On analyse deux tableaux fameux de Poussin – Paysage avec un homme tué par un serpent (National Gallery) et Apollon amoureux de Daphné (Louvre) – avant de confronter Poussin au Caravage. La thèse défendue est que les deux tableaux analysés illustrent la destitution de Narcisse, et que ce thème a, dans l’œuvre de Poussin, une signification non seulement psychologique et morale, mais encore proprement esthétique. C’est en effectuant une minutieuse et savante enquête qu’on résout de manière inédite l’élément énigmatique contenu (...) dans les deux tableaux et que, en suivant Louis Marin, on approfondit la comparaison de deux conceptions antagonistes de la représentation picturale. (shrink)

Le Paysage avec un homme tué par un serpent, peint par Nicolas Poussin en 1648, a donné lieu, depuis celles de Félibien, Fénelon ou Diderot, à de multiples lectures, suggérant telle source poétique ou telle gravure pour rendre compte de l’identité du personnage mort ou de celle du serpent, sans qu’aucune de ces hypothèses paraisse décisive. Celle que propose Hélène Bouchilloux désigne Narcisse pour le personnage mort et Python pour le serpent : Poussin aurait mis en scène la « (...) destitution » de l’amour stérile en même temps que celle de l’idée erronée de la peinture incarnée par le Caravage. Cette hypothèse séduisante présente toutefois des difficultés méthodologiques, tant dans l’interprétation du texte d’Ovide que dans l’approche comparative de plusieurs toiles de Poussin, n’évitant pas le risque d’une surinterprétation. (shrink)

Le tableau de Nicolas Poussin, Paysage avec un homme tué par un serpent (ou Les effets de la terreur), demeure énigmatique pour toute une critique qui oscille entre deux pôles : soit le tableau est mythologique, mais on ne sait pas à quelle histoire il renvoie (l’hypothèse de Cadmus n’étant guère soutenable) ; soit le tableau ne représente que les effets de la terreur, sans renvoyer à aucune histoire. La thèse défendue dans cet article est la suivante : tout (...) en représentant les effets de la terreur, le tableau renvoie à une histoire – non celle de Cadmus, mais celle de Narcisse, cet homme qui meurt près de la source qui le captive, prisonnier de l’amour vain qu’il se porte à lui-même. On se propose d’étayer cette thèse par la découverte de remarquables liens entre Narcisse et Python, non seulement à partir de l’œuvre poétique d’Ovide, mais encore à partir de l’œuvre picturale de Poussin. (shrink)

Dieses Buch will bisher ungelöste Fragen zur Interpretation des größten Teils der Gemälde von Nicolas Poussin im Kontext der Philosophie, der Rhetorik, der antiken Literatur und Musiktheorie beantworten. Annegret Kayling zeigt, auf welche Weise die omnipräsente Moralphilosophie Senecas und der Stoizismus die Themenwahl und die Darstellungsweise Poussins beeinflusst haben. Descartes prägte und befruchtete auf seine Weise das wissenschaftliche Denken; auch Poussin, wie sich verdeutlichen lässt, nahm wissenschaftliche Methoden für seine Kunst in Anspruch.

"Art history and art theory are inseparable. A history of art can be achieved only through the simultaneous construction of a theory of art." These words of the eminent scholar and critic Louis Marin suggest why he considered the paintings and the writings of Nicolas Poussin, painter and theoretician of painting, an enduring source of inspiration. Poussin was the artist to whom Marin returned most faithfully over the years. Since Marin did not live to write his proposed book on (...) Poussin, the ten major essays in this volume will remain his definitive statement on the painter who inspired his most eloquent and probing commentary. At the center of Marins inquiry into Poussins art are the theory and practice of "reading" paintings. Rather than explicate Poussins work through systematic textual and iconographic analysis, he sets out to explore a cluster of speculative questions about the meaning of pictorial art: Can painting be a discourse? If so, how can that discourse be deciphered? Marins horizon for interpreting Poussin depends more on the concepts of aesthetic philosophy and the insights of cultural history than on an account of the painters career or his relationship with his artistic predecessors. For example, he positions several of Poussins best-known landscapes with respect both to French seventeenth-century debates on the question of the sublime and to the philosophical tradition of reflection on the sublime. Among the topics Marin studies are the tempest as a major figure of the sublime in Poussins work, the presence of ruins in the paintings, Poussins use of the concept of metamorphosis, and the frequent presence of sleeping bodies in the work. The Poussin who emerges in these essays is preeminently a philosopher-artist whose painterly discourse embodies the limits of thought and of representation. (shrink)

In dit klassieke essay van de grote kunshistoricus Erwin Panfosky komt vast te staan dat het zinnetje ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, van oudsher te vinden op kunstwerken en in verhalen die Arcadië als thema hebben, tegenwoordig een andere betekenis krijgt dan vroeger. Waar wij het simpelweg vertalen als ‘Ook ik was in Arcadië’, een vertaling die past bij ons beeld van een idyllisch, pastoraal landschap, had het oorspronkelijk een veel minder onschuldige lading. Overtuigend toont Panofsky aan, door te verwijzen naar (...) onder meer Vergilius, Sannazaro en Guercino, dat de ‘ik’ die in het citaat spreekt niemand minder is dan de Dood. De juiste vertaling is dan het sinistere, moralistische ‘Ook in Arcadië heers ik, de Dood’: de Arcadiërs wordt gemaand hun sterven te gedenken. Panofsky maakt duidelijk dat de foutieve interpretatie, met alle gevolgen van dien voor het arcadisch thema, zijn oorsprong heeft bij Nicolas Poussins beroemde Et in Arcadia Ego-composities. Zijn essay maakt dat het lieflijke arcadische landschap alsnog zijn onschuld verliest, en dat ook voor ons de dood opnieuw tot Arcadië toetreedt. (shrink)

This paper attends to the curious affair of Jacques Derrida in Prague when he was arrested by the Czechoslovakian police on charges of drug smuggling. It reads two images by Valerio Adami and Nicolas Poussin, entitled, ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’, Tom Stoppard's play, Professional Foul about dissident philosophers in Prague, and a section from Ken McMullen's film Ghost Dance on Kafka. It turns around the question of what ‘innocence’ might mean in politics and reading.

This paper demonstrates the central role of the Socratic elenchus in the Sophist. In the first part, I defend the position that the Stranger describes the Socratic elenchus in the sixth division of the Sophist. In the second part, I show that the Socratic elenchus is actually used when the Stranger scrutinizes the accounts of being put forward by his predecessors. In the final part, I explain the function of the Socratic elenchus in the argument of the dialogue. By contrast (...) with standard scholarly interpretations, this way of reading the text provides all the puzzles about being (241c4–251a4) with a definite function in the dialogue. It also reveals that Plato’s methodology includes a plurality of method and is more continuous than what is often believed. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to begin to respond to the question of how to engage the presence of catastrophic climate change as a locus of philosophical thought. What has to be thought is the end of the world. Central to that project is Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and in particular, Heidegger’s thinking of the earth/world relation, both in itself and in terms of the limits it encounters. Heidegger’s use of “examples” of artwork, as well (...) as works by Nicolas Poussin and Anselm Kiefer, are deployed in order to begin to understand the role of art in thinking the end of the world. (shrink)

Nicolas Weill propose une lecture stimulante de ces textes qui constituent une des découvertes philosophiques les plus importantes de ces dernières années. La publication des "Cahiers" redonne une actualité brûlante à la question qui divise épigones et détracteurs du penseur allemand : comment continuer à philosopher avec Heidegger sans tenir compte d'une éventuelle contamination de cette philosophie par l'idéologie nazie? Par une analyse sans concession des "Cahiers", en se concentrant sur les Réflexions (tenues par Heidegger de 1931 à 1941) (...) mais tout en cherchant à en dégager les éléments proprement philosophiques, cet ouvrage invite à une approche équilibrée, quitte à "penser avec Heidegger, contre Heidegger", comme le suggérait Jürgen Habermas dès le début des années 1950. Il montre notamment comment l'auteur d'Etre et temps, en inventant une nouvelle forme de philosopher, a poursuivi et prolongé dans ces carnets la critique de la modernité telle qu'elle a été formulée par la "révolution conservatrice" allemande et par Oswald Spengler, le théoricien du déclin de l'Occident. (shrink)

This book is the first extensive treatment of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness. Nicolas de Warren uses detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, some only recently published in German, to examine Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity. He traces the development of Husserl's thinking on the problem of time from Franz Brentano's descriptive psychology, and situates it in the framework of his transcendental project as a whole. Particular discussions include the significance of time-consciousness for (...) other phenomenological themes: perceptual experience, the imagination, remembrance, self-consciousness, embodiment, and the consciousness of others. The result is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

What semantics should we attribute to nouns like "wisdom" and "generosity", which are derived from gradable adjectives? We show that, from a morphosyntactic standpoint, these nouns are mass nouns. This leads us to consider and answer the following questions. How are these nouns interpreted in their various uses? What formal representations may one associate with their interpretations? How do these depend on the semantics of the adjective? And where lies the semantic unity of nouns like wisdom and generosity with the (...) more familiar concrete mass nouns, like wine and furniture? (shrink)

In this paper we claim that pragmatist philosophical practice is incompatible with scientistic philosophy. The kind of pragmatism used for making this case follows the spirit and method of philosophical pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and a related pragmatic tradition, Confucian Philosophy. Pragmatism starts from immediate experience, and refuses to cleave off the reality and salience of what is found in such experience in the process of thinking. Pragmatism also concerns itself with social problems, broadly conceived. (...) In contrast to this focus on immediate experience, the influence of science in much philosophizing involves a kind of scientism through which the relevance, value, and even reality of experience is brought into question. It also concerns itself with a narrowly defined set of so-called philosophical problems. In this regard, pragmatist philosophical practice is fundamentally opposed to scientistic philosophical practice. We will start by modelling the kind of philosophical practice that stems from pragmatism, and the role of immediate experience in it. Subsequently, we will introduce two modes of philosophizing that diminish if not negate the role of experience. One is bald naturalist philosophizing, and the other is a priori scientific philosophizing. In the last section, we will show how main commitments of both of these traditions are incompatible with a pragmatist philosophy that remains committed to the original impulse of pragmatism. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss how we used institutional ethnography (Institutional ethnography as practice, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD and 2006) to map out powerful ruling relations that organize nurses’ wound care work. In recent years, the growing number of people living with wounds that heal slowly or not at all has presented substantial challenges for those managing the demands on Canada's publicly insured health‐care system. In efforts to address this burden, Canadian health‐care administrators and policy‐makers rely on scientific evidence (...) about how wounds heal and what treatments are most effective. Advanced wound care exemplifies the growing authorization of particular forms of evidence that change the ways in which nurses come to know about and conduct their work. The focus of this paper's nursing inquiry is a critique of registered nurses’ wound work as it arises within the established uptake of scientific evidence. (shrink)

Par delà les tensions infinies du monde ce gui, à partir de la terre, fleurit sur le ciel pur de la métaphysique sont les bourgeons de l'éthique. En l'occurrence, dans ce livre rare, ceux de la morale bouddhique se déclinent selon l'application des vœux particuliers doublés d'une pratique d'ouverture universelle. Par la connaissance des données, du développement de questions cruciales, grâce également au degré d'engagement individuel sur la voie, la perspective du message de l'Eveillé et ses conséquences inaugurales d'un état (...) d'esprit autre s'éclairent quasi scientifiquement. Se démarquant du simple dogme d'un comportement idéal, ce cheminement positif révèle la fonction utile de l'humaine condition qualifiée par l'expérience de préceptes transformateurs. Une conduite de vie s'amorce sans coup férir. Pacifier le sensible par la force de donner corps à une bonté impersonnelle, à des mœurs positives, participe d'un essentiel actif, apaisant, qui donne levain et sens à notre présence d'être vivant ici. (shrink)

Has the time come to put to bed the concept of a harm threshold when discussing the ethics of reproductive decision making and the legal limits that should be placed upon it? In this commentary, we defend the claim that there exist good moral reasons, despite the conclusions of the non-identity problem, based on the interests of those we might create, to refrain from bringing to birth individuals whose lives are often described in the philosophical literature as ‘less than worth (...) living’. (shrink)

When attempting to determine which of our acts affect future generations and which affect the identities of those who make up such generations, accounts of personal identity that privilege psychological features and person affecting accounts of morality, whilst highly useful when discussing the rights and wrongs of acts relating to extant persons, seem to come up short. On such approaches it is often held that the intuition that future persons can be harmed by decisions made prior to their existence is (...) mistaken as identity is a most fragile thing with even the smallest differences in the conditions under which we procreate affecting not the interests of distinct future persons, but the identities of those who will come to exist in the future. Within this paper I reject this view, holding that a subscription to these two accounts need not result in the conclusion that virtually all acts relating to possible persons are permitted. Further, I argue that such accounts may in fact allow a great deal more scope for the determination of prenatal harms than accounts of personal identity that privilege physical features. Finally, by interpreting claims regarding causal identity such as Parfit’s Time Dependence Claim in terms of Counterpart Theory I suggest that a solution to the non-identity problem can be found in the acceptance of, as relevant in prenatal cases, three kinds of objective similarity relations: Biological, Environmental and Decisional counterpart relations. (shrink)

In recent years much research has been undertaken regarding the feasibility of the human uterine transplant as a treatment for absolute uterine factor infertility. Should it reach clinical application this procedure would allow such individuals what is often a much-desired opportunity to become not only social mothers, or genetic and social mothers but mothers in a social, genetic and gestational sense. Like many experimental transplantation procedures such as face, hand, corneal and larynx transplants, UTx as a therapeutic option falls firmly (...) into the camp of the quality of life transplant, undertaken with the aim, not to save a life, but to enrich one. However, unlike most of these novel procedures – where one would be unlikely to find a willing living donor or an ethics committee that would sanction such a donation – the organs to be transplanted in UTx are potentially available from both living and deceased donors. In this article, in the light of the recent nine-case research trial in Sweden which used uteri obtained from living donors, and the assertions on the part of a number of other research teams currently preparing trials that they will only be using deceased donors, I explore the question of whether, in the case of UTx, there exist compelling moral reasons to prefer the use of deceased donors despite the benefits that may be associated with the use of organs obtained from the living. (shrink)

In the biomedical context, policy makers face a large amount of potentially discordant evidence from different sources. This prompts the question of how this evidence should be aggregated in the interests of best-informed policy recommendations. The starting point of our discussion is Hunter and Williams’ recent work on an automated aggregation method for medical evidence. Our negative claim is that it is far from clear what the relevant criteria for evaluating an evidence aggregator of this sort are. What is the (...) appropriate balance between explicitly coded algorithms and implicit reasoning involved, for instance, in the packaging of input evidence? In short: What is the optimal degree of ‘automation’? On the positive side: We propose the ability to perform an adequate robustness analysis as the focal criterion, primarily because it directs efforts to what is most important, namely, the structure of the algorithm and the appropriate extent of automation. Moreover, where there are resource constraints on the aggregation process, one must also consider what balance between volume of evidence and accuracy in the treatment of individual evidence best facilitates inference. There is no prerogative to aggregate the total evidence available if this would in fact reduce overall accuracy. (shrink)

For the majority of scholars concerned with the ethics of living organ donation, inflicting moderate harms on competent volunteers in order to save the lives or increase the life chances of others is held to be justifiable provided certain conditions are met. These conditions tend to include one, or more commonly, some combination of the following: The living donor provides valid consent to donation. Living donation produces an overall positive balance of harm–benefit for donors and recipients which cannot be obtained (...) in a less harmful manner. Donation is not liable to cause significant and long-term morbidity to, or the death of, the donor. This paper critically examines the suggestion that these criteria are not sufficient to offer a general account of justified living organ donation in the context of competent volunteers and that key to justified living organ donation is that donors receive sufficient benefits from their donation that these outweigh the harms they suffer. However, although this view—termed here ‘The Donor Benefit Standard’—directs welcome attention to the many and complex motives which may underlie living organ donation, this paper ultimately concludes that given the threats this position poses to individual autonomy and the lives of those in need of organ transplants ‘The Donor Benefit Standard’ should ultimately be rejected. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a morally good person? It can be tempting to think that it is simply a matter of performing certain actions and avoiding others. And yet there is much more to moral character than our outward actions. We expect a good person to not only behave in certain ways but also to experience the world in certain ways within.

This paper offers a framework for consciousness of internal reality. Recent PET experiments are reviewed, showing partial overlap of cortical activation during self-produced actions and actions observed from other people. This overlap suggests that representations for actions may be shared by several individuals, a situation which creates a potential problem for correctly attributing an action to its agent. The neural conditions for correct agency judgments are thus assigned a key role in self/other distinction and self-consciousness. A series of behavioral experiments (...) that demonstrate, in normal subjects, the poor monitoring of action-related signals and the difficulty in recognizing self-produced actions are described. In patients presenting delusions, this difficulty dramatically increases and actions become systematically misattributed. These results point to schizophrenia and related disorders as a paradigmatic alteration of a ''Who?'' system for self-consciousness. (shrink)

Some things have positive value and some things have negative value. The things with positive value are good and the things with negative value are bad. There are also things in-between that are neither good nor bad, which are neutral. All in all, then, there are three monadic value predicates: “good,” “bad,” and “neutral.”.

In the 20th century, the boundaries of psychosis emerged as an area in which psychiatric judgement faced numerous and profound uncertainties. Between obvious neuroses and personality and reactive disorders on the one hand, and unquestionable psychoses on the other, psychiatrists faced a world of suspected cases of schizophrenia, doubtful personality disorder diagnoses or probable cases of psychosis constituting a garden of equivocal clinical presentations in which both individual psychiatrists and the discipline as a whole were confronted with the limits of (...) their knowledge. This article examines how psychiatrists from two German university clinics managed the multiple uncertainties involved in diagnosing cases of early psychosis between 1950 and 1980. Based on the analysis of a sample of records, we propose a pragmatic interpretation of the ways in which these uncertainties were recorded by psychiatrists. How were uncertainties and doubts expressed in the records and managed by clinicians? What means were used to dispel doubt? What were the consequences for patients of these diagnostic uncertainties? The article defines an uncertainty diagnosis as a diagnosis expressed with reservations by its author and recorded as such in a medical file. Depending on the nature of the uncertainty, the types of evidence used by the professionals and how this evidence was dealt with, we have identified three types of uncertainty diagnoses: suspicion, plausibility and probability diagnoses. The article then reflects on the role of the patients themselves in shaping these uncertain situations. (shrink)

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the (...) psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework. (shrink)

Nicola Lacey presents a new approach to the question of the moral justification of punishment by the State. She focuses on the theory of punishments in context of other political questions, such as the nature of political obligation and the function and scope of criminal law. Arguing that no convincing set of justifying reasons has so far been produced, she puts forward a theory of punishments which places the values of the community at its centre.

In order to describe the logic of morality, "contractualist" philosophers have studied how individuals behave when they choose to follow their moral intuitions. These individuals, contractualists note, often act as if they have bargained and thus reached an agreement with others about how to distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation. Using this observation, such philosophers argue that the purpose of morality is to maximize the benefits of human interaction. The resulting "contract" analogy is both insightful and puzzling. On (...) one hand, it captures the pattern of moral intuitions, thus answering questions about human cooperation: why do humans cooperate? Why should the distribution of benefits be proportionate to each person's contribution? Why should the punishment be proportionate to the crime? Why should the rights be proportionate to the duties? On the other hand, the analogy provides a mere as-if explanation for human cooperation, saying that cooperation is "as if" people have passed a contract-but since they didn't, why should it be so? To evolutionary thinkers, the puzzle of the missing contract is immediately reminiscent of the puzzle of the missing "designer" of life-forms, a puzzle that Darwin's theory of natural selection essentially resolved. Evolutionary and contractualist theory originally intersected at the work of philosophers John Rawls and David Gauthier, who argued that moral judgments are based on a sense of fairness that has been naturally selected. In this book, Nicolas Baumard further explores the theory that morality was originally an adaptation to the biological market of cooperation, an arena in which individuals competed to be selected for cooperative interactions. In this environment, Baumard suggests, the best strategy was to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation in a fair way, so that those who offered less than others were left out of cooperation while those who offered more were exploited by their partners. It is with this evolutionary approach that Baumard ultimately accounts for the specific structure of human morality. (shrink)

Moral and legal philosophy are too entangled: moral philosophy is prone to model interpersonal moral relationships on a juridical image, and legal philosophy often proceeds as if the criminal law is an institutional reflection of juridically imagined interpersonal moral relationships. This article challenges this alignment and in so doing argues that the function of the criminal law lies not fundamentally in moral blame, but in regulation of harmful conduct. The upshot is that, in contrast to interpersonal relationships, the criminal law (...) cannot lose its standing to blame through institutional analogues of hypocrisy, complicity, and meddling. Rather, certain forms of structural and severe historical and contemporary injustice point to the question of the overall legitimacy of state authority. (shrink)

What makes someone responsible for a crime and therefore liable to punishment under the criminal law? Modern lawyers will quickly and easily point to the criminal law's requirement of concurrent actus reus and mens rea, doctrines of the criminal law which ensure that someone will only be found criminally responsible if they have committed criminal conduct while possessing capacities of understanding, awareness, and self-control at the time of offense. Any notion of criminal responsibility based on the character of the offender, (...) meaning an implication of criminality based on reputation or the assumed disposition of the person, would seem to today's criminal lawyer a relic of the 18th Century. In this volume, Nicola Lacey demonstrates that the practice of character-based patterns of attribution was not laid to rest in 18th Century criminal law, but is alive and well in contemporary English criminal responsibility-attribution. Building upon the analysis of criminal responsibility in her previous book, Women, Crime, and Character, Lacey investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century. Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal approach, this volume evidences how the theory behind criminal responsibility has shifted over time. The character and outcome responsibility which dominated criminal law in the 18th Century diminished in ideological importance in the following two centuries, when the idea of responsibility as founded in capacity was gradually established as the core of criminal law. Lacey traces the historical trajectory of responsibility into the 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility and the discourse of responsibility as founded in risk are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law. These ideas of criminal responsibility are explored through an examination of the institutions through which they are produced, interpreted and executed; the interests which have shaped both doctrines and institutions; and the substantive social functions which criminal law and punishment have been expected to perform at different points in history. (shrink)

Peer commentary on: Blumenthal-Barby, J. S. (2016). Biases and heuristics in decision making and their impact on autonomy. The American Journal of Bioethics, 16(5), 5-15.