Les auteurs de cet ouvrage se sont donné pour tâche de relire l'œuvre de Giorgio Agamben en refusant de la convertir en simple objet d'analyse. Ils essayent plutôt d'entendre " l'héritage de la puissance " à laquelle la littérature comme phénomène semble nous engager, en retraçant un chemin dont les haltes se situent au cœur de la méditation agambenienne sur notre époque : l'avènement possible d'un sujet qui descendrait d'une " puissance pure ", irréductible à l'identification, dépouillé de toute substance, (...) sinon du mouvement par lequel il s'approprie lui-même en tant que puissance sans objet. Chacun des auteurs tente ainsi de potentialiser certaines propositions d'Agamben à partir de ce qu'on appelle " littérature ". Comment, à l'heure où celle-ci semble faire l'épreuve d'une neutralisation de son destin historique, penser sa relation au temps messianique? Au moment où plusieurs œuvres se vouent au recueillement de l'innommé, de l'insignifiant et des heures mortes comme au seul territoire qui leur serait préservé, comment penser l'articulation philologique entre le reste et la résistance? Pourrait-on conférer à la littérature un statut d'exception politique, voire de zone d'anomie constitutive du politique? Avec la participation de Guillaume Asselin, Etienne Beaulieu, Jean-François Bourgeault, Georges- Leroux, Eric Méchoulan, Pierre Ouellet, Sarah Rocheville, Lionel Ruffel, Sylvano Santini et Jean-Pierre Vidal. (shrink)

Climate ethics has been concerned with polluter pays, beneficiary pays and ability to pay principles, all of which consider climate change as a single negative externality. This paper considers it as a constellation of externalities, positive and negative, with different associated demands of justice. This is important because explicitly considering positive externalities has not to our knowledge been done in the climate ethics literature. Specifically, it is argued that those who enjoy passive gains from climate change owe gains not to (...) the net losers, but to the emitters, just as the emitters owe compensation to the net losers for the negative externality. This is defended by appeal to theoretical virtues and to the social benefits of generating positive externalities, even when those positive externalities are coupled with far greater negative externalities. We call this the Polluter Pays, Then Receives ('PPTR', or 'Peter') Principle. This principle is then applied at two levels in the context of Canada. [Open access]. (shrink)

El debate académico sobre el significado político de los derechos humanos ha puesto el acento en su dimensión negativa o privada, olvidando la dimensión positiva o pública que despliegan en el proceso de integración de una sociedad política determinada, como la democrática. El artículo rescata la dimensión política de los derechos humanos como un elemento constitutivo clave de la sociedad democrática. La hipótesis de que parte es que los derechos humanos otorgan carta de naturalidad a una lucha real a favor (...) de la libertad política y contra la opresión que encuentra su materialización histórica en la sociedad democrática y su negación en la sociedad totalitaria. Para desarrollar el argumento, recurre a la teoría de Claude Lefort, quien asocia el discurso de los derechos humanos con una concepción general de la sociedad que se realiza históricamente en la sociedad democrática. (shrink)

In 2011, van Dijck and Fias described a positional SNARC effect: the SPoARC. To-be-remembered items presented centrally on a screen seemed to acquire a left-to-right spatial dimension. If confirmed, this spatialization could be crucial for immediate memory theories. However, given the intricate links between visual and spatial dimensions, this effect could be due to the visual presentation, which could have probed the left-to-right direction of reading/writing. To allow a generalization of this effect, we adapted van Dijck and Fias's task using (...) an auditory version of Sternberg's paradigm. Lists of five consonants were auditorily presented at a rate of 3 s/item. A SPoARC effect was observed. The consequences are discussed first from an immediate memory perspective, putting forward the view that order could be coded through spatialization, and then in terms of similarities between SPoARC and SNARC. (shrink)

An increasing number of studies about teacher’s induction issues mention that it is essential to take into account the types of support needs of beginning teachers to offer them adequate support. Few researchers have accurately portrayed the types of support needs felt by novice teachers and focused on the degree of agreement between the type of support needs felt and the perceived support received. This research used data drawn from a French-language survey (n = 156) and semi-directed interviews (n = (...) 10) conducted in Quebec with novice teachers. Quantitative analyzes using association measures on types of support needs and perception of support received indicate that the support perceived by teachers is largely inconsistent with the types of support needs felt. The interviews provide a better understanding of the quantitative results and suggest some possible solutions. (shrink)

Raymond Klibansky est né à Paris en 1905, dans une famille d'origine juive allemande. De l'Allemagne cultivée de l'entre-deux-guerres et des sociétés d'étudiants, via la montée du nazisme et le sauvetage de la bibliothèque Warburg, jusqu'à son rôle d'espion pour les Britanniques, ce philosophe a côtoyé les plus grands esprits de ce siècle.

Cumulative technological culture (CTC) refers to the increase in the efficiency and complexity of tools and techniques in human populations over generations. A fascinating question is to understand the cognitive origins of this phenomenon. Because CTC is definitely a social phenomenon, most accounts have suggested a series of cognitive mechanisms oriented toward the social dimension (e.g., teaching, imitation, theory of mind, and metacognition), thereby minimizing the technical dimension and the potential influence of non-social, cognitive skills. What if we have failed (...) to see the elephant in the room? What if social cognitive mechanisms were only catalyzing factors and not thesufficient and necessaryconditions for the emergence of CTC? In this article, we offer an alternative, unified cognitive approach to this phenomenon by assuming that CTC originates in non-social cognitive skills, namely technical-reasoning skills which enable humans to develop the technical potential necessary to constantly acquire and improve technical information. This leads us to discuss how theory of mind and metacognition, in concert with technical reasoning, can help boost CTC. The cognitive approach developed here opens up promising new avenues for reinterpreting classical issues (e.g., innovation, emulation vs. imitation, social vs. asocial learning, cooperation, teaching, and overimitation) in a field that has so far been largely dominated by other disciplines, such as evolutionary biology, mathematics, anthropology, archeology, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

Plato’s works have been the object of countless interpretations and recuperations ever since Greek antiquity. In the context of prenazi Germany, the writer Hans F.K. Günther published a work in defence of eugenic theories (aiming to improve man through authoritarian laws), allegedly based on the work of the Athenian philosopher and entitled Platon als Hüter des Lebens (“Plato as Protector of Life”). The present article tries to set forth what is at stake in that propaganda piece, its historical context, as (...) well as the disquieting implications of such an “appropriation” of classical philosophy to purely political ends. (shrink)

Diversity of evidence is widely claimed to be crucial for evidence amalgamation to have distinctive epistemic merits. Bayesian epistemologists capture this idea in the variety-of-evidence thesis: ceteris paribus, the strength of confirmation of a hypothesis by an evidential set increases with the diversity of the evidential elements in that set. Yet, formal exploration of this thesis has shown that it fails to be generally true. This article demonstrates that the thesis fails in even more circumstances than recent results would lead (...) us to expect. Most importantly, it can fail whatever the chance that the evidential sources are unreliable. Our results hold for two types of degrees of variety: reliability independence and testable aspect independence. We conclude that the variety-of-evidence thesis can, at best, be interpreted as an exception-prone rule of thumb. (shrink)

The variety-of-evidence thesis has been criticized by Bovens and Hartmann. This article points to two limitations of their Bayesian model: the conceptualization of unreliable evidential sources as randomizing and the restriction to comparing full independence to full dependence. It is shown that the variety-of-evidence thesis is rehabilitated when unreliable sources are reconceptualized as systematically biased. However, it turns out that allowing for degrees of independence leads to a qualification of the variety-of-evidence thesis: as Bovens and Hartmann claimed, more independence does (...) not always imply stronger confirmation. (shrink)

La philosophie bergsonnienne a rendu le monde de ses contemporains moins opaque, les aidant à lui trouver un sens. Si la France cartésienne coïncide avec les partisans de la démocratie parlementaire ancrée à gauche, celle de Bergson recrute ses plus gros bataillons dans la droite nationale, conservatrice, mais également dans une gauche antiparlementaire, révolutionnaire.

This article maintains that an important class of scientific generalizations should be reinterpreted: they have typically been understood as ceteris paribus laws, but are, in fact, generics. Four arguments are presented to support this thesis. One argument is that the interpretation in terms of ceteris paribus laws is a historical accident. The other three arguments draw on similarities between these generalizations and archetypal generics: they come with similar inferential commitments, they share a syntactic form, and the existing theories to make (...) sense of them are alike. Once these generalizations are properly understood as generics, the recent cognitive approach to generics can be extended to the study of the relevant sciences. The last section indicates ways in which this extension is fruitful for the two strands of research that we combine: the philosophy of science literature on generalizations and the semantics literature on generics. (shrink)

This article examines two theses formulated by Russo and Williamson in their study of causal inference in the health sciences. The two theses are assessed against evidence from a specific case in the social sciences, i.e., research on the institutional determinants of the aggregate unemployment rate. The first Russo–Williamson Thesis is that a causal claim can only be established when it is jointly supported by difference-making and mechanistic evidence. This thesis is shown not to hold. While researchers in my case (...) study draw extensively on both types of evidence, one causal claim out of the three analyzed is established even though it is exclusively supported by mechanistic evidence. The second Russo–Williamson Thesis is that standard accounts of causality fail to handle the dualist epistemology highlighted in the first Thesis. I argue that a counterfactual-manipulationist account of causality—which is endorsed by many philosophers as well as many social scientists—can perfectly make sense of the typical strategy in my case study to draw on both difference-making and mechanistic evidence; it is just an instance of the common strategy of increasing evidential variety. (shrink)