Emotions ( pathè) such as anger, fear, shame, and envy, but also pity, wonder, love and friendship have long been underestimated in Plato’s philosophy. The aim of Emotions in Plato is to provide a consistent account of the role of emotions in Plato’s psychology, epistemology, ethics and political theory. The volume focuses on three main issues: taxonomy of emotions, their epistemic status, and their relevance for the ethical and political theory and practice. This volume, which is the first edited volume (...) entirely dedicated to emotions in Plato’s philosophy, shows how Plato, in many aspects, was positively interested in these affective states in order to support the rule of reason. (shrink)

Dieser Band versammelt eine Auswahl von Vorträgen, die auf dem Platonicum XII Symposium über Platons Parmenides gehalten wurden, vom 15. bis 19. Juli 2019 in Paris. Der Band beinhaltet fünfzig Beiträge, die von der Lebendigkeit und Vielfalt der platonischen Studien zu diesem schwierigen Dialog zeugen. Er gliedert sich in sechs Abschnitte, die einen Weg durch den Dialog nach seinen wichtigsten Artikulationen darstellen: I. An der Schwelle zum Parmenides II. Parmenides im Kontext III. Dialog, Dialektik, Übungen IV. Die Theorie der Formen (...) V. Die Hypothesen VI. Parmenides und seine Rezeption. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, something can be called intermediate for Plato insofar as it occupies a place between two objects, poles, places, time, or principles. But this broad meaning of the intermediate has been eclipsed by the Aristotelian critique of the intermediate objects of the dianoia, so that it has become more difficult to think of the intermediates as functions of the soul. The aim of this paper is to show how, in the Republic, thumos is analogously treated as an intermediate with (...) other kinds of intermediate objects, and tentatively to relate this psychological intermediate in a broader theory with doxa, as its epistemological ground in the course of action. (shrink)

_Emotions in Plato_, through a detailed analysis of emotions such as shame, anger, fear, and envy, but also pity, wonder, love and friendship, offers a fresh account of the role of emotions in Plato’s psychology, epistemology, ethics and political theory.

_Les philosophes face au vice, de Socrate à Augustin_ explore la manière dont les philosophes de l’Antiquité ont tracé une cartographie des vices, analysé leurs causes et leurs effets, et se sont interrogés sur leurs usages. _Les philosophes face au vice, de Socrate à Augustin_ explores how ancient philosophers described the vices, delineated their various kinds, accounted for their causes and effects, and reflected on how to use them.

En réponse à l’affirmation (ou l’accusation) d’un dualisme trop rigide tel qu’il est interprété à partir du Phédon, l’ouvrage de C. Jorgenson entend faire justice d’un ensemble de problèmes relatifs à l’âme incarnée, principalement dans la République, le Timée et le Philèbe. Peut-on envisager une analyse du composé âme-corps sur un autre mode que celui de la condamnation du corps? L’A. fait le choix d’un parcours en « questions » en sept chapitres afin de montrer que l’intérêt de cette quest...

Le retour aux anciens constitue une stratégie souvent mise en œuvre pour réhabiliter le rôle des émotions dans la vie éthique, que les éthiques déontologiques et utilitaristes auraient minoré. On analyse l’emploi que fait Martha Nussbaum de la référence aux anciens, en particulier Aristote et les Stoïciens, depuis la publication de La Fragilité du bien jusqu’à ses récentes prises de position contre certaines émotions jugées incompatibles avec les principes libéraux de sa pensée éthique et politique. On espère ainsi montrer comment (...) Nussbaum écarte de notre vie démocratique contemporaine certaines émotions pourtant jugées capitales dans la vie éthique grecque, notamment la colère et la honte. (shrink)

This article aims at showing that the definition of pleasure in Plato’s dialogues cannot be separated from a political educational program and an anthropology that consider pleasure as the main vehicle towards virtue. The political use of pleasure is as important as its definition, insofar as its manifestation and content are the prerogatives of the legislator. All pleasures are politically meaningful in the Republic and in the Laws, and among them especially the triad hunger, thirst and sex ; in making (...) pleasures a “public” issue, as pleasures are object of surveillance and political control, Plato gives several means in order to shape the way pleasures are felt in the city, and in order to make the community of pleasure and pain a fundamental role in unifying the city under the reason’s commands. (shrink)

L’intérêt suscité par le concept d’émotion chez les Grecs a ouvert une voie d’interprétation nouvelle en histoire de la psychologie. D. Konstan a montré en particulier, dans The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (Toronto, 2006), qu’en accor­dant à certaines émotions une valeur cognitive, on relativise les lectures qui privilégient une dichotomie entre l’exercice de la pensée rationnelle et la dimen­sion affective, non rationnelle, de la vie psychique. Il reste cependant à montrer comment notre n...

La description de la vision intervient dans le Timée en 45b-47b, suivant une double perspective caractéristique de ce dialogue : le physicien Timée donne d’une part une explication mécanique de la vue qui met en jeu deux flux lumineux, celui de l’œil et du corps se trouvant dans le champ de la vision, et d’autre part une explication fonctionnaliste ou téléologique faisant de la vision la source des sciences de l’astronomie, des mathématiques, et même de la philosophie. Dans ce passage (...) du Timée, la vision est une puissance qui nous informe sur la façon dont une affection, produisant une sensation, pourrait donner lieu à une connaissance. Cet article envisage d’abord les principales articulations du passage 45b-47b du Timée, avant d’examiner les enjeux d’interprétations concurrentes sur le rôle de la vision dans la constitution de la pensée dans ce passage précis : il maintient que, dans le cadre d’un dualisme constitutif entre sensible et intelligible, qui implique un saut épistémologique, la vision est un instrument servant de médiation vers l’intelligible. (shrink)

L’ouvrage d’O. Renaut enquête sur le rôle des émotions dans la pensée platonicienne, prenant pour fil conducteur la notion de θυμός. Cet objet en quelque sorte double permet une traversée à la fois diachronique – des premiers dia­logues dits socratiques jusqu’aux Lois – et synchronique de l’œuvre platonicienne, en en articulant les différents pans (psychologie, éthique, pédagogie, politique). L’intérêt de cette étude tient d’abord dans l’ampleur de la prise de vue qu’elle fournit, non seuleme...

Ce volume vise à combler, sinon une lacune, du moins un déséquilibre entre l’abondance des recherches consacrées au thème des émotions chez Aristote, et l’exploration comparativement faible de ce même champ dans la pensée platonicienne, et cela alors même que les points de contact entre les deux éthiques sont nombreux. Parce qu’Aristote est perçu comme le premier théoricien des émotions, affirmation qui ouvre et referme le volume (p. 1 et 376), la contribution de Platon à l’élaboration de cet...

Some generic generalizations have both a descriptive and a normative reading. The generic sentence “Philosophers care about the truth”, for instance, can be read as describing what philosophers in fact care about, but can also be read as prescribing philosophers to care about the truth. On Leslie’s account, this generic sentence has two readings due to the polysemy of the kind term “philosopher”. In this paper, I first argue against this polysemy account of descriptive/normative generics. In response, a contextualist semantic (...) theory for generic sentences is introduced. Based on this theory, I argue that descriptive/normative generics are contextually underspecified. (shrink)

Formalisms such as description logics (DL) are sometimes expected to help terminologies ensure compliance with sound ontological principles. The objective of this paper is to study the degree to which one DL-based biomedical terminology (SNOMED CT) complies with such principles. We defined seven ontological principles (for example: each class must have at least one parent, each class must differ from its parent) and examined the properties of SNOMED CT classes with respect to these principles. Our major results are: 31% of (...) the classes have a single child; 27% have multiple parents; 51% do not exhibit any differentiae between the description of the parent and that of the child. The applications of this study to quality assurance for ontologies are discussed and suggestions are made for dealing with multiple inheritance. (shrink)

Ingvar Johansson has argued that there are not only determinate universals, but also determinable ones. I here argue that this view is misguided by reviving a line of argument to the following effect: what makes determinates falling under a same determinable similar cannot be distinct from what makes them different. If true, some similarities — imperfect similarities between simple determinate properties — are not grounded in any kind of property-sharing. I suggest that determinables are better understood as maximal disjunctions of (...) brutely and imperfectly similar determinates. Such brute similarities have been thought to clash with realism about universals. I argue that this worry stems from the mistaken assumption that perfect and imperfect similarities are relations of a same kind. If exact and inexact resemblances are distinct and heterogeneous explananda, the realist about universals might explain the first thanks to property-sharing, while happily leaving imperfect similarities between properties unexplained. (shrink)

This paper defends hedonic intentionalism, the view that all pleasures, including bodily pleasures, are directed towards objects distinct from themselves. Brentano is the leading proponent of this view. My goal here is to disentangle his significant proposals from the more disputable ones so as to arrive at a hopefully promising version of hedonic intentionalism. I mainly focus on bodily pleasures, which constitute the main troublemakers for hedonic intentionalism. Section 1 introduces the problem raised by bodily pleasures for hedonic intentionalism and (...) some of the main reactions to it. Sections 2 and 3 rebut two main approaches equating bodily pleasures with non- intentional episodes. More precisely, section 2 argues that bodily pleasures cannot be purely non-intentional self-conscious feelings, by relying on Brentano’s objection to Hamilton’s theory of pleasure. Section 3 argues that bodily pleasures cannot be non-intentional sensory qualities by relying on Brentano’s objections to Stumpf’s theory of pleasure. Section 4 develops a brentanian view of the intentionality of bodily pleasures by claiming bodily pleasures are directed at a sui generis class of sensory qualities. Section 5 presents an objection to Brentano’s later theory of pleasure according to which all sensory pleasures are directed at sensing acts. (shrink)

We study shared intentions in what we call “loose groups”. These are groups that lack a codified organizational structure, and where the communication channels between group members are either unreliable or not completely open. We start by formulating two desiderata for shared intentions in such groups. We then argue that no existing account meets these two desiderata, because they assume either too strong or too weak an epistemic condition, that is, a condition on what the group members know and believe (...) about what the others intend, know, and believe. We propose an alternative, pooled knowledge, and argue that it allows formulating conditions on shared intentions that meet the two desiderata. (shrink)

Nous partageons le problème de savoir comment faire face à autant d'humains si semblables et si différents. A autant d'êtres qui ne peuvent interpréter le fait d'exister sans se comparer les uns aux autres, sans se distinguer les uns des autres, et qui doivent néanmoins cohabiter. Et de savoir comment ces humains peuvent d'autant plus se distinguer qu'ils prennent la place successivement les uns les autres, qu'ils reprennent les mêmes traces et doivent les réinterpréter. La première formulation du problème est (...) plutôt celle de la problématologie, dans la mesure où elle place au centre de la condition humaine le langage ordinaire, l'incessante différence de la question et de la réponse. C'est par elle que les humains mesurent ce qui les éloigne ou les rapproche et qu'ils règlent leurs désaccords. La seconde formulation du problème est plutôt celle de l'herméneutique, dans la mesure où elle place au centre de la condition humaine la condition interprétative, où chaque génération doit réinterpréter le monde où elle se découvre, pour reprendre la conversation rompue par la mort. En exposant ces deux " gestes " élémentaires du questionnement, en construisant l'écart entre deux traditions philosophiques de styles aussi hétérogènes, sans chercher à les subordonner l'un à l'autre, il s'est agi de penser une éthique de l'interrogativité. Ce sens de l'interrogation peut seul orienter nos " éthiques de responsabilité " et nous remettre ensemble dans un monde où nous comparaissons d'autant plus heureux de nous distinguer que nous nous effaçons devant l'autre. Ces deux attitudes font notre civilité. (shrink)

The rise of blockchain as a techno-solution in the development sector underscores the critical imbalances of data power under ‘computational capitalism’. This article will consider the political economy of techno-solutionist and blockchain discourses in the developing world, using as its object of study blockchain projects in Pacific Island nations. Backed by US State Department soft power initiatives such as Tech Camp, these projects inculcate tech-driven notions of economic and political development, or ICT4D, while opening up new terrains for data accumulation (...) and platform control. Blockchain developers in search of proof of concept have found the development sector a fecund space for tech experimentation as they leverage a desire for tech-development and exploit regulatory weakness. The material implications of blockchain projects and discourse have been to create governance solutions which bypass the developing world state as a largely corrupting intermediary. In the Pacific, this has meant blockchain supply-chain management systems, proprietary financial innovation in humanitarian relief and an Asian Development Bank project to manage indigenous Fijian lands exclusively on the blockchain. In all these instances, discourses of solutionism, innovation and data empowerment have been deployed in aid of blockchain cartographies of control. (shrink)

Samuel Johnson claimed to have refuted Berkeley by kicking a stone. It is generally thought that Johnson misses the point of Berkeley's immaterialism for a rather obvious reason: Berkeley never denied that the stone feels solid, but only that the stone could exist independently of any mind. I argue that Johnson was on the right track. On my interpretation, Johnson’s idea is that because the stone feels to resist our effort, the stone seems to have causal powers. But if appearances (...) are to be taken at face value, as Berkeley insists, then the stone has causal powers. I argue that such causal powers threaten not only Berkeley’s view that only minds are active, but also, and more fundamentally, his central claim that sensible things depend on perception. (shrink)

t. 1. La liberté des anciens -- t. 2. Naissances de la modernité -- t. 3. Lumières et romantisme -- t. 4. Les critiques de la modernité politique -- t. 5. Les philosophies politiques contemporaines (depuis 1945).

Le philosophe est-il capable d'affronter intellectuellement les situations que subissent ceux dont la vie est confrontée à la plus extrême fragilité? Par-delà l'émotion et l'indignation, peut-on forger des outils philosophiques qui puissent nous aider à agir? A quoi servirait donc de philosopher, avec des concepts, des données et des images, en Haïti ou au sud du Sahara? A dégager les logiques qui, entre raison et déraison, dictent les pires radicalisations de la souffrance et de l'humiliation dont le monde humain reste (...) capable. A établir, au-delà de généralités convenues, d'indispensables priorités face aux exigences de la survie ou à celles d'une vie décente pour les femmes, les enfants, pour les plus vulnérables à la violence et au risque. « Comme être humain et comme philosophe, j'ai postulé en décidant d'écrire ce livre que la philosophie, à condition de sortir de son enfermement dans les concepts et les purs principes, peut être humaine – je veux dire : prendre en charge, comme une pensée et comme un discours qui a ses spécificités, les questions que soulève le type de vacillement entre l'humain et l'inhumain qui m'apparaît constitutif de l'extrême. » LES POINTS FORTS - Un auteur médiatique - Un sujet brûlant PUBLIC CONCERNE Public d'essais. (shrink)

Touch seems to enjoy some epistemic advantage over the other senses when it comes to attest to the reality of external objects. The question is not whether only what appears in tactile experiences is real. It is that only whether appears in tactile experiences feels real to the subject. In this chapter we first clarify how exactly the rather vague idea of an epistemic advantage of touch over the other senses should be interpreted. We then defend a “muscular thesis”, to (...) the effect that only the experience of resistance to our motor efforts, as it arises in effortful touch, presents us with the independent existence of some causally empowered object. We finally consider whether this muscular thesis applies to the perception of our own body. (shrink)

Sur un sujet peu étudié, et si contemporain, à savoir la haine et les différentes passions qu'elle engendre et qui l'engendrent (indignation, colère, mépris, envie), une étude originale et pluridisciplinaire mobilisant approches philosophiques, politiques et historiques sur des événements passés et contemporains. Une analyse des haines du passé, de leurs effets individuels et collectifs pour mieux comprendre les haines actuelles, tel est l'enjeu de cet ouvrage. SOMMAIRE Préface -- Introduction Chap I -- De la haine 1 -- Définition 2 -- (...) Tempérance affective et connaissance adéquate 3 -- La haine ne peut jamais être bonne Chap II -- Exacerbation et généralisation de la haine 1 -- Imagination et vie affective 2 -- Illusion du libre arbitre et vie affective 3 -- Quelques mécanismes d'extension des affects Chap III -- De quelques passions réputées mineures 1 -- Brève histoire philosophique et politique de la colère : de l'"Ethique" à l'"Iliade" et retour 2 -- Critique de la raillerie, éloge du rire, éthique, religion et politique 3 -- Le mépris Chap IV -- " L'indignation est une haine..." 1 -- Mauvaise ou bonne indignation? 2 -- Indignation, tyrannie et terreur Chap V -- "L'envie est la haine..." 1 -- Des envies à l'Envie 2 -- De l'Envie 3 -- "Le sentiment démocratique de l'envie" A. de Tocqueville Index. (shrink)

This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind. _Enaction_, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in _The Embodied Mind_, breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied (...) action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. _Enaction_ offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science. Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science. Contributors: Renaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Véronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Núñez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson. (shrink)

Of all the things we do and say, most will never be repeated or reproduced. Once in a while, however, an idea or a practice generates a chain of transmission that covers more distance through space and time than any individual person ever could. What makes such transmission chains possible? For two centuries, the dominant view was that humans owe their cultural prosperity to their powers of imitation. In this view, modern cultures exist because the people who carry them are (...) gifted at remembering, storing and reproducing information. How Traditions Live and Die proposes an alternative to this standard view. What makes traditions live is not a general-purpose imitation capacity. Cultural transmission is partial, selective, often unfaithful. Some traditions live on in spite of this, because they tap into widespread and basic cognitive preferences. These attractive traditions spread, not by being better retained or more accurately transferred, but because they are transmitted over and over. This theory is used to shed light on various puzzles of cultural change and to explain the special relation that links the human species to its cultures. Morin combines recent work in cognitive anthropology with new advances in quantitative cultural history, to map and predict the diffusion of traditions. This book is both an introduction and an accessible alternative to contemporary theories of cultural evolution. (shrink)

This book is a long-term history of optics, from early Greek theories of vision to the nineteenth-century victory of the wave theory of light. It is a clear and richly illustrated synthesis of a large amount of literature, and a reliable and efficient guide for anyone who wishes to enter this domain.

The first of its kind, this book is an in-depth history of hydrodynamics from its eighteenth-century foundations to its first major successes in twentieth-century hydraulics and aeronautics. It documents the foundational role of fluid mechanics in developing a new mathematical physics. It gives full and clear accounts of the conceptual breakthroughs of physicists and engineers who tried to meet challenges in the practical worlds of hydraulics, navigation, blood circulation, meteorology, and aeronautics, and it shows how hydrodynamics at last began to (...) fulfill its early promise to unify the different worlds of flow. Richly illustrated, technically thorough, and sensitive to cross-cultural effects, this history should attract a broad range of historians, scientists, engineers, and philosophers and be a standard reference for anyone interested in fluid mechanics. (shrink)

Tout au long des années 80, Derrida a exploré le thème de l’invention et étudié en particulier sa conception cartésienne. Derrida récuse avec force cette dernière pour montrer qu’elle dissimule une conception théologico-politique du sujet, accomplissant sur le plan politique la thèse métaphysique du logocentrisme. Mais, à partir de Psychè. Inventions de l’autre, cette vision est infléchie pour développer la signification positive de ce qu’il finit par appeler « l’invention du même » qui constitue l’un des courants majeurs de l’invention (...) techno-scientifique au sens moderne. Solidaire d’une certaine « politique de la recherche », Descartes voit l’une de ses inventions, la « langue universelle », être pour la première fois « contresignée » par Derrida. Cette reconnaissance ne doit pas toutefois cacher un désaccord où se révèle l’originalité de la pensée derridienne de l’invention : résolument anticartésienne, elle propose une inventio qui, en tant qu’elle confond avec le jeu même de la « différance », s’exclut de la cogitatio. Événement immanent à la res extensa qui, pour cette raison, ne saurait être entièrement rationalisé et qui, c’est significatif, en même temps qu’il s’ouvre à la chance, renvoie à une autre conception de l’être-ensemble. L’invention porte dans son excès, selon Derrida, l’annonce d’un temps nouveau. (shrink)

Who is Daisaku Ikeda? At one level, he is the leader of a religious movement--Soka Gakkai--which began in Japan, where it still has its headquarters, but which now claims 12 million adherents around the world. At another level, he is a globetrotting figure whose formal conversations with diverse writers, thinkers and diplomats--including Arnold Toynbee, Joseph Rotblat and Mikhail Gorbachev--have garnered him an international profile, as well as academic recognition. Perhaps above all else, Daisaku Ikeda is viewed as a campaigner for (...) peace. And it is Ikeda's specific contribution to peacebuilding, notably through the central emphasis he has placed on the significance of dialogue, that this book explores: the first to do so in a concerted way. Olivier Urbain shows that while Soka Gakkai (the "value society") may stem from the medieval principles of Nichiren Buddhism, under Ikeda's leadership it has taken these classic wisdoms and transformed them. Now essentially classless and secularised, as well as adaptable and sensitive to modern challenges like resource shortages and climate change, this, argues the author, is a pragmatic approach to peace which has proved both popular and eminently transportable. (shrink)

This book recounts a few ingenious attempts to derive physical theories by reason only, beginning with Descartes' geometric construction of the world, and finishing with recent derivations of quantum mechanics from natural axioms.

This collection of essays offers different ways of seeing twentieth-century art via the medium of aesthetics. Each essay explores a different vision: Pablo Picasso's Mercure , Paul Klee's work from the thirties, Yves Klein's concept of the Void, Ed Ruscha's gunpowder drawings, and Cy Twombly's Bacchus paintings. Having curated exhibitions on the majority of these artists, Olivier Berggruen's acquaintance with their work is profound, and his approach both scholarly and highly intimate. Olivier Berggruen lives in New York and (...) has curated museum exhibitions devoted to Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Yves Klein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Ed Ruscha. (shrink)

Quatre siecles apres la naissance de Rene Descartes, le colloque Lire Descartes aujourd'hui se propose de faire etat de la lecture a laquelle sa philosophie se prete aujourd'hui. Cette tentative de bilan s'articule autour de quatre sections, respectivement consacrees a la tradition medievale dont on sait beaucoup mieux aujourd'hui ce que le philosophe lui devrait; au fondement proprement metaphysique - s'il en est un - de sa philosophie; au rapport qu'entretient cette metaphysique avec la science moderne; enfin et surtout, a (...) la reception phenomenologique du cartesianisme. (shrink)