Les travaux de Patrice Bret occupent une place centrale en histoire des sciences et en histoire des techniques. Ce livre entend les mettre à l'honneur, qu'il s'agisse de l'histoire des savoirs académiques, du régime techno-politique du XVIIIe siècle, des interactions entre savants et praticiens à l'heure de la chimie lavoisienne, des circulations culturelles et des traductions ou encore de la place des femmes de sciences. Les contributions réunies dans ce volume illustrent, par leur diversité, l'influence de Patrice (...) Bret dans la communauté historienne. Nous proposons ainsi de mettre en perspective son oeuvre en la replaçant dans un contexte intellectuel, scientifique et épistémologique. Un constat s'impose : loin de distinguer entre les approches conceptuelles, érudites et méthodologiques, Patrice Bret joue un rôle de premier plan dans un milieu scientifique qui a choisi de conjuguer le renouvellement des questionnements avec la production d'instruments de recherche et les interrogations de repérage, de dénomination, d'identification, seules à même de contrer les récits téléologiques qui ont longtemps prévalu dans ce domaine. Si l'histoire des sciences et l'histoire des techniques sont de nos jours à l'avant-poste du renouvellement de la science historique, c'est aussi grâce au rôle de passeur de Patrice Bret. (shrink)

Parent pauvre de la formation polytechnicienne à l’époque de Poincaré, la chimie resta en dehors des centres d’intérêt du savant malgré l’importance sociale qu’elle acquit à la fin du xixe siècle. Le mathématicien, physicien et philosophie y fut confronté assez fortuitement en 1907 comme président de la Commission scientifique d’étude des poudres de guerre créée après l’explosion du cuirassé Iéna car Marcellin Berthelot, qui avait été pressenti comme éminent spécialiste des poudres et explosifs mourut dans l’intervalle. Dans un contexte international (...) tendu entre la France et l’Allemagne depuis l’annexion de l’Alsace-Moselle en 1871 et alors que la crise marocaine relança l’esprit de revanche, cet accident catastrophique porta un rude coup à la confiance du pays dans ses moyens de défense. Le gouvernement jugea alors que seul Poincaré avait l’autorité scientifique nécessaire pour rassurer l’opinion publique sur la sécurité des poudres sans fumée issues de l’industrie chimique inventées par son camarade de promotion Paul Vieille et maintenir l’ennemi à distance. Les archives de la Commission et la correspondance administrative de Poincaré témoignent de son investissement. Sa correspondance personnelle avec Henry Le Chatelier, autre ingénieur X-Mines spécialiste des poudres et explosifs, permet de mieux cerner son appréhension des problèmes complexes posés par les nouvelles poudres et de dévoiler sa stratégie pour contourner les blocages institutionnels dus à la rivalité entre le service producteur des Poudres et salpêtres et les services consommateurs de l’Artillerie et la Marine et aux attaques contre le monopole des poudres de la part des industriels et de leurs partisans au Parlement. (shrink)

(1993). Le Dernier des procédés révolutionnaires: La fabrication et l'expertise de la Poudre Ronde (1795–1830) Annals of Science: Vol. 50, No. 4, pp. 325-347.

Le Dépôt général de la Guerre, chargé de fournir les cartes nécessaires aux armées, connut sous la Révolution une période d'instabilité. La politique ambitieuse de Calon, son directeur, se heurta à la rivalité d'autres institutions civiles et militaires. Une période de lente reconstruction s'ouvrit avec le pouvoir napoléonien qui posa les bases rationnelles de la cartographie moderne et mit fin à la précarité du statut des ingénieurs-géographes en militarisant leur corps. La création simultanée d'une Ecole d'application des ingénieurs-geographes assura dès (...) lors une formation cohérente et de haut niveau dans le sillage de l'Ecole polytechnique, remplaçant les cours créés au Dépôt par Calon qui avaient jusqu'alors conservé jalousement leur autonomie. Puissant, qui y fut pendant vingt ans le professeur de mathématiques, introduisit l'analyse à l'école. Son oeuvre fut consacrée par son élection à l'Académie des Sciences au siège de Laplace et par le succès de la nouvelle carte de France au 1/80 000. L'ensemble de la période est marqué par la prise de conscience des enjeux de la géographie, par la mise en place des outils scientifiques de la cartographie et par la professionnalisation des ingénieurs-géographes. Disposant de son école et de son journal au même titre que les grands corps techniques, le Dépôt général de la Guerre était alors, entre l'Ecole polytechnique et le Bureau des Longitudes, une institution savante reconnue par la communauté scientifique.The Dépôt général de la Guerre, in charge of military mapping, experienced a period of change during the French Revolution. The new trends which then arose are explored here. Firstly, its director Calon failed in setting up an ambitious policy for geography, which challenged other civilian or military institutions. The courses he instituted to train surveyors collapsed. A time of slow reconstruction followed under Napoleonic rule, when the rational bases of modern cartography were laid as the ingénieurs-géographes were given a firm military status. In fact, a training school was created within the Ecole Polytechnique system, instead of the obsolete independent training courses. Henceforth, a high-level, coherent education was provided. Puissant, who was to teach mathematics there for twenty years, introduced analysis into the new school. His geodesic work was honoured by his succeeding Laplace at the Académie des Sciences, and by the success of the new 1:80 000 map of France. Eventually, the awareness of the importance of geography, the establishment of modern scientific tools in cartography, and the professionalization of the ingénieurs-géographes mark the whole period. The Dépôt général de la Guerre had its own school and journal, like any other corps of the technical Establishment. Thus it was a true scientific institution between the Ecole Polytechnique and the Bureau des Longitudes, and the scientific community recognized it as such. (shrink)

SUMMARYEighteenth-century scientific translation was not just a linguistic or intellectual affair. It included numerous material aspects requiring a social organization to marshal the indispensable human and non-human actors. Paratexts and actors' correspondences provide a good observatory to get information about aspects such as shipments and routes, processes of translation and language acquisition, texts acquisition and dissemination.The nature of scientific translation changed in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Beside solitary translators, it also happened to become a collective (...) enterprise, dedicated to providing abridgements or enriching the learned journals with full translations of the most recent foreign texts. That new trend clearly had a decisive influence on the nature of the scientific press itself. A way to set up science as a social activity in the provincial capital of Dijon, translation required a local and international network for acquiring the linguistic and scientific expertise, along with the original texts, as quickly as possible. Laboratory results and mineralogical observations were used to compare material facts with those described in the original text. By providing a double kind of validation – with both the experiments and the translations – the laboratory thus happened to play a major role in translation. (shrink)

Marie-Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville (1720-1805), aujourd’hui méconnue, a pourtant laissé des œuvres scientifiques et littéraires appréciées en son temps. Rien ne destinait cette femme de la noblesse financière et parlementaire, souffrant d’une éducation négligée et mariée à l’âge de 14 ans, à se passionner pour des domaines aussi variés que la physique, la chimie, la médecine, la botanique, la littérature, la morale, les langues ou encore l’histoire. C’est ce parcours atypique et ses motivat...

With limited resources and attention, managers have sought ways to categorize and prioritize stakeholders. The underlying assumption is that some stakeholders matter more than others. However, in the information age, stakeholders are increasingly interconnected, where a firm’s actions toward one stakeholder are visible to others and can affect members of the stakeholder ecosystem. Actions by a firm toward any of its stakeholders can signal its trustworthiness and determine to what degree other stakeholders will assume vulnerability and engage in future exchange (...) relationships. In this conceptual article, I present a model of stakeholder connectedness and describe the conditions in which a firm’s actions toward one stakeholder can build or erode trust across stakeholders. This work contributes to current tensions in stakeholder theory by elucidating how the treatment of a single stakeholder, or a narrow group of stakeholders, can have cascading effects on a broader group of stakeholders. (shrink)

Lorsque le couple se divise, comment l’enfant issu de celui-ci est-il impliqué dans les processus conflictuels? Nous montrerons la fonction de « porte-dépouille » que l’enfant est appelé à prendre en charge, selon la structure inconsciente de l’organisation de chaque type « d’objetcouple ».

The problem of the will has long been viewed as central to Heidegger's later thought. In the first book to focus on this problem, Bret W. Davis clarifies key issues from the philosopher's later period--particularly his critique of the culmination of the history of metaphysics in the technological "will to will" and the possibility of Gelassenheit or "releasement" from this willful way of being in the world--but also shows that the question of will is at the very heart of (...) Heidegger's thinking, a pivotal issue in his path from Being and Time (1926) to "Time and Being" (1962). Moreover, the book demonstrates why popular critical interpretations of Heidegger's relation to the will are untenable, how his so-called "turn" is not a simple "turnaround" from voluntarism to passivism. Davis explains why the later Heidegger's key notions of "non-willing" and " Gelassenheit " do not imply a mere abandonment of human action; rather, they are signposts in a search for an other way of being, a "higher activity" beyond the horizon of the will. While elucidating this search, his work also provides a critical look at the ambiguities, tensions, and inconsistencies of Heidegger's project, and does so in a way that allows us to follow the inner logic of the philosopher's struggles. As meticulous as it is bold, this comprehensive reinterpretation will change the way we think about Heidegger's politics and about the thrust of his philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

Every statement about language is also a statement by and about psyche. Guided by this primary assumption, and inspired by the works of Carl Jung, in _Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language_, Bret Alderman delves deep into the symbolic and symptomatic dimensions of a deconstructive postmodernism infatuated with semiotics and the workings of linguistic signs. This book offers an important exploration of linguistic reference and representation through a Jungian understanding of symptom and symbol, using techniques including amplification, dream (...) interpretation, and symbolic attitude. Focusing on Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty, Alderman examines the common belief that words and their meaning are grounded purely in language, instead envisioning a symptomatic expression of alienation and collective dissociation. Drawing upon the nascent field of ecopsychology, the modern disciplines of phenomenology and depth psychology, and the ancient knowledge of myth and animistic cosmologies, Alderman dares us to re-imagine some of the more sacrosanct concepts of the contemporary intellectual milieu informed by semiotics and the linguistic turn. Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of depth psychology. However, the interdisciplinary approach of the work ensures that it will also be of great interest to those researching and studying in the areas of ethology, ecopsychology, philosophy, linguistics and mythology. (shrink)

Shahriar S. Afshar claimed that his 2007 modified version of the double-slit experiment violates complementarity. He makes two modifications to the standard double-slit experiment. First, he adds a wire grid that is placed in between the slits and the screen at locations of interference minima. The second modification is to place a converging lens just after the wire grid. The idea is that the wire grid implies the existence of interference minima, while the lens can simultaneously obtain which-way information. More (...) recently, Cramer argued that the experiment bolstered the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum mechanics. His argument scrutinizes Bohr’s complementarity in favor of TIQM. We analyze this experiment by simulation using the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and find that it agrees with the wave-particle duality relation given by Englert, Greenberg and Yasin. We conclude that the use of Afshar’s experiment to provide a testbed for quantum mechanical interpretations is limited. (shrink)

In this paper, I evaluate recently defended mechanistic accounts of the unity of neuroscience from a metaphysical point of view. Considering the mechanistic framework in general , I argue that explanations of this kind are essentially reductive . The reductive character of mechanistic explanations provides a sufficiency criterion, according to which the mechanism underlying a certain phenomenon is sufficient for the latter. Thus, the concept of supervenience can be used in order to describe the relation between mechanisms and phenomena . (...) Against this background, I show that the mechanistic framework is subject to the causal exclusion problem and faces the classical metaphysical options when it comes to the relations obtaining between different levels of mechanisms . Finally, an attempt to improve the metaphysics of mechanisms is made and further difficulties are pointed out. (shrink)

Recently, scholars have argued that disclosure of personal information is an effective mechanism for building high-quality relationships. However, personal information can focus attention on differences in demographically diverse teams. In an experiment using 37 undergraduate teams, we examine how sharing personal information by ethnically similar and ethnically distinct newcomers to a team affects team perceptions, performance, and behavior. Our findings indicate that the disclosure of personal information by ethnically distinct newcomers improves team performance. However, the positive impact on team performance (...) comes at a cost to the newcomers, who are perceived as less competent by others and experience heightened social discomfort in team interactions. Ironically, what benefits the ethnically diverse team may undermine its ethnically distinct members. This study highlights how the management of diversity may sometimes require making trade-offs between individual interests and those of the team. (shrink)

Authors sometimes treat the promise of de-extinction as a forgone conclusion. But if we take Kasperbauer’s approach and assess the moral acceptability of de-extinction by weighting benefits to species against the suffering of individuals, the promise of de-extinction deserves greater critical attention. Accepting de-extinct individuals as replacements for extinct predecessors assumes species are separate from environment and can be reduced to DNA. In this response to Kasperbauer’s essay, I examine how the acceptability of de-extinction might shift if we instead view (...) species as the persistence of processes—the successful know-how of living in relation to other unfolding processes. (shrink)

In a fast-paced and interconnected global economy, a crisis is an eventuality for most organizations. Leading during a crisis can be particularly challenging because a crisis can disrupt a firm’s purpose, undermine the motivation of employees, and can encourage unethical behavior. In this article, I focus on managing a crisis of purpose. I articulate a framework that elaborates ways in which leaders find and pursue ethical purposes during times of crisis and why these specific purposes motivate employees and encourage organizational (...) resilience. Drawing on modern scholars’ theory of eudaimonia, I propose that leaders can find ethical purposes by framing crisis as opportunities for growth, authenticity, meaning and excellence. When leaders establish and pursue ethical purposes, they can motivate individuals and promote organizational resilience. (shrink)

Educating young people about how to interact with patients at the end of their lives is challenging. A qualitative study based on Husserl’s phenomenological approach was performed to describe the learning experience of secondary education students after watching, analysing, and reflecting on two videoclips featuring Cameron Duncan, a young man suffering from terminal cancer. Students from three vocational centres providing training in ancillary nursing, pharmacy, and dependent care in the Community of Madrid visited the Palliative Care Hospital. A total of (...) 110 students, with a median age of nineteen years, participated in the study. The students’ learning experience through the videoclips reveals the essential aspects required in palliative care, since the character suffers in every dimension of his being: physically as well as psychologically, socially, and spiritually. Therefore, this requires healthcare professionals to understand their experience, putting themselves in their place, to provide affectionate care and to display communication skills leading to a quality helping relationship. Four comprehensive educational categories were identified in the study. The students learned the importance of: 1) providing comprehensive and affectionate care to patients, 2) the need for communication skills in caring for patients, 3) being aware of the end of life and time left, 4) valuing life and fighting for what one wishes to attain. A visit to a PC hospital and the viewing of videoclips and reflection upon these, represents a useful strategy for secondary education healthcare students. The study indicates that videoclips are an innovative method for becoming aware of the various issues pertaining to palliative care. (shrink)

Departing from Bourdieu's collective habitus, this essay develops a theory of the subjectivity of habitus, meaning the social-psychological processes comprising the agent and fueling deliberation. By incorporating George Ainslie's theory of the will and deliberation as the intertemporal bargaining of a population of interests, I theorize the “saturated agent” composed of an economy of interests, analogous to Bourdieu's “economy of practices” invested and saturated with cultural capital. Here culturally saturated interests negotiate strategically within the agent, with the ending balance constituting (...) the habitus. Additionally, reflexivity becomes amenable to habitus as “desaturation” or suspending the commitment to a set of culturally saturated interests as a result of a crisis, followed by “resaturation”, the restructuring of the economy of interests. (shrink)

Recognition is not only a response to social pathologies. It is also an unstable and often ambivalent relationship that has its own pathologies. Owing to the intertwining between recognition and power, certain forms of recognition turn out to be forms of alienation in or from the world. Such pathologies affect inter-individual recognition as well as the recognition between individuals and the socio-political institutions. The article proposes a joint reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right, which provide norms (...) for identifying and dealing with these pathologies. The norm for inter-individual recognition is set out in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the norm for state/citizen recognition in the Philosophy of Right. The analysis envisages two other aspects of recognition: the interference of the ‘I–Me’ with the ‘I–You’ relationship and the incorporation of the ‘I–We’ into the ‘We–Us' dimension of recognition. As regards the interpretation of Hegel’s practical philosophy, the article analyses the link between Hegel’s concept of recognition and his theory of action. In this view, the highest form of recognition has more to do with reconciliation – reconciliation between human beings, reconciliation with the ‘finitude of action’ – than with the problematic of individual and collective identity. (shrink)

Critics often take conservationists to task for delivering a constant barrage of bad news without offering a compelling vision of the future. Could recent advances in synthetic biology—an optimistic, forward‐looking field with a can‐do attitude—let conservationists develop a new vision and generate some better news? Synthetic biology and related gene‐editing applications could be used to address threats to species. Genetic interventions might also be used in plants to better protect biodiversity in U.S. rangelands and forests. One possibility has stood out (...) in its ability to capture media attention and the public imagination—recreating extinct species. And perhaps a de‐extinction story could counter the seemingly relentless negativity in biodiversity talk. De‐extinction proponent Stewart Brand writes that resurrecting species could shift the “conservation story … from negative to positive, from constant whining and guilt‐tripping to high fives and new excitement.” So, why do many people in conservation oppose the de‐extinction narrative? This essay is an inquiry into whether there are intrinsic social reactions to these types of conservation solutions that might offset their potential benefits. If genetic tools are to be applied to address conservation issues in a realistic and responsible way, their broader social‐cultural implications deserve far more attention than they have so far received. (shrink)

In a recent article, P.G. Christiansen has strenuously questioned the communis opinio that Claudian was an immigrant from the Greek-speaking eastern Empire. Although Christiansen injects a healthy skepticism into the debate about Claudian's biography, his arguments in favor of Claudian being a native Latin speaker are flawed or unpersuasive. The only relevant external evidence indicates that in the centuries after Claudian's death he was considered an Egyptian. The evidence in Claudian's poems – the unique passing reference to Nilus noster in (...) carm. min. 19, the invocation the symbols of Egypt at the end of carm. min. 22, and Claudian's claim in carm. min. 41 that his first public Latin composition occured in 395 c.e. – suggest an eastern origin. The example of the inscription to Cronius Eusebius suggests that the bilingualism in the inscription to Claudian could point to a personal connection with Greek. Since the positive case for a western origin can be neither supported on linguistic or textual grounds, and recent research has shown that high levels of Latinity were possible for contemporary authors in the eastern Empire, the case for a western origin is decisively weaker than that supporting an origin in Egypt. (shrink)

This chapter examines the six forms that the teaching of emptiness takes in Zen. Before doing this, the chapter comments briefly on Zen's relation to the doctrinal sources upon which it critically and creatively draws. The Zen tradition understands itself to be based on Śākyamuni Buddha's profoundest teaching of Mahāyāna Buddhism, which has been passed down not through texts and doctrines but by way of face‐to‐face acknowledgment of awakening. The six rubrics which the notion of emptiness is used in the (...) Zen tradition are lack of ownbeing, formlessness of ultimate reality, distinctionless state of meditative consciousness, no‐mind in the action of non‐action, emptiness (or emptying) of emptiness, and emptiness of words. Each of the six rubrics contains a cluster of closely related teachings. Moreover, there are certainly many interconnections, and arguably some tensions, among the rubrics. (shrink)

As the central figure of the third generation of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy, UEDA Shizuteru 上田閑照 has not only followed in the footsteps of his predecessors, NISHIDA Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and NISHITANI Keiji 西谷啓治, but has taken several strides forward in their shared pursuit of what can be called a “philosophy of Zen.” The “of” in this phrase should be understood as a “double genitive,” that is, in both its objective and subjective senses. Ueda not only philosophizes about (...) Zen, he also philosophizes from Zen. Like Nishida and Nishitani before him, he has devoted himself to the practice of Zen as well as to the study of Western philosophy. However, what does it mean to speak, much less philosophize, about Zen experience? Ueda has in fact concentrated much of his attention on questions concerning the relation between Zen and philosophy or, more generally, between experience and language. Any development of a “philosophy of Zen,” Ueda recognizes, must begin with the question of what it means to “speak of experience.” What does it mean to express, that is, to speak from and about experience? This question has been at the heart of Ueda’s philosophical path from the beginning. His many works on this topic include a seminal early essay “Zen and Language,” later re-titled “The Language of Zen”, articles written in German including “Awakening in Zen Buddhism as a Word-Event”, and a recent article, “Language in a Twofold World,” which Ueda put together to represent his thought in a major anthology of Japanese philosophy. In these and other works, Ueda convincingly demonstrates that the question of the relation between language and experience has always been a pivotal issue for the Zen tradition itself. He also shows how this tradition can help us, in the wake of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, to return afresh to this fundamental question. (shrink)

As we attempt to engender a dialogue between different philosophical traditions, one of the first of the topics which need to be addressed is that of the very nature of dialogue. In other words, we need to engage in a dialogue about dialogue. Toward that end, this essay attempts to rethink the nature of dialogue from the perspective of two key members of the Kyoto School, namely its founder, Nishida Kitar1945), and its current central figure, Ueda Shizuteru (b. 1926). The (...) Kyoto School is the most prominent group of modern Japanese philosophers, whose thought emerges from the encounter between Western and Eastern traditions. This essay seeks to elucidate and further unfold the implications of rethinking of the nature of dialogue from the perspective of Nishida's and Ueda's primarily Zen Buddhist reception of and response to Western philosophy. (shrink)

L’épreuve projective intitulée « spatiographie projective familiale » a pour objectif de comprendre l’image inconsciente du corps familial à travers l’analyse du dessin groupal de la « maison de rêve ». Par cette méthodologie, les auteurs peuvent établir un diagnostic de la structure des liens inconscients de la famille et en faire un objet médiateur pour la prise en charge psychothérapique et une épreuve projective groupale familiale pour le diagnostic. Le dessin de la « maison de rêve » est un (...) outil original qui investigue les dimensions diachronique et synchronique permettant une approche complète de la structuration de l’image du corps familial. (shrink)

The paper argues that a functional reduction of ordinary psychology to neuropsychology is possible by means of constructing fine-grained functional, mental sub-types that are coextensive with neuropsychological types. We establish this claim by means of considering as examples the cases of the disconnection syndrome and schizophrenia. We point out that the result is a conservative reduction, vindicating the scientific quality of the mental types of ordinary psychology by systematically linking them with neuroscience. That procedure of conservative reduction by means of (...) functional sub-types is in principle repeatable down to molecular neuroscience. (shrink)