Intense, clever, and persuasive, Philosophy in Turbulent Times captures the dynamism of French thought while also reclaiming the value of Freudian theory and the philosophy of radical commitment.

This is the story of the clattering of elevated subways and the cacophony of crowded neighborhoods, the heady optimism of industrial progress and the despair of economic recession, and the vibrancy of ethnic cultures and the resilience of ...

" De quoi demain sera-t-il fait? " interroge Victor Hugo. Un philosophe, une historienne répondent au long d'un dialogue serré, exigeant. Pourquoi ont-ils choisi de faire ce livre ensemble? En raison d'une longue amitié, au nom d'une histoire commune, en vertu de la qualité d'un débat qui n'a jamais cessé entre eux depuis qu'à la fin des années soixante la jeune étudiante découvrit l'importance de ce penseur de quinze ans son aîné qui, avec d'autres, réveillait l'esprit critique de toute une (...) génération. Si les points de vue sont différents, l'héritage intellectuel est commun. Et c'est cet héritage qu'ils s'attachent à inventorier avant de circonscrire des enjeux majeurs de notre temps : comment penser la différence dans l'universel? La famille a-t-elle encore un avenir? La liberté se réduira-t-elle demain pour l'homme à l'intelligibilité des contraintes qui pèsent sur lui, ou le désir et l'imprévisible auront-ils encore leur place? Que nous dit la souffrance des animaux que nous massacrons? La page de la révolution est-elle définitivement tournée après l'échec du communisme? Est-il envisageable d'en finir une fois pour toutes avec la peine de mort? Quelles seront demain les formes nouvelles de l'antisémitisme et comment les combattre? L'échange s'achève sur un éloge de la psychanalyse, référence commune tout au long du dialogue. (shrink)

The sublime and the abject -- Sade pro and contra Sade -- Dark enlightenment or barbaric science -- The Auschwitz confessions -- The perverse society.

Prompted by the thirtieth anniversary of the French philosopher Jacques Lacan’s death, this exchange between two prominent intellectuals is rich with surprising insights. Alain Badiou shares the clearest, most detailed account to date of his profound indebtedness to Lacanian psychoanalysis. He explains in depth the tools Lacan gave him to navigate the extremes of his other two philosophical “masters,” Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Élisabeth Roudinesco supplements Badiou’s experience with her own perspective on the troubled landscape of the French (...) analytic world since Lacan’s death—critiquing, for example, the link between politics and psychoanalysis in Lacan’s work, among other issues. Their dynamic dialogue draws readers into an intimate, at times contentious, yet ultimately productive debate that reinvigorates the work of a pivotal twentieth-century thinker. (shrink)

On ne peut que se réjouir de la multiplicité des initiatives éditoriales concernant les femmes et le féminisme depuis le beau succès de l'Histoire des femmes dirigée par Georges Duby et Michelle Perrot. L'absence de « women's studies » en France a certes retardé l'institutionnalisation à grande échelle d'enseignements spécifiques mais nombre de travaux ont cependant vu le jour qui suscitent aujourd'hui l'attention des éditeurs et du public. L'ouvrage dirigé par Michel de Manassein, De...

Mobsters and others engaged in risky forms of social coordination and coercion often communicate by saying something that is overtly innocuous but transmits another message ‘off record’. In both ordinary conversation and political discourse, insinuation and other forms of indirection, like joking, offer significant protection from liability. However, they do not confer blanket immunity: speakers can be held to account for an ‘off record’ message, if the only reasonable interpreta- tions of their utterance involve a commitment to it. Legal liability (...) for speech in the service of criminal behavior displays a similar profile of significant protection from indirection along with potential liability for reasonable interpretations. Specifically, in both ordinary and legal contexts, liability depends on how a reasonable speaker would expect a reasonable hearer to interpret their utterance in the context of utter- ance, rather than on the actual speaker’s claimed communicative intentions. (shrink)

We sley Salmon, in his influential and detailed book, Four Decades of Scientific Explanation, argues that the pragmatic approach to scientific explanation, “construed as the claim that scientific explanation can be explicated entirely in pragmatic terms” (1989, 185) is inadequate. The specific inadequacy ascribed to a pragmatic account is that objective relevance relations cannot be incorporated into such an account. Salmon relies on the arguments given in Kitcher and Salmon (1987) to ground this objection. He also suggests that Peter Railton’s (...) concepts of the ideal explanatory text and explanatory information (Railton 1981) can provide what the pragmatic approach lacks. This suggestion is not a conclusion of course; we read it as the promotion of part of a research program aimed at forging a greater consensus on scientific explanation-an admirable goal. However, we do not see the pragmatic approach as inadequate. We will show that a synthetic account inspired by Salmon’s adaptation of Railton would be equivalent to van Fraassen’s pragmatic account in three respects: accepting or rejecting requests for explanation; the practice of giving scientific explanations; and the evaluation of the goodness of explanations. We include all three under the general rubric of explanatory “practice.” Admittedly these are not the only three features by which an account of explanation might be evaluated. Roughly, we mean to show that a synthetic account cannot do a better job of accounting for the scientific practices which are of importance to the constructive empiricist, and therefore no argument can be presented to the constructive empiricist to convince her that by her own standards the synthetic account is superior. (shrink)

In recent years, the integration of philosophical with scientific theorizing has started to yield new insights. This chapter surveys some recent philosophical and empirical work on the nature and structure of action, on conscious agency, and on our knowledge of actions.

Readings in Health Care Ethics provides a wide-ranging selection of important and engaging contributions to the field of health care ethics. The second edition adds a chapter on health care in Canada, and the introduction has been expanded to include discussion of a new direction in feminist naturalized ethics. The book presupposes no prior knowledge, only an interest in the bioethical issues that are shaping our world.

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

Der Tagungsband zielt auf Grundsatzliches in der Verwendung von Begriffen ab und versteht sich als Beitrag zu einer interdisziplinar gefuhrten Diskussion um Genese und Geltung von Kategorien in der gegenwartigen geistes-, kultur- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung. Ausgehend von einer vorlaufigen Differenzierung in metaphysische, analytische oder kulturhistorische Kategorien zeigen die versammelten Beitrage gerade die Verschranktheit und wechselseitige Abhangigkeit dieser Dimensionen auf. Kategorien als methodische Werkzeuge zur wissenschaftlichen Einordnung und Unterscheidung von beobachteten Phanomenen stehen neben Kategorien als Untersuchungsgegenstand der Begriffs- und Ideengeschichte und (...) werfen daruber hinaus die Frage nach der Kategorialitat in den Bedingungen menschlichen Denkens und den allgemeinen Aufbauprinzipien von Welt auf. Unterschiedliche theoretische und methodologische Ansatze sowie konkrete Anwendungsbeispiele aus Anglistik, Amerikanistik, Filmwissenschaft, Germanistik, Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Kunstwissenschaft, Philosophie und Sprachwissenschaft zeugen von der Brisanz des Themas. (shrink)

Elisabeth Porter's guide to the development of feminist thought on ethics & moral agency surveys feminist debates on the nature of feminist ethics, intimate relationships, professional ethics, politics, sexual politics, abortion and reproductive choices.

From antiquity, Galenic physicians extensively discussed the active powers of simple and compound drugs. In their views, simple drugs, that is, single ingredients, acted according to their material qualities and the properties of their substance. As for compound drugs, their efficacy resulted from the mutual interaction of their ingredients and their modes of preparation. In the late Renaissance, Galenic physicians and naturalists, such as Leonhart Fuchs and Pietro Andrea Mattioli, attempted to explain these pharmacological properties or “faculties” at the intersection (...) of medicine, botany, and natural philosophy. This chapter examines the case of the Italian physician and botanist Andrea Cesalpino. His pharmacological treatise De medicamentorum facultatibus [On the Faculties of Drugs, 1593] was particularly significant for its reception of ancient and medieval texts on drug properties, materia medica, and the role of the senses in the knowledge of bodies. (shrink)

A vital and timely contribution to the growing scholarship on the political thought of Alain Badiou.

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

La période périnatale suscite un bouleversement psychique de la famille où le passé, le présent et le futur s’entremêlent. Quand des traumatismes ont affecté des générations en amont, il est possible qu’un passé non élaboré resurgisse à la naissance d’un enfant. Des organisations défensives délétères se transmettent sans transformation. Une confusion des temps peut s’installer, entre passé et présent, obturant le futur, plongeant la nouvelle famille dans de la désorganisation, faisant apparaître des symptômes. Les autrices proposent un éclairage théorique, puis (...) des vignettes cliniques dont un accompagnement de thérapie familiale psychanalytique périnatale pour permettre à la nouvelle famille de se différencier et de construire un avenir détoxifié et « déconfusionné ». Le développement favorable de l’enfant et une parentalité plus harmonieuse peuvent en découler au bénéfice de tous. (shrink)