Jeremy Bentham entend rompre avec les théories du contrat social et proposer une justification utilitariste de la démocratie. Or, aucune théorie de la démocratie ne peut se dispenser d’une théorie du « demos ». L’utilitarisme benthamien comporte ainsi un renouvellement de la question du peuple dans chacun de ses aspects, ontologique, politique et moral. Bentham développe une véritable théorie du peuple qui, bien que méconnue, constitue un tournant dans l’histoire de la philosophie politique.

La notion de « peuple » n’est pas un vain mot en philosophie politique. Elle fait l’objet d’une réflexion qui a, depuis un point de vue moderne, un double horizon ; d’une part, les deux Révolutions du XVIIIème siècle qui voient l’entrée du peuple sur la scène de l’Histoire ; d’autre part, J.-J. Rousseau et l’idée de « peuple autolégislateur » condition et principe de l’autonomie du peuple. Suivant cette compréhension classique, non seulement le « peuple » renvoie f...

Recent debates on phenomenal consciousness have shown renewed interest for the idea that experience generally includes an experience of the self – a self-experience – whatever else it may present the self with. When a subject has an ordinary experience (as of a bouncing red ball, for example), the thought goes, she is not just phenomenally aware of the world as being presented in a certain way (a bouncy, reddish, roundish way in this case); she is also phenomenally aware of (...) the fact that it is presented to her. This supposed phenomenal dimension has been variously called “mineness”, “for-me-ness”, “pre-reflective self-awareness” and “subjective character”, among others. This view, associated with historical figures such as William James, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, is attracting a new surge of attention at the crossroads of phenomenology, analytic philosophy of mind and the philosophy of cognitive science, but also intense controversy. This book explores some of the questions running through the ongoing debate on the putative subjective dimension of experience: Does it exist?, the existence question; What is it?, the essence question; What is it for?, the function question; and What else does it explain?, the explanation question. The volume also surveys various domains of human experience, both normal and pathological, where a “sense of self” might be at play, including agency, bodily awareness, introspection, memory, emotions and values, and offers insights into the possible relations between the notions of subjective awareness involved. The first part of the book is devoted to more sceptical or deflationary views about self-experience, and the second, to more robust ones. (shrink)

In recent debates on phenomenal consciousness, a distinction is sometimes made, after Levine (2001) and Kriegel (2009), between the “qualitative character” of an experience, i.e. the specific way it feels to the subject (e.g. blueish or sweetish or pleasant), and its “subjective character”, i.e. the fact that there is anything at all that it feels like to her. I argue that much discussion of subjective character is affected by a conflation between three different notions. I start by disentangling the three (...) notions in question, under the labels of “for-me-ness”, “me-ness” and “mineness”. Next, I argue that these notions are not equivalent; in particular, there is no conceptual implication from for-me-ness to me-ishness or mineness. Empirical considerations based on clinical cases additionally suggest that the three notions may also correspond to different properties (although the claim of conceptual non-equivalence does not depend on this further point). The aim is clarificatory, cautionary but also critical: I examine four existing arguments from subjective character that are fuelled by an undifferentiated use of the three notions, and find them to be flawed for this reason. (shrink)

In their recent paper, “Practical Knowledge without Luminosity,” Bob Beddor and Carlotta Pavese (2022) claim that the doctrine of essentially intentional actions, or “essentialism,” is false. Essentialism states that some actions are essentially intentional, such that, “whenever they are performed, they are performed intentionally” (2022, p. 926). Beddor and Pavese work to reject essentialism, which figures as a key premise in Juan Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument against the knowledge condition for intentional action (Piñeros Glasscock, p. 1240). Historically, essentialism has received (...) little attention from philosophers since its inception in Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention (2000, §47). However, I believe that essentially intentional actions can play an important role in an ontology of action. In my paper, I develop and argue for a variety of essentialism in the context of naive action theory, which I call naive essentialism. Naive essentialism is a two-fold thesis, which claims that (1) essentially intentional actions exist, and (2) that essentially intentional actions ground accidentally intentional actions. My paper has four parts. In the first part, I distinguish between essentially and accidentally intentional actions, and unpack the relevant principles of naive action theory. Second, I present the grounding thesis that accidentally intentional actions are grounded in essentially intentional actions. Next, I provide an argument for the existence of essentially intentional actions. Lastly, I briefly respond to a possible objection to my argument. The upshot of my arguments is that essentially intentional actions form the metaphysical and explanatory bedrock in a naive ontology of action, and that there are good reasons for accepting a key premise in Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument. (shrink)

We argue that relating to myself as me provides, as such, a reason to care about myself: grasping that an event involves me, instead of another, makes it matter in a special way. Further, this self-concern is not simply a matter of seeing in myself some instrumental value for other ends. We use as our foil a recent skeptical challenge to this view offered in Setiya (2015). We think the case against self-concern is powered by unwarrantedly narrow construals of three (...) key notions. One is the notion of a first-personal way of relating to oneself. A narrow account of the first person in terms of special epistemic relations to oneself makes it easy to overlook a source of non-instrumental reasons of self-concern, located in the special relation a subject has to herself as agent. Two is the notion of what it is to be a reason. And three is the notion of self-concern itself. We show that the skeptical case rests in part on a slide towards neighbouring but distinct notions of egoism and selfishness. We also argue that Setiya’s notion of self-love, offered to capture the pre-theoretical intuition of self-concern, cannot do it justice. (shrink)

One broadly recognised characteristic feature of (a core subset of) the self-attributions constitutive of self-knowledge is that they are ‘immune to error through misidentification’ (hereafter IEM). In the last thirty years, Evans’s notion of “identification-freedom” (Evans 1982) has been central to most classical approaches to IEM. In the Evansian picture, it is not clear, however, whether there is room for a description of what may be the strongest and most interesting variant of IEM; namely what Pryor (1999) has first brought (...) to the fore under the name “Which-object IEM”, and which I’ll prefer calling existential IEM. I argue that recent development of relativist frameworks in semantics and pragmatics, particularly in Recanati (2007a-b), (2009), (2010), (2012a), may be precisely of a nature to address this limitation. The relativist theory of IEM, and in particular its suitability to cover existential IEM, may superficially seem to stem from a rejection of the core elements of the classical identification-freedom approach. However, I hope to show that, modulo a clarification and richer un-derstanding of the relevant notions of identification and identification-freedom, the relativist theory of IEM can be seen as both pushing further and complementing Evans’s intuitions, rather than conflicting with them. (shrink)

1. Introduction Ce numéro spécial dédié aux corpus d’ancien et moyen français, à leur constitution et à leur exploitation, vient après bien d’autres numéros de revues présentantl’usage des corpus en linguistique depuis une dizaine d’années. Mais celui-ci est spécifiquement consacré aux corpus concernant les périodes les plus anciennes de la langue, c’est-à-dire aux formes et pratiques linguistiques qui sont les plus différentes de ce que connaît et pratique le locuteur moderne, et pour lesque..

1. Introduction Ce numéro spécial dédié aux corpus d’ancien et moyen français, à leur constitution et à leur exploitation, vient après bien d’autres numéros de revues présentantl’usage des corpus en linguistique depuis une dizaine d’années. Mais celui-ci est spécifiquement consacré aux corpus concernant les périodes les plus anciennes de la langue, c’est-à-dire aux formes et pratiques linguistiques qui sont les plus différentes de ce que connaît et pratique le locuteur moderne, et pour lesque...

The indexical word “I” has traditionally been assumed to be an overt analogue to the concept of self, and the best model for understanding it. This approach, I argue, overlooks the essential role of cognitive phenomenology in the mastery of the concept of self. I suggest that a better model is to be found in a different kind of representation: phenomenal concepts or more generally phenomenally grounded concepts. I start with what I take to be the defining feature of the (...) concept of self, namely its “super-reflexivity”: to use this concept is not just to think of oneself, but to think of oneself as the thinker of the present thought. I call this familiar observation the “Thinker Intuition”. I review some shortcomings of the indexical model of the concept of self, which is the classical account of the Thinker Intuition. I go on to propose a different account, the “phenomenal model”, according to which the concept of self is a phenomenally grounded concept, anchored in a generic kind of cognitive phenomenolog... (shrink)

Corporate governance guidelines are a mechanism that a firm can enact which should reduce agency costs and better align the interests of boards and the suppliers of capital. This study examines stock price reactions primarily attributable to institutional investors occurring when corporations announce the enactment of corporate governance guidelines. A final sample of 77 firms was derived from the first announcement of corporate governance guidelines exclusive to the SEC-EDGAR database. The results indicate that good governance does matter. Firms that announced (...) the enactment of corporate governance guidelines experienced increased stock prices following the announcements. There was an immediate (days 1–4) reaction for firms that provided all or part of the guidelines’ substance; a delayed (days 8–10) reaction occurred for those firms that only referenced the guidelines’ enactment. Additionally, firms with either a potentially greater following or that had a previous history of acrimonious relations with stakeholders were rewarded by the announcement of the enactment of guidelines. (shrink)

Legislation banning gender-affirming medical care (GAMC) for minors is inconsistent with the Consensus Recommendations for Pediatric Decision-Making (Salter et al. 2023). Gender dysphoria is a medical condition, and GAMC promotes adolescents’ health interests. The evidence for GAMC is comparable to the evidence for other types of pediatric medical care. Parents are permitted to consent for similar risks in the treatment of other conditions. Evaluation of the potential benefits, risks, and treatment alternatives is contingent on individual patients’ clinical conditions and adolescents’ (...) and their parents’ values and preferences. Such decisions are within the scope of parental discretion and should be made through shared decision-making with health-care providers. Parents’ declining GAMC does not inherently create a significant risk of serious imminent harm required to justify state intervention. Usurping parental discretion for GAMC is unjust: it treats this medical care differently than other comparable types of medical care without sufficient justification. (shrink)

La théorie austinienne des énoncés performatifs fournit un modèle à un usage particulier de la parole, l’usage thérapeutique, illustré de deux façons différentes par la talking cure freudienne et par la méthode wittgensteinienne de dissolution des problèmes philosophiques à l’aide d’analyses grammaticales. La notion d’« énoncé de passion », proposée par S. Cavell pour enrichir la théorie d’Austin, permet de mettre en évidence cette parenté.

Malgré les déclarations d'intention et les efforts des écologistes, la planète est en danger. Ses ennemis cherchent un profit immédiat à empoisonner l'air, les sols et l'eau, à abattre les arbres et les animaux. Ils trouvent un intérêt à détruire la réalité pour lui substituer un monde virtuel contrôlable. Cet essai invite à établir de nouvelles relations entre la planète et les hommes.

It has recently been proposed that the framework of semantic relativism be put to use to describe mental content, as deployed in some of the fundamental operations of the mind. This programme has inspired in particular a novel strategy of accounting for the essential egocentricity of first-personal or de se thoughts in relativist terms, with the advantage of dispensing with a notion of self-representation. This paper is a critical discussion of this strategy. While it is based on a plausible appeal (...) to cognitive economy, the relativist theory does not fully account for the epistemic profile that distinguishes de se thinking, as some of its proponents hope to do. A deeper worry concerns the reliance of the theory on a primitive notion of “centre” that hasn’t yet received enough critical attention, and is ambiguous between a thin and a rich reading. I argue that while the rich reading is required if the relativist analysis of the de se is to achieve its most ambitious aims, it also deprives the theory of much of its explanatory power. (shrink)

We argue that relating to myself as me provides, as such, a reason to care about myself: grasping that an event involves me, instead of another, makes it matter in a special way. Further, this self-concern is not simply a matter of seeing in myself some instrumental value for other ends. We use as our foil a recent skeptical challenge to this view offered in Setiya 2015. We think the case against self-concern is powered by unwarrantedly narrow construals of three (...) key notions. One is the notion of a first-personal way of relating to oneself. A narrow account of the first person in terms of special epistemic relations to oneself makes it easy to overlook a source of non-instrumental reasons of self-concern, located in the special relation a subject has to herself as agent. Two is the notion of what it is to be a reason. And, three, is the notion of self-concern itself. We show that the skeptical case rests in part on a slide towards neighbouring but distinct notions of egoism and selfishness. We also argue that Setiya’s notion of self-love, offered to capture the pre-theoretical intuition of self-concern, cannot do it justice. (shrink)

The contents and structure of semantic memory have been the focus of much recent research, with major advances in the development of distributional models, which use word co‐occurrence information as a window into the semantics of language. In parallel, connectionist modeling has extended our knowledge of the processes engaged in semantic activation. However, these two lines of investigation have rarely been brought together. Here, we describe a processing model based on distributional semantics in which activation spreads throughout a semantic network, (...) as dictated by the patterns of semantic similarity between words. We show that the activation profile of the network, measured at various time points, can successfully account for response times in lexical and semantic decision tasks, as well as for subjective concreteness and imageability ratings. We also show that the dynamics of the network is predictive of performance in relational semantic tasks, such as similarity/relatedness rating. Our results indicate that bringing together distributional semantic networks and spreading of activation provides a good fit to both automatic lexical processing (as indexed by lexical and semantic decisions) as well as more deliberate processing (as indexed by ratings), above and beyond what has been reported for previous models that take into account only similarity resulting from network structure. (shrink)

Health care institutions have paid increasing attention to preventing nosocomial transmission of influenza through vaccination of health care personnel. While multifaceted voluntary interventions have increased vaccination rates, proponents of mandatory programs contend the rates remain unacceptably low. Conventional bioethical analyses of mandatory programs are inadequate; they fail to account for the obligations of nonprofessional personnel or to justify the weights assigned to different ethical principles. Using an ethics framework for public health permits a fuller analysis. The framework's focus on fairness (...) accentuates the potential differences between the risk of transmitting infection and employment status, and the need to equitably evaluate exemptions. The framework's emphasis on balancing benefits and burdens highlights the need to justify a specific goal and questions the need to exclude all nonmedical exemptions. While mandatory vaccination programs are justifiable, greater attention should be paid to their implementation. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 25-27.

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

Background: While employers are increasingly considering and implementing COVID-19 vaccination requirements, little is known about the reasons offered by employees seeking religious exemptions.Methods: We conducted a mixed methods analysis of all the requests for religious exemptions submitted during the initial implementation of a COVID-19 vaccination requirement at a single academic medical center in the United States.Results: Five hundred sixty-five (3.4%) employees requested religious exemptions. At least 305 (54.0%) requesters had job titles suggesting that they had direct patient contact. Four hundred (...) ninety-nine (88.3%) of requesters self-identified as Christian, of whom 120 (21.2%) identified as Roman Catholic. Requesters offered 0 to 8 (mean 2.7) categories of reasons for their request. The most frequently stated reasons pertained to the use of fetal cell lines in vaccine development and manufacturing (382, 67.6%), interest in maintaining purity (221, 39.1%), or belief in divine healing (172, 30.4%). Some requesters also volunteered evidence of the sincerity of their beliefs including examples of their religious practices (116, 20.5%), other practices (66, 11.7%), and emotional states (32, 5.7%). One hundred fifty-two applications (26.9%) contained text copied without attribution, primarily from sample religious exemption request letters available on the Internet.Conclusions: Most requesters focused on the use of fetal cell lines in the development or manufacturing of the vaccines as the justification for their request. The development of vaccines that are not reliant on fetal cell lines may increase vaccination rates. Understanding reasons for religious exemption requests may inform vaccine education and vaccination policies. (shrink)

Chapter LEARNING BY UNDERSTANDING ANALOGIES Russell Greiner1 ABSTRACT2 This article describes a method for learning by analogy — ie, for proposing new ...

The quantum formalism ofdistinguishable, yetequivalent particles (with symmetric or antisymmetric wave functions) is here worked out. The result is an entirely explicit formulation of the way in which classical mechanics emerges from quantum mechanics for such particles. Distinguishability is achieved at the cost of dynamical precision; the two are, in fact, complementary.

It is shown here that the microcanonical ensemble for a system of noninteracting bosons and fermions contains a subensemble of state vectors for which all particles of the system are distinguishable. This “IQC” (inner quantum-classical) subensemble is therefore fully classical, except for a rather extreme quantization of particle momentum and position, which appears as the natural price that must be paid for distinguishability. The contribution of the IQC subensemble to the entropy is readily calculated, and the criterion for this to (...) be a good approximation to the exact entropy is a logarithmically strengthened form of the usual criterion for the validity of classical statistics in terms of the thermal de Broglie wavelength and the average volume per particle. Thus, it becomes possible to derive the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution directly from the ensemble in the classical limit, using fully classical reasoning about the distinguishability of particles. The entropy is additive—theN! factor of the Boltzmann count cancels out in the course of the calculation, and the “N! paradox” is thereby resolved. The method of “correct Boltzmann counting” and the lowest term of the Wigner-Kirkwood series for the partition function are seen to be partly based on the IQC subensemble, and their partly nonclassical nature is clarified. The clear separation in the full ensemble of classical and nonclassical components makes it possible to derive the classical statistics of indistinguishable particles from their quantum statistics in a controlled, explicit way. This is particularly important for nonequilibrium theory. The treatment of molecular collisions along too-literally classical lines turns out to require exorbitantly high temperatures, although there are suggestions of indirect ways in which classical nonequilibrium theory might be justified at ordinary temperatures. The applicability of exact classical ergodic and mixing theory to systems at ordinary temperatures is called into question, although the general idea of coarse-graining is confirmed. The concepts on which the IQC idea is based are shown to give rise to a series development of thermostatistical quantities, starting with the distinguishable-particle approximation. (shrink)

Recent debates on phenomenal consciousness have shown renewed interest for the idea that experience generally includes an experience of the self—a self-experience—whatever else it may present the self with. When a subject has an ordinary experience (as of a bouncing red ball, for example), the thought goes, she is not just phenomenally aware of the world as being presented in a certain way (a bouncy, reddish, roundish way in this case); she is also phenomenally aware of the fact that it (...) is presented to her. This supposed phenomenal dimension has been variously called “mineness,” “for-me-ness,” “pre-reflective self-awareness,” and “subjective character,” among others. This view, associated with historical figures such as William James, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, is attracting a new surge of attention at the crossroads of phenomenology, analytic philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of cognitive science, but also intense controversy. This book explores some of the questions running through the ongoing debate on the putative subjective dimension of experience: Does it exist?, the existence question; What is it?, the essence question; What is it for?, the function question; and What else does it explain?, the explanation question. The volume also surveys various domains of human experience, both normal and pathological, where a “sense of self” might be at play, including agency, bodily awareness, introspection, memory, emotions, and values, and offers insights into the possible relations between the notions of subjective awareness involved. The first part of the book is devoted to more skeptical or deflationary views about self-experience, and the second, to more robust ones. (shrink)