Marsilio Ficino, fonti, testi, fortuna, convegno svoltosi à Firenze nell'ottobre del 1999, viene a chiudere la serie degli incontri internazionali coordinati dal Comitato Internazionale Marsilio Ficino e ora pubblicati a Londra e a Parigi. Il volume offre le versioni aggiornate delle conferenze pubbliche tenute all'Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento in quella occasione sull'opera ed il pensiero di Ficino, dal Quattrocento al Seicento. Il suo taglio prevalentemente filologico costituisce un imprescindibile complemento alle pubblicazioni del 1984-86, sempre in onore del Ficino, (...) di cui arrichisce le conclusioni con nuove prospettive di ricerca e nuove scoperte sul maggior filosofo del Quattrocento italiano. Un indice dei nomi agevola la consultazione del lettore, che troverà in questo libro uno strumento di ricerca fondamentale. (shrink)

This paper presents the hypothesis that concept possession is sufficient and necessary for self-consciousness. If this is true it provides a yardstick for gauging the validity of different research paradigms in which claims for self-consciousness in animals or human infants are made: a convincing demonstration of concept possession in a research subject, such as a display of inferential reasoning, may be taken as conclusive evidence of self-consciousness. Intuitively, there appears to be a correlation between intelligence in animals and the existence (...) of self-consciousness. I present three discussions to support the hypothesis: an analogy between perception and conception, where both are self-specifying; an argument that any web of concepts will always include the self-concept; and a fresh interpretation of Bermũdez showing how his theory of non-conceptual content provides strong support for the concept possession hypothesis. (shrink)

Local sustainable food systems have captured the popular imagination as a progressive, if not radical, pillar of a sustainable food future. Yet these grassroots innovations are embedded in a dominant food regime that reflects productivist, industrial, and neoliberal policies and institutions. Understanding the relationship between these emerging grassroots efforts and the dominant food regime is of central importance in any transition to a more sustainable food system. In this study, we examine the encounters of direct farm marketers with food safety (...) regulations and other government policies and the role of this interface in shaping the potential of local food in a wider transition to sustainable agri-food systems. This mixed methods research involved interview and survey data with farmers and ranchers in both the USA and Canada and an in-depth case study in the province of Manitoba. We identified four distinct types of interactions between government and farmers: containing, coopting, contesting, and collaborating. The inconsistent enforcement of food safety regulations is found to contain progressive efforts to change food systems. While government support programs for local food were helpful in some regards, they were often considered to be inadequate or inappropriate and thus served to coopt discourse and practice by primarily supporting initiatives that conform to more mainstream approaches. Farmers and other grassroots actors contested these food safety regulations and inadequate government support programs through both individual and collective action. Finally, farmers found ways to collaborate with governments to work towards mutually defined solutions. While containing and coopting reflect technologies of governmentality that reinforce the status quo, both collaborating and contesting reflect opportunities to affect or even transform the dominant regime by engaging in alternative economic activities as part of the ‘politics of possibility’. Developing a better understanding of the nature of these interactions will help grassroots movements to create effective strategies for achieving more sustainable and just food systems. (shrink)

Since at least the mid-1980s claims have been made for rationality in rats. For example, that rats are capable of inferential reasoning (Blaisdell, Sawa, Leising, & Waldmann, 2006; Bunsey & Eichenbaum, 1996), or that they can make adaptive decisions about future behavior (Foote & Crystal, 2007), or that they are capable of knowledge in propositional-like form (Dickinson, 1985). The stakes are rather high, because these capacities imply concept possession and on some views (e.g., Rödl, 2007; Savanah, 2012) rationality indicates self-consciousness. (...) I evaluate the case for rat rationality by analyzing 5 key research paradigms: spatial navigation, metacognition, transitive inference, causal reasoning, and goal orientation. I conclude that the observed behaviors need not imply rationality by the subjects. Rather, the behavior can be accounted for by noncognitive processes such as hard-wired species typical predispositions or associative learning or (nonconceptual) affordance detection. These mechanisms do not necessarily require or implicate the capacity for rationality. As such there is as yet insufficient evidence that rats can reason. I end by proposing the ‘Staircase Test,’ an experiment designed to provide convincing evidence of rationality in rats. (shrink)

The view that mirror self-recognition (MSR) is a definitive demonstration of self-awareness is far from universally accepted, and those who do support the view need a more robust argument than the mere assumption that self-recognition implies a self-concept (e.g. Gallup in Socioecology and Psychology of Primates, Mouton, Hague, 1975 ; Gallup and Suarez in Psychological Perspectives on the Self, vol 3, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, 1986 ). In this paper I offer a new argument in favour of the view that MSR shows (...) self-awareness by examining the nature of the mirror image itself. I argue, using the results of ‘symbol-mindedness’ experiments by Deloache (Trends Cogn Sci 8(2):66–70, 2004) , that where self-recognition exists, the mirror image must be functioning as a symbol from the perspective of the subject and the subject must therefore be ‘symbol-minded’ and hence concept possessing. Further to this, according to the Concept Possession Hypothesis of Self-Consciousness (Savanah in Conscious Cogn 2011 ), concept possession alone is sufficient to demonstrate the existence of self-awareness. Thus MSR as a demonstration of symbol-mindedness implies the existence of self-awareness. I begin by defending the ‘mark test’ protocol as a robust methodology for determining self-recognition. Then follows a critical examination of the extreme views both for and against the interpretation of MSR as an indication of self-awareness: although the non-mentalistic interpretation of MSR is unconvincing, the argument presented by Gallup is also inadequate. I then present the symbol-mindedness argument to fill in the gaps in the Gallup approach. (shrink)

Subjectivism about well-being holds that an object contributes to one's well-being to the extent that one has a pro-attitude toward this object under certain conditions. Most subjectivists have contended that these conditions should be ideal. One reason in favor of this idea is that when people adapt their pro-attitudes to situations of oppression, the levels of well-being they may attain is diminished. Nevertheless, I first argue that appealing to idealized conditions of autonomy or any other condition to erase or replace (...) adaptive pro-attitudes is mistaken. Second, I show that the most natural version of subjectivism that does not appeal to any such idealizing condition can explain why the well-being of people having adaptive pro-attitudes should not be restricted to the fulfillment of these pro-attitudes. In sum, the existence of adaptive preferences does not militate in favor of the introduction of conditions of idealization but against it. (shrink)

Following Meinong, many philosophers have been attracted by the view that emotions have intrinsically evaluative correctness conditions. On one version of this view, emotions have evaluative contents. On another version, emotions are evaluative attitudes; they are evaluative at the level of intentional mode rather than content. We raise objections against the latter version, showing that the only two ways of implementing it are hopeless. Either emotions are manifestly evaluative or they are not. In the former case, the Attitudinal View threatens (...) to collapse into the Perception View or any other view according to which emotions are evaluative at the level of content. In the latter case, the Attitudinal View does not stand up to an obvious alternative, namely that emotions can only be assessed with respect to extrinsic norms or conditions of correctness. (shrink)

En este artículo se desea mostrar la distinción que Jean-Luc Marion realiza entre fenómenos de derecho común y fenómenos saturados, se refleja de manera paradigmática su concepción de arte al presentar el ídolo como una modalidad saturada de los fenómenos; a su vez se presenta la diferencia entre los objetos construidos o los fenómenos constituidos por un sujeto que son presentados como principio y fundamento. Desde aquí se considera la pintura como una experiencia fenoménica de anamorfosis, donde la mirada del (...) espectador se somete al fenómeno, planteando la posibilidad de recibir aquello que se quiere ver. Además, busca mostrar cómo desde el arte, el proceso de la visibilidad es presentado como construcción del fenómeno que opera desde lo invisible. Se mostrará, entonces, cómo la reflexión artística de Jean-Luc Marion permite entrar en el corazón de su obra, observando cómo se puede modificar los conceptos de donación y de sujeto. (shrink)

This article renders a close reading of those passages in Walter Benjamin's work where he uses the term “unscheinbar.” Arguing that this concept cannot be reduced to its privative prefix “un-,” the article explores how moments in time, objects or images that are not meaningful in themselves can nevertheless trigger an experience that is to be called such. The article analyzes Benjamin's ideas on friendliness, commemoration, melancholy, mémoire involontaire and photography with the purpose of understanding how a detail or fragment (...) strikes us as significant, despite the fact that it cannot become visible as a unity or whole in its own right. (shrink)

Ce volume inaugure l'édition française de l'ensemble de l'activité exégétique d'Averroès sur la somme logique qu'est l' " Organon " aristotélicien. On trouvera, accompagnées de l'annotation essentielle, les oeuvres d'Averroès sur le traité " De l'interprétation ", où Aristote établit la doctrine de la proposition simple et de ses éléments constitutifs.

RESUMEN Tal como el siglo XX fue aquel de la fenomenología, el siglo XXI se caracteriza por el auge de los realismos. Se podría pensar que este cambio marca un giro radical en la filosofía. No obstante, es de recordar que en 1943 Jean-Paul Sartre quiso construir, desde la fenomenología, un neorrealismo absoluto que pueda conservar cierto realismo dentro de la fenomenología. Mediante una lectura de El ser y la nada se propone mostrar que el neorrealismo absoluto impone superar la (...) dicotomía entre idealismo y realismo gracias a la transfenomenicidad de dos seres; y, además, desplazar la tarea descriptiva y constitutiva de la fenomenología hacia un trabajo de revelación. ABSTRACT If the twentieth century was that of phenomenology, the twenty-first is characterized by the rise of multiple realisms. Although one might think that this is a radical turn in contemporary philosophy, it should be remembered that, in 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre tried to establish an absolute neorealism which wanted to preserve a certain realism within phenomenology. Through a reading of Being and nothingness, the author shows that absolute neorealism enables the dichotomy between idealism and realism to be surpassed, thanks to the transphenomenality of two beings and, in addition, imposes a displacement of the descriptive and constitutive task of phenomenology towards a work of revelation. (shrink)

Foucault’s Forgotten Marxism. This article tries to point out several methodological issues concerning Foucault’s Surveiller et punir, such as the equivocal status of some of Foucault’s main concepts, or the assumed homogeneity of the various disciplinary institutions analyzed in this book. And it aims at suggesting that such issues might find a solution, should one consider the Marxist background on which, as the Lectures at the Collège de France of the year 1973 clearly show, Foucault’s theories were dependant. In the (...) opinion of the author, only in as much as this heritage is accepted and seriously taken into account, shall Foucault’s concepts and theses regain their political and critical pertinence. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper aims to understand the emergence of comparative anatomy in the eighteenth century in the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences. As early as the 1670s, a program centered on animal anatomy was conceived, which was a first attempt to give some autonomy to studies on animals and to link anatomy with natural history, but it declined after 1690. However, a variety of studies on animals was published in theMémoiresof the Académie during the eighteenth century. We propose a descriptive typology (...) of them in order to explore the status of animals and the significance of anatomy in each type, and to determine, in particular, which elements of Perrault's program were passed on at the Académie throughout the century. We discuss the influence of this legacy on the development of comparative anatomy after 1750, especially in Daubenton's work. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a reductive account of intentions which I call a gate-based reductive account. In contrast with other reductive accounts, however, the reductive basis of this account is not limited to desires, beliefs and judgments. I suggest that an intention is a complex state in which a predominant desire toward a plan is not inhibited by a gate mechanism whose function is to assess the comparison of our desires given the stakes at hand. To vindicate this account, (...) I rely on several considerations: the similarity between epistemic feelings and the feeling of being decided that tells us that we have an intention, the necessity of postulating a gate mechanism to explain our hesitating behavior, and the tight link that exists between the realization of our actions and our desires. In agreement with non-reductivists, I nevertheless acknowledge that intentions encompass plans, although I emphasize that the planning capacity must also be dependent on our motivational life and the general evaluative mechanisms that explains our emotions. (shrink)

While the paradigm of utility maximisation has formed the basis of the majority of applications in discrete choice modelling for over 40 years, its core assumptions have been questioned by work in both behavioural economics and mathematical psychology as well as more recently by developments in the RUM-oriented choice modelling community. This paper reviews the basic properties with a view to explaining the historical pre-eminence of utility maximisation and addresses the question of what departures from the paradigm may be necessary (...) or wise in order to accommodate richer behavioural patterns. We find that many, though not all, of the behavioural traits discussed in the literature can be approximated sufficiently closely by a random utility framework, allowing analysts to retain the many advantages that such an approach possesses. (shrink)

Alors que la figure de l’intellectuel chrétien semble aujourd’hui en difficulté de légitimité dans les débats publics en France, il y a un intérêt à s’intéresser à André Dumas (1918-1996), aujourd’hui relativement oublié, qui fut un des intellectuels protestants les plus connus en France de son vivant. Les gestes de son éthique dans le débat public montrent comment il passe d’une figure intellectuelle à une autre : intellectuel universel, officiel, organique, traditionnel, spécifique... Étudier cette mobilité est une manière de reprendre (...) les débats sur la place et le rôle de l’intellectuel, au-delà, de la seule figure de l’intellectuel chrétien. (shrink)

The article aims at assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the objections to Habermas’s epistemic conception of democracy raised by Thomas McCarthy in some of his essays. The author defends two ideas. First, he contends that McCarthy is mistaken in believing that democratic debates would not be a matter of consensus. In this regard, two arguments are raised, showing that the search for agreement and consensus by citizens in public forums can hardly be dismissed and that consensus can be invested (...) with many meanings in democratic life. Secondly, however, the author approves McCarthy when challenging Habermas’s epistemic claims regarding his theory of democracy. Not all democratic deliberations can be analysed in epistemic terms, in particular, debates on values. The pitfalls of any epistemic account of this form of deliberation are pointed out in the end of the essay. (shrink)

This paper revisits the different notions of influence, persuasion and influencebound subjects. It illustrates and critiques the dominant prevailing concept of influence and its effects, which, though diversely denominated and presented through various theories, always comes down to reaffirming the relationship of dominance and the possibility of the nullification of the subject within the relationship with the other. With this aim, it studies the classical theories of interpersonal influence and brings to attention some of the bodies of information which have (...) been systematically neglected or set aside, particularly concerning suggestion, possession, mesmerism and somnambulism. (shrink)

L'évolution de la clinique psychiatrique a mis au centre de ses recherches l'écoute et la parole du patient. Cependant le plus souvent la parole échoit dans les discours et l'écoute se décentre vers la vérification des a priori théo­riques. L'empathie ou les règlements qui incitent le clinicien à mettre le patient au centre de ses préoccupations apportent confort et sécurité mais ratent la rencontre clinique qui échoit dans le relationnel. Une relation n'est pas une rencontre. Le contexte de...

Il ne subsiste aucun vestige de la charpente du temple d’Apollon construit à Delphes durant le ive s. av. J.‑C., ni de bloc comportant des réservations pour l’appui des poutres. En revanche, de nombreux passages des comptes de construction mentionnent des pièces en bois et font état de travaux sur les parties hautes du monument. Nous présentons ici un commentaire de ces inscriptions qui s’articule autour de trois objectifs principaux : déterminer la destination et la fonction des pièces de bois (...) ; analyser le vocabulaire technique ; établir la chronologie des travaux dans les parties hautes du temple. Au‑delà d’une étude centrée sur l’architecture delphique, le corpus mobilisé contribue à la caractérisation des techniques de charpente et à la connaissance du déroulement des chantiers d’architecture monumentale en Grèce ancienne. (shrink)

It is often suggested that emotions are intrinsically normative or that they have conditions of correctness that are intrinsic. In order to assess this thesis, I consider whether the main argument in favor of the normativity of belief can be transposed to emotions. In the case of belief, the argument is that when we wonder whether to believe that p, we acknowledge that we must abide by some norms. This is understood as showing that these norms are intrinsic to the (...) concept of belief. In contrast, it appears that no similar constraint applies when we deliberate about emotions. Indeed, I argue that extrinsic norms are suf ficient to understand thoroughly the normativity of emotions. Therefore, the postulation of intrinsic norms or correctness conditions seems unmotivated. Worse, if emotions had intrinsic norms or correctness conditions, they would manifest themselves when we wonder whether an emotion is appropriate in this or that context. But they don’t. (shrink)

La filosofía de Sartre presenta una paradoja en cuanto al sujeto. Por un lado, el sujeto está anclado en las raíces metafísicas del sujeto cartesiano, por otro lado, está abierto al surgimiento del otro mediante el entrecruzamiento de las miradas. Esta paradoja se manifiesta de la manera más fuerte en la experiencia del amor. Si bien el amor abre el sujeto a la posibilidad de un encuentro con el otro, el amor está pensado desde el sujeto que quiere, al amar, (...) reapropiarse de la fuente de su ser que yace en la libertad del otro. Incluso en el amor, el sujeto no puede abandonar completamente la problemática de su fundamento y la obsesión metafísica de llegar a ser su propia causa. Encontramos entonces en Sartre un verdadero puente entre el momento metafísico del sujeto y su momento postmetafísico. Se muestra aquí que Sartre no logra arrancarse totalmente de la concepción metafísica del sujeto por no poder pensar la estructura del llamado y por permanecer prisionero de la dicotomía entre actividad y pasividad. (shrink)

Art-philosophical treatise on the concept of beauty."--Publisher information.

In _The Marriage of Aesthetics and Ethics_, fifteen authors reflect on the nature of friendship and love and on the complex relation between art and morality.

The basic premise of the host‐defense theory is that genomic imprinting, the parent‐of‐origin expression of a subset of mammalian genes, derives from mechanisms originally dedicated to silencing repeated and retroviral‐like sequences that deeply colonized mammalian genomes. We propose that large clusters of tandemly‐repeated C/D‐box small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) or microRNAs represent a novel category of sequences recognized as “genomic parasites”, contributing to the emergence of genomic imprinting in a subset of chromosomal regions that contain them. Such a view is supported (...) by evidence derived from studies of the imprinted snoRNA‐ and/or miRNA‐encoding Dlk1‐Dio3, Snurf‐Snrpn, Sfbmt2, and C19MC domains. While adding a new piece to the challenging puzzle of mammalian genome history, this hypothesis also reinforces the notion that dissecting the features and molecular mechanisms that discriminate between “foreign” and “endogenous” sequences is of crucial importance in the field of mammalian epigenetics. (shrink)

La question des instincts est une voie d’entrée privilégiée pour le rapport du pragmatisme au naturalisme. Le problème que soulève la théorie des instincts de William James et John Dewey vient du maintien, à première vue surprenant, de l’idée d’une « nature humaine ». Je soutiens que c’est au sein même de la théorie pragmatiste des instincts que l’on trouve des arguments pour montrer que la nature humaine ne détermine pas univoquement la conduite. Bien comprendre la naturalité de l’être humain (...) suffit à défaire toute tentative pour l’ériger en source d’autorité des principes de la conduite. (shrink)