present: the thinker experiences a situation in a way that puts her at a distance and displaces her. This experience is transformed into an occasion to produce knowledge as well as a practice that allows it to be “thought,” not as a subjective experience, but rather as new objects for knowledge of which this experience of distance was not merely the occasion.It has already been a long time (1990) since I showed, using Kant as an example, that the invention of a philosophy is connected to an event at once present in the texts and concealed by its very systematicity; critical and transcendental philosophy was only possible by the ingenious articulation of heterogenous factors. Deleuze called this “a contingent reason” because of the heterogeneity among the concepts that construct a philosophical problematic. For example, here, the critique of the formalism of logic is the conceptual means with which Kant transformed the event, which was for him his fascination-repulsion for a “delirious” [délirant] thinker, namely, Swedenborg, into a new concept of metaphysics, the “science of the limits of human reason” and a transcendental logic of objectivity.Conceptually, the link he would forge was that of the confrontation between the mad system of Swedenborg and the philosophical idealism of Leibniz. The logical instrument of Leibnizian criticism defined a new kind of negation, the “real conflict,” which bears this name since it introduces the determination of a real object (realer Widerstreit), in contrast to three other kinds of negation: contradiction, which, in negating that which forms within thought, negates at the same time that to which it could refer (nihil negativum); “the being of reason” like the Leibnizian god or the spirits of Swedenborg, which are not contradictory concepts, but instead concepts for which one could not find any correlate in spatiotemporal experience, such that one cannot “count them among the possible things” (ens rationis). Finally, there... (shrink)

Aworkshop was held August 26–28, 2015, by the Earth- Life Science Institute (ELSI) Origins Network (EON, see Appendix I) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. This meeting gathered a diverse group of around 40 scholars researching the origins of life (OoL) from various perspectives with the intent to find common ground, identify key questions and investigations for progress, and guide EON by suggesting a roadmap of activities. Specific challenges that the attendees were encouraged to address included the following: What key (...) questions, ideas, and investigations should the OoL research community address in the near and long term? How can this community better organize itself and prioritize its efforts? What roles can particular subfields play, and what can ELSI and EON do to facilitate research progress? (See also Appendix II.) The present document is a product of that workshop; a white paper that serves as a record of the discussion that took place and a guide and stimulus to the solution of the most urgent and important issues in the study of the OoL. This paper is not intended to be comprehensive or a balanced representation of the opinions of the entire OoL research community. It is intended to present a number of important position statements that contain many aspirational goals and suggestions as to how progress can be made in understanding the OoL. The key role played in the field by current societies and recurring meetings over the past many decades is fully acknowledged, including the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) and its official journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, as well as the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL). (shrink)

This article contributes to the concept of social values by presenting analytical tools that explore how social values are classified, re-presented and interpersonally performed in the construction of identities. I approach social values as classificatory systems of acceptability and desirability that are collectively generated. The meanings of social values are embedded in culture and in power imbalanced social relations; they constantly undergo reformulation in identification processes and are also used to define the social order. I suggest that social values can (...) be analysed in relation to aspects of representation and interpersonal positioning that are also involved in the construction of identities: Value classifications involve compartmentalising moral orders into e.g. good, desirable, important, necessary; value projects are concerned with how value classifications and content occupy roles and become oriented to action; and value positioning is concerned with how narrators align with value classifications and projects as well as with individuals and groups seen to share or reject such classifications and projects. (shrink)

This article contributes to the concept of social values by presenting analytical tools that explore how social values are classified, re-presented and interpersonally performed in the construction of identities. I approach social values as classificatory systems of acceptability and desirability that are collectively generated. The meanings of social values are embedded in culture and in power imbalanced social relations; they constantly undergo reformulation in identification processes and are also used to define the social order. I suggest that social values can (...) be analysed in relation to aspects of representation and interpersonal positioning that are also involved in the construction of identities: Value classifications involve compartmentalising moral orders into e.g. good, desirable, important, necessary; value projects are concerned with how value classifications and content occupy roles and become oriented to action; and value positioning is concerned with how narrators align with value classifications and projects as well as with individuals and groups seen to share or reject such classifications and projects. (shrink)

In April 2020, almost six out of 10 people around the world were in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Being locked down usually has a deleterious effect on the confined individual's mental health. In this exceptionally challenging context, finding ways to minimize negative mood about the pandemic is essential. Pandemic-related negative states (“negative mood”) and recovery experiences were investigated in a sample of 264 individuals who completed daily surveys four times per day over 7 consecutive days. MSEMs analyses revealed (...) that negative mood persisted from moment-to-moment through the day, thus showing a response lag effect. Further analyses revealed that when someone experienced pandemic-related psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery, control, pleasure, or relatedness at specific periods of the day, mood had improved at the next measured time period, suggesting a protective effect. However, the pattern displayed by singles with dependents suggests that some recovery experiences at specific periods during the day seem to have a backfiring effect and worsen subsequent mood. These findings bring new insight into the role of recovery experiences during lockdowns and suggest that many could benefit from such experiences throughout the day when self-isolating. However, for individuals with multiple risk factors such as being single with dependents, some recovery experiences, at specific periods during the day, might not bring the desired outcome and future research is needed to examine if guilt or domestic burden may explain this finding. Results contribute to our understanding of how to take care of one's mental health during the current pandemic, and concrete recommendations adapted to individual contexts are provided. (shrink)

I propose a reflection on the notion of Mapuche archive focusing on Mapuche jewelry as a special kind of document. As they were made with coins, I analyze the problem of the value associated with these jewels. Thus, I describe a historical movement, through which the coins were first withdrawn from the logic given by the Chilean political-economic archive, and then were inserted in a Mapuche logic of value and archive, understanding the latter as an instrument of political legitimacy. Then (...) I analyze their post-conquest journey, and their reinsertion in the Chilean field as commodities until their current museographic resignifications. I conclude by commenting some forms of their present assessment in the context of multicultural and patrimonial management of cultural differences. (shrink)

Neste artigo, trata-se, por um lado, de compreender até que ponto a existência humana e o pensamento, naquilo que eles têm de inventivo, são feitos de sínteses disjuntivas. E qual tipo de repetição entre os elementos, ligados de maneira nãocasual, mas não sistemática, supõe esta síntese tão importante no pensamento de Gilles Deleuze. Por outro lado, trata-se de saber se esse conceito de repetição converge com aquele que reclama a psicanálise.

Under this title, I wish to clarify the philosophical perspective that has run through my work for the last fifteen years, in three volumes: L’hystérique entre Freud et Lacan, La folie dans la raison pure, and Les constructions de l’universel. In the first of these works, I reflected on the status of the body in psychoanalysis, on the distance that needed to be taken with regard to the two Western traditions of thought concerning the body, namely those of Aristotle and (...) Descartes, in order to understand Freud’s conceptions of the erogenous body and the drive. I also raised the question of the divergence between the physiological- and the drive-constructions of the body. In my second book, I tried to understand to what degree a philosophical system, in this case Kant’s transcendental theory of the object, may be the meeting point between a new logic—a new logic of negation in Kant’s case—and a fantasized encounter with a mad thinker. I also considered the way in which a philosophical text weaves several active heterogeneous directions like the warp and the weft within thought, and how they may be spotted in the text. Finally, in Les constructions de l’universel, I considered the relevance of the concept of the universal for understanding how conceptual thought detaches itself from its author, and compared art, philosophy, and dream analysis from this point of view. I also tried to evaluate the pertinence of Lacan’s project of producing a logic of sexuation, and the degree of autonomy such a project has with respect to the internal ambiguities of the logical and philosophical concept of the universal. In these three books, I have practiced a philosophy of contingency—contingency of the relation between discourses and contingency of the real with respect to the thought which knows it. It is this philosophy of contingency that I would like to explain. (shrink)

Ecrire un ouvrage intitulé La Révolution galiléenne; n'y faire l'analyse de la production d'aucun concept; n'exposer le procès de formation ni de la dynamique galiléenne, ni des rapports constitutifs de la théorie copernicienne à la mathématique ptoléméenne, ni de la géométrie analytique ou du principe d'inertie; taire l'architectonique des Principia de Newton et la récurrence qui s'y exerce sur les travaux de physique et d'astronomie mathématiques du siècle; tenir à juste raison que les sciences ont rapport à autre chose qu'elles (...) mais seulement pour parler de cet autre sans jamais penser distinctement les articulations spécifiques de ce rapport, tout en faisant néanmoins de locutions impliquant l'épistémologie un usage plus fréquent que peut être tout autre historien des sciences antérieur; tenir enfin le discours de la « culture occidentale » sur la science sans rien nous dire précisément sur celle-ci, en parlant toujours de celle-là, tel est le pari qui vient d'être en 900 pages formant deux tomes, tenu et gagne. On montrera de façon sommaire que pareille entreprise comporte des aspects moins gratuitement ludique qu'il n'y paraît ici. (shrink)

Ouvrage partagé en cinq chapitres: Sacré technique et techniques de sacralisation - Les techniques de la ruse - La ruse ontologique de la technique - Les ruses de la raison technicienne - Enigme et destin de la technique. Ce que les auteurs appellent "les ruses de la technique", c'est cette manière dont se déroule, "à travers l'histoire des civilisations humaines, le lent glissement de la technique d'un pôle sacré de transgression à un pôle sacré de l'ordre cosmique.".

Multisensory integration allows us to link sensory cues from multiple sources and plays a crucial role in speech development. However, it is not clear whether humans have an innate ability or whether repeated sensory input while the brain is maturing leads to efficient integration of sensory information in speech. We investigated the integration of auditory and somatosensory information in speech processing in a bimodal perceptual task in 15 young adults (age 19 to 30) and 14 children (age 5 to 6). (...) The participants were asked to identify if the perceived target was the sound /e/ or /ø/. Half of the stimuli were presented under a unimodal condition with only auditory input. The other stimuli were presented under a bimodal condition with both auditory input and somatosensory input consisting of facial skin stretches provided by a robotic device, which mimics the articulation of the vowel /e/. The results indicate that the effect of somatosensory information on sound categorization was larger in adults than in children. This suggests that integration of auditory and somatosensory information evolves throughout the course of development. (shrink)

Audiovisual interaction in speech perception is well defined in adults. Despite the large body of evidence suggesting that children are also sensitive to visual input, very few empirical studies have been conducted. To further investigate whether visual inputs influence auditory perception of phonemes in preschoolers in the same way as in adults, we conducted an audiovisual identification test. The auditory stimuli were presented either in an auditory condition only or simultaneously with a visual presentation of the articulation of the vowel (...) /e/ or /ø/. The results suggest that, although all participants experienced visual influence on auditory perception, substantial individual differences exist in the 5- to 6-year-old group. While additional work is required to confirm this hypothesis, we suggest that auditory and visual systems are developing at that age and that multisensory phonological categorization of the rounding contrast took place only in children whose sensory systems and sensorimotor representations were mature. (shrink)

This paper is a commentary of David -Ménard’s Répétition et invention en Deleuze et Freud.

Interpretational monists and pluralists most often accept contextualism. At the same time, most of them resist constructivism, which takes all interpretations of artworks to be separate artworks. However, one of the central arguments to establish contextualism, based on Borges’ story of Pierre Menard, is so formulated that using it can force all contextualists into accepting constructivism. This paper points out the under-specification present in the philosophical use of the Pierre Menard example to then combine it with arguments presented by contextualists (...) themselves and show that without a more careful look at the example discussed, accepting all those arguments entails constructivism. (shrink)

Ross examines the relation between thought and madness within the practical and theoretical wings of Kant's critical philosophy. She argues that the notion of critique is formulated as a guard against the tendency of thought to madness. She locates the significance of David-Ménard's essay on Kant's pre-critical works in the idea that Kant's own tendency to madness functions in these early works as a motivational principle for the mature, critical system.

: Ross examines the relation between thought and madness within the practical and theoretical wings of Kant's critical philosophy. She argues that the notion of critique is formulated as a guard against the tendency of thought to madness. She locates the significance of David-Ménard's essay on Kant's pre-critical works in the idea that Kant's own tendency to madness functions in these early works as a motivational principle for the mature, critical system.

Ross examines the relation between thought and madness within the practical and theoretical wings of Kant's critical philosophy. She argues that the notion of critique is formulated as a guard against the tendency of thought to madness. She locates the significance of David'Ménard's essay on Kant's pre-critical works in the idea that Kant's own tendency to madness functions in these early works as a motivational principle for the mature, critical system.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Foucault for Psychoanalysis”Monique David-Ménard’s Kind of BluePenelope DeutscherFoucault for psychoanalysis? This is a paradoxical question. Foucault also produced a critique of psychoanalysis, aiming to show that sexuality was not an a-temporal reality, nor a truth eventually discovered by Freud. It was a discursive formation, one among others.—Eloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle, 172.To the philosophers..A practicing psychoanalyst and a professor of philosophy, Monique David-Ménard extends a (...) singular proposition to philosophers. She is not the first philosopher to engage the assumptions of psychoanalysis, but hers is a particularly idiosyncratic suggestion for how to think with the analyst’s clinical work, intimate and alien. She has proposed we do so in the company of Gilles Deleuze,1 and most recently, in Eloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle (2011) has extended her invitation to think with the clinic through an ingenious reading of Michel Foucault.As Eloge opens, David-Ménard’s reading of Foucault is far from the scene. Early in the work, we are asked to think with a practice, seemingly in a different register. An analyst finds herself accused of being an obstacle, of opposing the analysand’s wishes in life. In this context, we are asked to think about the blue of a painting in the room where the analysand waits (David-Ménard 2011, 34). [End Page 111]Given the criticisms of psychoanalysis elaborated in the work of Foucault and Deleuze, one might have expected these philosophers to be considered in Eloge in that stead.2 Or, one could imagine Foucault playing a role because of his genealogical analysis of the formation of the Oedipus complex.3Two years after the publication of Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault had, in Abnormal, characterized the desiring space of the family as stimulated in a capillary network of individualizing normalization (Foucault 2003, 257), linked by medicalized and expert concern of which parents became the auxiliaries. They are charged, and charge themselves, with the goals of family health, of preservative and defensive good parenting, and with the conduct of the child’s conduct. Foucault describes the pre-twentieth century emergence of lay and expert preoccupation with the dangers of childhood masturbation. This produces an environment whose intensive scrutiny involves a close “folding of... parents’ bodies over... children’s bodies” (ibid., 265) in a saturated, hermetic environment stimulating oedipalized desire. This means one can offer a genealogical account of the conditions of formation of the latter. These include a responsibilization of parents, who control for the presence of abnormal sex, advised by new experts (lay, medical, pseudo-scientific) in collective crusades for health and life. Thus there is differentiation through minor gradations of abnormality. Even the specificity of the architectural spaces in which scrutiny is directed plays a role in the hollowing out of the child’s putatively interior psychic-sexual life, the intense object of “palpating” interest (Foucault 1978, 45) in new apparatuses of knowledge-power (Foucault 2003, 327).Because he presents this as the context in which the “nuclear and substantial family was gradually constituted” (Foucault 2003, 264), along with its oedipal configurations of desire, Foucault emphasizes the contingency of both. Psychoanalysis would be, from his perspective, willfully indifferent to these or other possibilities for genealogical analysis of the apparatus of power, knowledge, and the body, of the repeating configurations of desire that are its special domain of expertise,4 and the emergent forms of authority associated with the analyst, described in History of Madness (Foucault 2009) and in Psychiatric Power (Foucault 2006).Perhaps we’d expect to see David-Ménard, the psychoanalyst, addressing these accounts, but they are neither repudiated in Eloge, nor extensively discussed. Far from rejecting a genealogical analysis of psychoanalysis, she promotes its promise. But this is so in a particular sense.Necessity and repetitionA particular patient might fear being “mad like her mother.” She might fear being denied, trapped, or annihilated (David-Ménard 2011, 33). She might [End Page 112] consider herself somehow denied a lover. She might seem to be denying herself a lover. There’s a degree of necessity in all these variants. Perhaps these... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Object Life in Monique David-MénardJudith ButlerThe three papers published here were originally given as part of a colloquium, “Objects, Phantasms, Life, and Death” on the work of Monique David-Ménard at Columbia University in April 2014. Monique David-Ménard is a psychoanalyst and philosopher who has been teaching at the Université de Paris VII-Diderot and has been engaged in private psychoanalytic practice for many years. Her work (...) is distinguished in part because of the way she brings clinical experience to philosophical inquiry, and how she understands the unconscious to support and disrupt various philosophical systems. Trained in the Lacanian school, but returning time and again to Freud with her own questions, she has written extensively on the problem of drives, the role of biology in psychoanalysis, all along staging a way of thinking about philosophy and psychoanalysis as mutually illuminating. Engaged by feminist philosophy, she has offered a way of thinking about sexual alterity, social embodiment, [End Page 80] and gender, to offer a different “French feminist” trajectory than those usually canonized in English.David-Ménard completed a master’s degree in philosophy with Paul Ricoeur (Université de Nanterre, 1968), a doctorate in psychopathology and psychoanalysis with Pierre Fédida (Université Paris-VII, 1978), and a doctorate in philosophy with Jean-Marie Beysade (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris-III, 1990). She was a professor of philosophy in Reims, Sceaux, and Paris-VII, and received her psychoanalytic training at the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) then led by Jacques Lacan; she was a member of that school in 1979–80. Between 1982 and 1994 she was a member of the Centre de formation et de recherches psychanalytiques (CFRP) and then became a member of the Société de psychanalyse Freudienne in 1994. She was Directrice of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris from 1992 to 1995, and served as its vice president from 1995 to 1998. In 1999 she was appointed professor of psychopathology and psychoanalysis at the Université de Paris-VII, Denis Diderot, where she has served as Directrice of the Centre des études du vivant. In addition she is a co-founder of the Société Internationale de Philosophie et Psychoanalyse.Her publications include works on the relation of psychoanalysis to biological and philosophical discourses, hysterical conversion in Freud and Lacan, the Freudian account of drives as a “threshold” phenomenon; bodies and language, constructions of the universal, exemplified most dramatically by a consideration of “madness” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and gender and melancholia.1 The range of her work is relentless and impressive: it includes an early work on Kant’s reading of Swedenborg that initiates a critique of universality through the study of how sexuality and madness inform the text; a study of hysteria “between” Freud and Lacan that establishes her own way of negotiating between the two; several essays on drives and their various vicissitudes; theories of embodiment; feminism and philosophy; the difference between the sexes, the process of sexuation, desire, narcissism, what to do with an organless body following from an impressive, if disconcerting, study on the convergence of Deleuze with psychoanalysis. She has also written on the status of contingency in chaos theory. Although historically trained in Kant, Spinoza, and Husserlian phenomenology, she has also engaged Lacanian thought in a selective and critical way, working with its productive potentials and refusing some of its more rigid formulations. She draws from science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology to weave together a set of theoretical reflections prompted by an event, an occasion, or a challenge. Penelope Deutscher’s contribution to this volume shows how this cross-theoretical inquiry works. David-Ménard, for instance, makes use of a Foucaultian form of inquiry to establish a certain problematic within psychoanalysis and philosophy, posing questions about how the initial impetus for [End Page 81] a theoretical system both conditions, orients, and disrupts any effort at full systematicity. As Deutscher explains, the task is neither to psychoanalyze Foucault nor to apply Foucault to psychoanalysis, but to formulate and pursue an inquiry in which the driving impetus informs and precludes the systematic closure of the theory itself.And... (shrink)

For many, the very idea of an artificialintelligence has always been ethicallytroublesome. The putative ability of machinesto mimic human intelligence appears to callinto question the stability of taken forgranted boundaries between subject/object,identity/similarity, free will/determinism,reality/simulation, etc. The artificiallyintelligent object thus appears to threaten thehuman subject with displacement and redundancy.This article takes as its starting point AlanTuring''s famous ''imitation game,'' (the socalled ''Turing Test''), here treated as aparable of the encounter between human originaland machine copy – the born and the made. Thecultural (...) resonances of the recent on-lineperformance of a ''Turing Test'' for computergenerated art are then explored. Arttraditionally taken to stand for all that isconsidered quintessentially human – andtherefore resistant to mechanisation –represents in this sense a kind of ''criticalcase'' in the advance of machine intelligence.The article focuses on the moral status of thebody, human agency, and social knowledge in theongoing (re-)constructions of copy, original,and of the difference between them. (shrink)

C'est un ouvrage remarquable à bien des égards que Claude Ménard, qui est né au Québec en 1944 et a étudié en France l'histoire des sciences et l'économie avant d'enseigner l'histoire aux Pays-Bas, a récemment publié chez Flammarion sous le titre La formation d'une rationalité économique: A. A. Cournot. L'épistémologue des sciences sociales y trouvera une analyse intelligente et documentée d'une contribution qui occupe, par rapport à la formation de l'économie moderne, une place qui n'a probablement d'équivalent dans aucune (...) autre discipline. L'historien de la philosophie, tout autant que celui de l'économie, y appréciera l'éclairage neuf jeté sur l'œuvre d'un penseur dont l'importance a toujours été méconnue malgré le fait – ou peut-être plutôt à cause du fait – qu'au milieu du XIXe siècle, il se consacrait à des questions théoriques qui souvent n'allaient devenir importantes que pour les hommes du XXe siècle. L'historien des idées saura gré à l'auteur d'avoir su situer son analyse de la contribution de Cournot dans le contexte plus large des institutions et des idées qui ont fait du XIXe siècle le moment décisif de la reformulation moderne des idéologies. L'analyste des idéologies y trouvera donc aussi matière à réflexion puisque le rapport des sciences sociales et des idéologies y est abondamment discuté encore que, comme je chercherai à le montrer, le traitement proposé risque davantage, sur ce point, de laisser le lecteur sur sa faim. (shrink)

David-Ménard examines the problem of the genesis of Kant's moral philosophy. The separation between Kantian practical reason and the inclinations of sense which it regulates is shown by the author to originate in Kant's attempt to regulate his own tendency to hypochondria. Her argument links the themes from two of Kant's precritical works which attest to this tendency-"An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind" and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime-to the final form of (...) the critical philosophy. (shrink)

David-Ménard examines the problem of the genesis of Kant's moral philosophy. The separation between Kantian practical reason and the inclinations of sense which it regulates is shown by the author to originate in Kant's attempt to regulate his own tendency to hypochondria. Her argument links the themes from two of Kant's pre-critical works which attest to this tendency—“An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime—to the final form of (...) the critical philosophy. (shrink)

David-Ménard examines the problem of the genesis of Kant's moral philosophy. The separation between Kantian practical reason and the inclinations of sense which it regulates is shown by the author to originate in Kant's attempt to regulate his own tendency to hypochondria. Her argument links the themes from two of Kant's pre-critical works which attest to this tendency—“An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime—to the final form of (...) the critical philosophy. (shrink)