Le détachement, avec ses quelque 2,8 millions de salariés déclarés détachés en Europe en 2018, apparaît aujourd’hui comme une modalité centrale de l’organisation de la mobilité transnationale du travail. Celle-ci se fait notamment au travers de la structuration d’un vaste marché de l’intermédiation qui permet aux donneurs d’ordre des pays utilisateurs d’externaliser un certain nombre de risques, tout en assurant une mise au travail intensive des travailleurs détachés et un contrôle étroit de leur mobilité. Le présent article se propose d’analyser (...) les « régimes de temporalités » spécifiques que produit cette forme d’emploi. D’un côté, le détachement, de par le caractère totalisant du travail et l’étroitesse du hors travail dans le temps de la mission, semble construire les conditions d’une hégémonie des temporalités productives sur le travail. De l’autre, les temporalités biographiques révèlent de multiples manières de s’accommoder de cette intensité du travail, de son caractère pendulaire et d’une vie « à distance ». In fine, le détachement semble produire des subjectivités particulières qui rappellent les traits caractéristiques de l’expérience migratoire. (shrink)

The inner semiotic core of biology Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-3 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9547-z Authors Eliseo Fernández, Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology, Kansas City, MO 64110, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

This account of one man’s search for truth bears witness to defection and apostasy and, in the end, to the humility of deeply lived experience. Eliseo Vivas, distinguished teacher, lit­erary critic, and philosopher, relates the search by his alter ego, Alonzo Quijano, for a philosophy to live by as well as one to think well by. His intellectual odys­sey is marked by defection from com­munism and apostasy from the philoso­phy of John Dewey. Vivas provides throughout this ac­count of Alonzo’s rupture (...) with his com­mitments an analysis of the ideas of the major philosophic thinkers of the West­ern world, an analysis which first moves toward partial acceptance but which ends with their rejection. He devotes the final chapters to the views on politics and moral, theological, and aesthetic subjects at which Alonzo arrived follow­ing his apostasy and defection. Alonzo claims at the end that his philosophical quest was not a failure, for he now “knows that he does not know much.” Hence the two roads to ignorance. Eliseo Vivas has taught at Wisconsin, Chicago, Ohio State, and Northwestern. He has also edited journals, published widely, and has been a participant and, indeed, a major force in most of the in­tellectual discussions of his time. His examination of his contemporaries’ be­liefs and detailed analysis of the views he rejects are therefore especially valu­able. Those peace-loving minds who find Alonzo’s adventures relevant to an understanding of their age will be fasci­nated by this unique and important book. (shrink)

Expanding on the results of previous contributions I advance several hypotheses on the interaction of physical and semiotic processes, both in organisms and in human artifacts. I then proceed to employ these ideas to formulate a general account of evolutionary processes in terms of concrete generalization, where, in analogy with conceptual generalization, novel creations retain antecedent features as special or restricted cases. I argue the following theses: 1) the main point of intersection of physical and semiotic causation is the process (...) of regulation; 2) The broadest form of regulation is a course of actions known as modulation ; 3) Modulation is a universal means of conveyance by which a form is lifted from one supporting vehicle and re-embodied into another replica. These considerations suggest viewing biological evolution as a complex generalization of semiotic evolution. Biological reproduction is then regarded as a complex generalization of sign replication. The latter is a relatively simple affair: the embodied form is external and largely independent of its indifferent supporting medium. Biological reproduction, on the contrary, is an extremely complex dynamical process in which the embodied type is duplicated from within the medium, through the subsidiary internal replication of molecular genetic records. These ideas are developed and illustrated through comparisons between the evolution of organisms and that of human artifacts. (shrink)

En el presente texto planteo que la llamada ausencia de utopías de nuestro tiempo es una afirmación que necesita ser repensada. La historia de las ideas es el lugar donde esa afirmación se produce y la Historia misma es un campo de batallas entre escrituras que aspiran a detentar el patrimonio de concepciones del mundo como aquellas del progreso o las utopías políticas. Frente a la concepción del progreso, los trabajos de Walter Benjamin y Zygmunt Bauman, han propuesto figuras como (...) la del Trapero o las vidas desperdiciadas como sugerentes cuestionamientos a la dura costra de la universalidad y del conformismo. Esas figuras presentan la posibilidad de abrirnos a nuevas utopías. (shrink)

In order to answer our question, "What is the object of the poem?" we must consider two stages of the coming to be of the poem. This is what unqualified organicists forget. The first stage discloses what is called by A. C. Bradley the "subject matter of the poem." It shows the subject matter to consist of the objects of non-aesthetic experience, with whatever structure they may inherently possess as appropriate to their natures, which the poet employs in the making (...) of his poem. These objects can be classified by the philosopher of culture into four main categories: the cognitive, the aesthetic, the moral, and the religious. The reason for including aesthetic objects as possible stuff which makes up the subject matter of the poem is the fact that the artist sometime uses finished poems in the same way in which he uses the rest of his experience, as when a Shakespeare, a Goethe, or a Marlowe employs old poetry to make new. (shrink)

A cluster of similar trends emerging in separate fields of science and philosophy points to new opportunities to apply biosemiotic ideas as tools for conceptual integration in theoretical biology. I characterize these developments as the outcome of a “relational turn” in these disciplines. They signal a shift of attention away from objects and things and towards relational structures and processes. Increasingly sophisticated research technologies of molecular biology have generated an enormous quantity of experimental data, sparking a need for relational approaches (...) that could help to find recurrent patterns in the mass of data. Earlier conceptions of relational biology and cybernetics, once deemed too abstract and speculative, are now resurrected and applied by means of new computational and simulation tools. I think this receptivity should be extended to incorporate nets of semiotic relations as heuristic guides for discerning global patterns of interactions in living systems. In this article I review aspects of systems biology and new directions in evolutionary theory, focusing on the role of circular and downward causation in relational structures and dynamical networks. I also indicate promising avenues of integration of some ideas of biosemiotics with those emerging from these new currents in biology. Relational developments in biology bear a telling similarity to a parallel relational turn presently manifest in the philosophy of science, rooted in the philosophy of physics and mathematics and in different varieties of structural and informational realism. The recognition of the relational nature of reality within these disciplines entails a tacit repudiation of nominalistic biases in science that have hindered the reception of semitiotic conceptions in biology. In previous investigations I explored connections between two kinds of relational structures: the networks of self-referential circular loops that appear pervasively in living systems, and the triadic relational structures that Peircean semiotics places at the basis of all semiotic transactions. Current relational views in the sciences seem oblivious to the difference between dyadic and triadic relations. Incorporating this essential distinction from biosemiotics into other fields could be a first step in seizing the opportunities opened by the relational turn for a renewal of biology and of natural philosophy in general, across disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

Biosemiotics—a discipline in the process of becoming established as a new research enterprise—faces a double task. On the one hand it must carry out the theoretical and experimental investigation of an enormous range of semiotic phenomena relating organisms to their internal components and to other organisms (e.g., signal transduction, replication, codes, etc.). On the other hand, it must achieve a philosophical re-conceptualization and generalization of theoretical biology in light of the essential role played by semiotic notions in biological explanation and (...) modeling. This paper attempts to contribute to the second task by tracing some aspects of the historical evolution of explanatory models in biology. In so doing, a parallel can be drawn between the present status of biosemiotics and that of physics during the early decades of the last century. By following the career of the concept instrument (organon) in Aristotelian science, we revisit historical stages of the antithetical (but often complementary) roles of mechanical and teleological forms of explanation. The impact of the introduction of the organic codes in biology is seen to be somewhat analogous to that of the introduction of the quantum of action in physics. Faced with intractable empirical facts, physicists combined experimental results and bold philosophical speculation to create quantum physics—a wider, deeper framework that accommodates the new facts through a wholesale reformulation of the classical ideas. Essential to this development was the articulation of the epistemic functions of instruments, which was absent from classical physics. Similarly, the consideration of the role of instruments in biology may lead to a synthesis of Aristotelian and Kantian intuitions within a wider framework capable of joining now separate perspectives, such as Jablonka’s four-fold view of inheritance information, Barbieri’s theory of artifactual copymakers and codemakers, and recently developed models of causation based on the idea of manipulative interventions. (shrink)

There can be no possible quarrel with the assertion that the phenomena of value are amenable to scientific treatment if the statement is taken in an obvious sense, for the act of valuation is a fact of human experience, empirically observable in the same way as any other fact. There is therefore no reason why we should not deal with certain aspects of the phenomena of value as we deal with other empirical phenomena. To deny this would be to deny (...) scientific status to sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Sometimes one encounters such denials, but they need not be taken seriously, for they are obviously grounded on a very arbitrary and narrow definition of science. (shrink)