The question of the documentary value of the last statues of Late Antiquity has been much debated in many recent publications. This article contributes to this debate and addresses emperors’ statuary and its relation to the development of a Christian theology of the Late Roman emperorship. Traditionally, statues demonstrated the military, legal and economic power of Roman emperors, who were depicted as generals, judges or benefactors. Surprisingly, the Christianisation of imperial power seems to have had a limited influence upon the (...) official iconography of emperors. The religious dimension rarely appeared on statues even though they became rarer in Late Antiquity. Whilst literary sources, especially Christian sources, increasingly mentioned emperors’ personal piety and demonstrative humility, particularly in the monumental context of Constantinople, imperial statues remained faithful to the traditional iconography of power that obliterated physical weakness and embodied autocratic power. (shrink)

Institution caractéristique d'une Cappadoce peu urbanisée, les chorévêques (ou ' évêques des campagnes ') sont attestés pour l'essentiel aux IVe et Ve siècles. C'est leur place dans le gouvernement de l'Église nouvellement impériale que nous avons examinée pour montrer que, loin de témoigner d'une première évangélisation et prise en charge par l'Église de ces communautés rurales d'Asie Mineure, leur importance au IVe siècle, puis leur effacement au siècle suivant signalent en fait la mise sous tutelle de ces mêmes communautés et (...) de leur organisation ecclésiastique par la hiérarchie épiscopale, conformément au principe d'accommodement. Cette conclusion invalide l'idée, encore récemment énoncée, que les campagnes dans leur ensemble ont été christianisées tardivement, et postérieurement aux cités. (shrink)

Intuitive predictions and judgements under uncertainty are often mediated by judgemental heuristics that sometimes lead to biases. Our micro-developmental study suggests that a presumption of rationality is justified for adult subjects, in so far as their systematic judgemental biases appear to be due to a specific executive-inhibition failure in working memory, and not necessarily to a lack of understanding of the fundamental principles of probability. This hypothesis was tested using an experimental procedure in which 60 adult subjects were trained to (...) inhibit the classical conjunction bias on a frequency judgement task derived from Tversky and Kahneman's work. Pre- and post-test performance was assessed via a probability judgement task. The data indicated a training effect, suggesting that subjects traditionally labelled as "irrational" with respect to the classical rules of inductive reasoning are in fact "inefficient inhibitors". These findings are discussed in terms of a polymorphous view of rationality. (shrink)

Using the matching bias example, the aim of the present studies was to show that adults' reasoning biases are due to faulty executive inhibition programming. In the first study, the subjects were trained on Wason's classical card selection task; half were given training in how to inhibit the perceptual matching bias (experimental group) and half in logic without the inhibition component (control group). On the pre- and post-tests, their performance was assessed on the Evans conditional rule falsification task (with a (...) negation in the antecedent of the rule), a task that also involves matching bias. In addition, subjects were tested for perceptual field dependence/independence using the Embedded Figures Test. The results brought out a specific inhibition training effect, as well as a clear-cut relationship in the experimental group between receptiveness to training and perceptual field independence. In the second study, the training paradigm was the same except that on the pre- and post-tests, the negation was in the consequent of the conditional rule (in this case, the perceptual matching response corresponds to the logical response). The subjects succeeded on the pre-test, and the matching-bias inhibition training had a negative effect on post-test performance. This specific negative priming effect confirms the inhibitory impact of our experimental training and outlines the dissociation of inhibition and logical components. (shrink)

This paper examines the discussion about false pleasures in the "Philebus" (36 c3-44 a11). After stressing the crucial importance of this discussion in the economy of the dialogue, it attempts to identify the problematic locus of the possibility of true or false pleasures. Socrates points to it by means of an analogy between pleasure and doxa. Against traditional interpretations, which reduce the distinction drawn in this passage to a distinction between doxa and pleasure on the one hand and their object (...) on the other, it is argued that, rather, Socrates distinguishes between the mere fact of having a doxa or a pleasure, on the one hand, and the content of these acts, on the other hand. Consequently, the possibility for a pleasure to be false does not concern its relation to an object, but the affective content which defines it. In order to show how the affective content of a pleasure can be false, it is necessary to examine the three species of false pleasures described by Socrates in their relation to appearance and imagination. Appearance is not identical with perception for Plato: it consists in a mixture of perception and doxa. As for imagination, it consists in "illustrating" a doxa present in the soul by means of a "quasi-perception". It is the presence of a doxa in each of these processes which makes it possible for them to be true or false, while mere perception cannot be either true or false. It is then argued that according to the "Philebus" pleasure can be false precisely because its affective content is not a mere perception, but either an appearance or an imagination. (shrink)

This research investigates the potential for a “fair” co-branding operation. A major corporate brand is fictitiously allied with a Fair Trade labelling organization brand. The sample for the study is composed of 540 respondents, representative of the French population. By considering commercial brands and Fair Trade labels as dissimilar in terms of customers’ perceived Fair Trade orientations, this article studies how this lack of similarity impacts perceived congruence between both entities and how prior brand attitudes and congruence influence customers’ evaluation (...) of the co-branded product. The results of this research demonstrate that: Consumer prior brand attitudes toward the partner brands influence very little customers’ evaluation. Perceived similarity of the partner brands has a strong influence toward congruence of the co-branding operation. Results also indicate that congruence has a strong influence upon customers’ evaluation. An inverted U-shaped relationship exists between perceived similarity and relevancy of the alliance, and between expectancy and customers’ evaluation. The results obtained through the test of a partial least square model, and inverted U-shaped hypothesis, represent a new insight into co-branding theory. The high discursive power of fair co-branding is a key issue: the corporate brand provides the alliance with its leading position, while the Fair Trade brand provides the ethical attribute. (shrink)

Neuroconstructivism: How the Brain Constructs Cognition proposes a unifying framework for the study of cognitive development that brings together (1) constructivism (which views development as the progressive elaboration of increasingly complex structures), (2) cognitive neuroscience (which aims to understand the neural mechanisms underlying behavior), and (3) computational modeling (which proposes formal and explicit specifications of information processing). The guiding principle of our approach is context dependence, within and (in contrast to Marr [1982]) between levels of organization. We propose that three (...) mechanisms guide the emergence of representations: competition, cooperation, and chronotopy; which themselves allow for two central processes: proactivity and progressive specialization. We suggest that the main outcome of development is partial representations, distributed across distinct functional circuits. This framework is derived by examining development at the level of single neurons, brain systems, and whole organisms. We use the terms encellment, embrainment, and embodiment to describe the higher-level contextual influences that act at each of these levels of organization. To illustrate these mechanisms in operation we provide case studies in early visual perception, infant habituation, phonological development, and object representations in infancy. Three further case studies are concerned with interactions between levels of explanation: social development, atypical development and within that, developmental dyslexia. We conclude that cognitive development arises from a dynamic, contextual change in embodied neural structures leading to partial representations across multiple brain regions and timescales, in response to proactively specified physical and social environment. (shrink)

The notion of life is here presented as a major theme which permeates all of Spinoza’s writings, from the earliest work to the mature statement of his philosophy in the Ethics. Some of the implications of this concept are here outlined, and a number of possible objections to my dynamic interpretation of the concept of life are also explicitated and answered. This artide is a translation of the essay, “Sur une idée directrice de la philosophie de Spinoza,” from Sylvain (...) Zac, Etudes spinozistes, ©1985, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. (shrink)

In this collection of essays, Bromberger explores the centrality of questions and predicaments they create in scientific research. He discusses the nature of explanation, theory, and the foundations of linguistics.

Understanding the events that led to the emergence of the bilaterians is a daunting task, impaired by the huge evolutionary gap separating us from the pre‐Cambrian. During gastrulation, the expression of the transcription factor Brachyury is remarkably well conserved around the blastopore of bilaterians and cnidarians. Only the bilaterian Brachyury proteins, however, share a distinctive N‐terminal sequence not found in outgroups such as cnidarians, sponges or placozoans. We now know that, in vertebrates, this N‐terminal domain confers specific transcriptional activity, by (...) recruiting Smad1, the first identified co‐factor for Brachyury. Smad1 is an effector of the BMP pathway, and has been isolated in bilaterians and cnidarians. Here, I propose that the protein–protein interaction between Brachyury and Smad1 represents an evolutionary novelty of the Urbilateria. The gain of the N‐terminal domain might have been selected to spatially modulate the activity of Brachyury, thereby facilitating the establishment of bilateral symmetry during gastrulation movements. BioEssays 28: 413–420, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

En bref, nous pensons qu'un regard critique sur un passé parfois méconnu est un moyen d'ouvrir de nouvelles perspectives et de continuer, ainsi, de travailler avec Foucault.

Durant la fin des années 1940, les sections de sport et le comité national olympique soviétique intègrent les fédérations et le Comité international olympique, ce qui leur permet de prendre part aux compétitions et à la communauté mondiale des sportifs. Très vite, les championnes d’URSS remportent de francs succès. La participation soviétique y a une double fonction dans la « politique extérieure de l’image » (R. Frank). D’une part, elle donne à voir les succès en matière d’égalité femmes-hommes. D’autre part, (...) elle permet d’obtenir des médailles, essentielles à la mesure de la suprématie soviétique en matière de sport. Cet article étudie la manière dont l’administration et les médias soviétiques ont construit – en pratique et en représentations – la supériorité sportive féminine soviétique en interaction avec l’étranger. Loin d’être isolés, les acteurs du sport soviétique s’adaptent aux règlements internationaux, aux réactions que les performances des athlètes d’URSS suscitent et aux controverses qui surgissent dans la presse de l’adversaire. (shrink)

Cet article analyse les emplois schelérien et heideggérien de l’expression « logique du coeur ». Il revient sur l’origine de cette expression – forgée par Scheler, qui l’attribue à tort à Pascal en soulignant son opposition à la raison cartésienne – avant de reconstruire l’usage qu’en fait Heidegger. Trois phases sont mises au jour : Heidegger fait l’économie de cette expression dans ses jeunes années afin de prendre ses distances avec la doctrine schelérienne et pascalienne des sentiments ; il y (...) recourt dans les années trente et quarante pour signaler que cette doctrine est déterminée par la « logique » métaphysique cartésienne, qu’il oppose à deux logiques du coeur non métaphysiques (celles du λόγος grec héraclitéen et parménidien et du Λόγος johannique) ; dans les années cinquante, Heidegger abandonne pourtant cette expression au motif que toute logique – moderne (cartésienne) comme grecque et biblique – demeure métaphysique. (shrink)

Si le xixe siècle fut le temps de l’émergence de la figure de la “ grande voyageuse ”, on ne saurait surestimer cette innovation. La hiérarchie des genres de récits de voyage, l’importance du contre-exemple britannique, la condamnation morale de la voyageuse solitaire manifestent assez le sentiment de l’illégitimité du voyage féminin. Pourtant, pèlerines, valétudinaires et touristes se multiplièrent dans un siècle qui fut aussi celui de l’invention du voyage de noces. Cet article tente de prendre la mesure de l’ensemble (...) des normes qui ont alors commandé les pratiques, nombreuses et variées, du voyage féminin. (shrink)

CorpusReader est un dispositif expérimental permettant d'articuler plusieurs instruments pour construire des corpus multi-annotés. L'objectif de ce dispositif est la description de corrélations entre niveaux de description pour caractériser des normes, comme par exemple des discours ou des genres. Dans ce cadre, toute annotation est une interprétation et le contexte est défini comme une pluralité d'interprétations réifiées dans un codage commun. CorpusReader permet à la fois de construire cette annotation contextualisante puis d'en extraire des sous-ensembles et des quantifications pour des (...) analyses quantitatives. (shrink)

Over the last 40 years or so, there has been an explosion of cultural evolution research in anthropology and archaeology. In each discipline, cultural evolutionists investigate how interactions between individuals translate into group level patterns, with the aim of explaining the diachronic dynamics and diversity of cultural traits. However, while much attention has been given to deterministic processes, we contend that current evolutionary accounts of cultural change are limited because they do not adopt a systematic stochastic approach. First, we show (...) that, in contrast with the intense debates in ecology and population genetics, the importance of stochasticity in evolutionary processes has generated little discussion in the sciences of cultural evolution to date. Second, we speculate on the reasons, both ideological and methodological, why that should be so. Third, we highlight the inadequacy of genetically-inspired stochastic models in the context of cultural evolution modelling, and ask which fundamental stochastic processes might be more relevant to take up. We conclude that the field of cultural evolution would benefit from a stochastic revolution. For that to occur, stochastic models ought to be developed specifically for cultural data and not through a copy-pasting of neutral models from population genetics or ecology. (shrink)

In his paper “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Berkeley Missed and Descartes Saw,” Myles Burnyeat purports to show not only that idealism was not endorsed by any ancient philosopher, but also that it could not have been endorsed before Descartes; Greek philosophy was dominated by an “unquestioned, unquestioning assumption of realism.” By ‘idealism,’ Burnyeat means mainly Berkeley’s immaterialism, but he also extends his demonstration to something more akin to Kant’s transcendental idealism. After arguing that this last version has more historical (...) credentials to the title of idealism than Berkeley’s doctrine, I compare Burnyeat’s reading to Natorp’s interpretation in Platos Ideenlehre, subtitled “An Introduction to Idealism.” Natorp argues that there is, on the contrary, a kind of underlying idealism in Greek philosophy, one that can be discerned on the basis of an interpretation of the meaning of the verb ‘to be’ which has found support in more recent research. (shrink)

La philosophie française actuelle se réduit souvent à de l’historiographie ou à de l’exégèse de textes, s’exposant ainsi au reproche de stérilité. Certes, la philosophie ne doit pas céder à une telle tendance sous peine de se discréditer ou de disparaître. Cependant, à l’inverse, l’histoire de la théorie et l’exégèse sont nécessaires à la théorie non seulement pour produire de nouvelles hypothèses mais aussi pour les justifier, ceci étant vrai pour toutes les disciplines scientifiques.

In this paper we show that the membership problem for second order non-linear Abstract Categorial Grammars is decidable. A consequence of that result is that Montague-like semantics yield to a decidable text generation problem. Furthermore the proof we propose is based on a new tool, Higher Order Intersection Signatures, which grasps statically dynamic properties of λ-terms and presents an interest in its own.

Cet article se propose de confronter la réminiscence platonicienne à la connaissance a priori kantienne. Pour ce faire, après avoir rappelé la différence entre connaissance a priori et connaissance innée selon Kant, il se tourne vers l’interprétation néokantienne de la réminiscence platonicienne par Paul Natorp. Il montre ensuite, en examinant en particulier des passages du Phédon et du Théétète, que le point le plus critiquable de l’interprétation de Natorp est moins sa compréhension de la connaissance atteinte par la réminiscence platonicienne (...) comme étant a priori que comme étant transcendantale. (shrink)

Sylvain Luquet | : On tente ici de retracer aussi fidèlement que possible les tenants et les aboutissants du célèbre débat autour du bien commun et de la personne suscité par l’attaque du Père Eschmann contre le livre de Charles De Koninck, De la primauté du bien commun contre les personnalistes . On y verra vite à quel point il s’agissait d’un débat d’idées et nullement de conflits personnels. | : We attempt here to retrace as faithfully as possible (...) the whys and wherefores of the famous debate about the common good and the person that resulted from the attack by Father Eschmann against Charles De Koninck’s book, On the Primacy of the Common Good against the Personalists . It will soon be obvious how much the core of this debate were ideas, and not at all personal conflicts. (shrink)

This paper studies ‘minority’ initiatives to organize sports games. A meta-analysis of published data in the literature identifies the formal appearance taken by each of these initiatives under the Olympic model. But it also conduces to build a number of indicators to answer a series of questions about their logic and strategies. All the initiatives studied are based on an ambivalent posture that, while based on the denunciation of a discriminating space, claim access to it. By an astonishing paradox, ‘non-normative’ (...) actors are driven to reclaim a model that, under cover of Universal, aims to establish a norm that is situated and dated. In practice, they use two types of strategies: a strategy for participation in the Olympics to transform them into a space which represents a fight against exclusion, or a strategy to create alternative events. Whatever the strategy, these initiatives are implemented according to their objectives. Differentiated in their forms—participatory or autonomy—they are also in their purpose. The comparison of these initiatives shows that ultimately, beyond strategies and logic inherent in different social, historical and organizational contexts, the mobilizations of the actors reveal the same ambivalence about the sports model conveyed by the Olympic institution. (shrink)

CorpusReader est un dispositif expérimental permettant d'articuler plusieurs instruments pour construire des corpus multi-annotés. L'objectif de ce dispositif est la description de corrélations entre niveaux de description pour caractériser des normes, comme par exemple des discours ou des genres. Dans ce cadre, toute annotation est une interprétation et le contexte est défini comme une pluralité d'interprétations réifiées dans un codage commun. CorpusReader permet à la fois de construire cette annotation contextualisante puis d'en extraire des sous-ensembles et des quantifications pour des (...) analyses quantitatives. (shrink)

We study the finitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma in which the players are restricted to choosing strategies which are implementable by a machine with a bound on its complexity. One player has to use a finite automaton while the other player has to use a finite perceptron. Some examples illustrate that the sets of strategies which are induced by these two types of machines are different and not ordered by set inclusion. Repeated game payoffs are evaluated according to the limit of (...) means. The main result establishes that a cooperation at almost all stages of the game is an equilibrium outcome if the complexity of the machines the players may use is limited enough and if the length T of the repeated game is sufficiently large. This result persists when more than T states are allowed in the player’s automaton. We further consider a variant of the model in which the two players are restricted to choosing strategies which are implementable by perceptrons and prove that the players can cooperate at most of the stages provided that the complexity of their perceptrons is sufficiently reduced. (shrink)

We introduce a new allocation rule, called the sequential equal surplus division for rooted forest TU-games. We provide two axiomatic characterizations for this allocation rule. The first one uses the classical property of component efficiency plus an edge deletion property. The second characterization uses standardness, an edge deletion property applied to specific rooted trees, a consistency property, and an amalgamation property. We also provide an extension of the sequential equal surplus division applied to the problem of sharing a river with (...) bifurcations. (shrink)

Cet article étudie le rapport particulier établi par Plotin entre deux notions, l’antilêpsis et la phantasia, pour penser la prise de conscience par l’âme de certains «objets» et de certaines activités. Car celle-ci pose un problème que Plotin a formulé clairement, à la fin du traité 10 (V, 1), sans lui trouver encore de solution absolument satisfaisante. Si l’antilêpsis a besoin de la phantasia pour s’exercer, peut-il en être de même pour les activités supérieures de l’âme dont elle voudrait prendre (...) conscience, puisque la phantasia se rattache à la sensation dont elle est issue? La question est alors de savoir si les réalités supérieures échappent à toute conscience ou si cette dernière peut les saisir, au moins sous la forme qui lui est propre. On cherchera ici à exposer les aspects principaux de ce problème, mais surtout, à partir de textes tirés des traités 27 (IV, 3) et 46 (I, 4), à saisir la solution que Plotin lui apporte. (shrink)

Although Pascal is a thinker of the figure of Christ, he seems to neglect the other Persons of the Trinity, in particular the Holy Spirit. This article examines the place Pascal gives to the third Person of the Trinity. It shows that, for Pascal, the Holy Spirit plays an important role in the conversion of man, insofar as he spreads in his heart the grace of Christ sent by the Father. Finally, this study comes to a difficult fragment of Pascal’s (...) in which he asks whether all Holy Scripture is dictated by the Holy Spirit, in order to propose a new reading. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive commentary of the Philebus designed to shed light on the nature and function of the good in Plato’s philosophy as a whole. Topics discussed include dialectic, pleasure, epistemology, and the relations between metaphysics and ethics.

This opinion paper takes aim at an error made recently by Clarivate Analytics in which it sent out an email that congratulated academics for becoming exclusive members of academia’s most cited elite, the Highly Cited Researchers. However, that email was sent out to an undisclosed number of non-HCRs, who were offered an apology shortly after, through a bulk mail, which tried to down-play the importance of the error, all the while praising the true HCRs. When Clarivate Analytics senior management was (...) contacted, the company declined to offer an indication of the number of academics who had been contacted and erroneously awarded the HCR status. We believe that this regrettable blunder, together with the opacity offered by the company, fortify the corporate attitude about the value of the journal impact factor, and what it represents, namely a marketing tool that is falsely used to equate citations with quality, worth, or influence. The continued commercialization of metrics such as the JIF is at the heart of their use to assess the “quality” of a researcher, their work, or a journal, and contributes to a great extent to driving scientific activities towards a futile endeavor. (shrink)

We provide characterizations of the equal division values and their convex mixtures, using a new axiom on a fixed player set based on player nullification which requires that if a player becomes null, then any two other players are equally affected. Two economic applications are also introduced concerning bargaining under risk and common-pool resource appropriation.

We show that provability in the implicational fragment of relevance logic is complete for doubly exponential time, using reductions to and from coverability in branching vector addition systems.

This paper investigates the late medieval controversy over the causal role of substantial forms in the generation of new substances. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, when there were two basic positions in this debate (section II), an original position was defended by Walter Burley and Peter Auriol, according to which accidents alone—by their own power—can generate substantial forms (section III). The paper presents how this view was received by the next generation of philosophers, i.e., around 1350 (section IV), (...) and how, even though some of the initial theoretical motivations for this view were quickly abandoned, the view was still defended by several philosophers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (section V). It is finally shown that this theory, still discussed by Suárez and early modern scholastics, and despite being generally rejected, contributed in its own way to the evolution of hylomorphism in the late Middle Ages and, to a certain extent, its gradual decline (section VI). (shrink)