" Vivid . . . immense clarity . . . the product of a brilliant and extremely forceful intellect." — Journal of the Royal Naval Scientific Service "Still a sheer joy to read." — Mathematical Gazette "Should be read by any student, teacher or researcher in mathematics." — Mathematics Teacher The originator of algebraic topology and of the theory of analytic functions of several complex variables, Henri Poincare (1854–1912) excelled at explaining the complexities of scientific and mathematical ideas to lay (...) readers. Science and Method, written in 1908, has been appreciated by a wide audience of nonprofessionals and translated into many languages. It defines the basic methodology and psychology of scientific discovery, particularly in regard to mathematics and mathematical physics. Drawing on examples from many fields, it explains how scientists analyze and choose their working facts, and it explores the nature of experimentation, theory, and the mind. 1914 edition. Translated by Francis Maitland. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Recent research on thick terms like “rude” and “friendly” has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like “friendly” and “courageous” can be more easily canceled than the evaluative content of negative terms like “rude” and “selfish”. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick (...) terms but also for thin terms such as “good” or “bad” (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect indicates a pervasive asymmetry between positive and negative evaluative terms. (shrink)

This article introduces a new pragmatic framework for dual character concepts and their expressions, offering an alternative to the received lexical‐semantic view. On the prevalent lexical‐semantic view, expressions such as “philosopher” or “scientist” are construed as lexical polysemes, comprising both a descriptive and a normative dimension. Thereby, this view prioritizes established norms, neglecting normative expressions emerging in specific contexts. In contrast, the pragmatic view integrates pragmatic modulation as a central element in explaining context‐dependent dual character concepts and expressions. This not (...) only accounts for a wider range of phenomena but also addresses several theoretical shortcomings of the lexical view. (shrink)

This volume develops new conceptual and theoretical directions in the study of religion, conflict, and violence through a sharp focus on materiality, drawing upon two previously unrelated fields of scholarship: research on religion and conflict and the material turn within religious studies.

In this landmark work of economic sociology, Lucien Karpik introduces the theory and practical tools needed to analyze markets for singularities. Singularities are goods and services that cannot be studied by standard methods because they are multidimensional, incommensurable, and of uncertain quality. Examples include movies, novels, music, artwork, fine wine, lawyers, and doctors. Valuing the Unique provides a theoretical framework to explain this important class of products and markets that for so long have eluded neoclassical economics. With this innovative (...) theory--called the economics of singularities--Karpik shows that, because of the uncertainty and the highly subjective valuation of singularities, these markets are necessarily equipped with what he calls "judgment devices"--such as labels, brands, guides, critics, and rankings--which provide consumers with the credible knowledge needed to make reasonable choices. He explains why these markets are characterized by the primacy of competition by qualities over competition by prices, and he identifies the conditions under which singularities are constructed or are in danger of losing their uniqueness. After demonstrating how combinations of the numerous and multiform judgment devices can be used to identify different market models, Karpik applies his analytical tools to the functioning of a large number of actual markets, including fine wines, movies, luxury goods, pop music, and legal services. (shrink)

This article features a comprehensive interview with Vincent Blok, renowned author of “The Critique of Management: Towards a Philosophy and Ethics of Business Management”, published in 2022. The interview is structured around four core themes: (1) Philosophical Context, (2) Methodology, (3) Theory and Application, and (4) Future of Management. Firstly, we explore the contextual significance and urgency for a philosophical investigation on the essence of management. Secondly, we delve into Blok’s distinctive philosophical method. Thirdly, we examine the theoretical foundations and (...) practical applications of his work. Finally, we engage in a broader discussion on how Blok’s insights resonate with the future landscape of management, addressing topics ranging from business education to the rise of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

English summary: Lucien Jerphagnon (1921-2011) was one of the most imminent scholars of Greek philosophy during the twentieth century. This collection of texts offers his lectures from the 1970s and 80s on Platos Parmenides, tracing the history of Greek philosophy through to Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists and Gnostics with wit and erudition. The present volume follows the recent critical edition and French translation of Parmenides. French description: Big-bang philosophique, le Parmenide de Platon a donne naissance a un courant de (...) pensee, le neoplatonisme, qui a ponctue toute l'Antiquite de la Grece a Rome et dont les echos ont resonne jusqu'a la Renaissance. Texte matriciel, il a pourtant traine apres lui la reputation d'un dialogue obscur, voire abscons. Inedits, ces trois cours de Lucien Jerphagnon (1921-2011) en delient les difficultes pour en faire apparaitre l'harmonie secrete. Confrontation personnelle d'un philosophe avec un texte repute ardu, la premiere serie de cours, prononcee en 1973 et revue en 1979-1980, propose une analyse lineaire du texte et des fameuses hypotheses. La deuxieme (1982-1983) relate l'histoire des interpretations du Parmenide jusqu'a Plotin. Enfin la derniere partie fait revivre le seminaire tenu a l'universite de Caen en 1983-1984, offrant une lecture commentee de La Vie de Plotin par Porphyre.Empreintes d'oralite et de pedagogie, ces pages, tres accessibles et ou toujours pointent l'humour et l'intelligence bienveillante, invitent le lecteur a la rencontre non seulement d'un monument de l'histoire de la philosophie mais aussi d'un maitre de l'hellenisme, un Socrate pour notre temps, Lucien Jerphagnon. (shrink)

During his lifetime, Henri Poincaré published three major philosophical books which achieved great success: "La science et l'hypothèse" (1902), "La valeur de la science" (1905) and "Science et méthode" (1908). After his death in 1913, a fourth volume of his philosophical works was published by his heirs as "Dernières pensées" (1913). The four books constitute the core of Poincaré's philosophic works and were given an ovation by scientific and general public. Around 1919, Gustave Le Bon wrote to Poincaré's widow. As (...) the director of the "Bibliothèque de Philosophie Scientifique at Flammarion", he asked her permission to publish a second posthumous volume. "L'Opportunisme scientifique" was intended to be the fifth and final volume of Poincaré's philosophical writings. Louis Rougier had elaborated the project, with the collaboration of Gustave Le Bon, and the approval of the philosopher Émile Boutroux and his son Pierre. Because of the reservations of the mathematician's heirs, this book was never published and Dernières pensées remained his last philosophical book. Nevertheless Poincaré's correspondence - which is kept in the Poincaré Archives at University Nancy 2 - contains a large amount of documents concerning the project, its justification and the discussions between Louis Rougier and the mathematician's heirs. The aim of this book is to restore this episode, which gives some crucial informations about editorial practices of Poincaré and about the posterity of his philosophic thinking. (shrink)

D'une grande figure de la philosophie à une école de pensée, des maîtres aux disciples, d'un discours sur sa méthode à une leçon d'histoire, Lucien Jerphagnon nous plonge aux sources les plus originelles de notre temps et de notre culture. Avec son érudition savoureuse, et cet art fulgurant d'exhumer le passé et d'incarner les textes, le grand historien nous rappelle pourquoi les penseurs de l'Antiquité - Platon, Plotin et saint Augustin en tête - ont porté jusqu'à nos jours une (...) irréfutable initiation à tout ce qui est la vie de l'esprit, et à tout ce qui rend vivant en général. En recréant, par-delà les siècles, la plus enthousiasmante des communautés d'esprit, Lucien Jerphagnon remplit tous les devoirs de la paideia, cet art d'enseigner et de transmettre qui, plus qu'un savoir, est une éducation de l'être. (shrink)

The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that (...) ‘reasonable’ is predicted to be an evaluative term in the majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and challenges descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term—at least given the way we operationalize the latter. Interestingly, other expressions often used interchangeably in jury instructions (e.g. ‘careful,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘prudent,’ etc), however, are predicted to be descriptive. This indicates a discrepancy between the intended use of the term ‘reasonable’ and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the court room. (shrink)

t. 1. Essai de définition d'un champ de recherche.

The history of mathematics can be read in two ways. On the one hand, unlike the history of physics, it does not proceed by conjectures and refutations. New theories rarely refute old theories, but give them new foundations, generalize them, and reinterpret them through new concepts. This reading is unifying, highlighting the unity of the history of mathematics from its origins, through the permanence of its truths. On the other hand, many contemporary historians of mathematics have insisted on the diversity (...) of methods, objects, and practices throughout history. They have shown that the objects of the past mathematics are not the same as those of today. That second reading shatters the illusion of unity. It disjoins what the first reading unifies.Rather than deciding between these two readings, this chapter examines what makes them both possible and legitimate, based on an analysis of the acts of reading that we have to perform when confronted with the pages of a mathematical text, its signs, diagrams and images, and the different language modalities it employs. Starting with a discussion of Husserl's theses in The Origin of Geometry on the role of writing in the history of mathematics, and using a number of historical examples, the chapter shows that any reading of a mathematical text involves at least three divisions, three delimitations made by the reader’s gaze: divisions between the true and the false, between language and image, and between what is inside mathematics and what is outside. For the same text, these divisions are traced by the gaze in different ways throughout history.The chapter develops an example in greater detail, concerning the status of the equation in Descartes’ Geometry. It discusses the contrasting recent readings of the equation by two historians of science, Henk Bos and Enrico Giusti. It shows the concepts of The Geometry and the ideas the philosopher develops on reading and the nature of the sign. It shows how these ideas can be used to reconstruct how Descartes might have read a mathematical text, and it explains how successive readings of The Geometry can at the same time insert it into the mathematics of later centuries. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of two corpus studies investigating the discourse surrounding conspiracy theories and genuine theories. The results of these studies show that conspiracy theories lack the epistemic and scientific standing characteristic of theories more generally. Instead, our findings indicate that conspiracy theories are spread in a manner that resembles the dissemination of rumors and falsehoods. Based on these empirical results, we argue that it is time for both re-engineering conspiracy theory and for relabeling "conspiracy theory". We propose (...) relabelling conspiracy theories as either "conspiracy stories" or "conspiracy narratives" to more accurately convey their true nature. (shrink)

This article offers a novel account of a key concept in Hannah Arendt’s political thought: amor mundi. In political theory’s ethical turn, theorists have increasingly turned to amor mundi as a source of ethical guidance and inspiration for politics. However, in doing so, they have elided Arendt’s distinct understanding of care. This article recovers Arendt’s understanding of amor mundi as care for the world by reconstructing the central concerns of her dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and tracing them to the (...) “Crisis” essays of Between Past and Future. It shows that amor mundi emerges in the dissertation as part of a question: if love is our fundamental orientation toward the world, how can we love the world without instrumentalizing it? The two “Crisis” essays provide the following answer: if love is to avoid—and perhaps militate against—the instrumentalization of the world, it must take the form of care. Following this analysis, this article contends that the contribution of amor mundi to the ethical turn is best understood, not as the ethos needed to guide action in the political realm, but as a key pre- or nonpolitical ethos needed to conserve the world where politics takes place—and thus the very possibility of politics. (shrink)

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, (...) which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)

Un modèle de navire de terre cuite, long de 42 cm, propriété de la Fondation Piéridis, à Chypre, a été trouvé en mer par un pêcheur au large d'Amathonte. Sept personnages y sont représentés. Grâce au soin et aux connaissances du coroplaste, le modèle, dont l'état de conservation est remarquable, fournit d'utiles informations sur l'architecture navale chypriote vers 600, date probable de son exécution. La position et les attributs des personnages permettent de penser que trois d'entre eux participent à une (...) cérémonie rituelle de protection religieuse accordée au navire et à ses quatre autres occupants, formant l'équipage proprement dit. Par ailleurs, l'absence d'un pont complet, constatée aussi sur deux modèles apparentés, incite à s'interroger sur la fonction de certains modèles de navires chypriotes : réceptacles d'offrandes à une divinité marine, parfois jetés à la mer en guise d'ex-voto? (shrink)

Die Philosophiegeschichte hat festen Bestand als philosophische Disziplin. Sie wird hier als eine "Nachlese" der authentischen Texte der Philosophen eingeführt. Der heutige wissenschaftstheoretische Reflexionsstand im allgemeinen legt auch eine Reflexion auf die Prinzipien dieses "zweiten Diskurses" nahe. Dazu sind Vorbedingung die effektive Kenntnis der "Geschichte der Philosophiegeschichte" selber wie auch der Prinzipien, die diese Historiographie steuern. Eine Reihe sich für eine solche "Philosophie der Philosophiegeschichte" stellender Fragen und Problem-Topoi wird genannt, deren Existenz die heute allgemein spürbare "Prinzipienkrise" der Philosophiegeschichtsschreibung ausmacht. (...) Das führt zu der Frage, inwieweit die Prinzipienreflexion und das Problembewußtsein selber den Verfall einer magistralen Philosophiegeschichtsschreibung mitbedingt, der durch Kollektivarbeiten allenfalls verdeckt, nicht aber kompensiert wird. (shrink)

What makes a democratic school democratic? This question is answered using the example of the Swiss education system; the focus, however, is not on the usual pedagogic perspective of teaching democracy, but on the democratic organization of the education system. The discussion concentrates on two basic requirements for a democratic education organization: on the one hand, education for all under the equal rights premise calls for the definition of an educational minimum for all students. At the same time, defining this (...) minimum presupposes selection among the students. For part of the students are -- through the use of public funds -- being educated beyond the minimum; a situation which needs to be democratically legitimized. The selection is based on academic performance; as yet, a valuable alternative to this type of selection does not exist. On the other hand, it is essential in a democratic education organization that the authorities put in charge of certain responsibilities are democratically legitimized and controlled. The same applies to newly created authorities, such as principalships or autonomous schools, the introduction of which has been demanded repeatedly for some time now. (shrink)

Le savant et la science -- Le raisonnement mathématique -- La mécanique nouvelle -- La science astronomique.

Praised as a panacea for resolving all societal issues, and self-evidently presupposed as technological innovation, the concept of innovation has become the emblem of our age. This is especially reflected in the context of the European Union, where it is considered to play a central role in both strengthening the economy and confronting the current environmental crisis. The pressing question is how technological innovation can be steered into the right direction. To this end, recent frameworks of Responsible Innovation (RI) focus (...) on how to enable outcomes of innovation processes to become societally desirable and ethically acceptable. However, questions with regard to the technological nature of these innovation processes are rarely raised. For this reason, this paper raises the following research question: To what extent is RI possible in the current age, where the concept of innovation is predominantly presupposed as technological innovation? On the one hand, we depart from a post-phenomenological perspective to evaluate the possibility of RI in relation to the particular technological innovations discussed in the RI literature. On the other hand, we emphasize the central role innovation plays in the current age, and suggest that the presupposed concept of innovation projects a techno-economic paradigm. In doing so, we ultimately argue that in the attempt to steer innovation, frameworks of RI are in fact steered by the techno-economic paradigm inherent in the presupposed concept of innovation. Finally, we account for what implications this has for the societal purpose of RI. (shrink)

" Vivid . . . immense clarity . . . the product of a brilliant and extremely forceful intellect." — Journal of the Royal Naval Scientific Service "Still a sheer joy to read." — Mathematical Gazette "Should be read by any student, teacher or researcher in mathematics." — Mathematics Teacher The originator of algebraic topology and of the theory of analytic functions of several complex variables, Henri Poincare (1854–1912) excelled at explaining the complexities of scientific and mathematical ideas to lay (...) readers. Science and Method, written in 1908, has been appreciated by a wide audience of nonprofessionals and translated into many languages. It defines the basic methodology and psychology of scientific discovery, particularly in regard to mathematics and mathematical physics. Drawing on examples from many fields, it explains how scientists analyze and choose their working facts, and it explores the nature of experimentation, theory, and the mind. 1914 edition. Translated by Francis Maitland. (shrink)

THE VALUE OF SCIENCE INTRODUCTION The search for truth should be the goal of our activities; it is the sole end worthy of them. Doubtless we should first bend our efforts to assuage human suffering, but why ? Not to suffer is a negative ...

La 4e de couverture indique : "Georges Canguilhem nous laisse une oeuvre marquée par une exigeante lucidité et une grande rectitude morale. Ce livre se limite à analyser ses recherches sur la biologie et la médecine. L'apport majeur de Canguilhem porte sur l'histoire des idées médicales des origines jusqu'au début du XXe siècle. Il avait l'intention, et c'est ainsi que certains cherchent à le lire, de donner à ses recherches une dimension à la fois médicale et philosophique. En fait, il (...) nous propose un regard anthropologique sur la médecine, un regard qui lui est extérieur, et qui ne réussit pas à saisir la réalité humaine, sociale, culturelle et finalement médicale de la maladie. Il tirait de ses recherches des spéculations et des critiques sur la médecine contemporaine, en général surannées, car il n'avait pas compris la mutation profonde dont elle était, sous ses yeux, l'objet, car lui ont manqué les connaissances, l'expérience et le jugement clinique, qui eurent été nécessaires pour réaliser son ambition. Il a mal compris les concepts de normes, de normal et d'anormal en médecine". (shrink)