L’article étudie le traitement par Schiller de la pulsion de jeu (Spieltrieb) comme d’une troisième pulsion suspendant et transcendant dans le plaisir esthétique nos deux tendances sensible et raisonnable. Puisque la pulsion de jeu schillérienne transforme des inclinations matérielles en un plaisir pris à la forme, créant un amour de la beauté et du sublime, et puisqu’elle est l’indice du progrès moral au sein de la société, elle excède – telle est ma thèse – le domaine kantien de l’expérience esthétique. (...) Mais surtout, Schiller considère que la liberté humaine est le produit de l’expérience esthétique, par où l’individu surmonte, moyennant le jeu, l’oppression exercée par les contraintes sociales. (shrink)

Après avoir montré comment le concept de pulsion d’attachement, proposé par D. Anzieu, peut s’avérer fécond pour dépasser un certain nombre de polémiques qui ont eu lieu autour de la théorie de l’attachement, l’auteur fait ensuite l’hypothèse que ce concept, apparemment hérétique, permet peut-être de mieux articuler les processus de symbolisation en absence et en présence de l’objet.

Une relecture des lettres Sur l’esprit et la lettre en philosophie de 1795 permet de réévaluer le rôle de la pulsion esthétique comme agent d’historicisation du Moi. La méthode philosophique de la lettre, axée sur la réception passive d’un objet, s’oppose à celle de l’esprit qui s’intéresse à la relation pulsionnelle du sujet à son objet. Cette distinction s’articule sur la structure anthropologique de la pulsion fichtéenne qui différencie les pulsions théorique, pratique et esthétique. La pulsion esthétique joue une (...) fonction primordiale dans le passage d’une activité idéelle du Moi à sa réalisation matérielle. Cette démonstration explique le rôle particulier de la création dans le système du jeune Fichte comme l’acte qui permet l’éveil de ces pulsions chez le récepteur ouvrant ainsi la voie à la formation de son esprit. (shrink)

More than a simple expository history, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and F lix Guattari, while also engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics.Following in the wake of his groundbreaking War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a radical synthesis of historical development over the last one thousand years. More than (...) a simple expository history, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and F lix Guattari, while also engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history as an arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In every case, what one sees is the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress, and even more important, free of any deterministic source of its urban, institutional, and technological forms. Rather, the source of all concrete forms in the West's history are shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself. (shrink)

[from the publisher's website] Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De (...) Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition. -/- De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality. (shrink)

"Manuel DeLanda is a distinguished writer, artist and philosopher. In his new book, he offers a fascinating look at how the contemporary world is characterized by an extraordinary social complexity. Since most social entities, from small communities to large nation-states, would disappear altogether if human minds ceased to exist, Delanda proposes a novel approach to social ontology that asserts the autonomy of social entities from the conceptions we have of them." Editorial.

L’article examine la question des racines pulsionnelles du narratif en analysant le statut et la fonction du concept métapyschologique de pulsion dans les thèses sémiotiques de Jean Petitot. Cette question est d’ordre épistémologique et concerne la présence de thèses lacaniennes dans une théorie sémiotique qui affirme la morphogenèse du sens à partir d’un substrat naturel. L’article explique comment les critiques que Petitot adresse au structuralisme lacanien en 1981 s’insèrent dans une réinterprétation bioanthropologique et naturaliste de la métapsychologie freudienne et (...) comment cette réinterprétation précède et prépare la refondation morphodynamique de la sémiotique greimassienne. Après avoir discuté les arguments que Petitot présente pour faire de Lacan un précurseur du ‘tournant morphodynamique,’ l’article se centre sur la redéfinition de pulsion comme prégnance sémique. Il expose les avantages théoriques de cette notion, mais aborde également l’antinomie qu’elle contient. La conclusion en est que la redéfinition de la pulsion comme prégnance sémique escamote la nature sexuelle de la libido et projette sur la sémiotique morphodynamique l’ombre de ‘l’illusion archaïque.’. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é apontar cinco aspectos do pensamento nietzschiano que podem ser relevantes para os debates da filosofia da ciência em torno da natureza e representação do conhecimento científico. Para tanto, é realizada uma revisão de literatura com o objetivo de selecionar trechos de obras nietzschianas como O nascimento da tragédia, Genealogia da moral, A gaia ciência e outras que permitam interpretar Nietzsche como um filósofo da ciência preocupado com a construção do conhecimento cientifico sobre a realidade física. (...) Como resultado é possível identificar uma proposta epistemológica na perspectiva nietzschiana, cuja representação objetiva do mundo deve apontar para uma estética da vida. -/- The purpose of this article is to point out five aspects of Nietzschean thought that may be relevant to debates in the philosophy of science around the nature and representation of scientific knowledge. To this end, a literature review is carried out with the aim of selecting excerpts from Nietzschean works such as The Birth of Tragedy, Genealogy of Morals, The Gay Science and others that allow us to interpret Nietzsche as a philosopher of science concerned with the construction of scientific knowledge about the physical reality. As a result, it is possible to identify an epistemological proposal in the Nietzschean perspective, whose objective representation of the world should point to an aesthetics of life. (shrink)

The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and made possible the work of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, thus enabling the development of French feminism, gender studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism. Based on Saussure's lectures, _Course in General Linguistics_ (1916) traces the rise and fall of the historical linguistics in which Saussure was trained, the synchronic or structural linguistics with which he replaced it, and the new look of diachronic linguistics (...) that followed this change. Most important, Saussure presents the principles of a new linguistic science that includes the invention of semiology, or the theory of the "signifier," the "signified," and the "sign" that they combine to produce. This is the first critical edition of _Course in General Linguistics_ to appear in English and restores Wade Baskin's original translation of 1959, in which the terms "signifier" and "signified" are introduced into English in this precise way. Baskin renders Saussure clearly and accessibly, allowing readers to experience his shift of the theory of reference from mimesis to performance and his expansion of poetics to include all media, including the life sciences and environmentalism. An introduction situates Saussure within the history of ideas and describes the history of scholarship that made _Course in General Linguistics_ legendary. New endnotes enlarge Saussure's contexts to include literary criticism, cultural studies, and philosophy. (shrink)

In the graphical representation of ontologies, it is customary to use graph theory as the representational background. We claim here that the standard graph-based approach has a number of limitations. We focus here on a problem in the graph-based representation of ontologies in complex domains such as biomedical, engineering and manufacturing: lack of mereotopological representation. Based on such limitation, we proposed a diagrammatic way to represent an entity’s structure and various forms of mereotopological relationships between the entities.

The introduction of genomics and biobanking methodologies to the African research context has also introduced novel ways of doing science, based on values of sharing and reuse of data and samples. This shift raises ethical challenges that need to be considered when research is reviewed by ethics committees, relating for instance to broad consent, the feedback of individual genetic findings, and regulation of secondary sample access and use. Yet existing ethics guidelines and regulations in Africa do not successfully regulate research (...) based on sharing, causing confusion about what is allowed, where and when. In order to understand better the ethics regulatory landscape around genomic research and biobanking, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of existing ethics guidelines, policies and other similar sources. We sourced 30 ethics regulatory documents from 22 African countries. We used software that assists with qualitative data analysis to conduct a thematic analysis of these documents. Surprisingly considering how contentious broad consent is in Africa, we found that most countries allow the use of this consent model, with its use banned in only three of the countries we investigated. In a likely response to fears about exploitation, the export of samples outside of the continent is strictly regulated, sometimes in conjunction with regulations around international collaboration. We also found that whilst an essential and critical component of ensuring ethical best practice in genomics research relates to the governance framework that accompanies sample and data sharing, this was most sparingly covered in the guidelines. There is a need for ethics guidelines in African countries to be adapted to the changing science policy landscape, which increasingly supports principles of openness, storage, sharing and secondary use. Current guidelines are not pertinent to the ethical challenges that such a new orientation raises, and therefore fail to provide accurate guidance to ethics committees and researchers. (shrink)

The Future of Man is a magnificent introduction to the thoughts and writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, one of the few figures in the history of the Catholic Church to achieve renown as both a scientist and a theologian. Trained as a paleontologist and ordained as a Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin devoted himself to establishing the intimate, interdependent connection between science—particularly the theory of evolution—and the basic tenets of the Christian faith. At the center of his philosophy was (...) the belief that the human species is evolving spiritually, progressing from a simple faith to higher and higher forms of consciousness, including a consciousness of God, and culminating in the ultimate understanding of humankind’s place and purpose in the universe. The Church, which would not condone his philosophical writings, refused to allow their publication during his lifetime. Written over a period of thirty years and presented here in chronological order, the essays cover the wide-ranging interests and inquiries that engaged Teilhard de Chardin throughout his life: intellectual and social evolution; the coming of ultra-humanity; the integral place of faith in God in the advancement of science; and the impact of scientific discoveries on traditional religious dogma. Less formal than The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu , Teilhard de Chardin’s most renowned works, The Future of Man offers a complete, fully accessible look at the genesis of ideas that continue to reverberate in both the scientific and the religious communities. (shrink)

La contribution de Michel Troper à la théorie générale du droit et à la théorie constitutionnelle est aujourd'hui reconnue et célébrée un peu partout dans le monde. Un talent d'architecte se tient à l'origine de cette audience rarement égalée dans la sphère francophone : celui qu'il faut pour accommoder toutes les exigences, quel que soit l'ordre de valeur dans lequel on les trouve : originalité, rigueur, souci de la fonction, esthétisme, solidité, adaptation, intelligence, inquiétude, esprit critique, renoncement, réalisme... (...) A ces mérites, on ajoutera une curiosité insatiable, un goût prononcé pour l'échange et le débat, un refus distingué de l'académisme, un sens exigeant de l'amitié et une méfiance profônde pour les adjectifs... C'est cet édifice de qualités que les élèves, collègues et amis de Michel Troper sont heureux de célébrer en lui offrant ces Mélanges. (shrink)

On veut établir ici comment la relecture de Hume par l'école de Brentano, associée au projet d'une généalogie critique des théories des relations, conduit les philosophes autrichiens à élaborer une alternative décisive pour l'empirisme contemporain: l'opposition entre une psychologie fortement inspirée de Descartes et de Locke, et qui tend vers des positions typiquement conceptualistes, celle que défend Meinong, et un intuitionnisme enrichi de la référence aux « qualités de formes », dont Ehrenfels est l'initiateur. Our purpose is here to show (...) how the reading of Hume by Brentano's school, within a critical genealogy of the theory of relations, has led Austrian philosophers to set up a conclusive alternative for today's empiricism: on the one hand, a psychology deeply influenced by Descartes and Locke, and which verges on typically conceptualist positions (and which is supported by Meinong), and on the other and, an intuitionnism, strengthened by references to « gestaltqualities », initiated by Ehrenfels. (shrink)

Condillac's Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, first published in French in 1746 and offered here in a new translation, represented in its time a radical departure from the dominant conception of the mind as a reservoir of innately given ideas. Descartes had held that knowledge must rest on ideas; Condillac turned this upside down by arguing that speech and words are the origin of mental life and knowledge. He argued, further, that language has its origin in human interaction (...) and in our natural capacity to react spontaneously and instinctively to the expression of emotions and states of mind in others. The importance of this pointedly anti-Cartesian view, and its relevance to both aesthetics and epistemology, were quickly understood, and Condillac's work influenced many later philosophers including Herder, Rousseau, and Adam Smith. His conception also anticipated Wittgenstein's view of language, its usage, and its relation to mind and thought. (shrink)

This paper challenges the negative attitudes towards labelled proof systems, usually referred to as semantic pollution, by arguing that such critiques overlook the full potential of labelled calculi. The overarching objective is to develop a practice-based philosophical analysis of labelled calculi to provide insightful considerations regarding their proof-theoretic and philosophical value. To achieve this, successful applications of labelled calculi and related results will be showcased, and comparisons with other relevant works will be discussed. The paper ends by advocating for a (...) more practice-based approach towards the philosophical understanding of proof systems and their role in structural proof theory. (shrink)

The abuse of history is common and quite possibly once more on the rise. Although this is well documented, there is no general theory that enables historians to identify, prove, explain, and evaluate the many types of abuse of history. In this book, the author presents such a theory. Reflecting on the responsible use of history, the author identifies the duties that the living has toward the dead and analyzes the rights to memory and history necessary to fulfill these duties. (...) He concludes his argument by proposing a code of ethics as a guide for responsible historians. This work is vital for any historian who wants to oppose and prevent the abuse of history."-- Book jacket. (shrink)

We present a kind of logic named multideductive logic and outline an application of it in the problem of theoretic-formal unification of physical theories dealing with the Bohr atom theory. This is just a preliminary study that will be developed in future papers.

Being a subject and being conscious of being one are different realities. According to Hegel, the difference is not only conceptual, but also influences people's experience of the world and of one another. This book aims to explain some basic aspects of Hegel's conception of subjectivity with particular regard to the difference he saw in ancient and modern ways of thinking about and acting as individuals, persons and moral subjects.

Two important works by one of philosophy's most original and penetrating thinkers appear in this volume. Spinoza's "Theologico-Political Treatise" presents an eloquent plea for religious liberty, demonstrating that true religion consists of the practice of simple piety, independent of philosophical speculation. He examines the Bible at length to show that freedom of thought and of speech are consistent with the religious life. In the unfinished "Political Treatise," the author develops a theory of government founded on common consent.

Our main aim is to discuss the topic of scientific controversies in the context of a recent issue that has been the centre of attention of many epistemologists though not of argumentation theorists or philosophers of science, namely the ethics of belief in face of rational disagreement. We think that the consideration of scientific examples may be of help in the epistemological debate on rational disagreement, making clear some of the deficiencies of the discussion as it has been produced until (...) now. Another central claim of our paper is that the common view according to which beliefs (and changes of beliefs) may exhibit and commonly exhibit a deontic status can be clarified in the light of Brandom’s approach to normative pragmatics and the pragmatic theories of argumentation that also have a normative character (here our example is van Eemeren’s pragma-dialectics). Our article highlights the similarities between both projects, similarities that to our knowledge were not noticed before. Finally, an important point of the article is that we need to take contextual elements into account in order to develop an adequate theory of disagreement. (shrink)

Inventeur du néologisme « déontologie », le philosophe anglais Jeremy Bentham lui donnait pour but de fixer ce qui doit être sous l'égide du principe de l'utilité, de concilier les intérêts privés et les intérêts publics. Emmanuelle de Champs explore la branche politique de la déontologie benthamienne, l'art du législateur, celui du droit constitutionnel, et la dimension morale de l'utilitarisme, qu'elle juge centrale dans le système philosophique benthamien. Elle montre que la théorie du langage et de la connaissance est (...) une véritable condition de possibilité de la réflexion politique: il s'agit de forger les outils nécessaires à l'élaboration d'une morale de l'action publique. Loin d'être le produit d'une conversion tardive à la démocratie, la réflexion constitutionnelle habite l'œuvre de Bentham dès le début des années 1770. Au cours des années, elle se nourrit des Révolutions américaine et française, de la montée des revendications radicales en Grande-Bretagne, puis des révolutions libérales du sud de l'Europe et d'Amérique latine au début du XIXe siècle. Etudiée dans son contexte, la déontologie politique benthamienne s'inscrit dans un dialogue avec Montesquieu et Blackstone, Burke et Paine, Mill et Macaulay. Elle apparaît alors comme une étape majeure dans l'histoire des idées politiques occidentales. Pages de début Note concernant les citations et les traductions Introduction Les principes de la science de la législation Premiers écrits politiques, 1776 Éléments d'une théorie constitutionnelle La France révolutionnaire, laboratoire constitutionnel L'engagement radical La genèse d'une constitution universelle Le Constitutional Code, pouvoir, intérêts et bonheur ConclusionRemerciements Bibliographie Index des noms de personnes et de pays Pages de fin. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a proof-theoretic characterization of relevant logics including fusion and fission connectives, as well as Ackermann’s truth constant. We achieve this by employing the well-established methodology of labelled sequent calculi. After having introduced several systems, we will conduct a detailed proof-theoretic analysis, show a cut-admissibility theorem, and establish soundness and completeness. The paper ends with a discussion that contextualizes our current work within the broader landscape of the proof theory of relevant logics.

Conceptual engineering wants analytic philosophy to be centered around the assessment and improvement of philosophical concepts. But contemporary debates about conceptual engineering do not engage much with the vast literature on conceptual change that exists in philosophy of science. In this article, I argue that an adequate appreciation of the history of philosophy of science can contribute to discussions about conceptual engineering. Specifically, I show that the evolution of debates over scientific conceptual change arguably demonstrates that, contrary to what is (...) commonly assumed in the literature about conceptual engineering, conceptual change is possible within an externalist metasemantics and that any adequate theory of conceptual change should be metasemantically plastic. (shrink)

L'auteur montre que la demonstration aristotelicienne du principe de non-contradiction se joue sur le terrain de la psychologie. Le livre Gamma de la Metaphysique renvoie au traite De l'ame et c'est a une theorie de l'enonciation qu'aboutit Aristote: l'unite offerte par l'acte d'affirmer etant, selon lui, l'expression non seulement de l'unite, mais encore de l'individualite du sujet.

While COVID-19 spreads aggressively and rapidly across the globe, many societies have also witnessed the spread of other viral phenomena like misinformation, conspiracy theories, and general mass suspicions about what is really going on. This study investigates how exposure to and trust in information sources, and anxiety and depression, are associated with conspiracy and misinformation beliefs in eight countries/regions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected in an online survey fielded from May 29, 2020 to June 12, 2020, resulting in (...) a multinational representative sample of 8,806 adult respondents. Results indicate that greater exposure to traditional media is associated with lower conspiracy and misinformation beliefs, while exposure to politicians and digital media and personal contacts are associated with greater conspiracy and misinformation beliefs. Exposure to health experts is associated with lower conspiracy beliefs only. Higher feelings of depression are also associated with greater conspiracy and misinformation beliefs. We also found relevant group- and country differences. We discuss the implications of these results. (shrink)

Modern commentators have doubts about the authenticity and cogency of the early propositions of Archimedes’ On Equilibrium of Planes Book 1. Ernst Mach famously said that the proof of Prop. 6, the so-called law of the lever, assumes what is to be proven. Comparing the initial text in Heiberg’s modern edition (1881, 1913) to the first propositions in Eutocius’ commentary on EP 1, J. L. Berggren ([1976]. ‘Spurious Theorems in Archimedes’ Equilibrium of Planes: Book I’, Archive for History of Exact (...) Sciences 16.2 (1976), 87–103.) claimed that the propositions up through Proposition 3 of the standard modern edition are schoolbook additions written by an ancient author inferior to Archimedes. The present paper argues for the logical connectedness of Postulates 1–5 to Props. 1–6, by means of a detailed examination of the course of the argument and a re-examination of Eutocius’ remarks. The paper reinterprets the role of the empirical in the early propositions and offers a reading of the contribution of Archimedes’ mechanics to the method of EP 1. (shrink)

This article is an account of the dynamics of interaction across the social sciences and neurosciences. Against an arid rhetoric of ‘interdisciplinarity’, it calls for a more expansive imaginary of what experiment – as practice and ethos – might offer in this space. Arguing that opportunities for collaboration between social scientists and neuroscientists need to be taken seriously, the article situates itself against existing conceptualizations of these dynamics, grouping them under three rubrics: ‘critique’, ‘ebullience’ and ‘interaction’. Despite their differences, each (...) insists on a distinction between sociocultural and neurobiological knowledge, or does not show how a more entangled field might be realized. The article links this absence to the ‘regime of the inter-’, an ethic of interdisciplinarity that guides interaction between disciplines on the understanding of their pre-existing separateness. The argument of the paper is thus twofold: (1) that, contra the ‘regime of the inter-’, it is no longer practicable to maintain a hygienic separation between sociocultural webs and neurobiological architecture; (2) that the cognitive neuroscientific experiment, as a space of epistemological and ontological excess, offers an opportunity to researchers, from all disciplines, to explore and register this realization. (shrink)

Protagoras beansprucht, die Jugend erziehen zu können. Warum nicht? Wenn «Mensch Maß aller Dinge» ist, kann jeder jeden ‘besser’ machen… Für Plato geht das nicht auf. Was fehlt? Was ist das Maß des Menschen, wenn der Mensch Maß sein soll? Protagoras claims to be able to educate the young. Why not? If «Man is Measure of Everything», anybody can make everybody ‘better’… To Plato, this doesn't add up. What's lacking? What is the measure of Man, if Man be measure?

While $$\Lambda $$ Λ CDM has emerged as the standard model of cosmology, a small group of physicists defends modified newtonian dynamics (MOND) as an alternative view on cosmology. Exponents of MOND have employed a broad, at times explicitly philosophical, conceptual perspective in arguing their case. This paper offers reasons why that MONDian defense has been ineffective. First, we argue that the defense is ineffective according to Popperian or Lakatosian views–ostensibly the preferred philosophical views on theory assessment of proponents of (...) MOND. Second, we argue that the defense of MOND can instead best be reconstructed as an instance of meta-empirical theory assessment. The formal employment of meta-empirical assessment by MONDians is unconvincing, however, because it lacks a sufficient epistemic foundation. Specifically, the MONDian No Alternatives Argument relies on falsifiability or explanation conditions that lack epistemic relevance, while the argument from Unexpected Explanatory Success fails since there is a known alternative to MOND. In the last part of the paper, we draw some lessons for applications of meta-empirical assessment more generally. (shrink)

Game theory is the mathematical study of strategy and conflict. It has wide applications in economics, political science, sociology, and, to some extent, in philosophy. Where rational choice theory or decision theory is concerned with individual agents facing games against nature, game theory deals with games in which all players have preference orderings over the possible outcomes of the game. This paper gives an informal introduction to the theory and a survey of applications in diverse branches of philosophy. No criticism (...) is reviewed. Game theory is shown at work in discussions about epistemological dependence, liberalism and efficiency, Hume’s concept of convention, morality and rationality, and distributive justice and egalitarianism. A guide to the literature provides hints at applications in collective intentionality, epistemology, ethics, history of philosophy, logic, philosophy of language, and political philosophy. (shrink)