Epistemic decolonization, in its various conceptual formulations and presentations, could be taken to hold promise for either the completion of the anti-colonial struggle or the self-re-discovery of the formerly colonized and oppressed. In Africa this project has had a long history as both a counter to hegemonic histories of claimed Western epistemological superiority as well as theories of racism and racist practices against black people of African descent. What is not entirely clear are the precise achievements of decolonial thought and (...) practice. I interrogate the relevance, use and continuation of decoloniality as a genre of thought and practice on the African continent against the background of the perennial problems of material underdevelopment and stifled political spaces that render the supposed beneficiaries of decolonization hopeless subjects who continue to be disempowered and oppressed in their own home. This interrogation is to be carried alongside another inquiry aimed at evaluating the achievements of African philosophy as a form of epistemic decolonization. If African philosophy is a form of decolonization, as it should be, it should be able to clearly demonstrate its achievements and how they have had an effect on broader goals of decolonizing and empowering inhabitants of the African continent. (shrink)

It is clear that in the eyes of a growing number of humanitarian fieldworkers and decision-makers, palliative care is something humanitarian organizations should strive to provide as they address the needs of populations affected by crises. What remains less clear are the moral justifications underlying the push to do so. This chapter dives beneath surface prescriptions of what “ought to be” the place of palliative care within humanitarian response. It presents and analyses a series of evocative statements made by 24 (...) humanitarian healthcare actors about why, on what bases, and with what caveats, care for the dying deserves more attention within humanitarian healthcare response. Embedded in these statements are sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit ideas about what it means be a human and a humanitarian, and what humans need and deserve. Clarifying the experiences, practical considerations, understandings of care and responsibility, and norms and values underlying these feelings renders these available for more thorough reflection, discussion, and debate. (shrink)

Time is analyzed as being those processes by which a system notes the processes which comprise its own existence. The directionality of time is given by the concepts, past, present, and future. To understand the meaning of these concepts, a set of experiments was carried out with four male subjects in which areas of time were expanded or ablated by means of post-hypnotic suggestions. These operations were carried out singly or in combination. The data suggest that the present is primarily (...) associated with stimulus input, the past with the criteria for defining that input as well as the development of response inhibitions and the future with the directionality of that input. Marked personality changes which range from the occurence of catatonic-like states to obsessive types of reaction and manic-like reactions are associated with different combinations of time alterations. Some of the changes are in accord with the serialist position on time of J. W. Dunne. The concept of death is very important both with regard to one’s view of time and how one lives. While it is important to live in the present, the present has no meaning without at least a past or a future. Implications of these findings for psychopathology in general and schizophrenia in particular are considered. (shrink)

It's a truism to say that politicians lie. They twist the truth, exaggerate and spin. But blatant lying has now become the norm, led by Donald Trump and carried on by Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison. Combine this with an all-out assault on the truth in public debate along with the biggest communications revolution since the printing press, and you have a disaster in real time: a sea of fake news, hyper-partisanship and polarisation. No society or democracy can function without (...) trust, and the consequences of this profound shift are clear. The first step to a remedy is in understanding both the liars and the environments in which they lie. Lies and Falsehoods does exactly that, in this account of how we found ourselves in this fractured post-truth world, and how we might get out. (shrink)

The paper argues that in our usage of moral language we relate three concepts: guilt, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This assumes that we can distinguish between external actions and internal executions, because guilt as well as forgiveness and reconciliation are realities that first affect our inner humanity. When a relationship has been damaged by culpable actions (sometimes even by both sides), forgiveness is the precondition of reconciliation. As long as people accuse each other, there can be no talk of true reconciliation. (...) Although these are attitudes, that is, inner engagements, reconciliation also becomes outwardly recognizable as peace. However, these relationships can only be explained well in the connections of individual persons to each other. When political communities confront each other, our moral sense becomes fuzzy, because it is not so easy to say how such collectives (e.g., peoples) are to be determined in their inside and outside. Who can and may forgive, if other persons have become victims of culpable actions, but cannot forgive themselves? Here, then, the difficulty of individuality and collectivity is added. The essay pleads for maintaining the conceptual conjunction between individual and collective forgiveness. However, this should not be done at the price of a complete socio-ontological dissolution of collectives. Therefore, one must also be cautious about rash universalistic appropriation of the Other or the other group, because this is usually accompanied by a failure to recognize and endure the selfhood of the Other. Before it comes to a “false” reconciliation in this way, it is better to at least recognize each other – also in diversity. This should also be reflected in the rules of conflict, which must above all be oriented toward ensuring that conflicts are not carried out in such a way that the manner in which the conflict is carried out makes reconciliation impossible. But in both collective and individual reconciliation, the person does not have the outcome of the process entirely in his or her own hands. Reconciliation is not a technique, but a relational event that is carried out in an “open space.”. (shrink)

Locating the origin of psychic suffering akin to human kind requires an approach to the subject that cannot be reduced to any special method of natural sciences, psychology, history and sociology, and it oversteps particularities which are being carried by confined perspectives; cultural and historical spacing. The question of psychic suffering is a question regarding a human being in general, and thus except for insights compiled by the interdisciplinary method, we also need a philosophical investigation of the subject. It is (...) not meant in the sense of isolation, rather as coupled with that wholeness by which a human being attains its being as being one among many. In a sense given, this investigation is guided by an idea of rupturedness as a paradigm of what is considered to be psychic suffering, conditioned by the fact that suffering presupposes a sort of deficiency. The paper seeks possible solutions starting from understanding the human condition as an inherently tragic state of neediness. (shrink)

Stem cells derived from pluripotent cells offer the hope of new treatments for diseases for which current therapy is inadequate. Clinical trials are essential in developing effective and safe stem cell therapies and fulfilling this promise. However, such clinical trials raise ethical issues that are more complex than those raised in clinical trials using drugs, cord blood stem cells, or adult stem cells. Several clinical trials are now being carried out with stem cells derived from pluripotent cells, and many more (...) can be expected in light of the rapid scientific progress in the field.Degenerative neurological diseases are desirable targets for stem cell clinical trials. The FDA has approved Phase 1 clinical trials of neural stem cell transplantation for Batten Disease, Pelizaeus-Merzbacher Disease, and spinal cord injury. In Parkinson Disease, stem cell transplantation could correct the primary pathophysiological defect — inadequate levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Current treatment is unsatisfactory in late-stage PD. (shrink)

The conference did not target only the U.S. Christian right for opposing such things as stem cell research. It challenged every faith community that believes a human being is more than just one more biological product. The weekend of Aug. 7 was organized by the World Transhumanist Association. In 2005 its conference will be in Caracas, Venezuela, where this small band of transhumanists will continue to challenge all larger faith communities to review what they have to say about a "brave (...) new world" that would carry us far beyond the engineered manipulations that seemed so distant when Aldous Huxley wrote in 1932 about creating babies in test tubes. (shrink)

Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought reflects the present transitory nature of rhetoric and society. Its purpose is to relate the rhetorical theory and critical approaches of American critic Kenneth Burke to four major European philosophers - Jurgen Habermas, Ernesto Grassi, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida - as they discuss the nature of language and its central role in society. Supporting transitory forces in society, all these thinkers reject traditional, scientific, objective, reductionist thought and point to language or symbols as (...) the basis for understanding experience and knowledge. Burke, Habermas, and Grassi approach language by establishing global theories. In contrast to these global approaches, Foucault and Derrida attack language and the human situation microscopically. Michel Foucault examines "discursive practices" to discover relationships among the concepts of rhetoric, knowledge, and power. Derrida focuses on the methods of difference and deconstruction because he believes human beings are trapped by their own language, which inherently carries multiple meanings that need to be unpacked or deconstructed. (shrink)

Leibniz is one of the philosophers who is most present in the philosophy of Maine de Biran, particularly from 1813 onwards. His influence is decisive in the reform of metaphysics (or First Philosophy) that he carries out from that moment on, reviving the notion of substance. Leibniz allows him to reconcile it with the idea of force, and thus to link it to the primitive fact of consciousness. This move has often been emphasized by commentators, but what has been less (...) studied is the way in which this reform takes place in Biran’s intellectual trajectory from the time when he claimed to be an Ideologist inspired by Condillac’s philosophy, to the last texts written in 1824, when he eventually adopted a spiritualist monism that owed much to Leibniz, abandoning the Cartesian-inspired metaphysical dualism to which he had been committed until then. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that decoherence theory is, if not a complete answer, at least a great step forward towards a solution of the quantum measurement problem. It is shown here however that in the cases in which a sentient being is explicitly assumed to take cognizance of the outcome the reasons we have for judging this way are not totally consistent, so that the question has to be considered anew. It is pointed out that the way the Broglie–Bohm model (...) solves the riddle suggests a possible clue, consisting in assuming that even very simple systems may have some sort of a proto-consciousness, but that their “internal states of consciousness” are not predictive. It is, next, easily shown that if we imagine the systems get larger, in virtue of decoherence their internal states of consciousness progressively gain in predictive value. So that, for macro-systems, they may be identified (in practice) with the predictive states of consciousness on which we ground our observational predictions. The possibilities of carrying over this idea to standard quantum mechanics are then investigated. Conditions of conceptual consistency are considered and found rather strict, and, finally, two solutions emerge, differing conceptually very much from one another but in both of which the, possibly non-predictive, generalized internal states of consciousness play a crucial role. (shrink)

In this article, we review the conceptions of Collective Effervescence (CE) –a state of intense shared emotional activation and sense of unison that emerges during instances of collective behavior, like demonstrations, rituals, ceremonies, celebrations, and others– and empirical approaches oriented at measuring it. The first section starts examining Émile Durkheim's classical conception on CE, and then, the integrative one proposed by the sociologist Randall Collins, leading to a multi-faceted experience of synchronization. Then, we analyze the construct as a process emerging (...) in collective encounters when individuals contact with social ideal and values, referring to the classical work of Serge Moscovici as well as those more recent empirical approaches. Third, we consider CE as a set of intense positive emotions linked to processes of group identification, as proposed by authors of the Social Identity Theory tradition. Finally, we describe CE from the perspective of self-transcendence (e.g., emotions, experiences), and propose a unified description of this construct. The second section shows the results of a meta-analytical integration (k= 50,N= 182,738) aimed at analyzing CE's proximal effects or construct validity (i.e., Individual Emotions and Communal Sharing) as well as its association with more distal variables, such as Collective Emotions, Social Integration, Social Values and Beliefs and Empowerment. Results indicate that CE strongly associates with Individual Emotions –in particular, Self-Transcendent Emotions– and Communal Sharing constructs (e.g., Group Identity, Fusion of Identity), providing construct validity. Among the distal effects of CE, it is associated with Collective Positive Emotions, long-term Social Integration (e.g., Ingroup Commitment), Social Values and Beliefs and Empowerment-related variables (e.g., Wellbeing, Collective Efficacy, Collective Self-Esteem). Among the moderation analyses carried out (e.g., study design, CE scale, type of collective gathering), the effects of CE in demonstrations are noticeable, where this variable is a factor that favors other variables that make collective action possible, such as Group Identity (rpooled= 0.52), Collective Efficacy (rpooled= 0.37), Negative and Self-Transcendent Emotions (rpooled= 0.14 and 0.58), and Morality-related beliefs (rpooled= 0.43). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education ed. by David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman and Gary E. McPhersonCara Faith BernardDavid J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Gary E. McPherson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019)Three leading voices in music education, David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Gary E. McPherson, consistently work to (...) reconceive how music educators create and challenge the discourses of music learning and the ways in which people engage with music. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education furthers their contributions and serves as a break from the familiar and common “default philosophy of assessment” of tests, standards, regimens, and rankings to invite new ways of approaching music assessment.1 They, along with their coauthors, apply their theoretical, research, and teaching experience to examine music assessment through social praxis and how individuals and communities “deepen their growth as knowing and compassionate human beings.”2 In short, this Handbook is an invitation for music educators of all levels to reengage with their values and name them in their current and future practices.Using the current neoliberal state of education as a backdrop, Elliott, Silverman, and McPherson portray schools as spaces that yield corporate types of learning practices and assessments which “place little value on arts education.”3 Countering these realities, the diverse cadre of authors examines assessment [End Page 123] from different settings, roles, policies, and practices, organized around four themes. The first theme examines assessment through theoretical ideas including critical pedagogy, pragmatism, and Deleuzean frameworks. Next, in methodological practices, new ideas for assessment are considered through teacher evaluation, working with students with disabilities, and incorporating habits of mind. Creativity explores assessment through technological possibilities, popular music, and drawing, among others. Closing with international perspectives, the authors explore assessment through German and Scandinavian bildung/bildning, care as a driving force of assessment in South Africa, and an Iranian non-regulated perspective of assessment.Alexandra Kertz-Welzel asks: “Who decides what is assessed? How it is assessed? By whom is it assessed?”4 These questions are embraced and challenged throughout the Handbook. Instead of conceiving of assessment as something diagnostic—reaching musical benchmarks and aptitudes deemed by outside authorities—the authors welcome an epistemological shift of assessment. What might happen when music educators replace written self-assessments, quizzes, and playing tests in favor of, say, habits of mind (as Jillian Hogan and Ellen Winner describe in their chapter5) such as listening, noticing, being part of a community, persisting, expressing oneself, imagining, and making decisions? These changes might transform a community, one where students and teachers embrace music making beyond mere replication.6 The authors suggest ways of engaging in acts of subversion, resistance, care, and pragmatism to push past the product-driven view of assessment dictated by neoliberal and for-profit discourses.Historically, assessment has been contextualized, discussed, and critiqued through its practices; its purpose has been to gain information which aids in making decisions about teaching. In many contexts, particularly in the U.S., assessment practices stem from current educational policies, namely those noted in teacher evaluation systems.7 Such practices are intended to show student growth and drive instruction, to better label teaching quality and student success.8 In my own research on teacher evaluation, I found that music educators struggle with definitions and strategies of assessment; as a result, they defer to assessments based on hierarchies of musical skill and technique.9 Yet, Charlotte Danielson, a creator of many U.S. teacher evaluation frameworks, reminds that teaching “is not simply a matter of following a script of carrying out other people’s instructional designs.”10 Having to uphold the demands of assessment and evaluation forced many of the participants in my research to become compliant, even when they knew their teaching strategies were ancillary to who the students were and what they needed. They fabricated their assessments— often in the form of exit slips and inauthentic writing and musical compositional activities—to comply with policies. As a result, teachers’ values for music [End Page 124] teaching and learning were omitted from... (shrink)

Developmental research suggests that young children tend to value dominant individuals over subordinates. This research, however, has nearly exclusively been carried out in Western cultures, and cross-cultural research among adults has revealed cultural differences in the valuing of dominance. In particular, it seems that Japanese culture, relative to many Western cultures, values dominance less. We conducted two experiments to test whether this difference would be observed in preschoolers. In Experiment 1, preschoolers in France and in Japan were asked to identify (...) with either a dominant or a subordinate. French preschoolers identified with the dominant, but Japanese preschoolers were at chance. Experiment 2 revealed that Japanese preschoolers were more likely to believe a subordinate than a dominant individual, both compared to chance and compared to previous findings among French preschoolers. The convergent results from both experiments thus reveal an early emerging cross-cultural difference in the valuing of dominance. (shrink)

Census data from Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom make clear that the irreligious as well as those who indicate No Religion in censuses are growing rapidly. Despite being dominated by young males, we find that the demographics of those who identify with some form of irreligion or who indicate they have no religion are becoming more gender balanced and are rising in age. However, we also find that atheists, agnostics, and humanists are not having children, meaning their current remarkable (...) rate of growth will fall off in the near future. In contrast, ‘Nones’ are more fertile than the population at large. However, because more than a few Nones hold religious beliefs, it is difficult to predict how the growth of this portion of the population will impact the future growth of irreligion. We conclude that more empirical work needs to be carried out on the Nones. (shrink)

Competitive advantage and sustainability emerge as important factors for the success of an organization’s overall differentiation. This research aims to identify the relationship between internet banking and bank investment decision, as well as gaging the mediating effects of sustainability and competitive advantage as attributes of investment decisions. To achieve that, a questionnaire was administrated to banks’ employees and customers. To carry out the hypothesis testing, we have employed structural equation modeling through SPSS and SmartPLS. The findings suggest that internet banking, (...) sustainability, and competitive advantage constructs are significant antecedents of banks because they highlight valuable attributes for banks to attain future benefits. This paper contributes to bank managers and scholars by providing a framework and supporting theories that help to identify relevant constructs and strategic resource characteristics. From the findings, we recommend conducting future studies in other countries or fields to generalize our results. (shrink)

Conscious experience is one of the most difficult and thorny problems in psychological science. Its study has been neglected for many years, either because it was thought to be too difficult, or because the relevant evidence was thought to be poor. Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena - such as stimulus representations known to be attended, perceptual, and informative - with closely comparable unconscious ones - such (...) as stimulus representations known to be preperceptual, unattended, or habituated. Adducing data to show that consciousness is associated with a kind of global workplace in the nervous system, and that several brain structures are known to behave in accordance with his theory, Baars helps to clarify many difficult problems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 279 Epicureanlsm, Stoicism, Hermetism, Copernicanism, and sheer fantasy. "Heretic" was obviously a mild term for this belligerent prophet, sage, and magus. HF.aBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, California Bernard Lamy (1640-1715), dtude biographique et bibliographique. Textes in~dits. By Francois Girbal. Vol. II of the series Lemouvement des idges au XVII ~ 8i$cle, Collection dirig~e par Andr~ Robinet. (Paris: 1964. Pp. 194. NF 12.) The Reverend Father, Bernard (...) Lamy, of the Oratory, one of the minor figures of the late seventeenth century who played an important role in the diffusion of Cartesianism and Malebranchism, is hardly known or studied today (and if he is, he is usually confused with, or identified with, his namesake, Dom Franqois Lami, the Benedictine). Dr. Girbal's short biography, based on a great deal of new archival research, gives us a picture of Lamy's career and influence. This work, though very episodic and discontinuous, except chronologically, presents the essential facts of Lamy's activities as a teacher and writer; he set forth major Cartesian, Jansenist, and Malebranchian themes, and was the center of several controversies. His writings, especially his L'Art de Parler, his Entretiens sur les Sciences, and his works on mathematics, were widely read and used until the late eighteenth century. (The list of editions given by Dr. Girbal in his excellent bibliography is most impressive.) Though hardly an original or seminal thinker, Lamy was responsible for popularizing many new themes in pedagogy, science, mathematics, and philosophy, and it is his version of the Cartesian and Malebranchian innovations that was the one known to many of the savants during the century 1675-1775. Since Dr. Girbal's book is basically a bio-bibliography, he, unfortunately, devotes little time or space to analyzing or evaluating Lamy's own ideas. Much of Lamy's career from the 1680's onward was devoted to his theological works and the controversies they started. He seems to have been a mixture of Cartesian in theological method and a crank in interpretation. The long battles about whether Jesus celebrated the Jewish Passover just before his death (which Lamy denied) and the identification of the various Magdelenes in the Biblical literature are described in detail in this study, but little attempt is made to evaluate Lamy as a scholar or exegete for his time. lie hardly appears the equal of his once brother Oratorian, Richard Simon, or his contemporary, Pierre-Daniel Huet, in either his knowledge of the sources or his sense of critical scholarship. In view of the highly sophisticated and learned arguments Simon was carrying on at the time, it is hard to take Lamy seriously in his own context. The appended documents, the texts inddits, included in the volume, are much more interesting. They deal with the crisis at the University of Angers in 1673-76, when Lamy and other Oratorians were forbidden to teach Cartesianism and certain moral and political theories (quite similar in some cases to themes to appear in Malebranche's Traite de Morale.) The documents indicate both the philosophical Cartesian themes that were taught, their applications to theology, especially to the problem of transubstantiation, and the way the struggle went on. It is hardly a case of the war of science versus theology, since both sides, the traditional Aristotelians, and the avant-garde Jansenist and Cartesian oriented Oratorians, were Christian theologians. The Oraterians appear as the apostles of the "new philosophy" as the rationale of Augustinian Christianity, in much the way Malebranche presented the view in his Recherche and later works. The Aristotelians were trying to make the philosophical and scientific past the vested interest of both the Church and State. And, although Lamy was dismissed, and a good, reliable old time Aristotelian was brought back, and although various edicts of both Church and State were used to drive the nefarious new influences out of the University of Angers, the documents also indicate both how the Oratorians continued to carry on their good works for both the "new science and philosophy" and the "true religion" and the kind of support they had in high places in the State. Lamy might not have been able 280 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY to... (shrink)

Carrie Figdor presents a critical assessment of how psychological terms are used to describe the non-human biological world. She argues against the anthropocentric attitude which takes human cognition as the standard against which non-human capacities are measured, and offers an alternative basis for naturalistic explanation of the mind.

Descartes has often been called the 'father of modern philosophy'. His attempts to find foundations for knowledge, and to reconcile the existence of the soul with the emerging science of his time, are among the most influential and widely studied in the history of philosophy. This is a classic and challenging introduction to Descartes by one of the most distinguished modern philosophers. Bernard Williams not only analyzes Descartes' project of founding knowledge on certainty, but uncovers the philosophical motives for (...) his search. With acute insight, he demonstrates how Descartes' _Meditations _are not merely a description but the very enactment of philosophical thought and discovery. Williams covers all of the key areas of Descartes' thought, including God, the will, the possibility of knowledge, and the mind and its place in nature. He also makes profound contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy generally. With a new foreword by John Cottingham. (shrink)

This paper advances the development of a phylogeny-based psychology in which cognitive ability types are individuated as characters in the evolutionary biological sense. I explain the character concept and its utility in addressing (or dissolving) conceptual problems arising from discoveries of cognitive abilities across a wide range of species. I use the examples of stereopsis in the praying mantis, internal cell-to-cell signaling in plants, and episodic memory in scrub jays to show how anthropocentric cognitive ability types can be reformulated into (...) cognitive characters, thereby promoting the integration of psychology with other sciences of evolved traits. (shrink)

This book presents the thought of the Kyoto School in comparison with continental philosophers better known in the West and addresses the affiliation of some of its members with the militarism of the 1930s and 1940s.

After more than a decade teaching ancient Greek history and philosophy at University College, Oxford, British philosopher and political theorist Bernard Bosanquet resigned from his post to spend more time writing. He was particularly interested in contemporary social theory, and was involved with the Charity Organisation Society and the London Ethical Society. He saw himself as a radical in the Liberal Party, and at a theoretical level he was a 'collectivist', considering the individual to be a part of a (...) larger social organism. He thought the state should be in harmony with the general will, and that going beyond it would lead to repression. Bosanquet's political ideas are explained in this influential work, which was published in 1899 and ran to four editions by 1923. Bosanquet begins with the theory of state, and then addresses sociological and philosophical ideas about politics before examining the idea of 'will'. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

This interview with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler was conducted in Paris on 28 January 2015, and first appeared in Dutch translation in the journal De uil van Minerva. The conversation begins by discussing the fundamental place occupied by the concept of ‘technics’ in Stiegler’s work, and how the ‘constitutivity’ of technics does and does not relate to Kant and Husserl. Stiegler is then asked about his relationship with Deleuze, and he responds by focusing on the concept of quasi-causality, but (...) also by arguing that there is a certain trajectory in Deleuze’s thought, situating his own philosophy in relation to its various moments. Stiegler is then asked to respond to the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks carried out three weeks prior to the interview. After making a couple of precautionary remarks, Stiegler relates such occurrences to the problem of what he calls ‘spiritual poverty’, to the intensification of ‘negative sublimation’ that can occur when there is a disconnection between the generations, and more generally to the growth of nihilism. All of these phenomena relate to the exploitation of technology by a virulent capitalism that irrationally believes that only the market is rational. After consideration of the complex historical relationship between Islam and modernization, and of both of these to Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’, and after recalling the destructive role played by the West in the rise of fundamentalism and jihadism, Stiegler concludes by reflecting on the fact that, ultimately, ‘intellectuals’ have failed to use technologies in ways that produce alternatives to consumerism. (shrink)

We are consumers of drugs and news, and sometimes call ourselves addicts or junkies of one or both. I propose to take the concept of news – more generally, doxastic – addiction seriously. I define doxastic addiction and relate this type of addiction to echo chambers and religious belief. I show how this analysis directs attention to appropriate interventions to help doxastic addicts, and how it offers a new type of justification for limits on free speech. -/- .

In "Global Spencerism" the authors analyse the communication and appropriation of Herbert Spencer s ideas around the globe. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Spencer s distinctive theory of evolution, based on Lamarckianism, was almost as influential as Darwin s.".

Peu de philosophes contemporains choisissent de faire vivre leurs outils critiques grâce au terreau d'une association, d'un collectif. C'est le cas de Bernard Stiegler, qui a fondé Ars Industrialis en 2005. Le manifeste de l'association, Réenchanter le monde (Flammarion, 2005 ; 7400 ventes en Champs), devait connaître un grand retentissement. Depuis, les travaux et contributions fleurissent (de l'économiste André Gréau au comédien Robin Renucci, en passant par les spécialistes des digital studies), et Ars Industrialis franchit un cap en s'associant (...) à des collectivités locales (Nantes) ou en nouant des partenariats internationaux (Grande-Bretagne, Allemagne). Cet ouvrage fournit une synthèse de tous ces travaux en proposant un vocabulaire philosophique à la fois ambitieux et accessible. Qu'est-ce le marketing - le psychopouvoir - et pourquoi est-il un des dangers majeurs de notre époque? En quoi la technique influence-t-elle des fonctions aussi capitales que la mémoire ou l'écriture? Quelle nouvelle vision de l'éducation devons-nous mettre à jour depuis l'avènement du numérique? Que sont la bêtise et l'intelligence? Comment aider la transformation de citoyens passifs et débordés en amateurs, acteurs et membres d'une communauté de goûts et de savoirs? Faire attention propose, dans ces courts essais-définitions, le manifeste d'une époque charnière qui voit définitivement s'éloigner le monde ancien, tout en souhaitant mettre les outils de l'extrême contemporain au service d'un nouvel humanisme. (shrink)

Boucs émissaires, violences sacrificielles, désir mimétique, autant de thèmes que René Girard (1923-2015) n'a cessé d'explorer et qui sont devenus des ressources essentielles pour notre compréhension des sociétés. L'anthropologie mimétique, dont il a posé les bases, a en effet eu des échos multiples dans les sciences humaines et les religions. Avec ce livre, Bernard Perret offre une présentation éloquente de ce vaste chantier théorique. Il éclaire notamment la fonction et la signification de la violence dans les rapports humains, des (...) origines à nos jours, tout en explorant les liens et les différences entre la pensée de Girard et celle d'autres grands auteurs du XXe siècle (Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Mauss...). Le lien particulier de Girard aux Écritures juives et chrétiennes, le sens à la fois novateur et controversé qu'il donne à la passion et à la mort du Christ, ne sont pas éludés, tout comme sa vision apocalyptique du politique. En exposant la cohérence profonde et la fécondité d'une pensée majeure de notre temps, ce livre permet de ressaisir tous les débats passionnants auxquels elle a donné et donne toujours lieu."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The paper examines the view that Nietzsche's perspectivism about practical judgments, understood as a form of internalism about practical reasons, implies that any legitimate criticism of judgments emanating from a foreign perspective must be in terms that are internal to this perspective. Insofar as it is thought to be motivated by certain general theoretical strictures of perspectivism, this view is incoherent. The paper argues that, on the contrary Nietzsche's recourse to a strategy of internal criticism is motivated by his own (...) particular commitment to preserving the freedom of spirit of his interlocutors. The paper concludes with a discussion of how freedom of spirit is preserved by internal criticism, and how the nature of freedom of spirit affects the particular form such criticism will assume. (shrink)

A travers cet ouvrage, l'auteur démontre comment la pensée philosophique, de même que l'engagement politique d'Hannah Arendt contre le nazisme et la barbarie sous toutes ses formes, sont largement héritiers de Tocqueville.

1ere edition: Aubier, 1999 En assignant pour tache a la philosophie de surmonter la contingence, Hegel accomplit un geste original et difficile. Original parce qu'il s'ecarte aussi bien des rationalismes qui pensent n'en avoir fini avec le contingent que lorsqu'ils l'ont ramene au necessaire, que des penseurs qui estiment que reconnaitre la contingence, c'est y voir le tout autre de la raison. Hegel ne prone ni le regne de la necessite ni la capitulation devant l'absurde, mais une philosophie de la (...) liberte. Difficile, parce que, en decidant de penser ensemble et la consistance et la rationalite du contingent, Hegel doit a la fois reconnaitre ce qu'il appelle son droit monstrueux et au moment meme ou la raison avoue ses limites devant une contingence sans regle et sans frein ne jamais renoncer a l'exigence de dire le sens de cette limitation meme. A travers cette epreuve de la contingence, l'ouvrage tente d'offrir une interpretation d'ensemble du systeme aussi attentive a la lettre des textes qu'attachee a mettre en lumiere les apories que la philosophie hegelienne rencontre ou engendre. (shrink)

Paris, 1943. In a flash, a book is published that will shape post-war Europe like none other. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness discloses utterly new insights about human freedom, about feelings such as shame and desire, and about death. The new edition of the renowned book of commentary on the magnum opus of French existentialism opens access to the work through the latest state of research.

La science est un modèle qui mime dans l'abstrait le comportement de la nature. Créations du chercheur, les théories pour un fait donné peuvent être multiples et chacune valide. La science a des lois, la nature n'en a pas. L'ordre de la nature, c'est le chercheur qui l'y met. L'esprit, façonnant un amorphe premier, participe à la mise en forme de la nature produisant le Réel "en nous". Celle-ci, réciproquement, modèle l'esprit. De ce fait, l'univers n'existerait plus si l'homme disparaissait...

An exploration of the search for meaning in nonmonogamous relationships.

In Morality Bernard Williams confronts the problems of writing moral philosophy, and offers a stimulating alternative to more systematic accounts which seem nevertheless to have left all the important issues somewhere off the page.

This paper summarizes recent and ongoing experimental work regarding the reality, nature, effects, and causes of the underrepresentation of women in academic philosophy. We first present empirical data on several aspects of underrepresentation, and then consider various reasons why this gender imbalance is problematic. We then turn to the published and preliminary results of empirical work aimed at identifying factors that might explain it.

Volume 48, Issue 3, November 2019, Page 471-488.