This essay reflects on the concept of “hydropower” – the corrosive power of seawater to amalgamate Life and Nonlife in the context of migrant deaths in the waters of the Mediterranean. Through a focus on drowned bodies’ dissolution and eventual sedimentation into their deep-sea surroundings, my approach interrelates the order of biopolitical violence enacted by Europe’s restrictive migration policies and the thick time of the geophysical. The degradation of bodies under the influence of hydropower reveals residual ontologies marked by porousness (...) between embodied forms of Life and their geophysical environments, putting significant pressure on the putatively watertight divide between Life and Nonlife in the Anthropocene. Parsed from the lens of residuality, hydropower reveals humans’ full ontological coincidence with matter writ large, their endurance and solubility in geological life forces, but also the necessity to think agency in terms of human/inhuman continuity in excess of biopower’s regimenting forces. Against the attempted biopolitical suppression of a certain form of humanity, the residual dwelling enacted by hydropower champions the inclusion of new constellations of matter in our political thought processes. (shrink)

In this paper, I expound Philip Pettit’s political thought as an example of a ‘spontaneous and naturalistic’ view of politics and place his account within a liberal tradition of epistemological modesty which Pettit imagines he has transcended. To this end, I highlight the affinities between Pettit’s theory of freedom and a paradigmatically ‘modest’ social theory, namely, Hayek’s theory of the spontaneous social order. In light of the comparison with Hayek, I show that Pettit’s distinction between liberal and republican thought is (...) not as vivid as he suggests. My contention is that the republican ideal of freedom offers not so much the makings of a viable non-liberal theory of political association as the expression, under a ‘new’ language of citizenship, of specifically Hayekian intuitions that lie at the core of contemporary neoliberalism. (shrink)

Il n’y a pas d’âge pour se poser des questions philosophiques et, très tôt, face à l’étonnement devant le monde, les enfants s’interrogent sur la vie, la mort et les relations humaines. L’enfant serait par excellence celui qui, selon l’expression de G. Deleuze, fait « l’idiot » et pose la question du pourquoi et de l’essence des choses en toute naïveté et intensité. La pratique de « la philosophie avec les enfants « se développe ainsi en Europe depuis une vingtaine (...) d'années. Cette pratique répond au besoin de démocratisation d’une discipline jugée trop souvent comme hermétique et élitiste. Dans le même temps, la littérature de jeunesse semble avoir pris en compte ces interrogations métaphysiques. Les programmes de littérature à l‘école primaire insistent d’ailleurs sur cette dimension des œuvres et incitent à des débats réflexifs. C’est dans cette brèche que tous ceux qui souhaitent une initiation précoce à la philosophie ont pu s’engouffrer pour mettre en place des séances dans les classes. Le monde de l‘enfance pourrait ainsi être aujourd’hui le pont qui permettrait de réconcilier deux disciplines dont l’histoire s’est trop longtemps écrite sous les signes de la concurrence et de la méfiance réciproques. Elles pourraient ainsi retrouver leur alliance originelle : au-delà des formes spécifiques qu’elles entretiennent avec le langage, elles sont toutes les deux des discours qui visent à donner sens et intelligibilité à notre existence. Disciplines trop longtemps conflictuelles, la littérature et la philosophie ne trouveraient-elles pas ainsi une nouvelle complémentarité grâce au développement conjoint de leur didactique avec les enfants? (shrink)

I argue that stories are ‘equipment for living’ in two senses: retrospectively, they provide ‘configurational comprehension’ of a temporal sequence of events; prospectively, they offer templates for action. Narrative conceptions of the self appear well poised to leverage these functional roles for stories into an intuitively compelling view of self-construction as self-construal. However, the narrative conception defines selves in terms of the lives they live: a self is the protagonist in a lifelong story. And narrative structure is itself defined by (...) ‘retrospective necessity’: the meaning of events within a story is given by their contribution to that story's ending. Together, this entails that life stories hold selves metaphysically, epistemically, and practically hostage to their ends. Fortunately, narratives are just one species of interpretive frame. I suggest some alternative types of frames, including identity labels and metaphors, that support configurational comprehension, action guidance, and self construction without shackling selves to their lives’ ends. (shrink)

Tagba is a tone language that presents tonal patterns that appear quite regular at first glance. However, these are difficult to model under standard autosegmental hierarchical assumptions regarding the placement of skeleton, segments and tones. In this paper, we will present Tagba tonology and demonstrate that it can be accounted for by readjusting the tiers of hierarchization. From this, we reason that the proposed hierarchy is parametric and language specific.

Since the mid-1990s most EU Member States have established a national forensic DNA database. These mass repositories of DNA profiles enable the police to identify DNA stains which are found at crime scenes and are invaluable in criminal investigation. Governments have always brushed aside privacy objections by stressing that the stored DNA profiles do not contain sensitive genetic information on the included individuals and that they reside under the statutory privacy protection regulations. However, it has been generally overlooked that the (...) police also store the DNA samples from which the DNA profiles are derived. Although these DNA samples are actually a potential source of genetic information, they have so far scarcely been the subject of discussion. In this article we will show that both European and national regulations offer inadequate protection to completely prevent function creep, that is, the use of these forensic DNA samples for purposes beyond those envisaged at the time of collection. (shrink)

To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning.

In debates about the nature of scientific explanation, one theme repeatedly arises: that explanation is about providing understanding. However, the concept of understanding has only recently been explored in any depth, and this paper attempts to introduce a useful concept of understanding to that literature and explore it. Understanding is a higher level cognition, the recognition of connections between various pieces of knowledge. This conception can be brought to bear on the conceptual issues that have thus far been unclear in (...) the literature. Though this notion of understanding is broad, explaining various concepts of explanation, it is robust enough to underwrite an objective and useful notion of explanation. (shrink)

It is becoming clear that the post‐translational modification of histone and non‐histone proteins by acetylation is part of an important cellular signaling process controling a wide variety of functions in both the nucleus and the cytoplasm. Recent investigations designate this signaling pathway as one of the primary targets of viral proteins after infection. Indeed, specific viral proteins have acquired the capacity to interact with cellular acetyltransferases (HATs) and deacetylases (HDACs) and consequently to disrupt normal acetylation signaling pathways, thereby affecting viral (...) and cellular gene expression. Here we review the targeting of cellular HATs and HDACs by viral proteins and highlight different strategies adopted by viruses to control cellular acetylation signaling and to accomplish their life cycle. BioEssays 25:58–65, 2003. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Health care resource distribution is a subject of debate among health policy analysts, economists, and philosophers. In the United States, there is a widening gap between the more-and less-advantaged socioeconomic sub-populations in terms of both health care resource distribution and outcomes. Conventional wisdom suggests that there is a tradeoff, a zero-sum game, between efficiency and fairness in the distribution of health care resources. Promoting fairness in the distribution of health care resources and outcomes is not efficient in terms of maximization (...) of a health outcome production function. On the other side of the coin, improving efficiency comes at the expense of fairness. Such conventional wisdom is supported in part by standard static Paretian welfare analysis. However, in this paper it is shown that in a dynamic setting in which there are efficiency gains in the health production function, fairness in distribution of health care resources can improve simultaneously. (shrink)

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

Everyone has mistaken one thing for another, such as a stranger for an acquaintance. A person who has mistaken two things, Joseph Camp argues, even on a massive scale, is still capable of logical thought. In order to make that idea precise, one needs a logic of confused thought that is blind to the distinction between the objects that have been confused. Confused thought and language cannot be characterized as true or false even though reasoning conducted in such language (...) can be classified as valid or invalid. To the extent that philosophers have addressed this issue at all, they take it for granted that confusion is a kind of ambiguity. Camp rejects this notion; his fundamental claim is that confusion is not a mental state. To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning. Camp proposes a novel characterization of confusion, and then demonstrates its fruitfulness with several applications in the history of philosophy and the history of science. (shrink)

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

On a familiar and prima facie plausible view of metaphor, speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean another. A variety of theorists have recently challenged this view; they offer criteria for distinguishing what is said from what is merely meant, and argue that these support classifying metaphor within 'what is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I conclude by sketching how we might extract a (...) workable notion of 'what is said' from ordinary intuitions about saying. (shrink)

Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...) as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. (shrink)

I argue that we can reconcile two seemingly incompatible traditions for thinking about concepts. On the one hand, many cognitive scientists assume that the systematic redeployment of representational abilities suffices for having concepts. On the other hand, a long philosophical tradition maintains that language is necessary for genuinely conceptual thought. I argue that on a theoretically useful and empirically plausible concept of 'concept', it is necessary and sufficient for conceptual thought that a thinker be able to entertain many of the (...) potential thoughts produced by recombining her representational abilities apart from a direct confrontation with the states of affairs being represented. Such representational abilities support a cognitive engagement with the world that is flexible, abstract, and active. (shrink)

Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ”framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ”complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically (...) powerful because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech acts with assertoric force. (shrink)

This paper turns to Hannah Arendt’s brief, poignant remarks about the advent of a biotechnological revolution as a starting point for a renewed reflection on her concept of natality. By expanding on Arendt's significant, but often overlooked, reference to the work of the German anthropologist Arnold Gehlen, it will be argued that that natality is a concept that subverts any rigid opposition between zoe and bios, biological birth and politico-linguistic birth. Consequently, it will be shown that Jürgen Habermas and Michael (...) Sandel are mistaken to appeal to the concept of natality in their arguments against genetic enhancement. (shrink)

Does thought precede language, or the other way around? How does having a language affect our thoughts? Who has a language, and who can think? These questions have traditionally been addressed by philosophers, especially by rationalists concerned to identify the essential difference between humans and other animals. More recently, theorists in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental psychology have been asking these questions in more empirically grounded ways. At its best, this confluence of philosophy and science promises to blend the (...) respective strengths of each discipline, bringing abstract theory to bear on reality in a principled and focused way. At its worst, it risks degenerating into a war of words, with each side employing key expressions in its own idiosyncratic way – or worse, contaminating empirical research with a priori dogmas inherited from outmoded philosophical worldviews. In Baboon Metaphysics (2007), Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth offer an analysis of baboon cognition that promises to exemplify the very best interaction of philosophical theory and empirical research. They argue that baboons have a language of thought: a language-like representational medium, which supports the sophisticated cognitive abilities required to negotiate their complex social environment. This claim is intended to be surprising in its own right, and also to shed light on the evolution of spoken language. Because our own ancestors likely lived in a similarly complex social environment, Cheney and Seyfarth propose that the earliest humans also developed language first as a cognitive medium, and that spoken language evolved as a means to express those thoughts. There are two potential difficulties here. First, ‘Language of Thought’ (LOT) is a term of art, with much associated theoretical baggage and often comparatively little careful exposition. Thus, evaluating the claim requires getting clearer about just what LOT implies in this context.. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have discovered that they have a lot to learn from, or at least to ponder about, fiction. Many metaphysicians are attracted to fiction as a model for our talk about purported objects and properties, such as numbers, morality, and possible worlds, without embracing a robust Platonist ontology. In addition, a growing group of philosophers of mind are interested in the implications of our engagement with fiction for our understanding of the mind and emotions: If I don’t believe that (...) Anna Karenina exists, can I really pity her, or hope or desire that she extricate herself from her tragic situation? And why is there no “morality fiction,” analogous to science fiction? I suspect that philosophers have been especially comfortable thinking about fiction because it seems, at least prima facie, to employ the imagination in a way that conforms to a standard model of the mind. Specifically, contemporary philosophers tend to think of imagination as a form of mental pretense. Mental pretense can take two main forms: a cognitive attitude of supposing a set of propositions to be true (make-believe) or else an experiential state of imaging a scenario as if it were before one (imaging). Much of our pretense intertwines the cognitive and experiential modalities, of course. But both share a crucial common feature: all of one’s imaginative effort is invested in pretending that certain contents obtain. In this sense, we can understand imagination as the “offline” simulation of actual beliefs and perceptions (and perhaps other attitudes as well), where we analyze these in the normal way, as states individuated by their attitude and representational content. While I share the burgeoning interest in fiction, I want to suggest that we also have a lot to learn from poetry, and in particular from poetic metaphor. I will argue.. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally inclined toward one of two opposite extremes when it comes to metaphor. On the one hand, partisans of metaphor have tended to believe that metaphors do something different in kind from literal utterances; it is a ‘heresy’, they think, either to deny that what metaphors do is genuinely cognitive, or to assume that it can be translated into literal terms. On the other hand, analytic philosophers have typically denied just this: they tend to assume that if metaphors (...) express any genuine content at all, then that content can in principle be paraphrased into literal terms. They often conclude on this basis that metaphor is theoretically dispensable, and so that it poses no special challenges and affords no distinctive insights for the philosophy of language and mind. (shrink)

L’auteur présente le statut juridique de l’animal, les normes juridiques visant la protection de l’animal domestique, l’animal de compagnie et plus particulièrement les décisions de justice concernant le chien « dangereux ».

"Comment faites-vous pour défendre l'assassin d'un enfant?" C'est souvent cette question que les avocats pénalistes entendent à propos de leur métier. L'avocat est représenté, dans la fiction, sous les traits d'un être ambigu, sans cesse sur le fil... La réalité est sans doute tout autre. C'est elle que ce livre tente d'approcher en comblant un manque dans les réflexions contemporaines de l'avocature. Rares sont, en effet, les travaux qui abordent l'éthique de l'avocat pénaliste. Quelles sont ses interrogations, ses incertitudes lorsqu'il (...) est confronté à des choix de défense? A travers une enquête menée auprès d'avocats, l'auteur s'intéresse aux intentions, aux pratiques quotidiennes effectives et aux enjeux de responsabilité du pénaliste. Comment les mutations juridiques et politiques de la défense pénale orientent-elles les valeurs de l'avocat et sa manière d'agir? Par-delà la dimension déontologique de son métier, quelles relations d'ordre éthique l'avocat entretient-il avec lui-même mais aussi avec l'autre : son client, qu'il soit prévenu, accusé ou victime, les jurés, les magistrats? Peut-on parler du rapport de l'avocat à la vérité? Cette vérité est-elle spécifique? Plurielle? Le procès équitable permet-il d'affirmer une égalité des armes devant la justice? Comment l'avocat peut-il construire des lignes de défense tout en restant partenaire de justice? En définitive, est-il possible de comprendre l'acte même de défense des actes extrêmes, des crimes monstrueux sans prendre conscience de la complexité d'une réflexion éthique? Avocats, magistrats, policiers, journalistes, bâtonniers, et bien sûr tous ceux qui se destinent à ces professions, et puis encore les citoyens qui s'intéressent à la justice et les citoyens qui la découvrent en tant que jurés, tous ceux-là, pour des raisons très diverses, tireront profit de la lecture de cet ouvrage. (shrink)

We should not admit categorial restrictions on the significance of syntactically well formed strings. Syntactically well formed but semantically absurd strings, such as ‘Life’s but a walking shadow’ and ‘Caesar is a prime number’, can express thoughts; and competent thinkers both are able to grasp these and ought to be able to. Gareth Evans’ generality constraint, though Evans himself restricted it, should be viewed as a fully general constraint on concept possession and propositional thought. For (a) even well formed but (...) semantically cross-categorial strings often do possess substantive inferential roles; (b) hearers exploit these inferential roles in interpreting such strings metaphorically; (c) there is no good reason to deny truth-conditions to strings with inferential roles. (shrink)

Philosophers have often adopted a dismissive attitude toward metaphor. Hobbes (1651, ch. 8) advocated excluding metaphors from rational discourse because they “openly profess deceit,” while Locke (1690, Bk. 3, ch. 10) claimed that figurative uses of language serve only “to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats.” Later, logical positivists like Ayer and Carnap assumed that because metaphors like..

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for (...) thinking about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do fit the accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. (shrink)