Grace de Laguna was a philosopher working in the first part of the twentieth century on analytic and speculative philosophy, as well as on the psychology and philosophy of language, especially the social function of language. Joel Katzav’s lead essay focuses mainly on the former part of her work, while my commentary focuses mostly on the latter. Katzav shows how her work played a role in the development of analytic philosophy, I try to show how her work played a role (...) in the development of pragmatic linguistics, whose development overlapped with some aspects of analytic philosophy. I situate it in the context of an emerging ‘pragmatic Weltanschauung’ that was embraced by many working in linguistics, philology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology and what would later be called linguistic pragmatics. (shrink)

This paper aims to determine whether we can locate temporal passage in a non-dynamical (block universe) world. In particular, we seek to determine both whether temporal passage can be located somewhere in our world if it is non-dynamical, and also to home in on where in such a world temporal passage can be located, if it can be located anywhere. We investigate this question by seeking to determine, across three experiments, whether the folk concept of temporal passage can be satisfied (...) in our world if it is non-dynamical, and, if it can, what sort of thing in our world satisfies that concept. In particular, we focus on the question of whether that concept (if satisfied) is satisfied by something mind-dependent or something mind-independent. In other words, we ask, is temporal passage something that is at least partially in the mind, or is it entirely external to the mind? We find, contrary to what is often assumed by dynamists and non-dynamists alike, that the folk concept of temporal passage is satisfied in our world conditional on it being non-dynamical, and that the concept is satisfied by something mind-independent. This provides further ammunition for recent deflationary accounts of temporal passage that attempt to locate passage somewhere in our non-dynamical world. (shrink)

Rapprocher Facebook du Kula mélanésien, un système archaïque d’échanges intertribaux décrit par Marcel Mauss, permet de souligner la capacité de la plateforme phare du Web 2.0 à répondre à des besoins socioculturels anthropologiquement attestés. Tous deux obéissent à une contrainte implicite de réciprocité qui, au-delà du contenu matériel des échanges, possède une fonction symbolique : les interactions mises en œuvre et la recherche de partenaires traduisent une quête de prestige, de mana selon le fameux terme chinook. Le Kula et les (...) murs de Facebook offrent une immense vitrine où chacun valorise son mana et scrute celui d’autrui tout en cherchant de nouveaux partenaires. Mobiliser le Kula tel un modèle de Simmel – un schème d’intelligibilité – indique l’ancienneté de ces traits culturels : la combinaison des dimensions matérielle et symbolique dans les échanges entre pairs et, en l’absence d’instance régulatrice, le risque lié à l’emballement de ce processus inévitablement concurrentiel.Our comparison between Facebook and Melanesia’s Kula, an archaic system of inter-tribal exchanges described by Marcel Mauss, has highlighted the ability of the flagship Web 2.0 platform to respond to anthropologically verified socio-cultural needs. Both systems obey an implicit demand for reciprocity, which, over and above the actual content of exchanges, has a symbolic function: the interactions at play and the search for partners reflect a quest for prestige, or mana as it is famously known in Chinook. Kula and Facebook’s walls are a gigantic shop window where anyone can show off their mana and look at other people’s, while also seeking out other partners. The use of the Kula as described by Simmel – as a model of intelligibility – suggests the ancient roots of these cultural traits: the combination of material and symbolic dimensions in exchanges between peers and, if there is no regulating authority, the risk that this inevitably competitive process may run out of control. (shrink)

Par son rôle déterminant dans la réussite scolaire et professionnelle, ainsi que dans l’insertion sociale, l’apprentissage de l’orthographe lexicale représente un défi majeur pour les élèves du primaire. Dans ce contexte, nombreux sont les enseignants, orthophonistes et chercheurs à s’intéresser à la question des outils utiles à son enseignement et à son apprentissage, et à avoir recours notamment à des bases de données lexicales. Bien qu’elles constituent un apport considérable pour le domaine, les ressources existantes souffrent de plusieurs insuffisances. D’une (...) part, elles s’appuient sur des corpus de référence peu représentatifs du lexique scolaire auquel les élèves sont exposés au primaire, et d’autre part, elles ne permettent pas aux utilisateurs de déterminer la façon dont se développe l’acquisition de l’orthographe lexicale. À la lumière de ces constats, nous avons élaboré une ressource lexicale hybride, rendant compte à la fois de la fréquence et des caractéristiques linguistiques du lexique scolaire présent dans les manuels du primaire au Québec et, pour une partie des mots de ce lexique, de la capacité des élèves à les orthographier à chaque niveau du primaire. Dans cet article, nous revenons dans un premier temps sur la méthodologie d’élaboration de cette nouvelle base de données - nommée ÉQOL - dotée d’une Échelle Québécoise d’acquisition de l’Orthographe Lexicale, à l’origine de la création de la base de données. Dans un deuxième temps, nous évaluons l’apport de cet outil. La comparaison de notre base de données (Stanké, Royle, Rezzonico, Moreau, Dumais & Le Mené 2018) à des outils existants (trois bases de données et une échelle d’acquisition lexicale) témoigne de la pertinence de la création d’un outil propre au lexique scolaire adressé aux élèves du primaire et de la nécessité d’utiliser une nouvelle échelle d’acquisition de l’orthographe lexicale, spécifique aux compétences orthographiques des élèves québécois. (shrink)

La Renaissance commence vraiment avec Pléthon, contemporain de Nicolas de Cues et qui se voulait comme lui romain, mais du point de vue de Constantinople. Pléthon a conçu le modèle d'une constitution qui permettrait à tous les peuples de coexister en paix. Au temps où l'Occident latin est largement aristotélicien, il plaide pour le retour à Platon, l'idéalisme, la théologie affirmative.

Walter Benjamin, der Traum und das Bild des Weiblichen Geschichtsphilosophie aus gendertheoretischer Perspektive. 0Karin Stögner: 0Beschädigtes Leben und antisemitische „Schiefheilung". Freud und Adorno revisited.0Ljiljana Radonic: 0Autonomie versus Engagement? Über Adorno und Brecht. 0Gerhard Scheit: 0„Une promesse de bonheur". Herbert Marcuses „Über den affirmativen Charakter der Kultur".0Daniela Berner und Florian Wagner: 0Gebrochene Geschichte, Bedrängte Gegenwart. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines fremdgestellten Blicks 0auf die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit im Film. 0Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann: 0Das drastische Medium. Über Adornos Kritik des Films. 0Christoph Hesse: 0Träumerinnen im Wachen. (...) Die „Kollektivträume" der Comics und die Kritische Theorie. 0Barbara Eder : 0Verehrte Unsichtbare!"0Über die Kunst des Hörens bei Walter Benjamin und Theodor W. Adorno 0Christine Ehardt: 0Exkursion 0Shopping Mall, mit Walter Benjamin u.a. 0Anette Baldauf : 0Zum Einbruch des.Realen' in die Gegenwart 0Eingedenken, Erinnern, Katharsis 0Sara Vorwalder und Veronika Zangl : 0„Alles wirklich Brauchbare besteht in Aushilfen". Zwei Lektüren zu Oskar Negt und Alexander Kluges Geschichte und Eigensinn 0Valentin Mertes und Michael Paninski : 0„Die Nord-West-Passage der Revolution" 0Herrschaftsverhältnisse und die situationistische Kartographierung 0der Stadtlandschaft 0Brigitte Marschall: 0. (shrink)

Corruption involves greed, money, and risky decision-making. We explore the love of money, pay satisfaction, probability of risk, and dishonesty across cultures. Avaricious monetary aspiration breeds unethicality. Prospect theory frames decisions in the gains-losses domain and high-low probability. Pay dissatisfaction (in the losses domain) incites dishonesty in the name of justice at the individual level. The Corruption Perceptions Index, CPI, signals a high-low probability of getting caught for dishonesty at the country level. We theorize that decision-makers adopt avaricious love-of-money aspiration (...) as a lens and frame dishonesty in the gains-losses domain (pay satisfaction-dissatisfaction, Level 1) and high-low probability (CPI, Level 2) to maximize expected utility and ultimate serenity. We challenge the myth: Pay satisfaction mitigates dishonesty across nations consistently. Based on 6500 managers in 32 countries, our cross-level three-dimensional visualization offers the following discoveries. Under high aspiration conditions, pay dissatisfaction excites the highest- (third-highest) avaricious justice-seeking dishonesty in high (medium) CPI nations, supporting the certainty effect. However, pay satisfaction provokes the second-highest avaricious opportunity-seizing dishonesty in low CPI entities, sustaining the possibility effect—maximizing expected utility. Under low aspiration conditions, high pay satisfaction consistently leads to low dishonesty, demonstrating risk aversion—achieving ultimate serenity. We expand prospect theory from a micro and individual-level theory to a cross-level theory of monetary wisdom across 32 nations. We enhance the S-shaped Curve to three 3-D corruption surfaces across three levels of the global economic pyramid, providing novel insights into behavioral economics, business ethics, the environment, and responsibility. (shrink)

Climate scepticism in the sense of climate denialism or contrarianism is not a new phenomenon, but it has recently been very much in the media spotlight. When, in November 2009, emails by climate scientists were published on the internet without their authors' consent, a debate began in which climate sceptic bloggers used an extended network of metaphors to contest science. This article follows the so-called 'climategate' debate on the web and shows how a paradoxical mixture of religious metaphors and demands (...) for 'better science' allowed those disagreeing with the theory of anthropogenic climate change to undermine the authority of science and call for political inaction with regard to climate change. (shrink)

For language to function we clearly need two formal ordering principles: lexical entries and rules. Clahsen's target article provides multiple empirical evidence for this distinction, but this may be simply to overconfirm the undeniable and to overlook the hidden motor of language use and language development, namely, function. Since at least 1859, linguists have argued for the primacy of function, and these arguments are worth rediscovering today.

This article applies some ofthe insights from framing studies in policyresearch, metaphor analysis, and the history ofmedicine to a cultural understanding ofagriculture, using the 2001 outbreak of footand mouth disease in the UK as a case study.The article will show how metaphors of war wereused as a “rhetorical frame” by the media andas an implicit “action frame” by policy makers.It will be argued that although the war framemight initially have been useful in rallyingsupport for the slaughter policy, the metaphorlater backfired, (...) when a metaphorical war turnedinto a literal holocaust. This might haveencouraged the public to perceive the policy asmedieval, brutal, and misguided, thuspotentially undermining the willingness ofsections of the public to support the slaughterpolicy in future outbreaks. If, on the otherhand, a vaccination policy were adopted in thefuture, care would need to be taken to avoidmetaphorical linkages with other controversiesover vaccination in other domains. (shrink)

This paper deals with some structural properties of the sequent calculus and describes strong symmetries between cut-free derivations and derivations, which do not make use of identity axioms. Both of them are discussed from a semantic and syntactic point of view. Identity axioms and cuts are closely related to the treatment of negation in the sequent calculus, so the results of this article explain some nice symmetries of negation.

The phenomenon of self-healing forces has again and again challenged doctors in the different historical periods of medical science. They relied on effects of self-healing forces in diagnosis and therapy. They also tried to explain these effects based on the current model of organism. The understanding of this phenomenon has always influenced the understanding of therapy and played a role in defining the concept of health and disease. In the 17th and 18th century the idea of self-healing force was interpreted (...) as a phenomenon related to the organic forces, whereas in the 19th century the explanation was reduced to a materialistic mechanism. Nowadays the knowledge of heath-shock-proteins open the way of a new understanding of the organic defense mechanisms. (shrink)

This article adds to earlier research revealing that the American news media did not discharge their responsibility as a watchdog press in the post-9/11 years by failing to scrutinize extreme and unlawful government policies and actions, most of all the decision to invade Iraq based on false information about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction arsenal. The content analyses presented here demonstrate that leading US news organizations, both television and print, did not expressly refer to human rights violations when (...) they reported on the torturing of foreign detainees during “enhanced interrogations” in US-run prison facilities abroad and the killing of civilians, including children, in US drone strikes overseas and outside theaters of war. Moreover, by framing torture and the “collateral damage” caused by drone-launched missile attacks episodically rather than in the context of human rights, the news media failed to alert the American public to the grave humanitarian violations in the so-called war on terrorism during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. (shrink)

After the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights were adopted in 2011, an international treaty has been being negotiated since 2014. The two instruments reveal similarities and also conflicts regarding the adequate organization of the global economy based on human rights. The focus in this article will be on the processes leading to these instruments, because they themselves mirror different understandings of governance in the field of business and human rights as well as the struggle over the power (...) of definition and legitimacy. The UNGPs were developed on the basis of global multi-stakeholder consultations, underlining legitimacy through broad inclusion. There are varying judgements as to the success of this approach. The process towards the treaty follows the traditional path of negotiations at UN level. These negotiations reveal a struggle for recognition of the legitimacy of the process itself. Both procedures have shortcomings with regard to legitimacy and show the need for a revision concerning the inclusion of stakeholders. The complementarity of a soft and hard law instrument may enhance the creation of a level playing field in the global economy, thereby strengthening human rights. (shrink)

The paper presents a logical treatment of actions based on dynamic logic. This approach makes it possible to reflect clearly the differences between static and dynamic elements of the world, a distinction which seems crucial to us for a representation of actions.Starting from propositional dynamic logic a formal system (DLA) is developed, the programs of which are used to model action types. Some special features of this system are: Basic aspects of time are incorporated in DLA as far as they (...) are needed for our purpose. Names for states and for instants are simulated by formulas. It is possible to express formally that a formula is satisfiable or valid. A special program is introduced to reflect developments which are not caused by an official agent but by external influences. (shrink)

The impact of social media influencers (SMIs) on brand-related outcomes has been well researched, yet whether this influence also impacts political participation and what role the relationship between SMIs and their audiences play has not been sufficiently examined to date. Basing this study on the Balance Model, I investigated the potential of an unlikely vs. a likely source and the role of similarity with a SMI based on a shared topic interest to elicit the intention for political action in an (...) experimental study (n = 222). The perceived similarity with the SMI was examined as a mediator and the role of the shared topic interest with the SMI as a potential moderator. The results indicate that a likely source for political information generated a greater topic fit. The perceived similarity with the source depended on the shared topic interest between the source and the participants. This is a key finding, as perceived similarity with the source in turn predicted the intention to take political action, which positively activated participants who shared the topic interest of the unlikely source even if they did not indicate a topic interest in politics. Thus, a shared interest with a SMI might make even those not interested in politics more open to political participation. (shrink)

Entrepreneurs who start a business to serve both self-interests and collective interests by addressing unmet social and environmental needs are usually referred to as sustainable entrepreneurs. Compared with regular entrepreneurs, we argue that sustainable entrepreneurs face specific challenges when establishing their businesses owing to the discrepancy between the creation and appropriation of private value and social value. We hypothesize that when starting a business, sustainable entrepreneurs feel more hampered by perceived barriers, such as the institutional environment and have a different (...) risk attitude and perception than regular entrepreneurs. We use two waves of the Flash Eurobarometer survey on entrepreneurship, which contains information on start-up motivations, start-up barriers, and risk perceptions of approximately 3000 business owners across 33 countries. We find that sustainable entrepreneurs indeed perceive more institutional barriers in terms of a lack of financial, administrative, and informational support at business start-up than regular entrepreneurs. Further, no significant differences between sustainable and regular entrepreneurs are found in terms of their risk attitudes or perceived financial risks. However, sustainable entrepreneurs are more likely to fear personal failure than regular entrepreneurs, which is explained by their varied and complex stakeholder relations. These insights may serve as an important signal for both governments and private capital providers in enhancing the institutional climate. (shrink)

This book, first published in 2000, offers translations of the initial critical reactions to Kant's philosophy. Also included is a selection of writings by Kant's contemporaries who took on the task of defending the critical philosophy against early attacks. The first aim of this collection is to show in detail how Kant was understood and misunderstood by his contemporaries. The second aim is to reveal the sorts of arguments that Kant and his first disciples mounted in their defense of the (...) theoretical philosophy. The third aim of the book is to contribute to an understanding of the development of Kant's critical philosophy after its initial formulation in the Critique of Pure Reason, and in particular why Kant made the changes he did in the second edition of the work in 1787. This collection, which includes a glossary of key terms and biographical sketches of the critics on both sides of the debate, is a major addition to Kant scholarship and should be seen as a companion volume to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive account of Kant’s development from the 1755/56 metaphysics to the cosmological antinomy of 1781. With the Theory of the Heavens (1755) and the Physical Monadology (1756), the young Kant had presented an ambitious approach to physical cosmology based on an atomistic theory of matter, which contributed to the foundations of an all-encompassing system of metaphysics. Why did he abandon this system in favor of his critical view that cosmology runs into an antinomy, according to the (...) Critique of Pure Reason (CPR)? This book answers this question by focusing on Kant’s methodology and the internal problems of his 1755/56 theory of nature. A decisive role for Kant’s critical turn plays the argument from incongruent counterparts (1768), which drew much attention among philosophers of science, though not sufficiently in Kant research. Furthermore, the book analyses the genesis of the cosmological antinomy in the 1770s, the logical structure of the antinomy in the CPR, its relation to transcendental idealism, as explained in the “experiment of pure reason” (1787), and its role for the teleology of human reason. The book is addressed to Kant scholars, philosophers of science, and students of Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is twofold: first, to provide an account of the notion of creativity, and second, to consider some aspects of the scope of the concept of creativity, in particular whether it makes sense to speak of creativity in science. ;With regard to the first issue, I argue that creativity consists in the production of a radically new intelligibility and that for this production special, creative processes are required. The latter point is established through an analysis of (...) non-creative processes, which in turn is provided in terms of Kant's notion of schemata, interpreted as patterns of cognition. My claim is that these processes are not sufficient to bring about the radically new intelligibility that characterizes creative outcomes. The creative process is properly to be analysed through a consideration of Kant's conception of artistic genius and reference to some recent work in psychology. ;The final chapter treats the second issue, the topic of creativity in the sciences. I question whether it makes sense to speak of creativity in science. I argue that since the sciences provide radically novel, yet intelligible, ways of understanding the world, creativity is required here as well. (shrink)

This volume offers a broad, philosophical discussion on mechanical explanations. Coverage ranges from historical approaches and general questions to physics and higher-level sciences . The contributors also consider the topics of complexity, emergence, and reduction. Mechanistic explanations detail how certain properties of a whole stem from the causal activities of its parts. This kind of explanation is in particular employed in explanatory models of the behavior of complex systems. Often used in biology and neuroscience, mechanistic explanation models have been often (...) overlooked in the philosophy of physics. The authors correct this surprising neglect. They trace these models back to their origins in physics. The papers present a comprehensive historical, methodological, and problem-oriented investigation. The contributors also investigate the conditions for using models of mechanistic explanations in physics. The last papers make the bridge from physics to economics, the theory of complex systems and computer science . This book will appeal to graduate students and researchers with an interest in the philosophy of science, scientific explanation, complex systems, models of explanation in physics higher level sciences, and causal mechanisms in science. (shrink)

Lucid dreaming refers to a dream state characterized by the dreamers awareness of being in a dream and being able to volitionally control its content. The aim of this study was to find neurophysiological evidence for the 7 criteria of lucid dreaming proposed by Paul Tholey. Each of the criteria was analyzed separately with regard to its underlying neurocircuits. We hypothesized that not one, but many regions are involved in the state of lucid dreaming. Our results have shown a satisfactory (...) overlap of the theoretical components and the brain regions activated during a lucid dream. During lucid dreaming, a brain network seems to emerge, that is more than the sum of its parts. Further research is needed to understand the psychoneurological underpinnings of lucid dreams. (shrink)

This book analyzes--in terms of branching--the pervasive reorganization of Latin syntactic and morphological structures: in the development from Latin to French, a shift can be observed from the archaic, left-branching structures (which Latin inherited from Proto-Indo-European) to modern right-branching equivalents. Brigitte Bauer presents a detailed analysis of this development based on the theoretical discussion and definition of "branching" and "head." Subsequently she relates the diachronic shift to psycholinguistic evidence, arguing that the difficuly of LB complex structures as reflected in (...) their painstaking and delayed acquisition accounts for the extensive typological shift from left to right branching that took place in Latin/French and the other Indo-European languages. (shrink)

Extremists often aim to paint a biased picture of the world. Radical narratives, for instance, in forms of internet memes or posts, could thus potentially trigger cognitive biases in their users. These cognitive biases, in turn, might shape the users’ formation of extremist attitudes. To test this association, an online experiment (N=392) was conducted with three types of right-wing radical narratives (elite-critique, ingroup-outgroup, violence) in contrast to two control conditions (nonpolitical and neutral political control condition). We then measured the impact (...) of these narratives on the activation of three cognitive biases of relevance in the formation of extremist attitudes: the ingroup-outgroup bias, the negativity bias, and the just-world hypothesis. The results indicate that violence narratives seem to be particularly harmful as they heighten participants’ negativity bias and increase just-world views. Just-world views in turn show a positive relationship to extremist attitudes, which highlights the need of regulating violence invocations on social media. (shrink)

When philosophers of science relate Kant‘s theory of nature to modern physics, they neglect the critical parts of the Critique of Pure Reason. My paper focuses on the way in which Kant wanted to demonstrate the limitations of physical knowledge by means of the cosmological antinomy. According to Kant, cosmology gives rise to four variations of one-and-the-same antinomy of pure reason. He wanted to show that any attempt to complete our spatio-temporal or dynamical knowledge of the world is based on (...) a self-contradictory world view. Obviously he criticized the cosmological debates of his day whose topics are obsolete in our days. However, his doctrine of the antinomy of pure reason has a rationale which concerns the foundations of physics in Kant’s day as well as in ours. After giving a sketch of the subjects and of the structure of Kant’s antinomy, I present four variations on the theme "experience and completeness in physical theory" from a modern point of view. The fourth variation will indeed yield a conflict between the claims of completeness and the finite conditions of possible experience within physics which captures the rationale of Kant’s antinomy. Finally, I try to point out briefly how this rationale relates to Kant’s distinction of phenomena and noumena, and how this distinction can be re-interpreted in the context of modern physics. Indeed Niels Bohr made a similar distinction when he developed the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Paris a connu au xixe siècle une héroïsation la haussant au rang d’une Babylone ou Babel moderne. Le mur des fermiers généraux, qui enserra Paris jusqu’en 1860, doubla pendant quelques années les fortifications de Thiers, achevées en 1844 et détruites dans les années 1920, contribuant à la perception de la ville comme cocon, puis joyau protégé par son écrin. À l’époque du « Grand Paris », la « reine des cités » balzacienne, aujourd’hui cernée par le boulevard périphérique, restera le (...) cœur incontestable de la capitale future : ne conserve-t-elle pas intactes l’harmonie urbaine et l’aura culturelle façonnées en son siècle d’or?Paris in the 19th century was the theatre of a trend in urban planning that sought to elevate the city to the heroic status of a modern Babylon or Babel. The city wall erected by the “ fermiers généraux” , which enclosed Paris until 1860, was reinforced for a time by the fortifications completed by Thiers in 1844 and pulled down in the 1920s, thus strengthening perceptions of the city as a cocoon, and later a jewel nestling within its protective casket. Balzac’s “queen of cities”, the Grand Paris now encircled by the ring road, was necessarily the heart of the future capital: had it not preserved the essence of the urban harmony and cultural aura that took shape during its golden era? (shrink)

Le rapport entre féminisme et communisme est ambigu, souvent difficile certes, mais parfois aussi productif. C’est ce que démontrent les contributions du numéro 6 d’Aden, revue publiée par leGroupe Interdisciplinaire d’Études Nizaniennes,consacré à cette thématique. L’approche choisie est biographique et littéraire. C’est d’abord à travers la trajectoire et les écrits d’actrices et d’acteurs historiques que sont abordées la question de la place des femmes et du féminisme dans le communisme et...

Certains désordres somatiques traduisent une fragilité du moi corporel qui remonte aux vécus infantiles précoces. À partir de la thérapie d’un garçon « vomisseur », l’auteur, psychanalyste, montre comment l’introjection pulsionnelle ne peut avoir lieu par ratage des mécanismes de projection dans la relation à un objet primaire à l’étayage défectueux. Si celui-ci est trop pris dans la pathologie de ses propres relations, il rend problématique la possibilité d’introjection et d’identification à un objet interne pare-excitant permettant de psychiser l’excitation, de (...) favoriser l’intrication pulsionnelle et la reprise autoérotique. À sa place, l’incorporation de l’objet renforce la dépendance à cet objet primaire peu étayant. La relation transféro-contretransférentielle, sa capacité de « contenant » au sens de Bion, a contribué à l’élaboration introjective de la pulsionnalité permettant la séparation. (shrink)

This article explores the way in which the generative capacity of language inflects objects and props in several films by Alfred Hitchcock, focusing in particular on Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951). Camera angle and framing, the duration of the shot, the close-up or the long shot – all give shape to the filmed object. But why is language – or its absence – not mentioned among the set of operations that determines cinematic objects? In the form of (...) dialogue or imaged writing (words or letters visible in the frame), it notably contextualizes the object in Hitchcock's films. Language in relation to objects can be punning; it can extend the image, evoking another, unimaged object through the use of rhyme, and it may act as a verbal solution to a puzzle. When imaged as writing, language is materialized, itself an object. At their most macabre, Hitchcock films stage an oscillation between a word's literal and figurative use, generating an undertext that extends beyond the joke the film's surface makes available. This discussion teases out several functions of language in Hitchcock films as it impacts the viewer's understanding of objects, moments when language creates undertexts that are clearly intentional but resist interpretation. (shrink)

One of the first Swiss performance artists, Manon has fashioned a career for herself out of the identities of others. Whether exploring the limits of gender or the beauty of decay, Manon—through her personas, installations, and performance pieces—continually foregrounds the instability of place and self. Her most recent project, She Was Once MISS RIMINI, is one of her most brutal and touching. Here, she literally depicts imagined futures for an aging beauty queen. Each exquisite image in this pictorial essay teases (...) out the possible paths Miss Rimini—an alter-ego for Manon who “happened” upon a beauty pageant in the early 1970s and walked away with the crown—could have taken. A small-town diva? A hypersensitive viola player? Perhaps even a psychiatric patient? She Was Once MISS RIMINI is a trenchant meditation on the art, or artifice, of growing older. Costume, lipstick, lighting, attitude—all aspects of self-presentation are in concert here with quiet critiques of social and economic systems that limit the options of older women. Accompanied by an enlightening introduction by art theorist Brigitte Ulmer, She Was Once MISS RIMINI is the first and only documentation of Miss Rimini and one of the first books in English on Manon. (shrink)

Astroparticle physics is a recent sub-discipline of physics that emerged from early cosmic ray studies, astrophysics, and particle physics. Its theoretical foundations range from quantum field theory to general relativity, but the underlying “standard models” of cosmology and particle physics are far from being unified. The paper explores the pragmatic strategies employed in astroparticle physics in order to unify a disunified research field, the concept of observation involved in these strategies, and their relations to scientific realism.

The physics of condensed matter, in contrast to quantum physics or cosmology, is not traditionally associated with deep philosophical questions. However, as science - largely thanks to more powerful computers - becomes capable of analysing and modelling ever more complex many-body systems, basic questions of philosophical relevance arise. Questions about the emergence of structure, the nature of cooperative behaviour, the implications of the second law, the quantum-classical transition and many other issues. This book is a collection of essays by leading (...) physicists and philosophers. Each investigates one or more of these issues, making use of examples from modern condensed matter research. Physicists and philosophers alike will find surprising and stimulating ideas in these pages. (shrink)

Studying astroparticle physics sheds new light on scientific explanation and on the ways in which cosmology is empirically underdetermined or not. Astroparticle physics extends the empirical domain of cosmology from purely astronomical data to “multi-messenger astrophysics”, i.e., measurements of all kinds of cosmic rays including very high energetic gamma rays, neutrinos, and charged particles. My paper investigates the ways in which these measurements contribute to cosmology and compares them with philosophical views about scientific explanation, the relation between theory and data, (...) and scientific realism. The “standard models” of cosmology and particle physics lack of unified foundations. Both are “piecemeal physics” in Cartwright's sense, but contrary to her metaphysics of a “dappled world” the work in both fields of research aims at unification. Cosmology proceeds “top-down”, from models to data and from large scale to small-scale structures of the universe. Astroparticle physics proceeds “bottom-up”, from data taking to models and from subatomic particles to large-scale structures of the universe. In order to reconstruct the causal stories of cosmic rays and the nature of their sources, several pragmatic unifying strategies are employed. Standard views about scientific explanation and scientific realism do not cope with these “bottom-up” strategies and the way in which they contribute to cosmology. In addition it has to be noted that the shift to “multi-messenger astrophysics” transforms the relation between cosmological theory and astrophysical data in a mutually holistic way. (shrink)

A major purpose of this essay is to show that our assumptions regarding human development in general, and in particular, the mother and child have their roots in a Christian-humanistic tradition. I also wish to locate the origins of the discourse on the mother and child within a critical historical review of notions of a changing anthropology of the human subject. The working hypothesis is as follows: A changing view of the human being is associated with a changing approach to (...) child care and child development. This changing approach to child is accompanied by a ‘new woman’. Women are newly constructed when children, and thus a future person and a future society is defined. (shrink)