BackgroundReconciling results obtained using different types of sensory measures is a challenge for autism sensory research. The present study used questionnaire, psychophysical, and neurophysiological measures to characterize autistic sensory processing in different measurement modalities.MethodsParticipants were 46 autistic and 21 typically developing 11- to 14-year-olds. Participants and their caregivers completed questionnaires regarding sensory experiences and behaviors. Auditory and somatosensory event-related potentials were recorded as part of a multisensory ERP task. Auditory detection, tactile static detection, and tactile spatial resolution psychophysical thresholds were (...) measured.ResultsSensory questionnaires strongly differentiated between autistic and typically developing individuals, while little evidence of group differences was observed in psychophysical thresholds. Crucially, the different types of measures appeared to be largely independent of one another. However, we unexpectedly found autistic participants with larger auditory Tb ERP amplitudes had reduced hearing acuity, even though all participants had hearing acuity in the non-clinical range.LimitationsThe autistic and typically developing groups were not matched on cognitive ability, although this limitation does not affect our main analyses regarding convergence of measures within autism.ConclusionOverall, based on these results, measures in different sensory modalities appear to capture distinct aspects of sensory processing in autism, with relatively limited convergence between questionnaires and laboratory-based tasks. Generally, this might reflect the reality that laboratory tasks are often carried out in controlled environments without background stimuli to compete for attention, a context which may not closely resemble the busier and more complex environments in which autistic people’s atypical sensory experiences commonly occur. Sensory questionnaires and more naturalistic laboratory tasks may be better suited to explore autistic people’s real-world sensory challenges. Further research is needed to replicate and investigate the drivers of the unexpected association we observed between auditory Tb ERP amplitudes and hearing acuity, which could represent an important confound for ERP researchers to consider in their studies. (shrink)

Both natural and engineered systems are fundamentally dynamical in nature: their defining properties are causal, and their functional capacities are causally grounded. Among dynamical systems, an interesting and important sub-class are those that are autonomous, anticipative and adaptive (AAA). Living systems, intelligent systems, sophisticated robots and social systems belong to this class, and the use of these terms has recently spread rapidly through the scientific literature. Central to understanding these dynamical systems is their complicated organisation and their consequent capacities for (...) re- and self- organisation. But there is at present no general analysis of these capacities or of the requisite organisation involved. We define what distinguishes AAA systems from other kinds of systems by characterising their central properties in a dynamically interpreted information theory. (shrink)

This paper outlines an original interactivist-constructivist approach to modelling intelligence and learning as a dynamical embodied form of adaptiveness and explores some applications of I-C to understanding the way cognitive learning is realized in the brain. Two key ideas for conceptualizing intelligence within this framework are developed. These are: intelligence is centrally concerned with the capacity for coherent, context-sensitive, self-directed management of interaction; and the primary model for cognitive learning is anticipative skill construction. Self-directedness is a capacity for integrative process (...) modulation which allows a system to "steer" itself through its world by anticipatively matching its own viability requirements to interaction with its environment. Because the adaptive interaction processes required of intelligent systems are too complex for effective action to be prespecified learning is an important component of intelligence. A model of self-directed anticipative learning is formulated based on interactive skill construction, and argued to constitute a central constructivist process involved in cognitive development. SDAL illuminates the capacity of intelligent learners to start with the vague, poorly defined problems typically posed in realistic learning situations and progressively refine them, transforming them into problems with sufficient structure to guide the construction of a solution. Finally, some of the implications of I-C for modelling of the neuronal basis of intelligence and learning are explored; in particular, Quartz and Sejnowski's recent neural constructivism paradigm, enriched by Montague and Sejnowski's dopaminergic model of anticipative-predictive neural learning, is assessed as a promising, but incomplete, contribution to this approach. The paper concludes with a fourfold reflection on the divergence in cognitive modelling philosophy between the I-C and the traditional computational information processing approaches. (shrink)

Donald Campbell has long advocated a naturalist epistemology based on a general selection theory, with the scope of knowledge restricted to vicarious adaptive processes. But being a vicariant is problematic because it involves an unexplained epistemic relation. We argue that this relation is to be explicated organizationally in terms of the regulation of behavior and internal state by the vicariant, but that Campbell's selectionist approach can give no satisfactory account of it because it is opaque to organization. We show how (...) organizational constraints and capacities are crucial to understanding both evolution and cognition and conclude with a proposal for an enriched, generalized model of evolutionary epistemology that places high-order regulatory organization at the center. (shrink)

Résumé La sous-traitance dans les métiers londoniens est un phénomène massif au XVIIIe siècle qui transforme l’économie et la culture technique artisanales. Elle est liée à la recherche de producteurs qualifiés capables de répondre à la demande en nombre d’articles hautement composites, censés varier les effets visuels et fonctionnels des objets de consommation. L’économie de la variété, appliquée à une production importante, favorise l’extension des circuits entre producteurs et l’essor des marchés de production, c’est-à-dire une organisation ramifiée complexe fondée sur (...) la mobilisation d’opérateurs externes spécialisés, sous l’égide d’artisans-entrepreneurs. Nous nous proposons d’examiner l’impact de cette organisation du travail sur la culture technique et les identités professionnelles en milieu artisanal. On abordera cette question d’une part à travers l’écrit économique, d’autre part à partir d’actes de la pratique. (shrink)

We apply the Galilean covariant formulation of quantum dynamics to derive the phase-space representation of the Pauli–Schrödinger equation for the density matrix of spin-1/2 particles in the presence of an electromagnetic field. The Liouville operator for the particle with spin follows from using the Wigner–Moyal transformation and a suitable Clifford algebra constructed on the phase space of a (4 + 1)-dimensional space–time with Galilean geometry. Connections with the algebraic formalism of thermofield dynamics are also investigated.

We define rational Hermite interpolants to vector-valued functions and show that, in the context of Clifford algebras, the numerator and denominator polynomials belong to a complex extension of the Lipschitz group. We also discuss the problem of constructing an algebraic representation for the generalized inverse of a vector, which is at the heart of the usual development of vector rational approximation.

William James’ argument against William Clifford in The Will to Believe is often understood in terms of doxastic efficacy, the power of belief to influence an outcome. Although that is one strand of James’ argument, there is another which is driven by ampliative risk. The second strand of James’ argument, when applied to scientific cases, is tantamount to what is now called the Argument from Inductive Risk. Either strand of James’ argument is sufficient to rebut Clifford's strong evidentialism (...) and show that it is sometimes permissible to believe in the absence of compelling evidence. However, the two considerations have different scope and force. Doxastic efficacy applies in only some cases but allows any values to play a role in determining belief; risk applies in all cases but only allows particular conditional values to play a role. (shrink)

Fifty or sixty years ago anyone fluttering the pages of one of the many magazines which then catered for the cultivated and intelligent English reader would have been fairly certain to come upon an article bearing somewhat the same title as that of the present paper. The author would probably be an eminent scientist, such as Huxley or Clifford; a distinguished scholar, such as Frederic Harrison or Edmund Gurney; or a politician of cabinet rank, such as Gladstone or Morley. (...) Whichever side he might take, he would write with the moral fervour of which Englishmen at that time had an inexhaustible supply. Nowadays the so-called “conflict between Religion and Science,” which was then appetizingly hot from the oven, has acquired something of the repulsiveness of half-cold mutton in halfcongealed gravy. There seems to be a widespread opinion that Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, with some highly technical and not readily intelligible assistance from Professor Whitehead, have enabled the lion to lie down with the lamb. Well, I have no wish to pipe a discordant note in this scene of Messianic harmony. But I cannot help reflecting that psychology, anthropology, and psychical research have made considerable advances as well as mathematical physics; and that they seem prima facie much more likely to be relevant to religion. Even the ordinary common sense of the lawyer and the historian may still have something useful to say on such topics. (shrink)

This article examines the interpretive dimensions of human action. Although it takes the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as its starting point, the article attempts to develop a more robust hermeneutical account of the reflexivity of social actors and those who study them than Bourdieu himself has considered. It is argued that interpretation is best understood not as the homologous expression of inculcated structures but rather as context-sensitive and reflexively context-transforming action—or what the author wishes to characterize, respectively, as first- (...) and second-order thematizations of embeddedness. The article concludes by contrasting the author's position with the thick description of Clifford Geertz. (shrink)

We present a general derivation of the Duffin-Kemmer-Petiau (D.K.P) equation on the relativistic phase space proposed by Bohm and Hiley. We consider geometric algebras and the idea of algebraic spinors due to Riesz and Cartan. The generators βμ (p) of the D.K.P algebras are constructed in the standard fashion used to construct Clifford algebras out of bilinear forms. Free D.K.P particles and D.K.P particles in a prescribed external electromagnetic field are analized and general Liouville type equations for these cases (...) are obtained. Choosing particular values for the label p we classify the different types of the D.K.P Liouville operators. (shrink)

Jérôme Beauchez est sociologue, maître de conférences à l’université de Lyon/Saint-Étienne, et membre de l’équipe « Cultures publiques » du Centre Max Weber. Dans son premier livre, L’Empreinte du poing. La boxe, le gymnase et leurs hommes 1, il mène une enquête ethnographique au sein d’une salle de boxe anglaise d’une ville de l’Est de la France. Dans l’entretien qui suit, il revient sur les enjeux de l’ethnographie aujourd’hui, en situant son enquête à la convergence de la sociologie urbaine américaine (...) de Mitchell Duneier, de l’anthropologie de Clifford Geertz et de la sociologie culturelle de Jeffrey Alexander. Il prend clairement ses distances avec l’ethnographie inspirée par la sociologie de Pierre Bourdieu. C’est l’occasion de constater que si l’ethnographie n’est pas tout à fait un sport de combat, elle constitue un champ de questions théoriques passionnées, et un instrument irremplaçable pour la découverte des mondes contemporains, de leurs drames, de leurs combats et des résistances qui s’y affirment. (shrink)

Raisons de croire et éthique de la croyance -- L'éthique première de la croyance. Le problème de Clifford ; Trois défis pour l'éthique de la croyance -- Raisons de croire et raisons d'agir. Y a-t-il un "agir épistémique"? ; Bons et mauvais types de raisons ; Nos croyances ont-elles un but? ; Croyances correctes et raisons de croire ; Deux sortes d'"agir épistémique"? -- Croyances religieuses et certitudes primitives. Les croyances religieuses ont-elles besoin d'être justifiées ? ; Le pragmatisme (...) en matière de croyance religieuse et ses difficultés ; Réfutation du pragmatisme : l'incommensurabilité entre raisons pratiques et raisons épistémiques ; La foi échappe-t-elle aux normes de la croyance ? -- Les prospérités du vice intellectuel -- Ethique seconde de la croyance et vertu intellectuelle. De l'éthique première à l'éthique seconde de la croyance ; Des raisons de croire aux vertus intellectuelles -- Trois défis pour l'éthique seconde de la croyance. Les valeurs et les normes épistémiques sont-elles simplement sociales ? ; Les vertus dépendent-elles des circonstances ? ; Quelle taxinomie pour les vertus et les vices intellectuels ? -- Descartes et la vertu intellectuelle -- Vices ordinaires. Curiosité, foutaise et snobisme. La valeur de la connaissance ; Curiosité ; Impertinence et foutaise ; Snobs ! ; L'attitude correcte -- Bêtise, sottise et esprits faux. La bêtise et ses formes ; La conception intellectualiste de la bêtise ; La bêtise comme défaut du comprendre ; Bêtise et sottise ; Les esprits faux -- Vices politiques. Peut-il y avoir des vices intellectuels collectifs ? ; La fabrique de l'ignorance ; L'injustice épistémique. (shrink)

The ethics of belief involves an inquiry into what beliefs are legitimate to hold, including religious beliefs. Whatever the criteria determined in such an investigation, adopting a belief that does not meet this criterion is seen as illegitimate and it is considered an ethical violation. English mathematician W. K. Clifford (d. 1879) defines “sufficient evidence” as a criterion in his famous essay, “The Ethics of Belief”. Clifford’s evidence-centered argument becomes one of the most frequent references in the evidentialist (...) objection against theism. It turns out that this argument is not functional in the face of the diversity of beliefs. In this context, different suggestions are presented about what the ethics of belief could be. American philosopher William James (d. 1810), one of the founding names of pragmatism, offers a new proposal. In his classic work, “The Will to Believe”, James claims that Clifford is wrong in seeking the requirement of evidence for all beliefs. Because it is not possible to prove beliefs from the passionate nature of human beings, especially religious beliefs. Following this distinction, James proposes a new criterion for religious beliefs: a religious belief can be vivid or dead, forced or avoidable; and momentous or trivial. If a religious belief is vivid, forced, and momentous, it is necessary to have the courage to believe in it instead of suspending it. James' proposal is often valued as a strong counter-challenge or defense of religious beliefs. However, this argument also has aspects that are open to criticism. One of them is that the will to believe argument concurrently accepts conflicting religious beliefs or, in other words, confronts the issue of religious diversity. According to J. Hick, for example, this argument inevitably results in religious pluralism, even though James does not want to. Contrary to Hick, S. F. Aikin claims that the will to believe does not result in religious pluralism. According to Aikin, who draws attention to the relationship of argument with pragmatism, James obscures religious beliefs and removes them from being claims about truth. Therefore, there is no contradiction in the classical sense. So, which of the objections is valid? Does the will-to-believe argument result in religious pluralism by legitimizing more than one religious belief at the same time, or does it make a purely pragmatic proposition by devaluing religious beliefs? Which religion do I have the right to believe in according to the will to believe? The aim of this article is to provide an answer to the mentioned question. In the article, unlike the current evaluations, it is argued that the argument is closely related to James's theory of knowledge, radical empiricism, not pragmatism as it is usually made. For this purpose, after showing the relationship between the arguments of Clifford and James, the argument will be re-examined in this context and it will be revealed that James has two steps regarding religious beliefs: to make religious beliefs independent from factual beliefs; leaving theism to accept a monistic vision of God and basing religion on mystical experience, which is an emotional experience. As details emerge, it will become clear that James defends a natural religion that excludes traditional religions in his philosophical system and that he defends the beliefs of a humanized religion. With an individual definition of religion based on emotion, James on the one hand ensures the commonality of religious feeling, on the other hand, he makes religion independent from the field of facts. Therefore, with this study, it will be seen that the argument of the will to believe does not aim to legitimize believing in traditional religions, and diversity is not a fundamental problem. (shrink)

Il s'agit d'un problème combinatoire de logique formelle, formulé par Jevons; il sera expliqué en détails dans ce qui suit (voir no. 1). Jevona luimême n'a traité le problème que dans les cas les plus simples (n= 1, 2, 3); un cas plus difficile (n= 4) a été traité par Clifford; le cas général (nquelconque) a été à peine abordé.Le but de ce travail est de faire remarquer que ce problème de Jevons et de Clifford est contenu comme (...) cas particutier dans un problème combinatoire général que j'ai traité ailleurs. La méthode générale ramène le problème présent à l'étude d'un certain groupe de permutations d'ordren!2n, étroitement lié au groupe symétrique d'ordren!. J'ai fait les calculs nécessaires pourn= 1, 2, 3, 4. Mes résultats numèriques sont complètement en accord avec les résultats de Jevons, mais ils ne s'accordent qu'en partie avec les résultats de Clifford.Une proposition peut être vraie ou fausse. On peut exprimer la même chose en disant que nous pouvons attribuer à une proposition l'une ou l'autre des deux “valeurs logiques” qui s'excluent mutuellement: la “vérité” et la “fausseté.”. (shrink)

This is the final part of a three-part essay on fuzziness in medieval literary language. Each part corresponds broadly to Clifford Geertz's trifold instances of blur as involving “face-to-face interaction” (“life as game”), “collective intensities” (“life as stage”), and “imaginative forms” (“life as text”). Part 3 considers what Geertz might mean by describing text as a “dangerously unfocused term,” through discussing how bilingualism is negotiated in poetry. Three areas of vagueness are explored: the linguistic boundaries in a bilingual poem, (...) the definition of a poem in the trilingual culture of insular medieval writing, and the relationship between literary and ordinary language. Examples are taken from a fifteenth-century bilingual carol, an early fourteenth-century trilingual poem, a bilingual sermon, a passage of love-writing discovered in the midst of a fifteenth-century legal roll, and finally a pair of French poems about the death of the English commander, Thomas Montagu, fourth earl of Salisbury, at the English siege of Orléans in 1428, contrasted with some English translations of poems by Charles d'Orléans. The essay argues that blurriness in medieval bilingualism gives us a fresh way of approaching primary questions about poetry and the literary. (shrink)

Book Reviewed in this article: Israel's Prophetic Tradition: Essays in honour of Peter R. Ackroyd. Edited by Richard Coggins, Anthony Phillips and Michael Knibb, Pp.xxi, 272. Cambridge University Press, 1982, £21.00. Essays on John. By C.K. Barrett. Pp.viii, 167, London, SPCK, 1982, £10.50. The Letter to the Colossians. By Eduard Schweizer, translated by Andrew Chester. Pp.319, London, SPCK, 1982, £12.50. Foundational Theology: Jesus and the Church. By Francis Schüssler Fiorenza. Pp.xix, 326, New York Crossroad, 1984, $22.50. The Darkness of God: (...) Theology after Hiroshima. By Jim Garrison. Pp.x, 238, London, SCM Press, 1982, £5.95. Discerning the Mystery, An Essay on the Nature of neology. By Andrew Louth. Pp.xiv, 150, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983, £12.50. The Tao and the Daimon: Segments of a Religious Inquiry. By Robert C. Neville. Pp.xv, 281, Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 1982, $34.50 ), $11.95. Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World. By James Clifford. Pp.xi, 270, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982, £21.50. Transcendence and the Sacred. Edited by A.M. Olson and L.S. Rouner. Pp.xv, 230, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, £10.75. A History of Religious Ideas. Vol. 2: From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity. By Mircea Eliade. Translated by William R. Trask. Pp.xi, 565, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, £17.50. Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude‐Henri Racquet. By Mircea Eliade. Translated by Derek Coltman. Pp.ix, 225, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, £12.55. Religious Philosophy of Prince‐Bishop Njegosh of Montenegro. By Zika Rad. Prvulovich. Pp.xviii, 273, Birmingham, The Author, 1984, £12.50, £10.50. The Home of Meaning: The Hermeneutics of the Subject of Paul Ricoeur. By John W. Van Dengel. Pp.xxi, 333, Washington, D.C., University Press of America, 1982, $24.50, $13.25. Life Forms and Meaning Stucture. By Alfred Schutz, translated, introduced and annotated by Helmut Wagner. Pp.vi, 217, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, £11.95. The Shaping of Man: Philosophical Aspects of Sociobiology. By Roger Trigg. Pp.xx, 186. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, £12.50, £5.95. Marx and Marxisms: Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series, 14. Edited by G.H.R. Parkinson. Pp.vi, 268, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £9.95. Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism. By Allen E. Buchanan. Pp.xiv, 206, London, Methuen, 1982, £12.95. Israel Satanter: Text, Structure, Idea. By Hillel Goldberg. Pp.xvii, 358, New York, Ktav, 1981, $17.50. Freud on Femininity and Faith. By Judith Van Herik. Pp.xiii, 216, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982, £17.50. Women, Reason and Nature. By Carol McMillan. Pp.x, 165, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, £12.50. Supererogation: Its Status in Ethical Theory. By David Heyd. Pp.vii, 191, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £14.00. The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Edited by Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny and Jan Finborg. Pp.xi, 1035, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £40.00. St Thomas Aquinas. By Ralph McInerny. Pp.197, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1982, £4.50. Yves de Vallone: The Making of an Esprit‐Fort. By James O'Higgins, S.J. Pp.viii, 248, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1982, $35.00. Religion and National Identity. Edited by Stuart Mews. Pp.xvi, 618, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, £19.50. Mortmain Legislation and the English Church, 1279–1500. By Sandra Raban. Pp.xii, 215,, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £25.00. John XXIII, Pope of the Council. By Peter Hebblethwaite. Pp.viii, 550, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1984, £14.95.iCompiled by J.F. Púglisi and S.J. Voicu. Pp.260, Rome, Centro Pro Unione, 1984, $20.00. Ireland: A Bibliography of Material held at St Deiniol's Library. Compiled by Helen C. Price. Pp.iv, 136, Hawarden, St Deiniol's, 1984, £2.50. The Later Poems, 1972–1982. By R.S. Thomas. Pp.224, London, Macmillan, 1984, £4.95. (shrink)

The pragmatist epistemologist is supposed to defend the idea that there is no pure epistemic activity and, thereby, that the way we form our beliefs does not have to be assessed according to aims, or norms that rest on the illusory denial of the pragmatic encroachment of any inquiry. According to the pragmatist, the kind of epistemic purism that is widely endorsed in contemporary epistemology has in fact no other raison d’être than the doxastic puritanism that appears in W. K. (...) Clifford’s ethical principle. But a belief being defective has in fact nothing to do neither with the kind of practical factors that pragmatism so conceived, considers as relevant nor with the rules or values that epistemic puritanism reveres. Between believing that P and believing that E establishes that P, there is no such thing as the distance there is between practical reasons to φ and φ-ing. The position I defend is closer to Peirce’s pragmatism than to any other pragmatist approach. Among other things, it explains why C. S. Peirce’s thesis that: 1) The “real man of science” does not give any weight to practical stakes in his inquiries not only goes hand in hand with the thesis that 2) He never believes of any hypothesis that it is true, but also with the thesis that 3) The inquiry to which such a man devotes is infinite. Peirce is right from an epistemic point of view to praise men, whose life is devoted to the disinterested search for truth. (shrink)

D.C. Schindler reminds us that the motto of Villanova consists of three terms: Unitas, Caritas and Veritas. Postmodern philosophy is keen to malign good Veritas as an exercise in oppression, something which must be avoided if we truly want to reach universal care and unity. In opposition to this trend, Schindler illustrates how Desmond’s philosophy is capable of giving truth its dues against the assaults of Vattimo and others, but also and more importantly that truth serves as foundational for unity (...) and care. Building from Desmond’s Intimate Universal, Schindler illustrates how care and unity need an ontological grounding in truth in order to be more than merely superficial. (shrink)

Dans la seconde moitié du me siècle britannique, le nombre de textes traitant des rapports entre l'esprit et le corps est particulièrement conséquent. Cette époque est caractérisée par la formulation de la théorie de l'évolution de Darwin, par l'émergence des sciences du cerveau, et par une lutte pour l'autorité intellectuelle entre les élites traditionnelles et certains hommes de science. Le problème des rapports de l'esprit et du corps constitue à nos yeux une nouvelle porte d'entrée dans les débats de cette (...) époque et nous a permis d'identifier un mouvement philosophique, la philosophie psychophysiologique victorienne. Les auteurs étudiés sont les suivants : T.H. Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, Maudsley, Bain, Carpenter, Lewes et Romanes"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Progress cannot be reversed; what it has killed, we cannot restore to life. Professionalism, like pollution, is here to stay. However, the fact that professionalism and pollution are facts does not force us to welcome and implement them. Indeed, there are those who would accelerate "progress," their effective definition of which is what is going to happen willwe nillwe. I wonder why progressive thinkers do not, since it is inevitable we shall all die one day, advocate present universal suicide. Preferring (...) to cling to the remains of life rather than renounce it, preferring to strive for light so long as I can see a glimmer, I first recall the qualities ideal in one who is to search and trace the development of science.1 The workshop of the scholar in the history of science is the periods in which his authors lived. He should know those periods' ways of life and belief and education, both the common and the eccentric; their political histories; their variety in aspects; their social and economic structures; their architectures, literatures, and arts. He should feel at home in the houses of those times, sit easily in their chairs, both figurative and wooden, and discern what was then mostly admired or rejected in painting and sculpture and decoration. He should have read not only the books that carried the intellectual products of his period but also those that were then the fare of young minds as they were taught, such books having been commonly of an earlier time. The student who does not command, as a minimum, the main episodes of Holy Scripture, classic mythology, and the corpus of golden Latin is glaucomatose in the modes of thought of Western men educated before 1900. · 1. The text printed here is based on an address delivered at the banquet of the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of Technology, Washington, D.C., December 29, 1972. So as to retain definiteness and immediacy, I have not blurred the original focus upon the history of science and technology, trusting that any reader who can understand me at all will be able to turn the same lens upon his own field of learning or pseudolearning. Clifford Ambrose Truesdell, III, Professor of Rational Mechanics at John Hopkins University, is the author of, among others, Rational Thermodynamics, Six Lectures on Modern Natural Philosophy, and Essays in the History of Mechanics. He has edited or coedited six volumes of the Encyclopedia of Physics; he has founded three international journals of scientific and historical research and continues to edit two of them. Among his many honors, Professor Truesdell is a Foreign Member of seven European National Academies of Science. (shrink)

Préambule : science et herméneutique du mal Je voudrais mettre en exergue de cette intervention sur science et barbarie, sur le caractère d’oxymore du rapprochement de ces termes, et, à l’opposé, sur leur contiguïté historique, sur la contaminatio, qui s’est produite historiquement entre science et barbarie, les paroles de Hans Blumenberg : Toute méconnaissance des insurpassables services que la science moderne a rendus à la vie… me paraît indigne. L’affectation...