Bien connues, les dix-sept lithographies conçues par Eugène Delacroix d’après le Faust de Goethe, insérées dans un livre imposant paru en 1828 sous la double enseigne du libraire Auguste Sautelet et de l’imprimeur-lithographe Charles Motte, constituent une série souvent analysée par les historiens de l’art dans la perspective de l’œuvre du peintre. En modifiant cette approche, l’article la considère sous l’angle de son support, le livre dans lequel elle a été insérée, et en relation avec ce qui l’entoure, le (...) texte de la tragédie et les propos de Delacroix, en valorisant un faire de l’imagination, d’inspiration multiple et de facture inter-iconique. Grâce au collationnement d’une quinzaine d’exemplaires du livre, conservés dans les dépôts publics de plusieurs pays, on découvre en quoi la quinzième lithographie, l’apparition de Marguerite au sabbat, est exceptionnelle. L’interprétation proposée se fonde sur le rôle de l’ imagination dans ce Faust français, la pratique graphique de Delacroix, le passage afférent, et Le Voyage en Italie de Goethe. Quelques rectifications sur la manière usuelle de considérer cette œuvre sont apportées. (shrink)

Bien connues, les dix-sept lithographies conçues par Eugène Delacroix d’après le Faust de Goethe, insérées dans un livre imposant paru en 1828 sous la double enseigne du libraire Auguste Sautelet et de l’imprimeur-lithographe Charles Motte, constituent une série souvent analysée par les historiens de l’art dans la perspective de l’œuvre du peintre. En modifiant cette approche, l’article la considère sous l’angle de son support, le livre dans lequel elle a été insérée, et en relation avec ce qui l’entoure, le (...) texte de la tragédie et les propos de Delacroix, en valorisant un faire de l’imagination, d’inspiration multiple et de facture inter-iconique. Grâce au collationnement d’une quinzaine d’exemplaires du livre, conservés dans les dépôts publics de plusieurs pays, on découvre en quoi la quinzième lithographie, l’apparition de Marguerite au sabbat, est exceptionnelle. L’interprétation proposée se fonde sur le rôle de l’ imagination dans ce Faust français, la pratique graphique de Delacroix, le passage afférent, et Le Voyage en Italie de Goethe. Quelques rectifications sur la manière usuelle de considérer cette œuvre sont apportées. (shrink)

1. WeimarLa recherche consacrée au droit et à la pensée juridique sous la République de Weimar accorde une place privilégiée au droit public et constitutionnel. Parmi les raisons de ce phénomène il y a la question de la continuité et des ruptures entre Weimar et le nazisme, une question qui pose dans le même temps le problème de la nouveauté radicale que représente le nazisme en matière de pensée politique et de pratique sociale d’une part, et le problème des racines (...) qu’il a trouvées dans les... (shrink)

Body-environment (b-en) -- Functional cycle (fucy) -- An object -- The body and time -- Evolution, novelty, and stability -- Behavior -- Culture, symbol, and language -- Thinking with the implicit.

_Philosophical Delusion and its Therapy_ provides new foundations and methods for the revolutionary project of philosophical therapy pioneered by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The book vindicates this currently much-discussed project by reconstructing the genesis of important philosophical problems: With the help of concepts adapted from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, the book analyses how philosophical reflection is shaped by pictures and metaphors we are not aware of employing and are prone to misapply. Through innovative case-studies on the genesis of classical problems about (...) the mind and perception, and on thinkers including Locke, Berkeley and Ayer, the book demonstrates how such autonomous habits of thought systematically generate unsound intuitions and philosophical delusions, whose clash with reality, or among each other, gives rise to ill-motivated but maddening problems. The book re-examines models of therapeutic philosophy, due to Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and develops an approach that may let us overcome philosophical delusions and the problems they engender. In this way, the book explains where and why therapy in called for in philosophy, and develops techniques to carry it out. (shrink)

How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta-philosophical naturalism’ that addresses philosophical questions about a phenomenon by (...) empirically investigating how people think about this phenomenon. This chapter asks how this novel perspective can be successfully implemented: How can the empirical investigation of how people think about something address genuinely philosophical problems? And what methods – and, specifically, what methods beyond the questionnaire – can this investigation employ? We first review core projects of experimental philosophy and raise the question of their philosophical relevance. For ambitious answers, we turn to experimental philosophy’s most direct historical precursor, mid-20th century ordinary language philosophy, and discuss empirical implementations of two of its research programmes that use experimental methods from psycholinguistics and corpus methods from the digital humanities. (shrink)

The paper presents a novel account of nature and genesis of some philosophical problems, which vindicates a new approach to an arguably central and extensive class of such problems: The paper develops the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘philosophical pictures’ with the help of some notions adapted from metaphor research in cognitive linguistics and from work on unintentional analogical reasoning in cognitive psychology. The paper shows that adherence to such pictures systematically leads to the formulation of unwarranted claims, ill-motivated problems, and pointless (...) theories. To do so, the paper proceeds from a case-study on a lastingly influential development in early modern philosophy: the adoption of the doctrine of secondary qualities, and its principal consequences. The findings motivate a new approach to an arguably extensive and important class of philosophical problems: to the problems we raise in the grip of philosophical pictures. (shrink)

Every day we do all sorts of intelligent things without necessarily deliberating about it. We simply do, or cope with what the environment throws at us. Some of those things are mundane. Others are...

Life and the living (on Aristotelian biohorror) -- Supernatural horror as the paradigm for life -- Aristotle's De anima and the problem of life -- The ontology of life -- The entelechy of the weird -- Superlative life -- Life with or without limits -- Life as time in Plotinus -- On the superlative -- Superlative life I: Pseudo-Dionysius -- Negative vs. affirmative theology -- Superlative negation -- Negation and preexistent life -- Excess, evil, and non-being -- Superlative life II: (...) Eriugena -- Negation in the periphyseon -- The quaestio de nihilo: on nothing -- The quaestio de nihilo: superlative nothing -- Dark intelligible abyss -- Apophasis -- The apophatic logic -- Negation in Frege and Ayer -- Negation vs. subtraction in Badiou -- Negation and contradiction in Priest -- The dialetheic vitalism of negative theology -- Ellipses: Suhraward and the luminous void -- Univocal creatures -- On spiritual creatures -- Life as form in Aristotle -- The concept of the creature -- Univocity I: Duns Scotus vs. Aquinas -- Univocity in Aquinas' Summa theologica -- Univocity in Duns Scotus' Opus oxoniense -- The common nature of the creature -- Univocity II: Duns Scotus vs. Henry of Ghent -- Univocity in Henry of Ghent -- Negative vs. privative indetermination -- Absolute indetermination -- Univocity III: Deleuze's scholasticism three variations -- Spinoza et le problème de l'expression -- Différence et répétition -- Cours de Vincennes -- Univocal creatures -- Ellipses: Dgen and uncreated univocity -- Dark pantheism -- Everything and nothing -- Life as spirit in Aquinas -- The concept of the divine nature -- Immanence I: Eriugena's periphyseon -- Natura and the unthought -- Universal life -- Four statements on pantheism -- Immanence II: Duns Scotus' reportatio Ia -- Univocal immanence -- Actual infinity -- The pathology of the triple primacy -- Immanence III: Nicholas of Cusa's De docta ignorantia -- The coincidence of opposites -- The folds of life -- Absolute vs. contracted pantheism -- Speculative pantheism (Deleuze's interlocutors) -- Pantheism and pure immanence -- The insubordination of immanence in Deleuze -- Scholia I: the isomorphism of univocity and immanence -- Scholia II: the vitalist logic of common notions -- Scholia III: the life of substance -- Dark pantheism -- Ellipses: Wang Yangming and idealist naturalism -- Logic and life (on Kantian teratology) -- The wandering line from Aristotle to Kant -- Critique of life -- Spectral life and speculative realism -- Ontotheology in Kant, atheology in Bataille -- The night land. (shrink)

Lady Lovelace’s notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine never refer to the concept of surprise. Having some pretension to ‘originate’ something—unlike the Analytical Engine—is neither necessary nor sufficient to being able to surprise someone. Turing nevertheless translates Lovelace’s ‘this machine is incapable of originating something’ in terms of a hypothetical ‘computers cannot take us by surprise’ objection to the idea that machines may be deemed capable of thinking. To understand the contemporary significance of what is missed in Turing’s ‘surprise’ translation of (...) Lovelace’s insight, one needs to distinguish between trivial surprises and those events, propositions or encounters that lead us to question our understanding of ourselves or what surrounds us. Only some of these non-trivial surprises are the product of originality endeavours. Not only is it uncommon for surprises to track such endeavours, the type of autonomy that would be required on the part of ‘digital computers’ for originality and surprise to intersect in that way goes far beyond the operational autonomy that can be achieved by ‘learning machines’. This paper argues that a salient translation of Lovelace’s originality insight—for contemporary and future ‘learning machines’—is an upside-down version of Turing’s surprise question: can computers be surprised by us in a non-trivial, ‘co-produced’ way? (shrink)

Contrairement à d'autres revues représentées ici, Espaces Temps ne peut pas revendiquer le fait d'avoir participé jusqu'alors à la diffusion des travaux d'histoire des femmes ni celui d'avoir intégré dans sa réflexion sur les sciences sociales les apports de cette histoire. Pourtant l'identité de la revue, largement indiquée par son sous-titre « Réfléchir les sciences sociales », est marquée, dès sa création, par la volonté de ne pas séparer la réflexion épistémologique des recherches empiriq...

Après deux ouvrages remarqués, L’insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68. Essai d’histoire politique des usines paru en 2007 et Histoire des ouvriers en France au xxe siècle paru en 2012 qui ont imposé Xavier Vigna comme un spécialiste reconnu du monde ouvrier, ce dernier nous propose un ouvrage destiné à un public plus large : Les ouvriers dans la France des usines et des ateliers. Le livre est présenté comme un livre-objet, car, outre le matériel documentaire classique, il comprend éga...

Nelson and Winter’s An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982) was the foundational work of what has become the thriving sub-discipline of evolutionary economics. In attempting to develop an alternative to neoclassical economics, the authors looked to borrow basic ideas from biology, in particular a concept of economic “natural selection.” However, the evolutionary models they construct in their seminal work are in many respects quite different from the models of evolutionary biology. There is no reproduction in any usual sense, “mutation” (...) is directed as opposed to blind, and there is no meaningful distinction between phenotype and genotype. Despite these substantial departures from the conceptions of evolutionary biology, I argue that the “evolutionary” economics of Nelson and Winter is indeed a legitimate extension of Darwinian evolutionary principles to a novel domain, and that the traditional conception of evolution by natural selection must be revised. The novel features of evolutionary economics models reflect the distinctive theoretical requirements faced by economists. I further contend that reproduction, heredity, blind variation, and the genotype/phenotype distinction are all inessential to evolutionary theory, and that their role in evolutionary biology is a domain-specific feature of biological theory. (shrink)

Hart's and Kelsen's respective outlooks on the concept of normativity not only differ by the way they explain this concept but also, more importantly, in what they seek to achieve when endeavouring to account for the normative dimension of law. By examining Hart's and Kelsen's models in the light of Korsgaard's understanding of the “normativity problem,” my aim is to emphasise not only their contrasted perspectives, but also the common limit they impose on their theories by dismissing as inappropriate any (...) question regarding the emergence of legal normativity. On the basis of my previous arguments, I shall explain why I deem Raz's analysis of the contrast between Hart's and Kelsen's conceptions of normativity to be misleading. (shrink)

How can we explain that our dreams are often not a chaotic, incoherent pile of images, but a definite, perfectly organized sequence of images? How do the sensations and images fit in dreams, what kind of logic do they obey, what is the role of emotions and ideas? Henri Delacroix formulates these questions in his article and offers his answers, delineating and examining different types of dreams. Taking into account and critically evaluating the concepts of contemporary researchers who studied the (...) problem of dreams, Delacroix puts forward his own hypothesis. From his point of view, at the basis of many dreams lies an extremely changeable and mobile basic idea which is able to direct the movement of images that are its representation. Images represent the development of a mental theme or a combination of many topics. Between a dream and a daydream, according to Delacroix, there is only a difference in complexity and systematization. Translation of the publication: Delacroix H. Sur la structure logique du rêve // Revue de métaphysique et de morale. 1904. T. 12. № 6. P. 921–934. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay aims to contribute robust grounds to question the Susskinds’ influential, consequentialist logic when it comes to the legitimacy of automation within the legal profession. It does so by questioning their minimalist understanding of the professions. If it is our commitment to moral equality that is at stake every time lawyers hail the specific vulnerability inherent in their professional relationship, the case for wholesale automation is turned on its head. One can no longer assume that, as a rule, wholesale (...) automation is both legitimate and desirable, provided it improves the quality and accessibility of legal services. The assumption, instead, is firmly in favour of designing systems that better enable legal professionals to live up to their specific responsibility. The rest of the essay outlines key challenges in the design of such profession-specific, ‘ethics aware’ decision-support systems. (shrink)

In his review of Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Hart eloquently formulated an apprehension that still haunts much of contemporary jurisprudence: if the moral 'I must' has to be 'seen as coming not from outside, but from what is most deeply inside us? the fear is that this will not be enough'. I argue that this fear is the byproduct of the dualist outlook within which Hart—and a significant part of contemporary legal theory—is confined: because of his (...) bald naturalist premise, Hart could not conceive of moral objectivity except in terms presupposing an order of Reason resolutely distinct from the 'natural' world. This paper seeks to debunk this dualist outlook by engaging with the kind of 'non-bald' naturalism advocated in different ways by both McDowell and Blackburn. In considering contemporary efforts to draw a middle way between ethical scepticism and metaphysical rationalism, the paper draws on the pragmatic elements emerging from the confrontation between Habermas and Rawls. (shrink)

Il s’agit dans cet article d’analyser le travail de désingularisation relative de l’événement que Ricœur opère par couplage avec le récit dans Temps et récit au début des années 1980, puis la reprise de la question de la singularité et de l’unicité de l’événement dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli dans le cadre théorique recomposé de la représentation historienne mise à l’épreuve de “l’événement aux limites” qu’est la Shoah. Dans Temps et récit Ricœur entend dépasser, par l’entrecroisement entre histoire et fiction (...) appliqué à des événements fondateurs d’identité collective comme la Shoah, l’aporie épistémologique de la dichotomie entre une histoire qui dissout l’événement dans l’explication et une attitude purement émotionnelle face aux événements à intensité éthique considérable. Cette narrativisation de l’événement se heurte cependant à la puissance traumatique de l’extra-textuel radical de l’événement-Shoah qui constitue ainsi un défi pour la représentation historienne du passé. C’est cette question que Ricœur reprend dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, mais cette fois-ci cet examen a été largement reconfiguré par la dialectique de la mémoire et de l’histoire contribuant à la représentation du passé. Tout en distinguant l’incomparabilité absolue au plan moral de la Shoah et l’incomparabilité relative sur le plan historiographique, Ricœur maintient que l’enchevêtrement entre jugement historiographique et jugement moral est inévitable, ouvrant ainsi sur la grande question de la responsabilité sociale, politique et éthique de l’historien. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to introduce the concept of Cognitive Fitness (CF), identify its key ingredients underpinning both real-time task performance and career longevity in high-risk occupations, and to canvas a holistic framework for their assessment, training, and augmentation. CF as a capacity to deploy neurocognitive resources, knowledge and skills to meet the demands of operational task performance, is likely to be multi-faceted and differentially malleable. A taxonomy of CF constructs derived from Cognitive Readiness (CR) and Mental fitness (...) (MF) literature maps into phases of operational cycles from foundational to advanced, mission-ready and recovery. Foundational cognitive attributes, such as attention, executive control and co-action, were hypothesized to be trainable at the initial Cognitive Gym phase. More advanced training targets at the CR phase included stress and arousal regulation, adaptability, teamwork, situation awareness (including detection, sense-making and prediction) and decision making (de-biasing and confidence calibration). The mission-ready training phase is focused on tolerances (to sleep loss, monotony, pain, frustration, uncertainty) and resistance (to distraction, deception or manipulation). Operational Augmentation phase relies on support tools such as decision aids and fatigue countermeasures, while the Recovery phase employs reflexive (e.g., mindfulness), and restorative practices (e.g., nutrition and sleep hygiene). The periodization of cognitive training in this cycle is hypothesized to optimize both real-time cognitive performance and the resilience that enables life-long thriving. One of the most promising avenues of validating this hypothesis is by developing an expert consensus on the key CF ingredients and their relative importance in high-performance settings. (shrink)

In Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, Eugene Gendlin examines the edge of awareness, where language emerges from nonlanguage.

Empirical insights into language processing have a philosophical relevance that extends well beyond philosophical questions about language. This chapter will discuss this wider relevance: We will consider how experimental philosophers can examine language processing in order to address questions in several different areas of philosophy. To do so, we will present the emerging research program of experimental argument analysis (EAA) that examines how automatic language processing shapes verbal reasoning – including philosophical arguments. The evidential strand of experimental philosophy uses mainly (...) questionnaire-based methods to assess the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments that are adduced as evidence for philosophical theories and as premises for philosophical arguments. Extending this prominent strand of experimental philosophy, EAA underpins such assessments, extends the scope of the assessments, and expands the range of the empirical methods employed: EAA examines how automatic inferences that are continually made in language comprehension and production shape verbal reasoning, and draws on findings about comprehension biases that affect the contextualisation of such default inferences, in order to explain and expose fallacies. It deploys findings to assess premises and inferences from premises to conclusions, in philosophical arguments. To do so, it adapts methods from psycholinguistics and recruits methods from computational linguistics. (shrink)

The laws of classical logic are taken to be logical truths, which in turn are taken to hold objectively. However, we might question our faith in these truths: why are they true? One general approach, proposed by Putnam [8] and more recently Dickson [3] or Maddy [5], is to adopt empiricism about logic. On this view, logical truths are true because they are true of the world alone – this gives logical truths an air of objectivity. Putnam and Dickson both (...) take logical truths to be true in virtue of the world’s structure, given by our best empirical theory, quantum mechanics. This assumes a determinate logical structure of the world given by quantum mechanics. Here, I argue that this assumption is false, and that the world’s logical structure, and hence the related ‘true’ logic, is underdetermined. This leads to what I call empirical conventionalism. (shrink)

La démarche tient d'une « science de l'entre-deux » à la recherche de l'intervalle qui permettra de déchiffrer l'opposition de termes contraires et faire résonner leur fonction corrélative.

In Everettian quantum mechanics, justifications for the Born rule appeal to self-locating uncertainty or decision theory. Such justifications have focused exclusively on a pure-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a wave function. Recent works in quantum foundations suggest that it is viable to consider a mixed-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a (mixed-state) density matrix. Here, we develop the conceptual foundations for decoherence and branching in a mixed-state multiverse, and extend the standard Everettian justifications for the Born rule to this setting. This (...) extended framework provides a unification of 'classical' and 'quantum' probabilities, and additional theoretical benefits, for the Everettian picture. (shrink)

The rise and legacy of world religions out of that period centered roughly around 500-600 BCE, what John Stuart-Glennie termed in 1873 the moral revolution, and Karl Jaspers later, in 1949, called the axial age, has been marked by heightened ideas of transcendence. Yet ironically, the world itself, in the literal sense of the actual earth, took on a diminished role as a central element of religious sensibility in the world religions, particularly in the Abrahamic religions. Given the issue today (...) of ecological unsustainability, including massive die-offs of wildlife and ever-increasing global human population and consumption, the legacy of those world religions face the question I consider here: Can religion transcend the earth in the long run? With the Axial Age/Moral Revolution, comes the possibility of transcendence of the world per se. The moral revolution/Axial Age represented significant changes in civilization, to be sure, but it can also be taken, as I do, as a second phase in the radical shift to anthropocentric mind already begun with the advent of agriculturally based civilization. The axial ideal of transcendence connects to a larger ideal, manifest not only in the legacies of the world religions but in contemporary science and technology, of a philosophy of escape from the earth. I show how ideas of axial transcendence, celebrated by scholars such as Jaspers and Bellah, nevertheless involve an unacknowledged tragic cost, the forgetting of the earth and its lessons and limits as central to what I have termed elsewhere, “sustainable wisdom.” . (shrink)

Linguistics. Artificial intelligence. Related fields. Computation.

This article analyses Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics and surplus life in dialogue with three comparable theorizations: Agamben’s ‘bare life’, Marxist scholarship on ‘relative surplus populations’, and Afropessimist theorizations of ‘social death’. I argue that Mbembe’s work allows us to develop a critique of sacrifice that at the same time (contra Agamben) recognizes how it plays a structural role within necropolitics. Examining the influence of Georges Bataille’s writings on sacrifice allows me to clarify this argument. The second part of the (...) article examines the ‘surplus life’ of necropolitics in comparative analysis, tracing some of the limits of Mbembe’s reading through a dialogue with Marxist and Afropessimist readings. I characterize Mbembe’s work in terms of a poetics and politics of surplus: ‘reserves of life’ are affirmed against the excess of violence characterizing the present. However, this critique of violence relies upon abrupt leaps from politics to abstract ethical appeals in ways that obscure the implications of Mbembe’s own analysis. (shrink)

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.