Helen Beebee (2018) defends a view of the aims of philosophy she calls ‘equilibrism’. Equilibrism denies that philosophy aims at knowledge and maintains that the collective aim of philosophy is ‘to find what equilibria there are that can withstand examination’ (Beebee 2018, p. 3). In this note, I probe equilibrism by focusing on how disagreement challenges our doxastic commitment to our own philosophical theories. Call this the Commitment Challenge. I argue that the Commitment Challenge comes in three varieties and that (...) endorsing equilibrism provides us with an answer to one of them only. (shrink)

Abstract: According to the realist about philosophy, the goal of philosophy is to come to know the truth about philosophical questions; according to what Helen Beebee calls equilibrism, by contrast, the goal is rather to place one’s commitments in a coherent system. In this paper, I present a critique of equilibrism in the form Beebee defends it, paying particular attention to her suggestion that various meta-philosophical remarks made by David Lewis may be recruited to defend equilibrism. At the end of (...) the paper, I point out that a realist about philosophy may also be a pluralist about philosophical culture, thus undermining one main motivation for equilibrism. (shrink)

Les humeurs sont à la mode: le corps passionnel est au centre de notre culture, avec ses besoins, ses plaisirs, son équilibre et son mal-être. L’émotion est à raconter, l’exercice doit faire suer, la vie sexuelle se publicise. Le corps médical est humeur à part entière : les tests sanguins précèdent le diagnostic holistique dans l’analyse de la maladie et donc dans la recherche de l’équilibre optimal et du bien-être. Nos humeurs sont devenues des impératifs moraux : les (...) décharges émotionnelles sont à exhiber avant de s’équilibrer. Nos discours signifient peu sans l’expression sincère des passions qui les informent. Nous sommes des corps-monades cherchant leur bien-être, protégés des pollutions et miasmes externes. Comment notre corps s’est-il ainsi transformé ? Comment l’intériorité est-elle devenue externe ? Et quel est le rapport entre le monde intérieur maintenant ouvert à l’analyse et l’état du corps dans son environnement social ? Cette transformation a sa propre histoire, qu’il convient de retracer. (shrink)

While discovery of error provides personal gain for the entrepreneur, does this process automatically allocate value equitably among all stakeholders? We argue that the entrepreneurial process can be used to generate or maintain an entrepreneur’s personal wealth through the exploitation of a stakeholder group. Thus entrepreneurship can be both an equilibrating and a disequilibrating process and that both the visible hand of government and the decisions of an entrepreneur can speed or slow our movement toward value equilibrium. Speed toward value (...) equilibrium is likely to be important to a victimized stakeholder group and deserves further scholarly attention. (shrink)

While discovery of error provides personal gain for the entrepreneur, does this process automatically allocate value equitably among all stakeholders? We argue that the entrepreneurial process can be used to generate or maintain an entrepreneur’s personal wealth through the exploitation of a stakeholder group. Thus entrepreneurship can be both an equilibrating and a disequilibrating process and that both the visible hand of government and the decisions of an entrepreneur can speed or slow our movement toward value equilibrium. Speed toward value (...) equilibrium is likely to be important to a victimized stakeholder group and deserves further scholarly attention. (shrink)

That Piagetian epistemology has the dynamics of knowledge growth as its core consideration predetermines a need to consider it as potentially applicable to teaching. This paper addresses that need by first outlining the Piagetian theory of equilibration and then applying it to the construction of methods of teaching science.

L’expression équilibre naturel est largement utilisée dans les médias et par les militants écologistes pour sensibiliser le grand public aux conséquences néfastes des activités humaines sur l’environnement. Pourtant, alors qu’elle était relativement plébiscitée par les scientifiques au xixe et au début du xxe siècle, la quasi-totalité des écologues n’emploie plus cette expression. Dans cet article, nous visons à montrer que cette expression n’a pas été abandonnée à cause d’une réfutation de l’idée qu’elle recouvrait mais à cause d’une tombée en (...) désuétude. Nous avançons deux causes possibles à cette tombée en désuétude et nous défendons que les termes actuels de stabilité et de résilience renvoient à la même idée qui persiste et se précise. (shrink)

In 1986 David Gauthier proposed an arbitration scheme for two player cardinal bargaining games based on interpersonal comparisons of players’ relative concessions. In Gauthier’s original arbitration scheme, players’ relative concessions are defined in terms of Raiffa-normalized cardinal utility gains, and so it cannot be directly applied to ordinal bargaining problems. In this paper I propose a relative benefit equilibrating bargaining solution for two and n-player ordinal and quasiconvex ordinal bargaining problems with finite sets of feasible basic agreements based on the (...) measure of players’ ordinal relative individual advantage gains. I provide an axiomatic characterization of this bargaining solution and discuss the conceptual relationship between RBEBS and ordinal egalitarian bargaining solution proposed by Conley and Wilkie. I show the relationship between the measurement procedure for ordinal relative individual advantage gains and the measurement procedure for players’ ordinal relative concessions, and argue that the proposed arbitration scheme for ordinal games can be interpreted as an ordinal version of Gauthier’s arbitration scheme. (shrink)

While discovery of error provides personal gain for the entrepreneur, does this process automatically allocate value equitably among all stakeholders? We argue that the entrepreneurial process can be used to generate or maintain an entrepreneur’s personal wealth through the exploitation of a stakeholder group. Thus entrepreneurship can be both an equilibrating and a disequilibrating process and that both the visible hand of government and the decisions of an entrepreneur can speed or slow our movement toward value equilibrium. Speed toward value (...) equilibrium is likely to be important to a victimized stakeholder group and deserves further scholarly attention. (shrink)

While discovery of error provides personal gain for the entrepreneur, does this process automatically allocate value equitably among all stakeholders? We argue that the entrepreneurial process can be used to generate or maintain an entrepreneur’s personal wealth through the exploitation of a stakeholder group. Thus entrepreneurship can be both an equilibrating and a disequilibrating process and that both the visible hand of government and the decisions of an entrepreneur can speed or slow our movement toward value equilibrium. Speed toward value (...) equilibrium is likely to be important to a victimized stakeholder group and deserves further scholarly attention. (shrink)

Résumé Dans sa discussion critique du matérialisme – qui traite le droit et l’État comme « des réalités simplement fictives », par opposition à la « société dans l’économie » – Cohen écrit dans le dernier chapitre de son Introduction avec supplément critique à l’ Histoire du matérialisme de F.A. Lange que le droit et l’État ne doivent en effet être valorisés que comme « un système d’équilibre en pensée », à savoir comme « fiction de l’équilibre ». (...) Même s’il ne doit pas s’agir là d’un équilibre « stable », seulement d’un équilibre « labile », la « nécessité de la fiction»s’avère être néanmoins la seule possibilité offerte à la raison de demeurer dans le champ de tensions de l’histoire, si elle ne veut pas (comme l’écrit Cohen dans l’ Éthique de la volonté pure ) « laisser les tâches éthiques […] éclairer l’obscurité qui régnait jusque-là dans l’histoire, telles des fulgurations de forces en quelque sorte post-historiques ». (shrink)

While discovery of error provides personal gain for the entrepreneur, does this process automatically allocate value equitably among all stakeholders? We argue that the entrepreneurial process can be used to generate or maintain an entrepreneur’s personal wealth through the exploitation of a stakeholder group. Thus entrepreneurship can be both an equilibrating and a disequilibrating process and that both the visible hand of government and the decisions of an entrepreneur can speed or slow our movement toward value equilibrium. Speed toward value (...) equilibrium is likely to be important to a victimized stakeholder group and deserves further scholarly attention. (shrink)

While discovery of error provides personal gain for the entrepreneur, does this process automatically allocate value equitably among all stakeholders? We argue that the entrepreneurial process can be used to generate or maintain an entrepreneur’s personal wealth through the exploitation of a stakeholder group. Thus entrepreneurship can be both an equilibrating and a disequilibrating process and that both the visible hand of government and the decisions of an entrepreneur can speed or slow our movement toward value equilibrium. Speed toward value (...) equilibrium is likely to be important to a victimized stakeholder group and deserves further scholarly attention. (shrink)

To answer the question in the title, we take as an example the model for the regulation of agonistic antagonistic couples (MRAAC). It is a model that associates 4 non-linear differential equations and allows to simulate balance, imbalance between two state variables, and control, if necessary, by two control variables of the same nature as the state variables: this control is defined as a bilateral strategy (bipolar therapy in the medical field). The super model for the regulation of agonism antagonistic (...) couples (SMRAAC), that may be also considered as an agonistic antagonistic network (AAN), associates several elementary MRAAC's, but the interconnection structure falls equally under the category of the agonistic antagonism (AA). First we indicate what may be the results of the interconnection, favourable or not. In the last case, a control can be performed, by acting upon a sole couple of the SMRAAC, even if other couples were imbalanced (with two AA control variables only). Simulation examples are given. We bring also a new result with the SMRAAC, i.e. the appearance of strange auractors with this model. The general models belonging to the AA phylum should put on a growing importance in the future, because they could be the sole models enable to control some complex systems by avoiding the perverse effects of the unilateral strategies. (shrink)

While discovery of error provides personal gain for the entrepreneur, does this process automatically allocate value equitably among all stakeholders? We argue that the entrepreneurial process can be used to generate or maintain an entrepreneur’s personal wealth through the exploitation of a stakeholder group. Thus entrepreneurship can be both an equilibrating and a disequilibrating process and that both the visible hand of government and the decisions of an entrepreneur can speed or slow our movement toward value equilibrium. Speed toward value (...) equilibrium is likely to be important to a victimized stakeholder group and deserves further scholarly attention. (shrink)

While discovery of error provides personal gain for the entrepreneur, does this process automatically allocate value equitably among all stakeholders? We argue that the entrepreneurial process can be used to generate or maintain an entrepreneur’s personal wealth through the exploitation of a stakeholder group. Thus entrepreneurship can be both an equilibrating and a disequilibrating process and that both the visible hand of government and the decisions of an entrepreneur can speed or slow our movement toward value equilibrium. Speed toward value (...) equilibrium is likely to be important to a victimized stakeholder group and deserves further scholarly attention. (shrink)

While discovery of error provides personal gain for the entrepreneur, does this process automatically allocate value equitably among all stakeholders? We argue that the entrepreneurial process can be used to generate or maintain an entrepreneur’s personal wealth through the exploitation of a stakeholder group. Thus entrepreneurship can be both an equilibrating and a disequilibrating process and that both the visible hand of government and the decisions of an entrepreneur can speed or slow our movement toward value equilibrium. Speed toward value (...) equilibrium is likely to be important to a victimized stakeholder group and deserves further scholarly attention. (shrink)

A pair of harmonic oscillators come in contact and then separate. This could be a model of an atom encountering an electromagnetic field. We explore the coherence properties of the resulting state as a function of the sort of initial condition used. A surprising result is that if one imagines a large collection of these objects repeatedly coming in contact and separating, the asymptotic distribution functions are not Boltzmann distributions, but rather exponentials with the same rate of dropoff.

According to Ghislain Deleplace, Jacques Sapir criticizes economical science for lacking in internal coherence due to the domination of the theory of general balance, that doesn’t take in account the economical reality, in particular the behaviour of individual economical actors, constituting the research programme of the new economy.