Speeches delivered in Tamil at various schools in Tamil Nadu, during 2010-2015, by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, 1931-2015, former President of India.

Madison, G. B. Avant-propos.--Gadamer, H.-G. La mort comme question.--Lévinas, E. L'être et l'autre.--Dufrenne, M. L'esthétique de Paul Valéry.--Eliade, M. Orphée et l'orphisme.--Décarie, V. Vertu totale, vertu parfaite et kalokagathie dans l'Éthique à Eudème.--Strasser, S. Réflexions sur la proposition phénoménologique.--Peursen, C. van. L'existence fait-elle sens?--Edie, J. E. La pertinence actuelle de la conception husserlienne de l'idéalité du langage.--Taylor, C. Force et sens, les deux dimensions irréductibles d'une science de l'homme.--Henry, M. Phénoménologie de la conscience, phénoménologie de la vie.--Philibert, M. Marx, la (...) machine et la manufacture.--Dumas, A. Savoir objectif, croyance projective, foi interpellée.--Maqdici, A. L'ontologie kérygmatique de Paul Ricœur, approche arabe.--Kemp, P. Le rôle du mythe et de la poésie dans l'orientation sociale. (shrink)

In Hans Urs von Balthasar's 1947 Wahrheit, later republished as Theo-Logic I, he attempted to retrieve the notion that "truth is not just a property of knowledge but a transcendental quality of being as such". Villanova's D. C. Schindler enlists this retrieval in order to overcome "a metaphysics of presence," while also providing readers with an indispensable guide for navigating philosophical aspects of Balthasar's Werke. Although Schindler's text deals with notoriously dense subject matter, an undercurrent of pedagogical sense controls his (...) style and grants readers rewarding assimilation of a logic affirming both identity and difference within the concept of truth. (shrink)

Quelle est la nature et la fonction des sentiments dans l’activité de connaissance et, plus largement, dans l’existence humaine? Cette question, massive, n’a cessé d’inquiéter la philosophie, dont l’histoire paraît à bien des égards se confondre avec celle d’une opposition entre la lucidité de la raison et l’obscurité dangereuse des passions. Si le discours philosophique n’a jamais nié l’importance des sentiments, ni leur rôle dans l’ordonnancement général de la vie humaine, ce discours est cependant empreint d’ambiguïtés, comme l’est, déjà, le (...) statut du « cœur » dans la tripartition fonctionnelle de l’âme présentée par Platon : ni réductible à la droite raison, ni relégué dans la sphère des désirs qui nous empêchent de contempler les Idées, le sentiment est cet intermédiaire allié de la raison qui met en mouvement nos réactions morales. Cette ambiguïté se retrouve à l’âge classique, lorsque le discours philosophique découvre le fonctionnement des passions et cherche les modèles scientifiques susceptibles d’en rendre compte, hésitant entre la physiologie , la géométrie , la médecine et les sciences de la nature .En faisant de l’affectivité l’une des structures fondamentales de l’existence, la phénoménologie a replacé au centre du questionnement philosophique la problématique des sentiments. Mais comment décrire ces expériences singulières – celle de l’amour, de l’angoisse, du désespoir ou de la joie – sans les confondre avec des objets? Comment donner du sens aux affects sans adopter ce point de vue surplombant des sciences de la nature, qui confond le discours des causes et celui des raisons? Comment, en d’autres termes, continuer à parler des sentiments de manière raisonnée, tout en reconnaissant que les sentiments nous font autant que nous les connaissons – tout en continuant, par conséquent, à être réceptifs à leur pouvoir de nous ébranler? (shrink)

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has imperatively shaken the behavior of the global financial markets. This study estimated the impact of COVID-19 on the behavior of the financial markets of Europe and the US. The results revealed that the returns of the S&P 500 index have been greatly affected by a lockdown in the US owing to COVID-19. However, the health crisis generated due to the novel coronavirus significantly decreased the stock returns of the Nasdaq Composite index. The results also showed (...) that the economic crisis generated from the pandemic in Spain has had more impact on the IBEX 35 as compared to the health crisis itself. On the other hand, in the long-run, Italy’s stock markets are more affected by the health crisis as contrasted with the economic crisis, while, in the short-run, both lockdown conditions and economic instability lower the stock returns of FTSE MIB. The UK stock markets witnessed that in the short-run, deficiency of health management systems imperatively damaged the stock returns of the London Stock Exchange. The investigation revealed that deficiency of health systems and lockdown conditions have imperatively damaged the structure of financial markets, inferring that sustainable development of these nations is at risk due to COVID-19. The study suggested that governments should allocate more of their budget to the health sector to overcome a health crisis in the future. (shrink)

Les mathématiques sont bien plus qu’une science, tant elles ont acquis un statut central et tout à fait particulier. Elles sont à la fois un langage permettant d’articuler la réalité et un outil qui façonne le réel, et jouent à ce titre un rôle clé dans le développement des sciences de la nature, des sciences humaines et sociales, et de l’industrie. Leur position centrale dans les mécanismes de sélection et de reproduction qui caractérisent l’enseignement en France en fait par ailleurs (...) un enjeu social majeur. L’essence des mathématiques, c’est la liberté, disait Georg Cantor. Quelles sont les nouvelles frontières, les nouveaux défis de cette science qui ne s’impose aucune limite? Comment cette science de l’abstraction s’inscrit-elle au cœur de la réalité, au point d’être incontournable? Quel rôle, quelle place, quelle responsabilité s’assignent les mathématiciens? Deux mathématiciens, Pierre Cartier qui fut l’un des piliers du fameux groupe Bourbaki et Cédric Villani, un des représentants les plus brillants de sa génération (médaille Fields en 2010), le mathématicien et historien des sciences Jean Dhombres, et le philosophe des sciences Gerhard Heinzmann nous invitent à débattre avec eux de l’activité mathématique et de ses conséquences sociales, tant dans l’histoire de l’humanité que dans le monde contemporain. (shrink)

In this article, we present results from a literature review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values of nature conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as part of the Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuations of Nature. We identify the most frequently recurring meanings in the heterogeneous use of different value types and their association with worldviews and other key concepts. From frequent uses, we determine a core meaning for each value type, which is (...) sufficiently inclusive to serve as an umbrella over different understandings in the literature and specific enough to help highlight its difference from the other types of values. Finally, we discuss convergences, overlapping areas, and fuzzy boundaries between different value types to facilitate dialogue, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the methods for valuation of nature's contributions to people, including ecosystem services, to inform policy and direct future research. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. (shrink)

Paul Ricœur, with Rawls, Walzer, and Habermas as some of his main interlocuters, has developed a substantial and distinctive body of political thought. On the one hand, it articulates a rich conception of the paradoxical character of the domain of politics. On the other, it provides a fresh approach to such major topics as the relationship among politics, economics, and ethics and between concern for universal human rights and respect for cultural plurality. His work, rooted as it is in Aristotle, (...) Kant, and Hegel, also provides resources for a fruitful rethinking of the issues at stake in the liberal-communitarian debate. (shrink)

Tocqueville se montre préoccupé par le fait religieux dans l’ensemble de son œuvre. Il ne se contente pas d’observer le rapport de la religion au politique, il cherche ce qu’elle doit être pour s’ouvrir un avenir, et cela justifie une étude théologique de son concept de religion.Dans la 1ère partie de la Démocratie en Amérique , il souligne l’influence des croyances religieuses sur les mœurs politiques des Américains et la particulière inclination du christianisme aux institutions démocratiques. Sa pensée s’élève toutefois (...) à la conception d’un rapport générique entre la religion et la société politique, conception qu’il développera dans la 2e partie du même ouvrage , puis dans l’Ancien Régime et la Révolution . Il croit remarquer une évolution continue du xvie au xviiie siècle, qui tend à établir l’égalité et la ressemblance des citoyens et à substituer le libre examen des croyances dogmatiques au principe d’autorité. Il en conclut que l’opinion commune est appelée à jouer un rôle prépondérant dans les sociétés égalitaires, et il y voit un danger pour l’avenir de la religion, si elle se referme sur son dogmatisme, mais aussi pour l’avenir des sociétés démocratiques, qui ont plus qu’aucune autre besoin de la religion. Mais il juge que la religion chrétienne est mieux armée que les autres pour relever ce défi, pourvu que les chrétiens ne s’érigent pas en adversaires de la liberté.La religion occupe donc une place centrale dans la réflexion politique de Tocqueville, lui-même tourmenté depuis son adolescence par les questions religieuses. Son penchant croissant au doute le prédisposait à recueillir l’héritage des Lumières, mais n’a jamais entamé son espérance dans l’avenir du christianisme.Throughout his writings, Tocqueville shows that he was preoccupied by the religious phenomenon. He not only observed the relation to politics, but he looked for what religion should be in order to open itself to the future. This justifies a theological study of his concept of religion.In the first part of la Démocratie en Amérique , he pointed out the influence of religious beliefs on the political morals of Americans and the particular inclination of Christianity to democratic institutions. His thought, nevertheless, developed towards a conception of the generic rapport between religion and political society, an idea that he develops in the second part of the same work , and then in l’Ancien Régime et la Révolution . He thought that he saw a continual evolution from the 16th to the 18th century, which tended to establish equality and a similarity of citizens and to substitute the free examine of dogmatic beliefs for the principle of authority. He concluded from this that common opinion is called to play a preponderant role in egalitarian societies. He saw there a danger for the future of religion, if it closed itself on its dogmatism, but also for the future of democratic societies, which would need for religion more than any other type of society. But he judged that the Christian religion was better armed than others to take up the challenge, as long as Christians did not set themselves up as adversaries of freedom.Religion, then, occupies a central place in the political reflection of Tocqueville, who was tormented by religious questions from the time of his adolescence. His growing inclination to doubt predisposed him to welcome the heritage of the Enlightenment, but not so far as to weaken his hope in the future of Christianity. (shrink)

Was Plato a Platonist? While ancient disciples of Plato would have answered this question in the affirmative, modern scholars have generally denied that Plato's own philosophy was in substantial agreement with that of the Platonists of succeeding centuries. In From Plato to Platonism, Lloyd P. Gerson argues that the ancients are correct in their assessment. He arrives at this conclusion in an especially ingenious manner, challenging fundamental assumptions about how Plato's teachings have come to be understood. Through deft readings of (...) the philosophical principles found in Plato's dialogues and in the Platonic tradition beginning with Aristotle, he shows that Platonism, broadly conceived, is the polar opposite of naturalism and that the history of philosophy from Plato until the seventeenth century was the history of various efforts to find the most consistent and complete version of "anti-naturalism." Gerson contends that the philosophical position of Plato--Plato's own Platonism, so to speak--was produced out of a matrix he calls "Ur-Platonism." According to Gerson, Ur-Platonism is the conjunction of five "antis" that in total arrive at anti-naturalism: anti-nominalism, anti-mechanism, anti-materialism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism. Plato's Platonism is an attempt to construct the most consistent and defensible positive system uniting the five "antis." It is also the system that all later Platonists throughout Antiquity attributed to Plato when countering attacks from critics including Peripatetics, Stoics, and Sceptics. In conclusion, Gerson shows that Late Antique philosophers such as Proclus were right in regarding Plotinus as "the great exegete of the Platonic revelation.". (shrink)

A fine translation makes available the work of an eminent European phenomenologist. Fallible Man is the first part of Finitude and Guilt, which is the second part of M. Ric£ur's Philosophy of the Will. In Fallible Man he makes brilliant use of Kant's notion of the transcendental imagination, calling into play Plato and Aristotle. Descartes' concepts of fault and transcendence, which remained opaque to the eidetic analysis of man in the first part of Philosophy of the Will, are analyzed in (...) terms of "disproportion," in turn analyzed in terms of the "intermediacy" of man. Disproportion is a discrepancy between self aimed at and self attained, while intermediacy harks back to Kant's Schematism. The starting point on the way to his philosophical anthropology of fallibility is a transcendental analysis of perceptual receptivity, which he makes relevant to the structures of finitude and intermediacy. The abstractness of the transcendental approach is enriched by analyses of desire, character, person, feeling, and happiness, to overcome disparity between the conceptual and feeling. Yet incompleteness remains which is to be overcome by the "symbolics of evil" in the as yet unfinished Philosophy of the Will: with the concept of fallibility we arrive only at the possibility of evil. M. Ric£ur's line of argument is admirably clear-cut, his style lucid, and the sweep and balance of his thought impressive.—P. S. (shrink)

This is a collection of chapters by some of the most influential memory researchers.

Hobbes' classic work has set the tone for the course of political philosophy through to our own day. This new Broadview edition includes the full text of the 1651 edition, together with a wide variety of background documents that help set the work in context. Also included are an introduction, explanatory notes, and a chronology.

Thomas Hobbes’s _Leviathan_ is the greatest work of political philosophy in English and the first great work of philosophy in English. Beginning with premises that were sometimes controversial, such as that every human action is caused by the agent’s desire for his own good, Hobbes derived shocking conclusions, such as that the civil government enjoys absolute control over its citizens and that the sovereign has the right to determine which religion is to be practiced in a commonwealth. Hobbes’s contemporaries recognized (...) the power of arguments in _Leviathan_ and many of them wrote responses to it; selections by John Bramhall, Robert Filmer, Edward Hyde, George Lawson, William Lucy, Samuel Pufendorf, and Thomas Tenison are included in this edition. This revised Broadview Edition of Hobbes’s classic work of political philosophy includes the full text of Part I (Of Man), Part II (Of Commonwealth), and the Review and Conclusion. The appendices, which set the work in its historical context, include a rich selection of contemporary responses to _Leviathan_. Also included are an introduction, explanatory notes, and a chronology of Hobbes’s life. (shrink)

This Broadview edition of Hobbes's classic work of political philosophy includes the full text of Part I, Part II, and the Review and Conclusion. The appendices, which set the work in its historical context, include a rich selection of contemporary responses to Leviathan. Also included are an introduction, explanatory notes, and a chronology of Hobbes's life. Please note that the Broadview Edition of the complete Leviathan also remains available.

In this book, Mark P. Fusco offers a historical, philosophical and theological review and appraisal of current research into quantum, post-modern, atheistic, mathematical, and philosophical theories that engage our interpretation of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Ferdinand Ulrich’s accounts of Ur-Kenosis. This cross-disciplinary approach inspires a new speculative metaphysical theory based on the representation of being as a holo-somatic ontology. Holocryptic metaphysics gives us a novel interpretation of transubstantiation as it is founded on the findings of quantum mechanical theory. The (...) quantum object and black hole’s properties present a new way to explain physical matter based on its holographic identity. This scientific theory for representing physical matter’s identity is recognized, for example, in the symmetry existing between a subatomic particle and its orbital shell, a single particle’s identity in relationship to its thermodynamic system, Hawking radiation, and black hole entropy. Further, the properties of quantum non-locality and teleportation signpost a new way to understand the Eternal Logos’ relationship to Jesus Christ and the Eucharist. (shrink)

Background: In view of the increasing complexity of research ethics committee applications and thus the time and expense involved in completing the forms, continual monitoring of outcome of clinical research studies for which ethics applications have been submitted is essential in determining whether resources are being effectively used, or alternatively whether significant numbers of research proposals are abandoned because of lack of funding or manpower. Previously published surveys for which data are available examined outcome of studies receiving REC approval 10 (...) or more years ago.Methods: A prospective questionnaire-based survey sent out in July 2006 to all 506 principal investigators who submitted research ethics applications to nine Greater Manchester RECs between April 2004 and March 2005. Data on the outcome of REC applications, and the status of the research study were collected and analysed.Results: 288 of the 506 questionnaires were returned. 97% of REC applications were approved, and 87% of studies were in progress or had been completed 1–2 years after approval had been granted. Researchers employed by universities, healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry had similar rates of success in initiating research studies.Conclusions: This survey suggests that most research studies submitted to RECs in Manchester, UK are approved and initiated. (shrink)

Aristotle's definition of the soul should be interpreted as: 'the soul is the entelechy of a natural body that serves as its instrument'.

This essay lays the groundwork for a novel conception of autonomy that may be called “effective autonomy”—a conception designed to be genuinely action guiding in bioethics. As empirical psychology research on the heuristics and biases approach shows, decision making commonly fails to correspond to people’s desires because of the biases arising from bounded cognition. People who are classified as autonomous on contemporary philosophical accounts may fail to be effectively autonomous because their decisions are uncoupled from their autonomous desires. Accordingly, continuing (...) attempts to value patient autonomy must go beyond existing philosophical conceptions of autonomy to consider the background conditions of human decision making. (shrink)

Epistemic trust is an unacknowledged feature of medical knowledge. Claims of medical knowledge made by physicians, patients, and others require epistemic trust. And yet, it would be foolish to define all epistemic trust as epistemically responsible. Accordingly, I use a routine example in medical practice to illustrate how epistemically responsible trust in medicine is trust in epistemically responsible individuals. I go on to illustrate how certain areas of current medical practice of medicine fall short of adequately distinguishing reliable and unreliable (...) processes because of a failure to systematically evaluate health outcomes. I conclude by articulating the devastating obstacles to the consilience assumption, which takes intellectual character as the standard for epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

Supercommentary on Tantravārtika of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, exegesis on Mīmāṃsābhāṣya of Śabarasvāmī, classical commentary on Mīmāṃsāsūtra by Jaimini.

In this paper we conduct an analysis of the critical narratives of Stardew Valley and compare them to other relevant videogames in order to develop new possibilities for an ecological critique of capitalist extractive econo­mies. Critical narratives of this game are aimed primarily at the alienating conditions of labour and deeply devastating modes of production under capitalism that impact and severely damage the environment. Analysing these narratives, we superimpose the immediate messages of the game with the procedural rhetoric and material (...) conditions of their existence. Over the course of our analysis, we highlight a material-narrative disso­nance which, in the case of Stardew Valley, fails to function as a commu­nicative strategy of the game and remains its mere external contradiction. Although the game’s critical narrative may seem overly utopian and its political imaginary a bit underdeveloped, the game elaborates on concrete ways to tackle the alienation of labour and resolve the ecological crisis. In addition to this, the paper covers the history of the interplay between the video game industry and the field of global ecological crisis research. We compare the attempts to raise awareness of the videogames’ own material­ity that preceded Stardew Valley. We conclude that Stardew Valley utilises the language of sustainable co-existence and wasteless local production, expanding this logic both to the sphere of labour and the spectrum of en­vironmental problems. In the case of ecological critique, some gameplay decisions in Stardew Valley enable us to come up with new strategies aimed at creating critical narratives about the environment in videogames. Thus supplementing Stardew Valley’s findings with critical tropes derived from other games (mainly, Rain World), we were able to gather a set of theoretical instruments that could facilitate the creation of games about ecosystems. Following Donna Haraway’s emphasis on the crucial role of narrative fram­ing (“it matters which stories tell stories”), we highlight new opportunities for the entire medium of videogames. (shrink)

This article, written in honor of Fritz Rohrlich, briefly surveys the role of topology in physics.