A l'occasion du cinquantenaire de la mort de Gaston Berger (1896-1960), la Chaire Humanisme, Citoyenneté, Civilisations de l'université catholique de Lyon a pris l'initiative d'organiser deux journées d'études pour commémorer l'oeuvre de ce philosophe audacieux et atypique, fondateur d'institutions et de revues, chef d'entreprise et homme d'action. Ces journées ont permis d'étudier les modalités sous lesquelles Gaston Berger a envisagé les liens entre philosophie et sciences humaines, qu'il n'a eu de cesse de faire dialoguer. Sa trajectoire intellectuelle originale a été (...) interrogée, depuis la tradition blondélienne de la philosophie de l'action et la phénoménologie, jusqu'au "tournant pragmatique" qu'il opère avec l'idée de la prospective. Associant des chercheurs issus de différentes institutions, mais héritières à divers titres de l'oeuvre de Gaston Berger, elles ont montré comment le cheminement intellectuel de Berger a influencé ses orientations et ses décisions d'homme d'action, et comment en retour son expérience d'homme de terrain a nourri et alimenté sa réflexion philosophique, psychologique et sociologique. (shrink)

Rassemblant l'integralite des dimensions de la pensee de S. Weil selon un double axe chronologique et thematique, ce livre montre comment, heritiere du spiritualisme francais allant de Biran a Alain, S. Weil en a radicalise les intuitions les plus audacieuses: celles d'un cogito perceptif, d'une ontologie du travail, ou d'une christologie philosophique renouvelant en profondeur le platonisme chretien. Il montre ensuite comment le dialogue opere de 1938 a 1943 entre modernite, hellenisme, christianisme et pensees orientales revele un essai de refondation (...) trinitaire de la question de l'etre unique dans l'histoire de la metaphysique. Anticipant sur la critique heideggerienne de l'-ontotheologie- [...], la pensee weilienne de l'universel concret a ignore l'opposition moderne du theorique et du pratique, du rationnel et du religieux, et redeploye au XXeme siecle la triple dimension existentielle, speculative et mystique de la philosophie antique.". (shrink)

In contrast to the readings that oppose a first 'revolutionary' Simone Weil to a second 'conservative' Simone Weil, this article supports the thesis of a profound continuity and coherence in Weil's political thought, parallel to the overall unity of her philosophy. Just as there is no opposition between her political thought of the early and the late 1930s, there is no opposition between her 'mystical' philosophy from the period in Marseille and her "political" philosophy from the period in London. However, (...) this does not abolish the distance that must be maintained between religion, mysticism and politics, because the "synthesis" of these levels is not historical-political, but eschatological. Ultimately, we show that Weilian thought supports both the dual necessity and the mutual insufficiency of mysticism and politics, which enables it to escape both totalitarian idolatry and the mysticism of a pure afterlife. If she ignores the opposition so common in modern thought between "Amor Dei" and "Amor Mundi", it is because she wishes to comply with the dual Platonic and Christian injunction to bring the Good down into necessity without confusing both, thus making political action the criterion of truth of political thought. (shrink)

La critique phénoménologique de la métaphysique a opposé « l’intuition » à la« représentation », et le débat philosophique contemporain une phénoménologie « minimaliste » à une phénoménologie « maximaliste ». Face à ces alternatives, l’approfondissementweilien de l’expérience n’oppose ni la présence et l’absence, ni le fini et l’absolu, mais cherche à éprouver et penser le lien qui les unit, à partir de la structure trinitaire du don del’être. À distance d’une médiation extériorisante comme d’une immanence pure, le processus de (...) révélation n’est jamais négateur du mystère, mais en manifeste au contraire la profondeur. Ainsi, depuis la perception jusqu'à l’amour surnaturel, « évidence » et « mystère »vont toujours de pair, ce qui permet de ne rejeter aucun des niveaux de l’être et de l’expérience. (shrink)

Le travail est-il, quoi qu'on fasse, l'opposé de la liberté et de la " vraie vie ", dont l'humanité pourrait, et devrait parvenir à se libérer? Ou bien est-il une modalité essentielle de l'accomplissement de soi, un lieu essentiel de la vie sociale en même temps que d'une transformation du monde capable de libérer l'homme du règne de la nécessité? La modernité a exalté cette seconde perspective. Mais la crise de la modernité fait resurgir la première, et semble conduire à (...) osciller entre ces représentations opposées. Par rapport à ces tendances souvent enchevêtrées dans le débat contemporain, la pensée de Simone Weil 11909-19431 peut apparaître paradoxale. D'une part, nul n'a davantage qu'elle, à partir de son expérience directe de la condition prolétarienne des années 1930, analysé et dénoncé l'aliénation du travail. Mais d'autre part, aucun autre philosophe n'a sans doute affirmé autant la valeur humaine et spirituelle du travail authentique, et la possibilité réelle d'élaborer une " civilisation " et une " spiritualité " du travail. (shrink)

L'oeuvre du philosophe Paul Gilbert, jésuite belge professeur de métaphysique depuis vingt-cinq ans à l'Université Grégorienne, est considérable et mérite d'être mieux connue. Après avoir étudié les écrits de saint Anselme (Dire l'ineffable, 1984), Paul Gilbert a questionné la métaphysique classique, sous l'influence de la philosophie réflexive (La Simplicité du principe, 1994). Il a ensuite souligné les chances offertes à la réflexion fondamentale par l'analogie, thème classique mais oublié (La Patience d'être, 1996, et Sapere e sperare, 2003). Plus récemment, il (...) a abordé la question de la violence, ce mal- être si commun (Violence et compassion, 2009). En 1997 déjà, son travail a été récompensé du prix Cardinal Mercier de l'U.C.Louvain-la-Neuve. Durant de nombreuses années, Paul Gilbert a été professeur invité à l'Institut catholique de Paris. A l'occasion de son éméritat dans cette institution, un colloque y a été organisé. Dans leurs communications, S. Bonanni, Ph. Capelle-Dumont, S. D'Agostino, E. Gabellieri, J. de Gramont, 1. Malaguti, R. Repole et E. Tourpe reprennent et développent l'élaboration de la pensée de Paul Gilbert. Ce dernier fait écho à chacune d'elles et, dans un exposé final, retrace son propre itinéraire intellectuel. (shrink)

As Emmanuel Levinas states in the preface to Existence and Existents, "this study is a preparatory one. It examines . . . the problem of the Good, time, and the relationship with the other [person] as a movement toward the Good." First published in 1947, and written mostly during Levinas's imprisonment during World War II, this work provides the first sketch of his mature thought later developed fully in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. This (...) new edition marks the first time this important work has been made available in an inexpensive paperback edition. Levinas's project in Existence and Existents is to move from anonymous existence to the emergence of subjectivity; to subjectivity's practice, theory and morality; to its encounter with the alterity of the other person. He is concerned here primarily with the time of the solitary subject; time is the inner structure of subjectivity, of the movement of existing. "Levinas's work," says Alphonso Lingis, "contains not only wholly new analyses of the forms of time of the present, the past, the future but also a new conception of the work of time." Beginning with Existence and Existents, then, it is possible to begin tracing the progressive "alterization" of time as it unfolds across the development of Levinas's entire philosophy. As a "preparatory" study, Existence and Existents introduces the major themes and concerns that occupied Levinas throughout his career. This is essential reading for understanding both Levinas's own philosophy and the developments in philosophical thought in the twentieth century. (shrink)

La question de Dieu dans la pensée de Husserl fut très tôt un objet d'attention pour la recherche phénoménologique, mais la diversité des textes est telle qu'il était nécessaire d'établir le dossier historique relatif à cette question. Bien évidemment, la mise en lumière de l'unité et de la continuité des analyses de Husserl sur Dieu est animée par une interrogation proprement spéculative : quelle place pour Dieu dans une philosophie descriptive qui se veut méthodologiquement athée? A partir du "je" transcendantal, (...) quel est l'accès possible à la pure phénoménalité de Dieu? Si Husserl décrit la transcendance de Dieu comme celle d'une Idée théorique, éthique et téléologique, il ne s'agit pas pour lui de s'en tenir aux reconstructions abstraites de la métaphysique, niais de revenir à l'expérience originaire de Dieu. La réduction phénoménologique ne demande pas de cesser de croire, mais elle rend possible une purification éthique de l'expérience religieuse qui permet d'élucider son sens. En cela, tout le projet contemporain d'un concept non ontologique de Dieu est redevable à Husserl d'avoir fait le premier pas décisif en affranchissant de tout en soi " et en montrant que la transcendance de Dieu ne peut être séparée de la vie intentionnelle dans laquelle elle s'annonce. Husserl ne confond pas pour autant philosophie et théologie, et la compréhension de Dieu comme évidence d'une Idée pratique infinie laisse ouverte la possibilité de la Révélation sans vouloir parler pour elle. (shrink)

Suszko’s problem is the problem of finding the minimal number of truth values needed to semantically characterize a syntactic consequence relation. Suszko proved that every Tarskian consequence relation can be characterized using only two truth values. Malinowski showed that this number can equal three if some of Tarski’s structural constraints are relaxed. By so doing, Malinowski introduced a case of so-called mixed consequence, allowing the notion of a designated value to vary between the premises and the conclusions of an argument. (...) In this article we give a more systematic perspective on Suszko’s problem and on mixed consequence. First, we prove general representation theorems relating structural properties of a consequence relation to their semantic interpretation, uncovering the semantic counterpart of substitution-invariance, and establishing that mixed consequence is fundamentally the semantic counterpart of the structural property of monotonicity. We use those theorems to derive maximum-rank results proved recently in a different setting by French and Ripley, as well as by Blasio, Marcos, and Wansing, for logics with various structural properties. We strengthen these results into exact rank results for nonpermeable logics. We discuss the underlying notion of rank, and the associated reduction proposed independently by Scott and Suszko. As emphasized by Suszko, that reduction fails to preserve compositionality in general, meaning that the resulting semantics is no longer truth-functional. We propose a modification of that notion of reduction, allowing us to prove that over compact logics with what we call regular connectives, rank results are maintained even if we request the preservation of truth-functionality and additional semantic properties. (shrink)

The presupposition triggered by an expression E is generally satisfied by information that comes before rather than after E in the sentence or discourse. In Heim’s classic theory (1983), this left-right asymmetry is encoded in the lexical semantics of dynamic connectives and operators. But several recent analyses offer a more nuanced approach, in which presupposition satisfaction has two separate components: a general principle (which varies from theory to theory) specifies under what conditions a presupposition triggered by an expression E is (...) satisfied; and an ‘incremental’ component specifies that the principle must be checked on the basis of information that comes before E. Several researchers take this incremental component to be a processing bias, which can be overcome at some cost. If so, it should be possible, though costly, to satisfy presuppositions ‘symmetrically’, i.e. by taking into account linguistic material that comes both before and after the presupposition trigger. We test this claim with experimental means. Using inferential (and to some extent acceptability) tasks involving the anaphoric trigger aussi (‘too’) in French, we argue that symmetric readings are indeed possible (albeit degraded) in environments involving the connectives if, or, and unless. (shrink)

La philosophie de la nature de l'Encyclopedie des sciences philosophiques fut, jusqu'a une date recente, presque ignoree par les etudes hegeliennes. Hegel s'y serait rendu coupable d'une pretention a concurrencer les sciences positives sur leur propre terrain et a rivaliser avec elles, en revelant a la fois son incomprehension de la scientificite la mieux etablie et la faible rationalite de son propre projet. Une lecture attentive permet de rectifier ces prejuges, en montrant non seulement que Hegel s'y trouve attentif et (...) respectueux du savoir positif de son temps, mais encore qu'il tente d'y definir les modalites d'une collaboration methodologiquement reglee entre philosophie et sciences. En quoi consiste le projet d'une science speculative? En quoi consiste chez Hegel la deduction speculative de la verite? En quoi consiste la comprehension hegelienne du statut et des formes du discours des sciences de la nature? Quelle attitude la speculation doit-elle adopter face aux controverses scientifiques? C'est a ces questions que s'efforce de repondre cet ouvrage. (shrink)

Over the last decade, businesses, policymakers, and researchers alike have advocated the need for value creation through inter-organizational collaboration. Researchers have widely argued that organizations that are engaged in collaborative processes create value. Because researchers have tended to focus on the identification of organizational motivations and on key success factors for collaboration, however, both the nature and processes of value creation in inter-organizational collaboration have yet to be examined. A recent theory by Austin and Seitanidi :726–758, 2012a; Nonprofit Volunt Sect (...) Q 41:929–968, 2012b) has proposed an analytical framework for analyzing value creation in inter-organizational collaboration, based on four types of value. The purpose of this current study is to empirically test this framework, and to provide key pointers for analyzing the nature of value, particularly in relation to learning. Our detailed empirical research is based on a 6-year retrospective case study of an inter-organizational partnership within an international development project for local economic development in Guatemala. The study’s contributions are twofold. First, it provides evidence of the critical path of the creation of diverse types of values in a collaborative process; second, it links the different types of value creation with the types of learning that occur in an inter-organizational process. (shrink)

La théorie critique de la société, telle qu'elle s'est développée dans le cadre de ce qu'on appelle parfois l'école de Francfort, se caractérise notamment par le fait qu'elle donne toute son importance aux dominations et aux conflits dans son analyse du monde contemporain. L'une de ses figures aujourd'hui centrales, Axel Honneth, est aussi l'auteur de la théorie de la reconnaissance sans doute la plus systématique et riche en perspectives théoriques et critiques. C'est de cette théorie qu'Emmanuel Renault part dans (...) cc livre, tout en lui apportant des inflexions justifiées d'une part par l'histoire de la théorie critique, d'autre part par l'analyse du temps présent. L'analyse de l'imbrication de la reconnaissance, de la domination et du conflit demande une approche spécifique : l'apport du pragmatisme américain et les débats sociologiques contemporains, en particulier Dewey et Bourdieu, complètent ici le modèle hégélien et les intuitions de Marx. Quelques exemples choisis parmi des objets souvent délaissés par les sciences sociales la conduite oppositionnelle d'un groupe de punks squatters, le langage protestataire de jeunes de banlieues populaires mettent à l'épreuve la capacité d'analyse de l'approche proposée par l'auteur, celle d'une philosophie sociale conçue comme une hybridation de la philosophie et des sciences sociales. Une contribution d'importance au coeur des débats les plus actuels."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1996) has exerted a profound influence on 20th-century continental philosophy. This anthology, including Levinas's key philosophical texts over a period of more than forty years, provides an ideal introduction to his thought and offers insights into his most innovative ideas. Five of the ten essays presented here appear in English for the first time. An introduction by Adriaan Peperzak outlines Levinas's philosophical development and the basic themes of his writings. Each essay is accompanied by a brief introduction (...) and notes. This collection is an ideal text for students of philosophy concerned with understanding and assessing the work of this major philosopher. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the new millennium, initiatives known as roundtables have been developed to create voluntary sustainability standards for agricultural commodities. Intended to be private and voluntary in nature, these initiatives claim their legitimacy from their ability to ensure the participation of all categories of stakeholders in horizontal participatory and inclusive processes. This article characterizes the political and material instruments employed as the means of formulating agreement and taking a variety of voices into consideration in these arenas. Referring to (...) the specific case of the “Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil”, I undertake a detailed analysis of the tensions relating to different forms of participation, which create a gap between “local minority voices” and international stakeholders—either non-governmental organizations or industries. Local communities and small-scale farmers face difficulties when making their voices heard in the form of debate proposed. Firstly, some participants attempt to re-impose a vertical hierarchical relationship between small-scale farmers or affected communities and company managers/directors in order to deprive the former of their powers of representation and of being able to transform reality. Secondly, the liberalism of interest groups in the roundtable accords value to experts, global knowledge, strategy, and detachment, at the expense of other capabilities of rooted or attached people who come to defend their real lives with a desire to raise critical issues of injustice. In this context, I highlight the capacity of local NGOs to relieve some of those tensions and to help locally affected communities and small-scale farmers introduce public stages for debates, by accommodating other forms of participation apart from the liberal one. By being close to and by restoring their dignity through a specific work of solicitude and care, local NGOs prepare affected people for public speaking. (shrink)

Introduction: Return to the obvious -- Perception -- Language -- Ontology of the visible -- Conclusion: Toward dia-phenomenology.

Albert Lautman,.philosophe, juif, fusillé par les Nazis pour faits de Résistance comme son ami et collègue Jean Cavaillès, a laissé inachevée une œuvre puissante et dont l'influence s'est fait sentir au-delà de son domaine. Lautman est une figure rare : un philosophe souverain, capable de mobiliser les grands noms de la tradition philosophique, de Platon à Heidegger, et suffisamment averti des mathématiques pour proposer une intelligence de leur développement acceptée des savants. Les membres du groupe Bourbaki ont reconnu en Lautman (...) un auteur exposant adéquatement les mathématiques auxquelles ils contribuaient ; Deleuze se réfère à lui de manière élogieuse ; Badiou, Petitot et Salanskis, notamment, lui font écho ou tentent de le prolonger. On examine ici cette œuvre dense, depuis Essai sur les notions de structure et d'existence en mathématiques et Essai sur l'unité des sciences mathématiques dans leur développement actuel aux textes posthumes, Symétrie et dissymétrie en mathématiques et en physique suivi du Problème du temps, après l'avoir située dans son contexte historique-scientifique. On espère ainsi montrer la profondeur et l'actualité d'une pensée singulière, celle d'un grand rationaliste qui était aussi un métaphysicien. (shrink)

For a long time, Gilbert Simondon’s work was known only as either a philosophy restricted to the problem of technology or as an inspirational source for Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. As Simondon’s thinking is now finally in the process of being recognized in its own right as one of the most original philosophies of the twentieth century, this also entails that some critical work needs to be done to disentangle it from an all too hasty identification with Deleuzian categories. (...) While both Simondon and Deleuze have made crucial contributions towards a theory of differential individuation that significantly diverges from other authors associated with French poststructuralism insofar as they insist on the dynamic and vital dimension of difference, they also differ on crucial points. Whereas Simondon sees the process of becoming as transductive amplification, Deleuze theorizes it as intensifying involution, leading to two notably distinct concepts of difference. (shrink)

A number of multi-stakeholder initiatives and commodity roundtables have been created since the 1990s to respond to the growing criticism of agriculture’s environmental and social impacts. Driven by private and global-scale actors, these initiatives are setting global standards for sustainable agricultural practices. They claim to follow the new standard-making virtues of inclusiveness and consensus and base their legitimacy on their claim of balanced representation of, and participation by, all categories of stakeholders. This principle of representing a wide range of interests (...) with a balance of power is at the heart of a new type of action that forms part of a broader political liberal model for building coalitions of interest groups. The intention of this symposium is to assess the nature of processes and outcomes of this model while paying particular attention to the forms of inclusion and exclusion they generate. In this introduction, we highlight the differences in theoretical approaches to analyzing MSIs and the manifestation of power through them. We distinguish between more traditional political–economy approaches and approaches concerned with ideational and normative power, such as convention theory. We discuss some of the main paradoxes of MSIs related to their willingness to be “inclusive” and at the same time their exclusionary or “closure” effects due in part to interactions with existing political economic contexts and embedded power inequalities, as well as more subtle manifestations of power linked to the favoring of some forms of knowledge and engagement over others. (shrink)

Linguists often sharply distinguish the different modules that support linguistics competence, e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics. However, recent work has identified phenomena in syntax (polarity sensitivity) and pragmatics (implicatures), which seem to rely on semantic properties (monotonicity). We propose to investigate these phenomena and their connections as a window into the modularity of our linguistic knowledge. We conducted a series of experiments to gather the relevant syntactic, semantic and pragmatic judgments within a single paradigm. The comparison between these quantitative data leads (...) us to four main results, (i) Our results support a departure from one element of the classical Gricean approach, thus helping to clarify and settle an empirical debate. This first outcome also confirms the soundness of the methodology, as the results align with standard contemporary accounts of scalar implicature (SI), (ii) We confirm that the formal semantic notion of monotonicity underlies negative polarity item (NPI) syntactic acceptability, but (iii) our results indicate that the notion needed is perceived monotonicity. We see results (ii) and (iii) as the main contribution of this study: (ii) provides an empirical interpretation and confirmation of one of the insights of the model-theoretic approach to semantics, while (iii) calls for an incremental, cognitive implementation of the current generalizations, (iv) Finally, our results do not indicate that the relationship between NPI acceptability and monotonicity is mediated by pragmatic features related to Sis: this tells against elegant attempts to unify polarity sensitivity and Sis (pioneered by Krifka and Chierchia). These results illustrate a new methodology for integrating theoretically rigorous work in formal semantics with an experimentally-grounded cognitively-oriented view of linguistic competence. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most important figures of twentieth-century philosophy. Exerting a profound influence upon such thinkers as Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot, and Irigaray, Levinas's work bridges several major gaps in the evolution of continental philosophy--between modern and postmodern, phenomenology and poststructuralism, ethics and ontology. He is credited with having spurred a revitalized interest in ethics-based philosophy throughout Europe and America. _Entre Nous_ (Between Us) is the culmination of Levinas's philosophy. Published in France a few years before his (...) death, it gathers his most important work and reveals the development of his thought over nearly forty years of committed inquiry. Along with several trenchant interviews published here, these essays engage with issues of suffering, love, religion, culture, justice, human rights, and legal theory. Taken together, they constitute a key to Levinas's ideas on the ethical dimensions of otherness. Working from the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Levinas pushed beyond the limits of their framework to argue that it is ethics, not ontology, that orients philosophy, and that responsibility precedes reasoning. Ethics for Levinas means responsibility in relation to difference. Throughout his work, Levinas returns to the metaphor of the face of the other to discuss how and where responsibility enters our lives and makes philosophy necessary. For Levinas, ethics begins with our face to face interaction with another person--seeing that person not as a reflection of one's self, nor as a threat, but as different and greater than self. Levinas moves the reader to recognize the implications of this interaction: our abiding responsibility for the other, and our concern with the other's suffering and death. Situated at the crossroads of several philosophical schools and approaches, Levinas's work illuminates a host of critical issues and has found resonances among students and scholars of literature, law, religion, and politics. _Entre Nous_ is at once the apotheosis of his work and an accessible introduction to it. In the end, Levinas's urgent meditations upon the face of the other suggest a new foundation upon which to grasp the nature of good and evil in the tangled skein of our lives. (shrink)

La réflexion sur le positivisme juridique est au cœur d'interrogations importantes concernant la portée des règles de droit, la nature de l'Etat et les relations entre droit et morale. L'examen des présupposés et des thèses philosophiques de la Théorie pure du droit de Hans Kelsen et du Concept de droit d'Herbert Hart permet de s'orienter dans ces débats. Les deux auteurs proposent des théories distinctes d'une même réalité : la mise en vigueur, dans des collectivités, de règles possédant une forme (...) d'objectivité. Leurs descriptions du fonctionnement des systèmes juridiques obligent à reconduire à ses fondements l'examen de la nature et de la connaissance des normes. De ce fait, la comparaison des doctrines doit permettre de mieux comprendre, en particulier, l'articulation entre le registre du devoir-être et la prise en compte de la réalité de la vie sociale organisée par le droit. (shrink)

Internationally renowned as one of the great French philosophers of the twentieth century, the late Emmanuel Levinas remains a pivotal figure across the humanistic disciplines for his insistence--against the grain of Western philosophical tradition--on the primacy of ethics in philosophical investigation. This first English translation of a series of twelve essays known as _Alterity and Transcendence_ offers a unique glimpse of Levinas defining his own place in the history of philosophy. Published by a mature thinker between 1967 and 1989, (...) these works exhibit a refreshingly accessible perspective that seasoned admirers and newcomers will appreciate. In today's world, where religious conceptions of exalted higher powers are constantly called into question by theoretical investigation and by the powerful influence of science and technology on our understanding of the universe, has the notion of transcendence been stripped of its significance? In Levinas's incisive model, transcendence is indeed alive--not in any notion of our relationship to a mysterious, sacred realm but in the idea of our worldly, subjective relationships to others. Without presupposing an intimate knowledge of the history of philosophy, Levinas explores the ways in which Plotinus, Descartes, Husserl, and Heidegger have encountered the question of transcendence. In discourses on the concepts of totality and infinity, he locates his own thinking in the context of pre-Socratic philosophers, Aristotle, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, and Descartes. Always centering his discussions on the idea of interpersonal relations as the basis of transcendence, Levinas reflects on the rights of individuals (and how they are inextricably linked to those of others), the concept of peace, and the dialogic nature of philosophy. Finally, in interviews conducted by Christian Chabanis and Angelo Bianchi, Levinas responds to key questions not directly addressed in his writings. Throughout, _Alterity and Transcendence_ reveals a commitment to ethics as first philosophy--obliging modern thinkers to investigate not merely the true but the good. (shrink)

This book starts off from a philosophical premise: nobody can be in the world unless they are born into the world.

A la fin du XVIIIe siècle, la philosophie, dans un débat autour de l'héritage de Kant, s'autodétermine comme système de la liberté, pour achever la révolution copernicienne, et accéder, dans le système du savoir, au concept, à la conscience de soi. La liberté s'affirme comme identité du penser et de l'être. Schelling est alors inspiré d'une part par Spinoza, et d'autre part par Kant et Fichte.

Les religions sont-elles condamnées à s'opposer et à être source de conflits en raison de la diversité et du caractère souvent contradictoire de leurs doctrines? Lorsqu'elles sont missionnaires et prétendent détenir la vérité sur Dieu, le monde et l'homme, le caractère systématique de leurs énoncés théologiques et juridiques qui excluent les autres systèmes ne redouble-t-il pas ces conflits? Comment dans ces conditions le dialogue interreligieux pourrait-il aller au-delà des rencontres et du dialogue de vie? Peut-on penser du point de vue (...) théologique une ouverture à l'autre qui assoie l'unité entre les religions, leur communion et leur réconciliation au niveau de la doctrine sans obliger chacune à renoncer aux énoncés de sa foi?0Pour envisager ces questions fondamentales qui concernent tous les acteurs impliqués dans le dialogue interreligieux ou la théologie du pluralisme religieux, plusieurs théologiens ont interrogé George Lindbeck afin d'évaluer si les principes qu'il avance pour repenser l'oecuménisme sont transposables au niveau de l'interreligieux. En effet, conscient de l'enjeu des différences doctrinales entre les Églises chrétiennes, Lindbeck a questionné la nature d'une doctrine et a proposé un modèle post-libéral privilégiant la praxis, l'articulation entre l'action et le langage, la réactivation et la réadaptation constante des identités. Ces recherches montrent qu'en dépit de bien des limites de son modèle, on trouve chez le théologien luthérien une approche originale et féconde pour répondre à bien des défis contemporains. (shrink)

BackgroundThe safety of sleeping pills has increased dramatically during the last 100 years, from barbiturates to bensodiazepines to modern day so-called Z-drugs.MethodsThe circumstances of prescribing sleeping pills in the early 20th century are illustrated by summarizing the main storyline of a novel by Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg. This is followed by a thought experiment and a theoretical discussion.ResultsIn his 1937 novel Sömnlös (Swedish for sleepless) Vilhelm Moberg portrayed existential and relational distress in relation to insomnia. In a thought experiment, past (...) progresses in sleeping pills safety are projected into the future. Thereby, it is claimed that important issues in the area of philosophy of medicine come to the fore. This leads to a theoretical discussion about broader questions concerning the role of the physician, the goals of medicine (as described by Lennart Nordenfelt), the concept of pharmaceuticalisation (as described notably by sociologist of sleep Simon J. Williams and co-workers), and health enhancement (c.f. Carl Elliott and the alleged wish to be better than well).ConclusionInsomnia is a prism through which important philosophical and sociological questions related to the practice of medicine can be asked. (shrink)

According to Wiredu, the Akan profess secular esteem rather than religious worship to supra-natural beings, who they perceive in an empirical sense. He backs this up by re-reading what he sees as the Akan general ontology in a way that denies them of the concepts of the supernatural, the transcendental, the mental, the spiritual, and an ontologically distinct mind. At the end of denying the three criteria of worship as well as all of these other concepts which might otherwise be (...) available to the Akan, one might struggle to find any evidence that the Akan even had a religion. I dispute this secular reading, and I more generally demonstrate that the characterizations of the Akan attitude to divinity as non-worshipping, non-supernatural, non-transcendent, and non-spiritual, are either conceptually flawed, factually incorrect, or both. (shrink)

Shareholder activism has become a force for good in the extant corporate governance literature. In this article, we present a case study of Nigeria to show how shareholder activism, as a corporate governance mechanism, can constitute a space for unhealthy politics and turbulent politicking, which is a reflection of the country’s brand of politics. As a result, we point out some translational challenges, and suggest more caution, in the diffusion of corporate governance practices across different institutional environments. We contribute to (...) the literature on corporate governance in Africa, whilst creating an understanding of the political embeddedness of shareholder activism in different institutional contexts—i.e. a step closer to a political theorising of shareholder activism. (shrink)

Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work. -/- Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western (...) attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy, developing a novel genealogy of both visual studies and the concept of the medium. Alloa reconstructs the earliest Western media theory—Aristotle’s concept of the diaphanous milieu of vision—and the significance of its subsequent erasure in the history of science. Ultimately, he argues for a historically informed phenomenology of images and visual media that explains why images are not simply referential depictions, windows onto the world. Instead, images constantly reactivate the power of appearing. As media of visualization, they allow things to appear that could not be visible except in and through these very material devices. (shrink)

Wiredu’s call for democracy by consensus is illustrated by his description of traditional African consensual rationality. This description contains the attribution of immanence to African consensual rationality. This paper objects to this doctrine of immanence. More importantly, the doctrine of immanence has led to the attribution of pure rationality to traditional African consensual practices. With reference to Aristotle’s three components of persuasion, I object to deliberation as purely rational and impervious to extraneous factors. I further argue that it is because (...) deliberation is not always perfectly rational that the process of consensus can suffer three forms of social conformity: conformity to dominant players, to numerical opinion majority, and to group-centrism. These forms of conformity mean that a consensus task order could lead to decisions of more inclusive value, but not necessarily decisions of more epistemic value. The concept of agonistic inquiry is employed to tackle what I see as the dangers of conformity and complacency in the project of inclusivity, and this is to strike a crucial balance between too-consensual and purely adversarial forms of deliberation. (shrink)

This article examines the controversy that has arisen in the last decade about Michel Foucault’s supposed “fascination” with neoliberalism, especially around the contributions of Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent. Their theses are contrasted with Foucauldian writings and reconsidered from a different approach to the historical, political and intellectual context of the French 1970s, which, in our opinion, shows a lack of complexity in the studies of those authors. Thus, this paper tries to establish that the limitations of Michel Foucault’s (...) approach to neoliberalism do not respond to any sort of neoliberal “sympathies”, but to another kind of problems-mainly analytical-. (shrink)

Preoccupation with multiparty aggregative democracy in Africa has produced superficial forms of political/electoral choice-making by subjects that deepen pre-existing ethnic and primordial cleavages. This is because the principles of the multiparty system presuppose that decision-making through voting should be the result of a mere aggregation of pre-existing, fixed preferences. To this kind of decision-making, I propose deliberative democracy as a supplementary approach. My reason is that deliberation, beyond mere voting, should be central to decisionmaking and that, for a decision to (...) be legitimate, it must be preceded by deliberation, not merely the aggregation of pre-existing fixed preferences. I agree with arguments that when adequate justifications are made for claims/demands/conclusions, deliberation has the potential to have a salutary effect on people’s opinions, transform/evolve preferences, better inform judgments/voting, lead to increasingly ‘common good’ decisions, have moral educative power, place more burden of account-giving on public officers, and furnish subjects/losers/outvoted with justifications for collectively binding decisions. I argue that a deliberative turn in politics in Africa will have a mitigating effect on tribal and money politics. (shrink)

This article examines new patterns of workplace inequality that emerge as transgender people are incorporated into the global labor market. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 41 transgender call center employees in the Philippines, I develop the concept “purple-collar labor” to describe how transgender workers—specifically trans women—are clustered, dispersed, and segregated in the workplace and how their patterned locations in social organizational structures serve a particular value-producing function. These patterned inclusions, I argue, come with explicit and implicit interactional expectations about how (...) “trans” should be put to work in the expansion and accumulation of global capital. In this way, the study examines the production and extraction of queer value and the folding of trans women’s gendered performances into commercial exchange. Data show how the affective labor of transgender employees is used to help foster productivity, ease workplace tensions, and boost employee morale. This study of transgender employment experiences opens new lines of inquiry for understanding gender inequalities at work, and it builds on scholarship that combines political economy approaches with transgender studies. (shrink)

Kant’s emphasis on the immorality of lying even to a murderer at the door who is asking about a victim hidden inside has drawn criticism ever since. The example originally given by Constant has been read as the thread of morality by totalitarian ruthlessness. In order to defend the importance of Kant’s moral philosophy, many critics have tried to update his position by taking into account the threat of modern totalitarianism. Nonetheless, this article tries to argue that Kant is right, (...) especially since the rise of post-truth politics. Sincerity towards oneself and towards others remains the basis of democracy: we have to admit what seems to be the truth regardless of our feelings about it. (shrink)

Dialectics, especially Engels’s dialectics of nature, is nowadays mostly held in low esteem, even by Marxist scholars because of its Stalinist dogmatisation over the past century. The aim of this comparative review is to show some stakes and prospects, in Marxism and for Marxism, of the debate: the two reviewed books show how the dialectics of nature could, and why it should be considered in a renewed materialist approach to the natural sciences, and provides the reader with complementary outline from (...) the cognitive sciences to physics, via mathematics. (shrink)

ObjectivesIn 2015, the Province of Quebec, Canada passed a law that allowed voluntary active euthanasia. Palliative care stakeholders in Canada have been largely opposed to euthanasia, yet there is little research about their views. The research question guiding this study was the following: How do palliative care physicians in Quebec position themselves regarding the practice of VAE in the context of the new provincial legislation?MethodsWe used interpretive description, an inductive methodology to answer research questions about clinical practice. A total of (...) 18 palliative care physicians participated in semistructured interviews at two university-affiliated hospitals in Quebec.ResultsParticipants positioned themselves in opposition to euthanasia. Their justifications were framed within their professional commitment to not hasten death, which sat in tension with the value of patients’ autonomy to choose how to die. Participants described VAE as unacceptable if it impeded opportunities to evaluate and alleviate suffering. Further, they contested government rhetoric that positioned VAE as a way to improve end-of-life care. Participants felt that VAE would diminish the potential of palliative care to relieve suffering. Dilemmas were apparent in their narratives, about reconciling respect for patient autonomy with broader palliative care values, and the value of accompanying and not abandoning patients who make requests for VAE while being committed to neither prolonging nor hastening death.ConclusionsThis study provides insight into nuanced positions of experienced palliative care physicians in Quebec and confirms expected tensions between an important stakeholder and the practice of VAE as guided by the new legislation. (shrink)

** This piece was originally titled "Beyond Borders: Exploring Ubuntu as a Lived Philosophy" but was later retitled "African thought can rescue Western philosophy" by the publisher. ** -/- Western philosophy is often abstract and disconnected from the real ethical problems we face today. Emmanuel Chiwetalu Ossai and Lloyd Strickland argue that the African philosophy of ubuntu, with its emphasis on community, interconnectedness, and practical application of ethical principles, offers a compelling alternative.

Given a consequence relation in many-valued logic, what connectives can be defined? For instance, does there always exist a conditional operator internalizing the consequence relation, and which form should it take? In this paper, we pose this question in a multi-premise multi-conclusion setting for the class of so-called intersective mixed consequence relations, which extends the class of Tarskian relations. Using computer-aided methods, we answer extensively for 3-valued and 4-valued logics, focusing not only on conditional operators, but also on what we (...) call Gentzen-regular connectives. For arbitrary N-valued logics, we state necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of such connectives in a multi-premise multi-conclusion setting. The results show that mixed consequence relations admit all classical connectives, and among them pure consequence relations are those that admit no other Gentzen-regular connectives. Conditionals can also be found for a broader class of intersective mixed consequence relations, but with the exclusion of order-theoretic consequence relations. (shrink)