Quartz & Sejnowski's constructivist manifesto promotes a return to an extreme form of empiricism. In defense of learning by selection, we argue that at the neurobiological level all the data presented by Q&S in support of their constructive model are in fact compatible with a model comprising multiple overlapping stages of synaptic overproduction and selection. We briefly review developmental studies at the behavioral level in humans providing evidence in favor of a selectionist view of development.

A breathtaking look at the new science that can track consciousness deep in the brain How does our brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events (...) behind a conscious state. We can now pin down the neurons that fire when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information and understand the crucial role unconscious computations play in how we make decisions. The emerging theory enables a test of consciousness in animals, babies, and those with severe brain injuries. A joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities, Consciousness and the Brain will excite anyone interested in cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying consciousness. (shrink)

This article defends the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) from a simple and direct valid argument according to which PSR implies that there is a truth that explains every truth, namely an omni-explainer. Many proponents of PSR may be willing to bite the bullet and maintain that, if PSR is true, then there is an omni-explainer. I object to this strategy by defending the principle that explanation is irreflexive. Then I argue that proponents of PSR can resist the conclusion that (...) there is an omni-explainer by denying that explanation distributes over conjunction. In the final section, I consider a plausible revision of this assumption. I argue there that, given the revised assumption, PSR seems to yield a striking picture of the explanatory structure of the universe. I explain why the resulting model does not appear utterly implausible to me. (shrink)

The Japanese “new religions” active in Kinshasa nearly all perform healing through the channeling of invisible divine light. In the case of Sekai Kyūseikyō, the light of Johrei cannot be visually apprehended, but is worn as an invisible aura on the practitioner’s body. This article discusses the trans-cultural resonances between Japan and Central Africa regarding the ontology of spiritual force, regimes of subjectivity, and the gradual embodiment of Johrei divine light as a protection against witchcraft. Meanwhile, I argue that religious (...) multiplicity in urban Africa encourages cultural reflexivity about concepts of health and healing, self-responsibility, and Pentecostal suspicion-mongering of occult sciences. Thus, Johrei divine light not only feeds into a longstanding local tradition of spiritual healing; within the religiously multiple city, it is also a discursive space for, and an experience and performance of, emic critique. (shrink)

This chapter is concerned with the coextension difficulty for nominalist theories of properties that reject tropes alongside universals. After carefully explaining the coextension difficulty and describing the theories it targets, the chapter describes different solutions to the difficulty. These solutions differ with respect to how much involved they are into a dualist approach to coextension. A dualist approach to a case of coextension consists in agreeing with the realist that the relevant ascriptions of properties are numerically distinct. A monist approach (...) to a case of coextension consists in contending that the relevant ascriptions of properties are identical. In this chapter, I defend a monist approach to cases of coextension that appeals to a counterpart theory for propositions. (shrink)

This text presents and addresses the philosophical movement of antiphilosophy working thru the texts of Christian thinkers such as Pascal and Kierkegaard. The author as influenced by Alain Badiou, portrays these Christian thinkers as of a subjective dimension negating the possibility of an objective quest for truth. The claim here is that antiphilosophy is abundant in the eyes of these two thinkers who frame the thought event as represented by Christianity, ultimately resigning itself to more or less the opposite of (...) philosophy itself. Readers will discover why philosophical reason should never be convinced by that which denies its very authority. Subjecting faith to the perils of philosophical analysis, confronting the philosophical tradition with the truth of the Christian faith, and occupying the space between the two: such are the challenges facing an antiphilosophy of Christianity. This text will appeal to researchers and students working in continental philosophy, philosophy of religion and those in religious studies who want to investigate the links between Christianity and antiphilosophy. (shrink)

This book is the first of its kind to offer a new definition of contemporary management. It uses Michel Henry’s philosophy and takes the real, sensitive and pathetic subjectivity of individuals as the starting point of the analysis as opposed to the usual large categories of representations; resources; images; and discourses. This book thus proposes to rethink management by insisting on the dialectic of strength and vulnerability; its power of constraint, imitation and imagination; and finally its framework of action situated (...) in a fourfold concern for the self, for people, for institutions and for the environment. These different notions are useful in order to experience a deeper understanding of management that is free from the obsolescence of the distant recommendations of ancient protomanagement and the outdated and dubious prescriptions of the so-called “scientific management”. (shrink)

The culmination of three decades of studying and treating survivors of adult onset trauma, _Wounded by Reality_ is the first systematic attempt to differentiate adult onset trauma from childhood trauma, with which it is frequently confused. When catastrophic events overtake adult lives, they often scar the psyche in ways that psychodynamically oriented clinicians struggle to understand. For Ghislaine Boulanger, the enormous challenge of working with these patients is unsurprising. Survivors of major catastrophe, whether a natural disaster, a life-threatening assault, (...) a serious accident, or an act of terrorism, experience a near-fatal disruption of fundamental aspects of self experience. The sense of agency, of affectivity, of bodily integrity, the capacity for self-reflection, the sense of time, and the ability to relate to others - all are called into question. (shrink)

The influence of Jules Lequier on the development of continental philosophy is currently being revived. Ghislain Deslandes introduces Lequier's thought while highlighting its influence in the development, throughout the twentieth century, including in process thought, pragmatism, existentialism, and phenomenology.

This book offers a comparative study of the management of legal pluralism. The authors describe and analyse the way state and non-state legal systems acknowledge legal pluralism - defined as the coexistence of a state and non-state legal systems in the same space in respect of the same subject matter for the same population - and determine its consequences for their own purposes. The book sheds light on the management processes deployed by legal systems in Africa, Canada, Central Europe and (...) the South Pacific, the multitudinous factors circumscribing the action of systems and individuals with respect to legal pluralism, and the effects of management strategies and processes on systems as well as on individuals. The book offers fresh practical and analytical insight on applied legal pluralism, a fast-growing field of scholarship and professional practice. Drawing from a wealth of original empirical data collected in several countries by a multilingual and multidisciplinary team, it provides a thorough account of the intricate patterns of state and non-state practices with respect to legal pluralism. As the book's non-prescriptive approach helps to uncover and evaluate several biases or assumptions on the part of policy makers, scholars and development agencies regarding the nature and the consequences of legal pluralism, it will appeal to a wide range of scholars and practitioners in law, development studies, political science and social sciences. (shrink)

This introductory chapter attempts to clarify the philosophical, empirical, and theoretical bases on which a cognitive neuroscience approach to consciousness can be founded. We isolate three major empirical observations that any theory of consciousness should incorporate, namely (1) a considerable amount of processing is possible without consciousness, (2) attention is a prerequisite of consciousness, and (3) consciousness is required for some specific cognitive tasks, including those that require durable information maintenance, novel combinations of operations, or the spontaneous generation of intentional (...) behavior. We then propose a theoretical framework that synthesizes those facts: the hypothesis of a global neuronal workspace. This framework postulates that, at any given time, many modular cerebral networks are active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner. An information becomes conscious, however, if the neural population that represents it is mobilized by top-down attentional amplification into a brain-scale state of coherent activity that involves many neurons distributed throughout the brain. The long-distance connectivity of these `workspace neurons' can, when they are active for a minimal duration, make the information available to a variety of processes including perceptual categorization, long-term memorization, evaluation, and intentional action. We postulate that this global availability of information through the workspace is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state. A complete theory of consciousness should explain why some cognitive and cerebral representations can be permanently or temporarily inaccessible to consciousness, what is the range of possible conscious contents, how they map onto specific cerebral circuits, and whether a generic neuronal mechanism underlies all of them. We confront the workspace model with those issues and identify novel experimental predictions. Neurophysiological, anatomical, and brain-imaging data strongly argue for a major role of prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, and the areas that connect to them, in creating the postulated brain-scale workspace. (shrink)

Amidst the many brain events evoked by a visual stimulus, which are specifically associated with conscious perception, and which merely reflect non-conscious processing? Several recent neuroimaging studies have contrasted conscious and non-conscious visual processing, but their results appear inconsistent. Some support a correlation of conscious perception with early occipital events, others with late parieto-frontal activity. Here we attempt to make sense of those dissenting results. On the basis of a minimal neuro-computational model, the global neuronal workspace hypothesis, we propose a (...) taxonomy which distinguishes between vigilance and access to conscious report, as well as between subliminal, preconscious and conscious processing. We suggest that these distinctions map onto different neural mechanisms, and that conscious perception is systematically associated with a sudden surge of parieto-frontal activity causing top-down amplification. (shrink)

Nominalism, which has its origins in the Middle Ages and continues into the Twenty-First Century, is the doctrine that there are no universals. This book is unique in bringing together essays on the history of nominalism and essays that present a systematic discussion of nominalism. It introduces the reader to the distinction between particulars and universals, to the difficulties posed by this distinction, and to the main motivations for the rejection of universals. It also describes the main varieties of nominalism (...) about properties and provides tools to understand how they developed in the history of Western Philosophy. All essays are new and are written by experts on the topic, and they advance the discussion about nominalism to a new level. (shrink)

Un temps de crise grave peut devenir un moment de grande espérance. Nous savons aujourd'hui que la civilisation du logos sous laquelle l'Occident vit depuis près de trois mille ans, dans une dialectique constante entre philosophie et christianisme, arrive à un point à la fois d'accomplissement et d'épuisement. Elle avait d'abord donné sa confiance à des explications englobantes. Celles-ci ont trouvé, dans l'Antiquité, leur forme quasi idéale : le logos avait pris alors un tour mystique et débouchait vers un Au-delà (...) de tout, qui n'a laissé indifférent ni l'islam ni le christianisme. Dans la modernité, il s'était organisé de manière parfaitement immanente ou soigneusement historique. A présent, il continue son chemin, mais devant l'épuisement des idées et des constructions qui lui donnaient corps et sens, il ne conserve que son armature essentiellement mathématique, dépouillée de toute réalité, sinon celle du nombre - ce que, dans notre langage actuel, nous appelons le " virtuel ". Nous pouvons recueillir aujourd'hui l'efficacité de ces pensées et pratiques pénétrées de la dynamique du Tout et du Rien. Mais, au point où nous en sommes actuellement, il y a une vraie menace que le Tout bascule vraiment dans le Rien et que nous allions à la catastrophe éthique, humaine, cosmique. Il a manqué sans doute à cette civilisation le respect du Quelque chose : ni tout, ni rien, mais substance, action, relation. Ici Aristote, dans l'Antiquité, et Thomas d'Aquin, au seuil de la modernité, peuvent venir à notre secours et nous aider à retrouver notre épaisseur d'homme, à ne pas fuir le jeu étrange en nous de la matière pénétrée de ce que nous appelons esprit, qui à la fois lui est immanent et la dépasse, à restituer par là un humanisme et une approche non aliénante du divin. Il y a sans doute là un motif d'espérance. Mais ce grand motif d'espérance réside surtout dans le tournant anthropologique contemporain : nous comprenons aujourd'hui que l'homme n'existe pas en réalité sans son frère qui lui parle. A la lumière de cette conversation essentielle, on doit pouvoir définir un humanisme et une politique ; une perspective s'ouvre aussi pour réinterpréter la religion et particulièrement le christianisme. À l'horizon apparaissent le symbole, la relation, la mort et la résurrection, l'amour. (shrink)

Une présentation de l'intérêt accordé aux religions par le philosophe Bergson à la fin de sa vie et notamment au christianisme.

Cet article s’intéresse au marché de l’édition scientifique et à son évolution dans le cadre de l’Internet et du développement du libre accès. Il s’attache à montrer la diversité de ce marché en fonction des champs scientifiques, notamment par le type d’éditeurs impliqués, les lectorats concernés, les économies associées. Il met en exergue le nécessaire discernement de ces marchés face aux critiques générales de dysfonctionnement soulignées. Il pointe certains effets contrastés du numérique conduisant à certaines reconfigurations paradoxales. Enfin, la vision (...) prospective sur le devenir de ce marché insiste sur la pluralité des modalités de progression vers le libre accès, le poids de la dimension politique et celui des processus d’évaluation de la recherche. La voie d’un partenariat public-privé est privilégiée au regard de certaines valeurs centrales : indépendance, qualité, accessibilité et pérennité des publications scientifiques.This article investigates the scientific publishing market and how it is being transformed by the Internet and the development of open-access services. We illustrate the diversity of the market in terms of scientific fields, and especially in the types of publishers and readerships concerned, and of the associated economics. In view of the sweeping criticisms of dysfunctional practices illustrated in the article, we alert readers as to the need for discernment among these markets. The article points to a number of contrasting effects of digital publishing that are leading to various paradoxical reconfigurations. Finally, this forward-looking study of the publishing market’s future emphasises the multiple forms of the onward march towards open access and the influence exerted by the political dimension and the research evaluation process. Public-private partnerships are the preferred option to cater for the central values of independence, quality, accessibility and the enduring nature of scientific publications. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether accounting professionals’ ethical judgment is influenced by the disciplinary system established by the accounting profession in France and the United States. Our study first attempts to determine whether there is a link between the EJ of accounting professionals and the disciplinary context, in each country. It then performs a comparative analysis of the two nations. Our findings indicate that the judgment of American accounting professionals is correlated with the disciplinary decisions of the accountancy board. By contrast, (...) the judgment of French accounting professionals is independent of the disciplinary context. Whereas cross-national studies have thus far attributed differences among nations mainly to cultural distance, current research shows that non-cultural national factors should also be considered. In line with this perspective, our study suggests that institutional factors, in particular the disciplinary system, may also account for the differences between French and American accounting professionals’ ethical perceptions. We support these results by highlighting some characteristics of the countries’ respective legal systems, which may explain the divergences observed. We conclude by identifying implications for the independence of accounting professionals’ EJ and the risks associated with dissuasive disciplinary systems. (shrink)

I call anti-resemblism the thesis that independently of any contextual specification there is no determinate fact of the matter about the comparative overall similarity of things. Anti-resemblism plays crucial roles in the philosophy of David Lewis. For instance, Lewis has argued that his counterpart theory is anti-essentialist on the grounds that counterpart relations are relations of comparative overall similarity and that anti-resemblism is true. After Lewis committed himself to a form of realism about natural properties he maintained that anti-resemblism is (...) true about the relations of overall similarity that enter his counterpart theory and his analysis of counterfactuals. However, in this article I argue that Lewis’s account of degrees of naturalness for properties combined with his modal realism entails that anti-resemblism is false. The Lewisian must amend Lewis’s system if she aims to benefit from the alleged virtues of anti-resemblism. I consider two ways of amending it, neither of which is a free lunch. (shrink)

This paper is going to discuss, what will be called, ‘The Internet of Bodies’. Our physical and virtual worlds are blending and shifting our understanding of three key areas: (1) our identities are diversifying, as they become hyper-enhanced and multi-sensory; (2) our collaborations are co-created, immersive and connected; (3) our innovations are diverse and inclusive. It is proposed that our bodies have finally become the interface.

A number of philosophers have recently found it congenial to talk in terms of grounding. Grounding discourse features grounding sentences that are answers to questions about what grounds what. The goal of this article is to explore and defend a counterpart-theoretic interpretation of grounding discourse. We are familiar with David Lewis's applications of the method of counterpart theory to de re modal discourse. Counterpart-theoretic interpretations of de re modal idioms and grounding sentences share similar motivations, mechanisms, and applications. I shall (...) explain my motivations and describe two applications of a counterpart theory for grounding discourse. But, in this article, my main focus is on counterpart-theoretic mechanisms. (shrink)

This article has two goals: a historical and a speculative one. The historical goal is to offer a coherent account of Spinoza’s view on mereological composition. The speculative goal is to show that Spinoza’s substance monism is distinct from versions of monism that are currently defended in metaphysics and that it deserves the attention of contemporary metaphysicians. Regarding the second goal, two versions of monism are currently defended and discussed in contemporary metaphysics: existence monism according to which there actually exists (...) exactly one concrete entity; and priority monism that is famously defended by Jonathan Schaffer and according to which there exists exactly one fundamental concrete being, the cosmos, and several derivative concrete beings that are the parts of the cosmos. In this article, I argue that substance monism is neither an existence nor a priority monism because, while Spinoza’s monist is committed to the existence of a unique fundamental individual—the substance—and to the existence of several derivative individuals—the bodies or modes of extension—, Spinoza denies that the substance is mereologically complex. Regarding the first goal, the paper solves several interpretative puzzles by arguing that Spinoza distinguishes between three kinds of composition and that his talk of composition between the substance and its modes is by his own light not to be interpreted as literally true. (shrink)

Does geometry constitues a core set of intuitions present in all humans, regarless of their language or schooling ? We used two non verbal tests to probe the conceptual primitives of geometry in the Munduruku, an isolated Amazonian indigene group. Our results provide evidence for geometrical intuitions in the absence of schooling, experience with graphic symbols or maps, or a rich language of geometrical terms.

A uniquely integrative work, this volume provides a much needed compilation of primary source material to researchers from basic neuroscience, psychology, developmental science, neuroimaging, neuropsychology and theoretical biology. * The ...