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)

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)

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)

Via a hermeneutics focused on Chinese numerology and concentric arrangements, the book offers a novel construal of the textual universe proper to early China writings. The author lays bare distinguishable patterns of textual composition while relating them to corresponding patterns of thinking. He differentiates rhetorical variants through detailed studies of the Zhuangzi's Inner chapters, the Laozi, the Analects, and the Huainanzi. The philosophical depth and relevance of the Chinese ancient worldview appear in a fresh light when one unearths the patterns (...) into which its content is embedded. The focus on textual patterns and rhetorical arrangements also facilitates the reading of Chinese classics alongside other traditions. The book will be a valuable reference for scholars and graduate students studying Chinese literary criticism, Chinese philosophy, and comparative philosophy. (shrink)

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 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)

It is widely agreed that humans have specific abilities for cooperation and culture that evolved since their split with their last common ancestor with chimpanzees. Many uncertainties remain, however, about the exact moment in the human lineage when these abilities evolved. This article argues that cooperation and culture did not evolve in one step in the human lineage and that the capacity to stick to long-term and risky cooperative arrangements evolved before properly modern culture. I present evidence that Homo heidelbergensis (...) became increasingly able to secure contributions form others in two demanding Paleolithic public good games (PPGGs): cooperative feeding and cooperative breeding. I argue that the temptation to defect is high in these PPGGs and that the evolution of human cooperation in Homo heidelberngensis is best explained by the emergence of modern-like abilities for inhibitory control and goal maintenance. These executive functions are localized in the prefrontal cortex and allow humans to stick to social norms in the face of competing motivations. This scenario is consistent with data on brain evolution that indicate that the largest growth of the prefrontal cortex in human evolution occurred in Homo heidelbergensis and was followed by relative stasis in this part of the brain. One implication of this argument is that subsequent behavioral innovations, including the evolution of symbolism, art, and properly cumulative culture in modern Homo sapiens , are unlikely to be related to a reorganization of the prefrontal cortex, despite frequent claims to the contrary in the literature on the evolution of human culture and cognition. (shrink)

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)

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.

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.

Introduction: the Study of Argumentation Although our overall organization of the readings suggests one way of dividing our selected literature, ...

This article addresses the treatment of individuals who experience conflict between their religious convictions and their same-sex attraction. Recently, attention has been drawn to the ethical issues involved in the practice of sexual reorientation therapy (SRT) with such conflicted individuals. This article reviews the ethical arguments for and against SRT through the lens of the general ethical principles of the American Psychological Association's (2002) ethics code. Practitioners are then challenged to think about how they might respond virtuously (Meara, Schmidt, & (...) Day, 1996) when presented with such a client. Thought questions are presented to assist therapists to develop in virtue while working with religious clients who are conflicted about same-sex desire. (shrink)

In the early eighties, answering a question of A. Macintyre, J. H. Schmerl ([13]) proved that every countable recursively saturated structure, equipped with a function β encoding the finite functions, is the β-closure of an infinite indiscernible sequence. This result implies that every countably saturated structure, in a countable but not necessarily recursive language, is an Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski model, by which we mean that the structure expands, in a countable language, to the Skolem hull of an infinite indiscernible sequence (in the (...) new language). More recently, D. Lascar ([5]) showed that the saturated model of cardinality ℵ 1 of an ω-stable theory is also an Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski model. These results naturally raise the following problem: which (countable) complete theories have an uncountably saturated Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski model. We study a generalization of this question. Namely, we call ACI-model a structure which can be expanded, in a countable language L', to the algebraic closure (in L') of an infinite indiscernible sequence (in L'). And we try to characterize the λ-saturated structures which are ACI-models. The main results are the following. First it is enough to restrict ourselves to ℵ 1 -saturated structures: if T has an ℵ 1 -saturated ACI-model then, for every infinite λ, T has a λ-saturated ACI-model. We obtain a complete answer in the case of stable theories: if T is stable then the three following properties are equivalent: (a) T is ω-stable, (b) T has a ℵ 1 saturated ACI-model, (c) every saturated model of T is an Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski model. The unstable case is more complicated, however we show that if T has an ℵ 1 -saturated ACI-model then T doesn't have the independence property. (shrink)

Les recompositions familiales touchent l’ensemble des liens familiaux et des liens intergénérationnels. Or, si l’on observe, tant sur le plan juridique que dans les pratiques des familles conjugales, une acception plus complexe et plus riche de la parentalité, les grands-parents restent souvent méconnus. Comment construisent-ils leurs rapports à leurs « beaux-petits-enfants »? Nous avons examiné la littérature et interrogé des « belles-grands-mères » pour tenter d’y voir plus clair. Quelles représentations le champ social offre-t-il des beaux-grands-parents? Et quelles sont concrètement (...) les conditions et les étapes qui rendent possible une identité « beau-grand-parentale »? (shrink)

À partir d’une rencontre avec la «sino-théologie», l’auteur tente une double ressaisie: du rapport entre sagesse et révélation tel qu’il nous est loisible de le penser aujourd’hui; du régime de la sagesse chinoise et, par extension, d’autres expressions de la «sagesse des peuples» à la lumière d’une herméneutique renouvelée. Il suggère quelques chemins par lesquels «sagesse» et «révélation» peuvent être comprises comme des catégories «ouvertes», ne recevant sens et pertinence que d’être référées à une constante reprise à neuf. En parallèle, (...) le régime épistémologique de la sagesse chinoise se découvre avoir vocation à former un type d’homme en qui l’humanisation est inséparable du sens de la perte et de la quête, et du retournement des sens vers l’intérieur. Le passage par la tradition chinoise nous permet de saisir comment la catégorie de «révélation» ne fait sens qu’en relation à une «sagesse» qui seule en permet la réception par l’interprétation vivante dont elle fournit la trame. (shrink)

When on the last page of What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari (1995: 218) claim that philosophy needs a non-philosophy, this statement is the result of a long engagement with the problem of thinking in society. It is this engagement that we intend to reconstruct in this article. By developing an original definition of thinking after Heidegger, Deleuze is able to claim that philosophy is not the only ‘thinking’ discipline. Our point of departure is Deleuze's constant reference to a phrase (...) from Heidegger's lecture course What Is Called Thinking?: ‘We are not yet thinking’ (Deleuze 1988: 116, 1989: 167, 1994: 144, 2002: 108; Deleuze and Guattari 1995: 56). This phrase points to the demand for a new distribution of the relation between philosophy and its outside. The purpose of this article is to trace Heidegger's influence on Deleuze's definition of thinking and to raise two points. First, Deleuze borrows some elements of Heidegger's definition of thinking to further his own understanding of politics as an involuntary practice. For both, the question of thinking is political. Second, by departing from Heidegger, Deleuze can democratise the definition of thinking, beyond its confinement to philosophy, by turning to cinema. Deleuze calls cinema the art of the masses because it brings the masses in contact with external signs. Finally, in the last part of this article, we will discuss how Deleuze raises stupidity (and not error) as a transcendental problem that should be constantly fought. In this way, we hope to shed light on how Deleuze moves from Heidegger's question ‘what is called thinking?’ to the problem of stupidity and shame. (shrink)

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)

« L’animal » n’est pas une notion au programme de philosophie, et pourtant combien nous la rencontrons dans nos cours : interpellés par les élèves, souvent moins au fait des nouveautés de l’éthologie que l’on pourrait le croire ; ou en mobilisant l’animal à l’occasion du traitement de notions. Cet article vise principalement à mettre au jour les problématiques et les références classiques et récentes qui permettent de traiter cette question en évoquant le statut de l’animalité et de l’humanité, le (...) rapport aux hypothèses nouvelles concernant les cultures animales, l’inclusion d’une pensée de l’animalité dans la conception du vivant, et enfin les perspectives non seulement morales mais politiques de l’animalité. (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)

La discipline médiévale de l’ars dictaminis ou dictamen, florissante du xii e au xiv e siècle, peut être considérée comme une adaptation de la rhétorique classique latine aux besoins communicationnels de la société médiévale. La question des rapports entre son enseignement et sa mise en pratique est donc centrale. Elle est pourtant rarement abordée, tant les malentendus sur les différents niveaux d’apprentissage de l’ars sont nombreux. Quelques pistes de recherche sont suggérées ici.

This new translation of four revised radio interviews, conducted in December 2002 at France Culture with Elie During, is the best introduction to Stiegler's Time and Technics series. This collection includes a new interview conducted specially for this volume and an interview with Artpress from 2001. In Philosophising By Accident, Stiegler introduces some of the key arguments about the technical constitution of the human and its relation to politics, aesthetics and economics. He reads philosophical texts from the perspective of his (...) controversial thesis about the three types of memory and speaks about concepts central to his later works, such as synchrony/diachrony, grammatisation and the industrial temporal object. (shrink)

Evidence is presented for the notion that selection-for-perception and selection-for-action progress in parallel to become tightly coupled at the saccade target before the execution of the movement. Such a conception might be incorporated in the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading.

Dans une note de son ouvrage consacré à Henry, P. Audi affirme qu’« il n’y a pas de philosophie de l’histoire à proprement parler chez Henry ». Nous ambitionnons de rappeler ici que Henry a néanmoins donné un contenu au concept d’histoire et posé les conditions épistémologiques pour construire une phénoménologie radicale de l’histoire. Cette thématique, il est vrai, est généralement ignorée de la littérature secondaire. À son corps défendant, on est obligé de reconnaître que la question de l’...

Book Reviews Benoît Dubreuil, Economics and Philosophy, FirstView Article.

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)

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)

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.