La présente étude rassemble les passages de l’Ab Vrbe condita de Tite-Live où un terme lié au rire est associé à un discours ou à une parole rapportée, afin de les confronter aux vues exprimées par Cicéron et Quintilien sur le rire en contexte rhétorique. Si tous les passages étudiés s’insèrent très bien dans la conception rhétorique du rire, l’historien latin s’appuie sur celle-ci pour offrir une répartition originale entre usages acceptables et formes abusives du rire qui participe à la (...) construction des portraits personnages et de l’œuvre. (shrink)

The progressive dominance of historical-critical methods in the reading of ancient Chinese classics has led scholars to privilege micro levels of textual analysis. Consequently, the question as to whether laws of composition could be identified in this corpus has often been ignored, or considered irrelevant. Working on Chinese number symbolism as well as on rules governing “ring composition” in other cultural contexts, this article aims at fashioning anew the question of the possibility of an ancient Chinese “structural rhetoric” and at (...) envisioning the patterns that might have governed it. It specifically applies the approach it propounds to Huainanzi 淮南子, showing how numerology frames its structure and argument, the text being built after the image of the “roundness” of the Way and of the Ruler. It then endeavors to apply these results to the unearthing of “inter-structural” patterns that would help us to locate Huainanzi, Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋, the versions at hand of Zhuangzi 莊子, Lunyu 論語, or yet Laozi 老子 into a textual universe that shares correlated rhetorical features. (shrink)

The current SARS-CoV-2 crisis raises questions about the challenges faced by nation states and international organisations in offering a coordinated international response to the pandemic, and reveals the great vulnerability of European countries, which are implementing lockdown measures and imposing restrictions on international travel, for the most part on a unilateral basis. Such measures run counter to the prevailing approach of the previous two centuries that developed an international public health space. This article examines the measures adopted by European states (...) in order to contain 19th-century cholera pandemics, which took shape through the development of an international maritime quarantine system, based primarily on the implementation of national regulations and local decision-making. This regime was quickly viewed as ineffective and out of step with liberal ideas that urged a “laissez-faire” approach to public health matters. In its stead, a long-term trend developed towards easing quarantine measures. Nation states supported the internationalisation of the fight against pandemics, which chiefly consisted of externalising quarantine measures to the East in order to eliminate them in Europe. This process was based on a subtle dialectical relationship between the construction of an international public health space and the affirmation of state sovereignty, and continued into the 20th century with the progressive creation of international institutions responsible for advancing global health. (shrink)

This article shows how, starting from Schelling and Henry, one can build a radical critique of objectification and subjectification within humanities. This critique opens the way for the construction of a point of view of immanence, which is characterized by the experimentation of a constitution of affects in a process from which proceeds the subjectivity. This point of view of immanence questions the accepted attitudes in the production of social relationships and the norms that govern them, so as to increase (...) the attention to the vulnerability of these processes and their power to transform the affects. (shrink)

My main aim in this paper is to contribute to the elucidation of the nature of non-religious faith. I start by summarising several well-known arguments that belief is neither necessary nor sufficient for faith. I then try to identify the nature of the positive cognitive attitude towards p that is involved in having faith that p. After dismissing some candidates for the role, I explore the idea that faith and hope are similar attitudes. On this basis, I then advance a (...) new characterisation of faith. Finally, I turn to the question of the rationality of faith. I argue that faith is intrinsically irrational because it is an intrinsically incoherent propositional attitude, but that there is nonetheless a sense in which faith is neither intrinsically epistemically irrational nor intrinsically practically irrational. (shrink)

The recent literature on social norms has stressed the centrality of emotions in explaining punishment and norm enforcement. This article discusses four negative emotions (righteous anger, indignation, contempt, and disgust) and examines their relationship to punitive behavior. I argue that righteous anger and indignation are both punitive emotions strictly speaking, but induce punishments of different intensity and have distinct elicitors. Contempt and disgust, for their part, cannot be straightforwardly considered punitive emotions, although they often blend with a colder form of (...) indignation to favor low-cost, indirect, and collective forms of punishment such as mockery, exclusion, and ostracism. (shrink)

Benoit Mathot | : La négativité, comme catégorie fondamentale de l’existence humaine, connaît aujourd’hui une crise profonde qui la conduit à son effacement progressif des pratiques et des discours sociaux, culturels, religieux, au profit d’une logique de la coïncidence. Dans cette perspective, cet article a pour projet de proposer un parcours interdisciplinaire à travers la psychanalyse, les études littéraires et la théologie chrétienne, afin de montrer la centralité de ce phénomène. | : The negativity, as fundamental category of the (...) human existence, knows a deep crisis today which leads it to the progressive disappearance of the socials, cultural and religious practices and speeches, for the benefit of a logic of the coincidence. In this perspective, this article plans to propose an interdisciplinary work through the psychoanalysis, the literary studies and the Christian theology, to show the centrality of this phenomenon. (shrink)

The infinite pigeonhole principle for 2-partitions asserts the existence, for every set A, of an infinite subset of A or of its complement. In this paper, we study the infinite pigeonhole pr...

In this book, Benoît Dubreuil explores the creation and destruction of hierarchies in human evolution. Combining the methods of archaeology, anthropology, cognitive neuroscience and primatology, he offers a natural history of hierarchies from the point of view of both cultural and biological evolution. This volume explains why dominance hierarchies typical of primate societies disappeared in the human lineage and why the emergence of large-scale societies during the Neolithic period implied increased social differentiation, the creation of status hierarchies, and, eventually, political (...) centralisation. (shrink)

The last sentence of Chapter 10 of the Analects describes a brief encounter between Confucius and a hen-pheasant, and it does so in puzzling terms, ridden with lexical difficulties. At the same time, intertextual references insert this fragment into the context of Confucius’ life mission as well as of Chinese mythological narratives. This contribution assesses the fragment’s meaning and significance: Confucius’ reaction to the hen-pheasant unveils his evolving understanding of the Heavenly Mandate bestowed upon him. The fragment thus forcefully concludes (...) the chapter in which it is inserted. Additionally, I put forward a hypothesis: the focus of this narrative, coupled with its positioning at the end of Chapter 10, induce us to postulate that it may have been purposefully located at the very center of the Analects, a proposition that reverberates on the way we look at the composition of the book. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to elucidate the nature of a form of intellectual and practical neutrality that is not covered by existing accounts of suspension of judgment. After rejecting some inadequate characterizations of this attitude of neutrality, I provide a positive characterization of it: it is a successful effort to resist certain tendencies that are part of the dispositional profile of the doxastic state one is in on a given issue. I conclude by saying a few words about (...) the reasons for which this effort can be made, and by answering in the negative the question of whether all the attitudes that can be characterized as attitudes of committed neutrality are of the same type. (shrink)

ABSTRACT : Many philosophers and psychologists think that moral norms have a different nature as rules from convention: while we are obliged to respect moral norms because of what they are in themselves, our respect for conventions depends on our attitude toward a particular social context. I question this distinction between moral norms and conventions and argue that conventions depend on social context because the context structures the agents’ expectations, sets reference points for the assessment of gains and losses, and (...) helps the observer to infer the presence and the seriousness of harms. (shrink)

Les travaux coraniques de Guglielmo Raimmondo Moncada, alias Flavius Mithridate (circa 1440-1489 ?), converti judéo-sicilien au parcours complexe et maître d'hébreu, d'araméen et d'arabe de Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, ont fait l'objet d'appréciations contradictoires, oscillant entre l'exaltation et la dépréciation. Une analyse de l'activité de collation, de traduction et de commentaire effectuée par Moncada (et d'autres mains) sur le coran « judéo-arabe » Vat. Ebr. 357 dévoile l'association étroite entre les aspects a priori les plus déroutants de la coranologie « (...) moncadienne » et son contexte de formation linguistique et culturelle, entraînant un réexamen de ce qui reste probablement le dossier le plus riche concernant l'étude du Coran en contexte italien à la fin du XVe siècle. (shrink)

Calligraphy has been used to preserve significant writings and texts in a beautiful form and to make the different styles of writing enjoyable. It is not only the art of beautiful handwriting but also a cultural heritage and tradition that reflects the culture and history of a society, a race, a nation, and a country. Hence, it has very great educational value. In China calligraphy is done with a brush, which was a common writing implement in ancient times. In addition (...) to its utilitarian function, calligraphy is the most fundamental element in other types of art, such as painting and seal-carving, and is closely connected to many subject disciplines, such as literature, history, and philosophy. Brush calligraphy .. (shrink)

Benoit Mathot À partir du cadre théorique de la décoïncidence proposé par le philosophe François Jullien, cet article explore les enjeux d’humanisation des soins médicaux, ainsi que l’introduction de la dimension spirituelle dans la prise en charge des patients. Il revient enfin sur le dialogue possible entre ces réflexions contemporaines et les considérations du théologien luthérien Paul Tillich sur la santé.

One of the first frameworks developed for understanding the relation of science and technology to the economy has been the linear model of innovation. The model postulated that innovation starts with basic research, is followed by applied research and development, and ends with production and diffusion. The precise source of the model remains nebulous, having never been documented. Several authors who have used, improved, or criticized the model in the past fifty years rarely acknowledged or cited any original source. The (...) model usually was taken for granted. According to others, however, it comes directly from V. Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier. This article traces the history of the linear model, suggesting that it developed in three steps corresponding to three scientific communities looking at science analytically. The article argues that statistics is a main reason the model is still alive despite criticisms, alternatives, and having been proclaimed dead. (shrink)

Throughout the manuscript of the Pensées and in other writings, Pascal crisscrosses his research on what the art of writing achieves and entails, on the one hand, and on the way to read and interpret the Holy Scriptures, on the other hand. Reading and writing practices are critically interwoven. This article offers a synthesis on Pascal’s reflexive account of such practices. After a summary of previous findings on the subject, it examines Pascal’s approach to (a) the rules that govern scriptural (...) interpretation; (b) the techniques of persuasion; and (c) the way to ground an instituted body, an expression by which we refer to a textual corpus, a political society, or a community of believers. (shrink)

Considérée comme le seul pays « émergent » de son continent, l' Afrique du Sud est le produit d'une histoire tourmentée, sortie du système de l'apartheid pour devenir un État démocratique et multiracial au début des années 1990. Si la constitution prône une diversité culturelle et linguistique, reflet de sa population, l'Afrique du Sud s'intéresse plus à l'institution de la Francophonie, pour les avantages que son commerce et sa diplomatie en Afrique francophone peuvent en tirer, que pour l'usage de la (...) langue française surtout pratiquée par une communauté africaine francophone récemment implantée.South Africa is considered as the sole emerging country on its continent and has undergone a very difficult history. Following the end of the apartheid system, South Africa was transformed into a multiracial and democratic state in the nineties. The South African constitution now endorses linguistic and cultural diversity which mirrors its population. Francophony as an institution is of major interest for South Africa more to support its proactive trade and diplomacy in the Francophone area than to help develop the French language which is mainly spoken by a recently settled Francophone African community. (shrink)

Many Hong Kong schools are concerned about the growing number of ethnic minority students. How they are supported and how the diversity of their pastoral needs is fulfilled become critical. This article examines teachers?, students? and parents? narratives of the cross?cultural experience of ethnic minority students from India, Pakistan, Philippines, Nepal and Thailand, and the diversity of those students? pastoral needs. The qualitative data were collected from interviews, through which the constructs of 32 teachers and 32 students from three secondary (...) schools were explored. Four groups of focus?group interviews were conducted, in which 15 parents were involved. This article argues that to implement the ethos of caring, it is not only necessary for the school to promote the intercultural sensitivity of all practitioners, but equally important to develop a connected school system where ethnic minority students and parents can be consistently supported in the subsystems of classroom, school and home. (shrink)

Recent empirical evidence has demonstrated that research misconduct occurs to a substantial degree in biomedical research. It has been suggested that scientific integrity is also of concern in China, but this seems to be based largely on anecdotal evidence. We, therefore, sought to explore the Chinese situation, by making a systematic review of published empirical studies on biomedical research integrity in China. One of our purposes was also to summarize the existing body of research published in Chinese. We searched the (...) China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang Data, PubMed and Web of Science for potentially relevant studies, and included studies meeting our inclusion criteria, i.e. mainly those presenting empirically obtained data about the practice of research in China. All the data was extracted and synthesized using an inductive approach. Twenty-one studies were included for review. Two studies used qualitative methods and nineteen studies used quantitative methods. Studies involved mainly medical postgraduates and nurses and they investigated awareness, attitudes, perceptions and experiences of research integrity and misconduct. Most of the participants in these 21 studies reported that research integrity is of great importance and that they obey academic norms during their research. Nevertheless, the occurrence of research misbehaviors, such as fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, improper authorship and duplicate submission was also reported. Strengthening research integrity training, developing the governance system and improving the scientific evaluation system were areas of particular attention in several studies. Our review demonstrates that a substantial number of articles have been devoted to research integrity in China, but only a few studies provide empirical evidence. With more safeguard measures of research integrity being taken in China, it would be crucial to conduct more research to explore researchers’ in-depth perceptions and evaluate the changes. (shrink)

t. 1. Introduction générale. Critique existentielle.--t. 2. Analytique existentielle.

Since the November 1991 elections, it has become a common statement to argue that Belgium has entered a -possibly unprecedented- period ofchange and instability. This article focuses on the evolution of the electoral system and electoral behaviour, in order to test this widely agreed-upon judgement. All things considered, one observes that the electoral system has not been radically modified since World War II. In spite of the transformation of the country into a federal state and several severe conflicts, political decision-makers (...) have opted for the 'fine-tuning" of the electoral system instead of radical reforms.As far as electoral behaviour is concerned, the picture is less clear. On one hand, relying on various indicators, one does observe that the early 1990s were characterised by change and transformation. On the other hand, one cannot conclude that the amplitude of change or instability in the early 1990s has been "exceptional" or "unprecedented" as compared with earlier periods.Building upon this ambiguous diagnosis, the author speculates on the probability of a major breakdown of the Belgian political system at the turn of the century. (shrink)

In the late 1980s, a new conceptual framework appeared in the science, technology, and innovation studies: the National Innovation System. The framework suggests that the research system's ultimate goal is innovation, and that the system is part of a larger system composed of sectors such as government, university, and industry and their environment. The framework also emphasized the relationships between the components or sectors, as the ``cause'' that explains the performance of innovation systems. Most authors agree that the framework came (...) from researchers like Freeman, Nelson, and Lundvall. In this article, the author want to go further back in time and show what the ``system approach'' owes to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and its very early works from the 1960s. This article develops the idea that the system approach was fundamental to OECD work, and that, although not using the term National Innovation System as such, the organization considerably influenced the above-mentioned authors. (shrink)

This article argues for the need to recover the concept of political myth in order to understand the crucial phenomena of our epoch. By drawing on Blumenberg’s philosophical reflections on myth, it proposes to understand political myth as the continual process of work on a common narrative by which the members of a social group can provide significance to their political conditions and experience. In order to show how this understanding of political myth can throw light on important aspects of (...) contemporary politics, the article analyses the work on one of the most conspicuous political myths of our time: the clash of civilizations. By reconstructing the mechanisms through which this myth works, the article shows how a paradigm that has been strongly criticized as too simplistic and scientifically inadequate could have turned into a successful political myth, i.e. into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (shrink)

There exist two main notions of typicality in computability theory, namely, Cohen genericity and randomness. In this article, we introduce a new notion of genericity, called partition genericity, which is at the intersection of these two notions of typicality, and show that many basis theorems apply to partition genericity. More precisely, we prove that every co-hyperimmune set and every Kurtz random is partition generic, and that every partition generic set admits weak infinite subsets, for various notions of weakness. In particular, (...) we answer a question of Kjos-Hanssen and Liu by showing that every Kurtz random admits an infinite subset which does not compute any set of positive effective Hausdorff dimension. Partition genericity is a partition regular notion, so these results imply many existing pigeonhole basis theorems. (shrink)

I outline and criticise the received interpretation of the controversy between Clifford and James over the ethics of belief. I defend Clifford’s view by arguing that his maxim ‘that it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’ should be understood as stating that any belief that results from the corruption of one’s judgement by one’s desires is wrong. I indicate what follows about religious beliefs in particular.

In this paper the author revisits selected scenes of love and war from the Old French Partonopeus de Blois. He focuses on the rhetoric of these passages and by a close textual reading highlights the dynamics of the romance and the game of echoes between the two spheres. He underlines the symmetry of the discourse of love and war and the constant dialogue which is established by the anonymous author. Epic and courtly motifs are knowingly intertwined to create meaning and (...) to renew the art of writing. He concludes that in this story, love is the way to redeem not only the knight but also the narrator of the romance. (shrink)

This article deals with the nature and the evolution of the relationships between the Belgian French-speaking Green party Ecolo and the new social movements in Wallonia and Brussels, from the larger identified sectors of these movements to various other movements. To start with, the status of these movements in the emergence of the Greenparty is scrutinised. Then, on the basis of a survey conducted amongst members of the party elite, different modalities of the party/movements links are analysed: joint activism, selective (...) communication channels between the elites, structural links. The bottom line is that, altogether, the links are tighter than one might expect, but that the Green party new social movements linkage remains ambiguous in many respects. (shrink)

This paper studies how in his Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith answered to Mandeville on the role of pride and vanity in the economic and social dynamics of commercial societies. We show why vanity supersedes pride in his analysis and how he offers a more positive view of these two passions. We study in particular the economic and social consequences of pride and vanity and describe the psychological foundations of excessive self-esteem that these passions entail.

Theories of knowledge as credit for true belief, or as cognitive achievement, have to face the following objection: in the famous Barn façades case, it seems that the truth of Barney's belief that he is in front of a barn is to be explained by the correct functioning of his cognitive capacities, although we are reluctant to say that he knows he is in front of a barn. Duncan Pritchard concludes from this that a safety clause, irreducible to the conditions (...) a true belief must satisfy in order to be credited to the believer, constitutes a necessary condition of knowledge. Because those who define knowledge as a cognitive achievement have not convincingly answered this objection, I intend, in the first section of this paper, to refute it by showing how practical and doxastic achievements differ. Then I defend the idea that we should also distinguish two kinds of environmental epistemic luck, and, correlatively, two kinds of safety, that are not equally incompatible with knowledge. Finally, I argue that this distinction is inevitably vague and I indicate some consequences of this vagueness for our knowledge‐intuitions. (shrink)