The main exegetical work of Jean Philopon, the De opificio mundi, which rehearses the literalist reading of Genesis found in the Basil of Caesarea’s Hexaemeron rather than an allegorical reading, uses a surprising hermeneutic given the general expectations of the era and in particular the Miaphysite milieu to which Philoponus belongs. This paper studies how Philoponus’ work stems from the demands of the Christological debate in which he took part, and offers an evaluation of its immediate aftermath.

Rouage essentiel du soin dans des sociétés médicalisées, l’ambulancier-ère accomplit des tâches qui relèvent a priori de registres divers : conduire, brancarder, pratiquer les gestes de premiers secours, assister le malade… Cet article propose de saisir le processus de construction de la profession d’ambulancier à travers le prisme du genre, en portant une attention particulière aux conductrices-ambulancières de la Croix-Rouge française. Ces femmes, engagées en 1939 pour répondre aux besoins du temps de guerre, apparaissent comme des pionnières de la codification (...) de la profession qui a été réglementée en France au tournant des années 1970, alors même qu’elles soient minoritaires dans la profession. Retracer quelques jalons de leur histoire permet alors de mettre au jour ce paradoxe et d’interroger la place du conflit de genre dans la définition d’un care ambulancier. (shrink)

v. 1. Cinq mémoires sur l'instruction publique -- v. 2. Rapport sur l'instruction publique.

This article offers an analysis of ecologist Charles Elton’s “functional” concept of the niche and of the notion of function implicitly associated with it. It does so in part by situating Elton’s niche concept within the broader context of the “functionalist-interactionist” approach to ecology he introduced, and in relation to his views on the relationship between ecology and evolution. This involves criticizing the common claim that Elton’s idea of species as fulfilling functional roles within ecological communities committed him to (...) an idea of communities as units of selection. While such a claim implicitly attributes to Elton an understanding of function along the lines of the selected-effects theory of function advocated by many biologists and philosophers of biology, Elton’s use of the niche concept, I maintain, involves an understanding of function more along the lines of alternative nonselectionist theories such as the causal-role, goal-contribution, and organizational theories. I also briefly discuss how ecologists after Elton also tend to have typically adopted a nonselectionist understanding of the function concept, similar to his. (shrink)

This paper analyzes community ecologist Charles Elton’s ideas on animal communities, and situates them with respect to the classical opposition between organicist–holistic and individualistic–reductionist ecological views drawn by many historians of ecology. It is argued that Elton espoused a moderate ecological holism, which drew a middle way between the stricter ecological holism advocated by organicist ecologists and the merely aggregationist views advocated by some of their opponents. It is also argued that Elton’s moderate ecological holism resonated with his preference (...) for analogies between ecological communities and human societies over more common ones between communities and individual organisms. I discuss, on the one hand, how the functionalist-interactionist approach to community ecology introduced by Elton entailed a view of ecological communities as more or less self-maintaining functionally organized wholes, and how his ideas on this matter were incorporated into their views by organicist ecologists Frederic Clements, Victor Shelford, and Warder C. Allee et al. On the other hand, I identify some important divergences between Elton’s ecological ideas and those of organicist ecologists. Specifically, I show how Elton’s ideas on species distribution, animal migrations, and ecological succession entailed a view of animal communities as exhibiting a weaker degree of part-whole integration than that attributed to them by Clements and Shelford; and how Elton’s mixed stance on the balance of nature idea and his associated views on community stability attributed to communities a weaker form of self-regulation than that attributed to them by Allee et al. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

This article addresses the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on the implications of state secularism for the public use of reason. Recent commentators have traced this debate either to Habermas’s and Taylor’s divergent views about the status of Western modernity or to their disagreement about the relation between the good and the right. I argue that these readings rest on misinterpretations of Habermas’s theory of social evolution and understanding of impartial justification. I show that the debate rests (...) on diverging interpretations of what it means for citizens to embed the principles of liberal democracy in their respective conceptions of the good. This difference in turn leads Habermas and Taylor to espouse different criteria of democratic legitimacy. I conclude by suggesting that we have prima facie reasons to prefer Habermas’s conception of legitimacy to Taylor’s, and to that extent, to favor his model of the public use of reason. (shrink)

Ce livre propose d'aborder la pensée de Charles Taylor par ce qu'il reconnaît être son centre de cohérence : "l'horizon moral de signification". D'entrée de jeu, il situe assez clairement Taylor dans le vaste horizon de la philosophie morale contemporaine. Le texte pose bien l'originalité de la conception taylorienne de l'ontologie ; ses idées d'incarnations, d'engagement et la relation incontournable du moi. Sans complaisance, il montre le rôle central que joue cet horizon dans la philosophie morale taylorienne tout en (...) exposant les zones d'ombre où Taylor est moins clair ou moins explicite dans sa pensée. En illustrant clairement le lien entre l'horizon moral et l'identité d'une part, et celui entre les horizons et le dialogue interculturel d'autre part, le livre enrichit les analyses existantes sur le sujet. Il expose le dilemme taylorien entre contexte et universalisme. L'originalité de Taylor réside dans la manière dont il repose ce dilemme conservant en tension ces deux axes; orienter sa vie en fonction du bien nous oblige à naviguer entre deux eaux. La question du dialogue interculturel est naturellement incontournable dans le présent débat avec Taylor. Les considérations sur le "langage des contrastes" et le passage par les écrits de Raoul Fornet-Betancourt sont tout à fait pertinents. En effet, l'interculturalité ou le dialogue interculturel appelle un nouveau langage, mais les conditions de celui-ci? et son statut ontologique d'ailleurs ne sont pas clairement exprimées dans les écrits tayloriens. Et ils peuvent difficilement l'être, car cela demeure pour lui de l'ordre du mystère et du dévoilement. L'ouverture à l'autre et à l'altérité est un chemin qui mène à plusieurs inconnus et appelle ce que Taylor nomme une transformation."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

L’Encyclopédie méthodique constitue une des entreprises éditoriales les plus imposantes publiées au tournant des Lumières. Conçue par l’éditeur Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, elle s’échelonne sur cinquante ans (1782- 1832). Elle remanie et reprend les volumes de l’Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert, en substituant à l’ordre alphabétique un ordre des matières. Elle oriente les Lumières vers l’épistémologie positiviste. C’est pourquoi cette encyclopédie, qui demeure pourtant souvent méconnue, revêt aujourd’hui un intérêt considérable, notamment parce qu’elle montre un moment particulier des savoirs qui relient (...) les mots et les choses. Les trois volumes du Dictionnaire d’Architecture, dus à la plume de Quatremère de Quincy, s’inscrivent dans ce cadre éditorial et culturel, et en même temps dans l’histoire longue des théories de l’architecture : ils achèvent une tradition qui remonte à Vitruve. Quatremère de Quincy reprend et corrige Vitruve quand la théorie de ce dernier est démentie par la raison ou par l’histoire. Mais derrière cette critique, Quatremère se bat aussi avec son siècle. En définissant l’architecture par les mots, il retrouve les exigences d’une définition de l’architecture « à l’antique », à savoir par et dans la langue. (shrink)

L’ouvrage dirigé par Philippe Régnier regroupe une série de 12 études sur le saint-simonisme, auxquelles sont adjoints deux documents inédits, des photographies de Charles Lambert Bey, Louis Jourdan, Maxime DuCamp et Prosper Enfantin et un brouillon de Dominique Tajan-Rogé, portant un regard critique sur son expérience saint-simonienne. Une bibliographie du saint-simonisme de 1984 à 2001 réalisée par Philippe Régnier prolonge celle qu’il avait établie de 1965 à 1984 dans le dernier travail co..

"As a distinctive philosophy, religious humanism emphasizes man's place in an unfathomed universe, reason as an instrument for discovering the truth, free inquiry as a condition for discerning meaning and purpose, and happiness as a fundamental value. "Man's uniqueness emerges partly from homo sapiens' capacity to employ symbols effectively. For this reason, Willard's provocative book is not a celebration of controversy but a sophisticated study exploring the grounds of man's knowledge. Drawing upon phenomenologists such as Alfred Schultz, psychologists such as (...) George Kelley, and argumentation philosophers such as Stephen Toulmin, Willard makes a genuine contribution to intellectual inquiry by extending essential consideration about human knowledge. The [author] demonstrates how 'secular sources' provide a fundamental resource in developing religious understanding from argumentative interactions. "Highly insightful and intellectually refreshing... _Argumentation and the Social Grounds of Knowledge_ provides thought-provoking reading for humanists concerned with rational inquiry, communication theory, religious philosophy, and liberal education." _--Religious Humanism_. (shrink)

The title of Charles Taliaferro’s book is derived from poems and stories in which a person in peril or on a quest must follow a cord or string in order to find the way to happiness, safety, or home. In one of the most famous of such tales, the ancient Greek hero Theseus follows the string given him by Ariadne to mark his way in and out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. William Blake's poem “Jerusalem” uses the metaphor of a (...) golden string, which, if followed, will lead one to heaven itself. Taliaferro extends Blake’s metaphor to illustrate the ways we can link what we see, feel, and do with deep spiritual realities. Taliaferro offers a foundational case for the recognition of the experience of the eternal God of Christianity, in which God is understood as the fount of all goodness and the subject and object of our best love, revealed through scripture, tradition, philosophical reflection, and encountered in everyday events. He addresses philosophical obstacles to the recognition of such experiences, especially objections from the “new atheists,” and explores the values involved in thinking and experiencing God as eternal. These include the belief that the eternal goodness of God subordinates temporal goods, such as the pursuit of fame and earthly glory; that God is the essence of life; and that the eternal God hallows domestic goods, blessing the everyday goods of ordinary life. An exploration of the moral and spiritual riches of the Christian tradition as an alternative to materialism and naturalism, _The Golden Cord_ brings an originality and depth to the debate in accessible and engaging prose. “Charles Taliaferro has written a thought-provoking, original work that succeeds in throwing some of the central tenets of naturalism into question. He has gathered cutting-edge scholarship from the context of debates about naturalism and discusses that within the framework of a theological account of the human condition. The result is a robust theological response to secular naturalism, one that deserves to be taken seriously by the latter’s proponents.” —_Victoria Harrison, University of Glasgow_. (shrink)

Survival of the fittest in evolutionary biology has a counterpart in the evolution of research paradigms. It’s called survival of the funded, and there is a sense in which paradigms are even more adaptable than species. Whereas species may become extinct if their fitness declines below a critical threshold, paradigms can rise again, perhaps with a new name, following fiscal collapse, provided only that funding is once again made available.A current example is the born-again concept of comparative effectiveness research , (...) which achieved resurrection status with the passage of the Affordable Care Act of 2010. The ACA established a private, nonprofit entity to oversee publicly financed CER. According to .. (shrink)

Qui peut repondre a la question: qu'est-ce que la vie? le biologiste? le geneticien? le naturaliste? l'epistemologue? Comment se reperer dans la jungle des reponses proposees par ces differents specialistes? Ce petit livre met l'accent sur trois points qui sont actuellement l'objet de debats tres vifs. Tout d'abord le cadre de la reponse est celui d'une epistemologie non physicaliste, qui refuse d'accepter la double these de la completude et de la cloture causale du monde physique, et renvoie dos a dos (...) les deux positions metaphysiques intenables du physicalisme et du vitalisme. Ensuite, la vie apparait liee a un systeme d'objets hetero-organise qui ne peut etre completement decrit par l'ensemble de ses contraintes internes, contrairement aux systemes physiques ordinaires. Voila pourquoi la vie n'est pas simplement la replication ou la reproduction, ni l'heredite genetique, mais est liee au metabolisme, a la compartimentation cellulaire, a la selection naturelle, etc. Enfin il faut parler d'un systeme d'agents plutot que d'un systeme d'objets, car un systeme biologique se caracterise par le fait que le temps agit sur lui. Pour cette raison il est difficile d'en degager des invariants internes, la description initiale que nous pouvons en donner n'est pas celle de son fonctionnement. C'est en ce sens que nous nous proposons de parler de proprietes emergentes. Qu'est-ce que la vie, alors? une disposition? une essence? une structure atemporelle? Ne faut-il pas reformuler la question et se demander: d'ou vient la vie? comment la vie evolue? (shrink)

Do hunting and fishing lead to the development of environmental virtues? This question is at the heart of philosopher Charles List’s engaging study, which provides a defense of field sports when they are practiced and understood in an ethical manner. In his argument, List examines the connection between certain activities and the development of virtue in the classical sources, such as Aristotle and Plato. He then explores the work of Aldo Leopold, identifying three key environmental virtues that field sports (...) instill in practitioners in the kind of conservation advocated by Leopold and others. After reviewing several powerful philosophical objections to his viewpoint, List considers the future of environmental sportsmanship. He suggests that, in order to incorporate a revived connection between field sports and environmental virtue, the practice of hunting and angling must undergo changes, including shifts that would impact hunter education, civic engagement, the role of firearms, our understanding of “game” animals, and alliances with other sorts of outdoor recreation. _ Hunting, Fishing, and Environmental Virtue_ will appeal to academics interested in the ethical issues surrounding hunting and fishing, professionals in wildlife management, and hunters and anglers interested in conservation. (shrink)

The Mississippi River flows through American history and culture as a mythic waterway brimming with tragedy and hope, and awash in passionate ambitions and harsh realities. In 1953, a young Charles Dee Sharp traveled twice down the Mississippi to make a documentary film of it, taking black-and-white photographs of the river, its communities, and its people. While Sharp’s documentary never came to fruition, the striking images he captured survived as moving and evocative historical testaments to a lost era, now (...) collected in his new book The Mississippi in 1953. These images create a vivid portrait of America’s heartland a half century ago, and they are enriched with excerpts from Sharp’s original trip journal, intriguing anecdotes from the people he encountered along his journey, and an engaging environmental history of the river by historian John O. Anfinson. The Mississippi in 1953 offers an original and poignant look at the living artery of the American landscape and how it molded the United States into the nation it is today. (shrink)

The writings of Bruno Latour have invigorated empirical inquiry in the social sciences and in the process helped to redefine their character. In recent years the philosophy of social science that made this inquiry possible has been deployed to a different end, namely that of rethinking the character of politics. Here I suggest that in the pursuit of this goal, inflated claims are made about that philosophy, and some basic theoretical tools are asked to do a job for which they (...) may not be best equipped. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic caused university education to transition from face-to-face contacts to virtual learning environments. Young adults were forced to live an entirely new life online, without valuable and enjoyable social interaction. We examined subjective perspectives towards life online during the pandemic. We identified four viewpoints about life mediated by computers. Two viewpoints express “struggling”: Viewpoint 1 (Angry, Depressed and Overwhelmed), and Viewpoint 3 (Restricted to and Overwhelmed by Virtuality). A third feeling-state conveys experiences of “surviving”: Viewpoint 4 (Isolated and (...) Powerless in Convenience). Surprisingly, Viewpoint 2 is about “thriving” (Comfortable and Convenient Routine with Computers). The research shows that virtualization, confinement, and anxiety are taking a toll on the mental health of some members of the younger generation, while at the same time other members feel they are thriving in a situation of limited resources, virtuality, and reduced face-to-face human interaction. (shrink)

Etude sur la réception de l'oeuvre de G. Berkeley (1685-1753) et de sa théorie de l'immatérialisme par les penseurs des Lumières en France, ses contemporains, disciples ou adversaires. Analyse l'interprétation au XVIIIe siècle de l'oeuvre de Berkeley comme une pensée sceptique.

This paper explores what happens when artists fail to execute their goals. I argue that taxonomies of failure in general, and of failed-art in particular, should focus on the attempts which generate the failed-entity, and that to do this they must be sensitive to an attempt’s orientation. This account of failed-attempts delivers three important new insights into artistic practice: there can be no accidental art, only deliberate and incidental art; art’s intention-dependence entails the possibility of performative failure, but not of (...) failed-art; and art’s intention-dependence is perfectly compatible with the role that luck plays in artistic creation. (shrink)

Anders Nygren has for years been recognized as a leading con­temporary theologian. His major work, _Agape and Eros_,_ _has become a classic of theological research. And though he has been comparatively little known in this country, these critical essays which scrutinize Professor Nygren’s philosophical and theological theses on such subjects as motif research, meanings of love, systematic theology, and philosophy of religion attest to the importance given to his work by scholars and theolo­gians throughout the world. The illumination given Nygren’s (...) thought by this close examination is further enhanced by his “Intellectual Autobiography” and by his “Reply to Interpreters and Critics,” a commentary and defense in response to the essays, written by Professor Nygren for this volume. In addition, the vol­ume includes a complete bibliography of Nygren’s publications, covering his entire career and listing all translations of his works. (shrink)

In “The Meaning of Rights,” Norman Wilde offers an original account of rights, still of interest. Rights, he contends, are possessed by an individual by virtue of the social function she fulfills. It is because individuals belong to a common social order, in which each has her part to play, that they are “entitled to the conditions necessary for playing it” [288]. This approach allows for a nuanced view, according to which rights are neither absolutely inherent to the individual nor (...) entirely dependent on social conventions. But is such a function-based justification of rights plausible? (shrink)

Les dernières oeuvres de Diderot révèlent une écriture et une pensée morales plurielles, mettant en scène des points de vue complémentaires. Diderot réfléchit en outre, dans l'Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, à une véritable éthique de l'interprétation.