Comment la philosophie de Hegel pourrait-elle encore promettre quelque chose puisqu'elle est apparue, aux yeux des lecteurs contemporains, comme une entreprise d'annulation du temps? Le savoir absolu n'est-il pas le resultat du processus dialectique par lequel l'esprit releve toute temporalite et par la toute surprise, l'evenement se produisant toujours trop tard? D'une absence de pensee de l'avenir dans la philosophie de Hegel decoulerait une absence d'avenir de la philosophie hegelienne elle-meme. C'est contre une telle assertion que le present ouvrage s'inscrit (...) en faux; il se propose pour cela de travailler le concept de plasticite, montrant comment il forme en profondeur, a la fois comme sa structure et comme son rythme, le contenu speculatif. Est plastique ce qui est susceptible de recevoir comme de donner la forme, mais aussi de l'aneantir. Hegel degage ce concept de son sol natal, l'art, pour le rendre a sa veritable origine : le developpement de la subjectivite. Est dit plastique, en effet, le rapport que la subjectivite entretient avec l'accident, avec ce qui arrive. L'auto-determination apparait comme proces de temporalisation au sein duquel la subjectivite, dans l'attitude contrastee d'un voir venir, se donne et par la recoit sa propre forme, anticipant son avenir tout en renoncant a en maitriser l'irruption. La plasticite du concept hegelien de temps est le foyer de resistance clandestin ou se prepare la reponse a l'accusation de vulgarite portee par Heidegger a l'encontre de ce meme concept. (shrink)

Les âgés et leurs familles sont souvent confrontés aux problématiques liées à l’entrée en institution. La séparation, le deuil du domicile réactivent des problématiques œdipiennes ou préœdipiennes qu’il est parfois difficile d’élaborer. Simultanément les établissements accueillant des personnes âgées dépendantes se trouvent entraînés dans des représentations idéales du soin qui les mettent en conflit avec les familles. Dans de telles situations le psychologue peut se trouver tiraillé entre le sujet âgé, sa famille et le personnel de l’établissement. L’article s’appuie sur (...) la théorisation d’Anzieu à propos des enveloppes familiales et plus largement sur les théories psychanalytiques prenant en compte les groupes et les institutions et montre en quoi elles sont particulièrement pertinentes pour la compréhension de telles situations. Considérer la dimension de groupe, qu’elle concerne les familles ou les institutions, peut donner aux psychologues des outils de compréhension et d’élaboration de ces situations. (shrink)

La scénographie est le plus souvent considérée au théâtre dans sa dimension esthétique ou dans sa capacité à devenir un espace ludique. Or, à l’opéra, si ces deux dimensions restent importantes et se complexifient du fait des contraintes spécifiques du chant et des attentes du public, c’est la fonction dramaturgique qui passe au premier plan. La nécessité de donner le décor à l’avance pour qu’il soit construit dans les ateliers impose qu’il soit pensé avec la mise en scène, en (...) même temps qu’elle. Grâce à un exemple précis, nous montrerons comment le trio dramaturgie-scénographie et mise en scène fonctionne étroitement pour faire émerger le sens. C’est donc à cette voix dramaturgique du scénographe que nous nous intéresserons ici. (shrink)

À propos de : Catherine et Raphaël Larrère, Penser et agir avec la nature : Une enquête philosophique, Paris, La Découverte, 2015. -/- L’idée d’une nature sauvage à protéger des avancées techniques ne prend en compte ni la complexité des artefacts, ni ce qu’implique aujourd’hui la protection de la nature. En mettant l’accent sur la notion de biodiversité, C. et R. Larrère cherchent à donner un nouveau fondement à l’écologie politique.

Calls for justice and reconciliation in response to political catastrophes are widespread in contemporary world politics. What implications do these normative strivings have in relation to colonial injustice? Examining cases of colonial war, genocide, forced sexual labor, forcible incorporation, and dispossession, Lu demonstrates that international practices of justice and reconciliation have historically suffered from, and continue to reflect, colonial, statist and other structural biases. The continued reproduction of structural injustice and alienation in modern domestic, international and transnational orders generates contemporary (...) duties of redress. How should we think about the responsibility of contemporary agents to address colonial structural injustices and what implications follow for the transformation of international and transnational orders? Redressing the structural injustices implicated in or produced by colonial politics requires strategies of decolonization, decentering, and disalienation that go beyond interactional practices of justice and reconciliation, beyond victims and perpetrators, and beyond a statist world order. (shrink)

In the last decade, the organization of pharmaceutical research on neglected tropical diseases has undergone transformative change. In a context of perceived “market failure,” the development of new medicines is increasingly handled by public-private partnerships. This shift toward hybrid organizational models depends on a particular form of exchange: the sharing of proprietary assets in general and of intellectual property rights in particular. This article explores the paradoxical role of private property in this new configuration of global health research and development. (...) Rather than a tool to block potential competitors, proprietary assets function as a lever to attract others into risky collaborative ventures; instead of demarcating public and private domains, the sharing of property rights is used to increase the porosity of that boundary. This reimagination of the value of property is connected to the peculiar timescape of global health drug development, a promissory orientation to the future that takes its clearest form in the centrality of “virtual” business models and the proliferation of strategies of deferral. Drawing on the anthropological literature on inalienable possessions, we reconsider property’s traditional exclusionary role and discuss the possibility that the new pharmaceutical “commons” proclaimed by contemporary global health partnerships might be the precursor of future enclosures. (shrink)

Elaborates the author’s conception of plasticity by proposing a new way of thinking through Heidegger’s writings on change.

Concepts for sustainable bioeconomy systems are gradually replacing the ones on linear product chains. The reason is that continuously expanding linear chain activities are considered to contribute to climate change, reduced biodiversity, over-exploitation of resources, food insecurity, and the double burden of disease. Are sustainable bioeconomy systems a guarantee for a healthy planet? If yes, why, when, and how? In literature, different sustainability indicators have been presented to shed light on this complicated question. Due to high degrees of complexity and (...) interactions of actors in bioeconomy systems, trade-offs and non-linear outcomes became apparent. This fueled the debates about the normative dimensions of the bioeconomy. In particular, the behavior of actors and the utilization of products do not seem to be harmonized according to the environmental, social, and economic pillars of sustainability. Potential conflicts require a new conceptual framework that is here introduced. It consists of a ‘sustainability’ cylinder captured between an inner-cylinder, representing order, and an outer-cylinder for chaos, based on the laws of physics and complex adaptive systems. Such a framework permits (bioeconomy) systems to propagate in the sustainability zone only if they follow helical pathways serving as the new norms. Helices are a combination of two sinusoidal patterns. The first represents here the sustainable behavior of interacting actors and the second the balanced usage of resources and products. The latter counteracts current growth discourses. The applicability of the conceptual cylinder framework is positively verified via 9 cases in Europe, which encompass social-organizational and product-technological innovations. –. (shrink)

In the post-feminist age the fact that 'woman' finds herself deprived of her 'essence' only confirms, paradoxically, a very ancient state of affairs: 'woman' has never been able to define herself in any other way than in terms of the violence done to her. Violence alone confers her being - whether it is domestic and social violence or theoretical violence. The critique of 'essentialism' (i.e. there is no specifically feminine essence) proposed by both gender theory and deconstruction is just one (...) more twist in the ontological negation of the feminine. (shrink)

This volume argues that feminist theory can provide distinctive and potent resources to confront and take on post-truth. By ‘post-truth’, we refer to a variety of discourses and practices that subvert the sense that we share a common world. Because post-truth undermines the norms and conditions that make possible shared political practices and institutions, post-truth politics is fundamentally anti-democratic. The most common response to post-truth has, however, come from those who call for reinstating truth and rationality, with special emphasis on (...) returning to the facts and fact-checking. From a feminist perspective, this approach is worrisome as it risks idealizing the connection between democracy and truth, disowning the tensions within and between them, and suppressing contestation tout court. Diagnosing the post-truth moment we face two challenges: on the one hand, there is too much contestation (of the post-truth variety); on the other hand, there is too much depoliticization (of the technocratic or rationalist variety). This binary effectively limits the space within which critiques of post-truth can meaningfully intervene. Feminist takes on post-truth must take seriously this dual challenge at the crossroads of depoliticization and hyper-politicization, acknowledging the anti-democratic dangers of post-truth while keeping open the possibility and necessity of contestation. Our gambit is that effective rejoinders to post-truth can be found in practices that affirm rather than repudiate a plural world. Rather than simply condemning or dismissing post-truth as mad or irrational, the feminist theorists in this volume move closer to what we’re up against in order to see how encounters with reality provide opportunities to radicalize and politicize our relation to it in ways that do not undermine the conditions for others to do the same. This volume is an attempt to open new, and emphasize existing, feminist modes of response that might break the deadlock in the post-truth discourse. (shrink)

Jealousy has been disparaged as psychologically debilitating and morally flawed since well before Shakespeare wrote Othello and is indeed represented—particularly well—as far back as in Homer's portrayal of gods and goddesses in The Iliad. According to some of these traditional views, often shared by philosophers, psychologists and the general public, jealousy is the sign, if not of an irredeemably corrupt mind, then at least of an excessively possessive and insecure character. But does jealousy always indicate some sort of flaw or (...) failure? Is jealousy rerehensible in all contexts? In the present paper, I intend to suggest some modifications to the view that it is, by giving jealousy a more sympathetic and charitable hearing than it normally receives, and suggesting that jealousy might, in some cases, be justifiable. (shrink)

Philosophical investigation in synthetic biology has focused on the knowledge-seeking questions pursued, the kind of engineering techniques used, and on the ethical impact of the products produced. However, little work has been done to investigate the processes by which these epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical forms of inquiry arise in the course of synthetic biology research. An attempt at this work relying on a particular area of synthetic biology will be the aim of this chapter. I focus on the reengineering of (...) metabolic pathways through the manipulation and construction of small DNA-based devices and systems synthetic biology. Rather than focusing on the engineered products or ethical principles that result, I will investigate the processes by which these arise. As such, the attention will be directed to the activities of practitioners, their manipulation of tools, and the use they make of techniques to construct new metabolic devices. Using a science-in-practice approach, I investigate problems at the intersection of science, philosophy of science, and sociology of science. I consider how practitioners within this area of synthetic biology reconfigure biological understanding and ethical categories through active modelling and manipulation of known functional parts, biological pathways for use in the design of microbial machines to solve problems in medicine, technology, and the environment. We might describe this kind of problem-solving as relying on what Helen Longino referred to as “social cognition” or the type of scientific work done within what Hasok Chang calls “systems of practice”. My aim in this chapter will be to investigate the relationship that holds between systems of practice within metabolic engineering research and social cognition. I will attempt to show how knowledge and normative valuation are generated from this particular network of practitioners. In doing so, I suggest that the social nature of scientific inquiry is ineliminable to both knowledge acquisition and ethical evaluations. (shrink)

Moral properties are widely held to be response‐dependent properties of actions, situations, events and persons. There is controversy as to whether the putative response‐dependence of these properties nullifies any truth‐claims for moral judgements, or rather supports them. The present paper argues that moral judgements are more profitably compared with theoretical judgements in the natural sciences than with the judgements of immediate sense‐perception. The notion of moral truth is dependent on the notion of moral knowledge, which in turn is best understood (...) as a possible endpoint of theory change for the better. (shrink)

Reversing centuries of methodological caution and skepticism, philosophers have begun to explore the possibility that experience in some form is widely distributed in the universe. It has been proposed that consciousness may pertain to machines, rocks, elementary particles, and perhaps the universe itself. This paper shows why philosophers have good reason to suppose that experiences are widely distributed in living nature, including worms and insects, but why panpsychism extending to non-living nature is an implausible doctrine.

Quelle est l'intention de Platon lorsqu'il fait de Socrate un virtuose de l'étymologie dans le Cratyle? Préciser les rapports entre la " science des lettres " qui se constitue en son siècle et la nouvelle théorie des Idées qu'il élabore. Socrate s'entretient avec le jeune Hermogène puis avec l'énigmatique Cratyle des rapports entre les mots et les choses. La rectitude des noms est-elle affaire de convention, ainsi que le soutient Hermogène? Ou s'agit-il d'un accord " naturel ", comme le prétend (...) Cratyle? Découvre-t-on cet accord par science ou par inspiration? Au terme du débat, après avoir mis à l'épreuve toutes les ressources de la " science des lettres ", Socrate propose une nouvelle théorie du nom, instrument faillible construit pour faire voir la réalité en la minant. Il dessine aussi un ordre des priorités : il faut d'abord connaître les êtres, puis les noms. " Savoir comment il faut apprendre ou découvrir les êtres, peut-être est-ce là trop lourde tâche pour toi et moi! C'est déjà beau de reconnaître qu'il ne faut pas partir des noms. ". (shrink)

The practice of terminating a pregnancy following the diagnosis of a fetal abnormality raises questions about notions of bodily normality and the ways these shape ethical decision-making. This is particularly the case with terminations done on the basis of ostensibly minor morphological anomalies, such as cleft lip and isolated malformations of the limbs or digits. In this paper, I examine a recent case of selective termination after a morphology ultrasound scan revealed the fetus to be missing a hand . Using (...) the work of Georges Canguilhem, I show that a person with acheiria could be considered normal. Further, I show that this case reveals a kind of “undecidability” in the significance of fetal sex/gender and disability in termination. From this, I consider the conceptual interaction of disability with sex/gender, to argue that the ethics of disability termination are not as distinct from those of sex/gender selection as is commonly supposed. (shrink)

This article first examines pervasive present‐day attitudes toward humility before turning to Thomas Aquinas and Zhu Xi for their more positive treatments of this disposition. It then considers their ideas about how humility is related to our human limitations, before surveying how they think it should be expressed in our relationships with our neighbours. The article looks at what Thomas and Zhu have to say about excessive pride in rulers before closing in the Conclusion with some thoughts about the viability (...) of humility as a virtue for the strong, and its especial importance in contemporary politics. (shrink)

Leibniz entertained the idea that, as a set of “striving possibles” competes for existence, the largest and most perfect world comes into being. The paper proposes 8 criteria for a Leibniz-world. It argues that a) there is no algorithm e.g., one involving pairwise compossibility-testing that can produce even possible Leibniz-worlds; b) individual substances presuppose completed worlds; c) the uniqueness of the actual world is a matter of theological preference, not an outcome of the assembly-process; and d) Goedel’s theorem implies that (...) there can be no algorithm for producing optimal worlds, assuming an optimal world contains truth-discerning creatures, though this is not to say that such worlds cannot arise naturally. (shrink)

Reversing centuries of methodological caution and skepticism, philosophers have begun to explore the possibility that experience in some form is widely distributed in the universe. It has been proposed that consciousness may pertain to machines, rocks, elementary particles, and perhaps the universe itself. This paper shows why philosophers have good reason to suppose that experiences are widely distributed in living nature, including worms and insects, but why panpsychism extending to non-living nature is an implausible doctrine.

A collection of essays covering a range of topics related to Leibniz. The monads and the pre-established harmony make numerous appearances, and so do Leibniz's discussions of causality, relations, individuation, nature, freedom, consciousness, and divinity. In addition to sections on Leibniz's physics and his theory of substance, a number of papers are included on his philosophy of mind that draw heavily on the New Essays, along with several articles on metaphysical and theological issues, and a section on Leibniz's relationships with (...) his contemporaries and predecessors. (shrink)

Leibniz entertained the idea that, as a set of “striving possibles” competes for existence, the largest and most perfect world comes into being. The paper proposes 8 criteria for a Leibniz-world. It argues that a) there is no algorithm e.g., one involving pairwise compossibility-testing that can produce even possible Leibniz-worlds; b) individual substances presuppose completed worlds; c) the uniqueness of the actual world is a matter of theological preference, not an outcome of the assembly-process; and d) Goedel’s theorem implies that (...) there can be no algorithm for producing optimal worlds, assuming an optimal world contains truth-discerning creatures, though this is not to say that such worlds cannot arise naturally. (shrink)

Augustine’s _Confessions_ is one of the most significant works of Western culture. Cast as a long, impassioned conversation with God, it is intertwined with passages of life-narrative and with key theological and philosophical insights. It is enduringly popular, and justly so. The Routledge Guidebook to Augustine’s Confessions is an engaging introduction to this spiritually creative and intellectually original work. This guidebook is organized by themes: the importance of language creation and the sensible world memory, time and the self the afterlife (...) of the Confessions. Written for readers approaching the _Confessions_ for the first time, this guidebook addresses the literary, philosophical, historical and theological complexities of the work in a clear and accessible way. Excerpts in both Latin and English from this seminal work are included throughout the book to provide a close examination of both the autobiographical and theoretical content within the _Confessions. _. (shrink)

The spillovers in knowledge among largely college-educated workers were among the key reasons for the impressive degree of economic growth and spread of entrepreneurship in the United States during the 1990s. Prior 'industrial policies' in the 1970s and 1980s did not advance growth because these were based on outmoded large manufacturing models. Zoltan Acs and Catherine Armington use a knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to explain new firm formation rates in regional economies during the 1990s period and beyond. The (...) fastest-growing regions are those that have the highest rates of new firm formation, and which are not dominated by large businesses. The authors of this text also find support for the thesis that knowledge spillovers move across industries and are not confined within a single industry. As a result, they suggest, regional policies to encourage and sustain growth should focus on entrepreneurship among other factors. (shrink)

This paper discusses the significance for the philosophy of perception and aesthetics of certain productions of the ‘offline brain’. These are experienced in hypnagogic and other trance states, and in disease- or drug-induced hallucination. They bear a similarity to other visual patterns in nature, and reappear in human artistry, especially of the craft type. The reasons behind these resonances are explored, along with the question why we are disposed to find geometrical complexity and ‘supercolouration’ beautiful. The paper concludes with a (...) plea on behalf of neuroaesthetics, but with a caution or two. (shrink)

I offer a Darwinian perspective on the existence of aesthetic interests, tastes, preferences, and productions. It is distinguished from the approaches of Denis Dutton and Geoffrey Miller, drawing instead on Richard O. Prum's notion of biotic artworlds. The relevance of neuroaesthetics to the philosophy of art is defended.

ABSTRACTHume was not a philosopher famed for what are sometimes called ‘ontological commitments'. Nevertheless, few contemporary scholars doubt that Hume was an atheist, and the present essay tenders the view that Hume was favourably disposed to the 'vital materialism' of post-Newtonian natural philosophers in England, Scotland and France. Both internalist arguments, collating passages from a range of Hume's works, and externalist arguments, reviewing the likely sources of his knowledge of ancient materialism and his association with his materialistic contemporaries are employed.

Relevance Theory is a cognitively oriented theory of pragmatics, i.e., a theory of language use. It builds on the seminal work of H.P. Grice1 to develop a pragmatic theory which is at once philosophically sensitive and empirically plausible (in both psychological and evolutionary terms). This entry reviews the central commitments and chief contributions of Relevance Theory, including its Gricean commitment to the centrality of intention-reading and inference in communication; the cognitively grounded notion of relevance which provides the mechanism for explaining (...) pragmatic interpretation as an intention-driven, inferential process; and several key applications of the theory (lexical pragmatics, metaphor and irony, procedural meaning). Relevance Theory is an important contribution to our understanding of the pragmatics of communication. (shrink)

One of the main contributions of A Feminist Theory of Refusal is its connection of everyday action and prefigurative practices with an explicit commitment to structural change. But how such change happens, and what kind of relations it implies between ‘the city’ (as the existing political community) and feminist heterotopias of refusal, remains unclear. Reading Honig’s work as a prefigurative theory, I argue that it links moments of doing-otherwise with moments of institutional politics, sparking questions about the conditions of a (...) successful return to the city. I then develop these conditions through a case study of the feminist activism of Women on Waves; and argue that feminist refusal can lead to political transformation if it durably connects practices inside and outside the city. (shrink)

This paper discusses the contributions of Bernard Williams to Moral and Political Philosophy.

The paper critically evaluates two commonplaces of historiography. One is that Empiricism as a philosophical movement of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was opposed to Rationalism corresponding to an English-Continental division of personnel. The other commonplace is the view that the main accomplishments of eighteenth century science were mainly taxonomic in contrast to the remarkable conceptual innovations of Galileo, Descartes and Newton. I point instead, as characteristic of eighteenth century science, to an energetic blend of hands-on experimentalism, methodological caution (...) about the employment of metaphysical concepts, and imaginative speculation where the powers of ‘matter’ unassisted by God were concerned, with Buffon playing a leading role. Kant’s attempt to confine empirical reasoning and the Newtonian system to the appearances reflects widely held views about the ‘veiling’ of nature behind our ideas in eighteenth century methodological reflection but serves mainly to ground his appeals to the supersensible element in human agency. (shrink)

If moral epistemology can be naturalized, there must be genuine moral knowledge, knowledge of what it is morally right for someone or even everyone to do in a particular situation. The naturalist hopes to explain how such knowledge can be acquired by ordinary empirical means, without appealing to a special realm of moral facts separate from the rest of nature, and a special faculty equipped to detect them. Various learning mechanisms for acquiring moral knowledge have been proposed. Most, however, have (...) the following deficiency: What they actually explain is moral acculturation with respect to accepted or author-preferred moral norms, not the acquisition of moral knowledge. Of course, an additional premise to the effect that accepted moral norms or author-preferred norms embody moral truths would deal nicely with this problem, but at the expense of the distinction between opinion and knowledge, or true belief, in which epistemologists are necessarily interested. (shrink)

The naturalistic approach to metaethics is sometimes identified with a supervenience theory relating moral properties to underlying descriptive properties, thereby securing the possibility of objective knowledge in morality as in chemistry. I reject this approach along with the purely anthropological approach which leads to an objectionable form of relativism. There is no single method for arriving at moral objectivity any more than there is a single method that has taken us from alchemy to modern chemistry. Rather, there is an ensemble (...) of instruments, techniques, experiments and observations that contribute to eliminating moral error, delivering what we are entitled to call greater objectivity. (shrink)

Leibniz’s metaphysics has been cited as a source of the dynamic and organic worldview of romantic Naturphilosophie. This chapter evaluates that claim by examining two distinct lineages of Leibniz’s metaphysical conception of dynamic appetition. On one hand, by demonstrating the existence of a “vis viva” in inanimate objects and by ascribing two distinct powers—perception and appetition—to all plants and animals as well as to his incorporeal “monads,” Leibniz seemed to restore force to physics and experience and intentionality to animals. On (...) the other hand, on account of the publication history of his writings, Leibniz’s pre-established harmony and preformation theory were seen by most philosophers before Herder and Schelling as reducing humans as well as animals to machines without free-will and their development to a mechanically predetermined succession of states. While appreciation of Leibniz’s views on activity and creativity in nature did increase towards the end of the century, other philosophical antecedents for the “drive” motif in German philosophy should be considered. (shrink)

Newton’s famous Hypotheses non fingo raises many questions. While he castigated the Cartesians for their vortex hypothesis, and his follower Cotes attacked mechanical chemistry, Newton himself ventured many hypotheses, notably in his Opticks, the Queries to the Opticks and in the last book of the Principia. Although it is true that Newton, unlike Descartes, fit his data to mathematical models, what he said about hypotheses seems straightforwardly false. To explain this situation, Wilson explores the web of associations between Cartesianism, hypotheses, (...) ‘speculation’ and ‘vain philosophy’ in the Pauline sense. She shows how Cartesian hypotheses concerning the origins of the world were understood as dangerously pagan, and how Newton and his supporters took pains to distinguish their brand of science from his by denying that they were engaged in any form of speculative or ‘vain’ philosophy. (shrink)