Résumé – Nous nous intéressons à l’enseignement et l’apprentissage de l’infini en classe de mathématiques en considérant les différences et les relations entre infini potentiel et infini actuel. Nous présentons les principaux éléments de notre étude philosophique, épistémologique et didactique, ainsi que trois situations visant à conduire un travail explicite avec les élèves sur ces questions en début de lycée. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- Abstract – We are interested in the teaching and learning of infinite in mathematics class, taking into account the relations (...) between potential infinite and actual infinite. We report the main elements of our current philosophical, epistemological and didactical study; we also present three mathematical situations that we consider relevant for this purpose and to be explored with 10 and 11 grade students. (shrink)

Unlike research ethics committees, which were created in 1988, the number of functioning hospital based ethical organisations in France, such as clinical ethics committees, is unknown. The objectives of such structures are diverse. A recent law created regional ethical forums, the objectives of which are education, debate, and research in relation to healthcare ethics. This paper discusses the current situation in France and the possible evolution and conflicts induced by this law. The creation of official healthcare ethics structures raises several (...) issues. (shrink)

Drawing on Jewish dimensions in the works of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan, Vivian Liska reflects on the dialogues between these contemporaries and traces the changing role that Jewish tradition has played in the development of modern thought. She notes how these intellectuals and philosophers transmitted their particular visions of modernity but also viewed them in the light of the Jewish tradition’s legacies and challenges. Liska argues that these visions derive from a paradoxical dynamic, (...) namely that the attempt to break with convention also calls for using deep-seated figures of thought. (shrink)

C'est au croisement des personnalités et des événements que se structure progressivement une culture stratégique. Qu'en est-il de celle de la France, nation bâtie "à coups d'épée"? Quelles expériences l'ont forgée, quelles philosophies la sous-tendent? Telles sont les questions fondamentales auxquelles répond cet ouvrage. Car la stratégie militaire française constitue un objet d'étude à la fois bien et mal connu. Connu puisqu'inscrit dans une histoire intimement liée à la construction d'une identité nationale et internationale dont on constate aujourd'hui encore sur (...) les champs de guerre toute la vivacité. Mal connu cependant lorsqu'il s'agit d'en examiner les fondements idéels et culturels. Cette méconnaissance est liée à la complexité même de toute stratégie. Loin d'être un simple art des moyens, elle produit des concepts, doctrines ou représentations de la guerre qui résultent d'expériences militaires spécifiques mais qui trouvent leurs racines dans des conditions philosophiques à l'oeuvre dans la construction de toute stratégie. La stratégie militaire française constitue un fascinant terrain d'étude : cette indispensable histoire philosophique de la pensée stratégique française — du XVIIIème siècle à nos jours — en est le reflet. Ce premier tome traite de la stratégie continentale. Un second tome à paraître traitera de la stratégie africaine. (shrink)

After the Introduction (pp. 1-22), the course falls into two parts, "Meditation on the dictum [μΕέτα τò πâv]-the difference between beings and Being" (pp. 23-93), and "The originary utterance of Being in the fragmentary saying of Anaximander" (pp. 94-123). The Introduction, each chapter of Part One, and the first subdivision of Part Two ends with a "recapitulation'; here only the last will be treated separately.

In this paper we defend structural representations, more specifically neural structural representation. We are not alone in this, many are currently engaged in this endeavor. The direction we take, however, diverges from the main road, a road paved by the mathematical theory of measure that, in the 1970s, established homomorphism as the way to map empirical domains of things in the world to the codomain of numbers. By adopting the mind as codomain, this mapping became a boon for all those (...) convinced that a representation system should bear similarities with what was being represented, but struggled to find a precise account of what such similarities mean. The euforia was brief, however, and soon homomorphism revealed itself to be affected by serious weaknesses, the primary one being that it included systems embarrassingly alien to representations. We find that the defense attempts that have followed, adopt strategies that share a common format: valid structural representations come as “homomorphism plus X”, with various “X”, provided in descriptive format only. Our alternative direction stems from the observation of the overlooked departure from homomorphism as used in the theory of measure and its later use in mental representations. In the former case, the codomain or the realm of numbers, is the most suited for developing theorems detailing the existence and uniqueness of homomorphism for a wide range of empirical domains. In the latter case, the codomain is the realm of the mind, possibly more vague and more ill-defined than the empirical domain itself. The time is ripe for articulating the mapping between represented domains and the mind in formal terms, by exploiting what is currently known about coding mechanisms in the brain. We provide a sketch of a possible development in this direction, one that adopts the theory of neural population coding as codomain. We will show that our framework is not only not in disagreement with the “plus X” proposals, but can lead to natural derivation of several of the “X”. (shrink)

Race/Class/Gender otherwise known as Intersectionality is one of the most important theoretical precepts developed in the past two decades in women's and gender studies and in the social sciences and humanities. Yet the concept remains elusive and poorly understood. This book seeks to solve these problems by answering the basic questions surrounding intersectionality in prose undergraduate students can understand and appreciate.

To the question of the beginning Hegel gives three answers. The major texts in which he elaborates them are: the section in the Science of Logic entitled "With What Must the Beginning of Science Be Made?"; the early stages of science proper in the Encyclopedia ; within science proper, the late stages of the philosophy of Logos and the philosophy of Spirit; the "Preface" of the Phenomenology of Spirit; and the late section on absolute Knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit. (...) Other texts also mention something on the question, especially the introductions to his lectures, but they add nothing essential to the published works. Part One of this communication will offer an account of the three beginnings of Hegelian science. (shrink)

La « querelle de la folie » a opposé Michel Foucault et Jacques Derrida. Cette « querelle » a déjà donné matière à plus d'un demi-siècle de débats. Et elle est toujours d'actualité. Pour l'auteure, il s'agit plutôt d'un différend, au sens où l'entend Jean-François Lyotard. Un différend à deux niveaux : celui de l'argument, émanant de la lecture que chaque philosophe a faite de la première méditation cartésienne, mais également, celui qui est tributaire de leur relation. Cet ouvrage apporte, (...) avec l'intégration du niveau relationnel, une nouvelle voie qui reprend la question classique des rapports entre la vie et l'oeuvre, la « biographie » et la « bibliographie » des philosophes. (shrink)

Neurosemantics is not yet a common term and in current neuroscience and philosophy it is used with two different sorts of objectives. One deals with the meaning of the electrical and the chemical activities going on in neural circuits. This way of using the term regards the project of explaining linguistic meaning in terms of the computations done by the brain. This book explores this second sense of neurosemantics, but in doing so, it will address much of the first as (...) well, for we believe that the capacity of neural circuits to support linguistic meaning, hinges on their peculiar role in coding entities and facts of the world. It is an enterprise at the edge of the available state-of-the-art knowledge in neuroscience and specifically, in the growing understanding of brain computational mechanisms. We conceive neurosemantics, however, as the natural evolution of a long standing project that began in the early days of Boole’s logic, the idea that semantics can be construed and explained in mathematical terms. Classical formal semantics, for a very long time, excluded from the analysis of language any account of mental processes, which on the contrary, became the central focus during the cognitive turn. Cognitive semantics, however, failed to provide a rigorous mathematical framework for semantic processes. Today, it is possible to begin explaining language by way of a new mathematical foundation, one that is empirically grounded in how the brain computes: neurosemantics. The way this book intends to contribute is twofold. One is to present a series of existing examples of neurosemantics in practice: early models addressing aspects of linguistic semantics purely in neurocomputational terms. The other is to try to identify the principles upon which models of this kind can be constructed, and their corresponding neural bases. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough philosophers have often insisted that specular perception is illusory or erroneous in nature, few have stressed the reliability and indispensability of mirrors as optical instrumen...

For nearly twenty years, Anglo-American feminist theory has posed its own epistemological questions by looking at the lives and bodies of transsexuals and transvestites. This paper examines the impact of such scholarship on improving the everyday lives of the people central to such feminist argumentation. Drawing on indigenous scholarship and activisms, I conclude with a consideration of some central principles necessary to engage in feminist research and theory—to involve marginal people in the production of knowledge and to transform the knowledge-production (...) process itself. (shrink)

Les études tentant de répondre à la question " Qu'est-ce que la justice? " et à cette autre, inséparable, " Qu'est-ce qu'une société juste? " sont assez nombreuses ces dernières années, mais elles ne sont pas toujours faciles d'accès, au contraire du livre d'Alain Durand. Par un discours systématique et structuré, il présente quelques réflexions occasionnées par des lectures ou par des événements et tendances de fond liés à l'actualité. L'auteur se confronte à de grands auteurs qui, depuis Aristote (...) jusqu'à John Rawls, sans oublier d'autres penseurs plus récents, ont substantiellement enrichi les approches de la justice sociale. Une attention particulière est accordée à l'apport du christianisme. La foi, en effet, ne cesse d'apparaître comme une force d'interrogations radicales pour l'élaboration d'une société plus juste. Et l'Eglise, qui doit être attentive aux priorités et aux dérives dans ce domaine, est ainsi conduite à des remises en question, tant en elle-même, que dans un monde devenu éthiquement pluraliste. La lecture de ce livre peut être faite assez librement, par les multiples portes d'entrée qu'il offre. (shrink)

The theory of mind (ToM) framework has been criticised by emerging alternative accounts. Each alternative begins with the accusation that ToM's validity as a research paradigm rests on the assumption of the ‘unobservability’ of other minds. We argue that the critics' discussion of the unobservability assumption (UA) targets a straw man. We discuss metaphysical, phenomenological, epistemological, and psychological readings of UA and demonstrate that it is not the case that ToM assumes the metaphysical, phenomenological, or epistemological claims. However, ToM supports (...) the psychological UA as a claim about cognitive processes responsible for mindreading. The latter can be interpreted as a claim that (a) neither the other's ‘mindedness’ in general nor the other's particular mental states are observable (i.e. apprehended perceptually); (b) particular mental states are unobservable, whereas some aspects indicative of ‘mindedness’ are observable; (c) some mental states are unobservable but some are also observable. Whereas the critics tend to attribute (a) to ToM, most ToM accounts actually take positions (b) or (c). We conclude that the allegations against ToM for positing UA are seriously misdirected. We further bring out an important stipulation of any account of observability of mental states: mental states are not observable in the same way as the sensory properties of physical objects. (shrink)

Mindreading is often considered to be the most important human social cognitive skill, and over the past three decades, several theories of the cognitive mechanisms for mindreading have been proposed. But why do we read minds? According to the standard view, we attribute mental states to individuals to predict and explain their behavior. I argue that the standard view is too general to capture the distinctive function of mindreading, and that it does not explain what motivates people to read minds. (...) In order to understand why mindreading is evolutionarily adaptive, individually beneficial, and motivationally compelling, we need to include another level of explanation: the level of social relationships. I introduce a theory of the cognitive underpinnings of social relationships—the relational models theory of Alan Fiske. I outline the hypothesis that the function of mindreading is to shape social relations. I further hypothesize that mindreading is often motivated by social emotions. If mindreading serves r.. (shrink)

Most philosophical or scientific theories suppose that colour composition judgments refer to the way colours appear to us. The dominant view is therefore phenomenalist in the sense that colour composition is phenomenally given to perceivers. This paper argues that there is no evidence for a phenomenalist view of colour composition and that a conventionalist approach should be favoured.

To be able to make “change” happen in the lives of patients entrusted to his care, Watzlawick says he tried to produce a theory about it. He was forced to acknowledge that the mechanisms of change resist systematization and, therefore, all wishes to elicit them as well.Well-being is to therapy what discovery is to thought and the event is to History: the position – unforeseen, unforeseeable – in reality of what did not hitherto exist. And heuristics would be, if not (...) a science, since there could be no science of change, then at least the name given to reflection on its mystery. (shrink)

This volume brings together a number of papers by Vivian Salmon, previously published in various journals and collections that are unfamiliar, and perhaps even inaccessible, to historians of the study of language. The central theme of the volume is the study of language in England in the 17th century. Papers in the first section treat aspects of the history of language teaching. The second section consists of three articles on the history of grammatical theory. The papers in the third and (...) final section deal with the search for the universal language. (shrink)

Most philosophers consider olfactory experiences to be very poor in comparison to other sense modalities. And because olfactory experiences seem to lack the spatial content necessary to object perception, philosophers tend to maintain that smell is purely sensational or abstract. I argue in this paper that the apparent poverty and spatial indeterminateness of odor experiences does not reflect the “subjective” or “abstract” nature of smell, but only that smell is not directed to particular things. According to the view defended in (...) this paper, odors are properties of stuffs. This view, motivated by several arguments grounded in the phenomenology of olfactory experience, explains in particular why odors appear to be located both in the air around our nose and in the objects from which they emanate. It also explains the power of smell in the task of discriminating chemical compounds. (shrink)

Taking up Kimberlé Crenshaw's conclusion that black feminist theorists seem to continue to find themselves in many ways “speaking into the void” (Crenshaw 2011, 228), even as their works are widely celebrated, I examine intersectionality critiques as one site where power asymmetries and dominant imaginaries converge in the act of interpretation (or cooptation) of intersectionality. That is, despite its current “status,” intersectionality also faces epistemic intransigence in the ways in which it is read and applied. My aim is not to (...) suggest that intersectionality cannot (or should not) be critiqued, nor do I maintain that celebratory applications/interpretations are immune from epistemic distortion when it comes to interpreting intersectionality. Rather, my goal is to demonstrate that critiques of intersectionality are one important site to examine hermeneutic marginalization and interpretive violence; the politics of citation; and the impact of dominant expectations or established social imaginaries on meaning-making. In so doing, I aim to consider more fully how entrenched ways of thinking are frequently relied upon to interpret and critique intersectionality, even as these are often the very frameworks that intersectionality theorists have identified as highly problematic tools of misrepresentation, erasure, and violation. This slippage away from intersectionality's outlooks, whether in critical or laudatory contexts, is a pivotal site of epistemic negotiation we must examine more closely. (shrink)

Traditional theory of mind (ToM) accounts for social cognition have been at the basis of most studies in the social cognitive neurosciences. However, in recent years, the need to go beyond traditional ToM accounts for understanding real life social interactions has become all the more pressing. At the same time it remains unclear whether alternative accounts, such as interactionism, can yield a sufficient description and explanation of social interactions. We argue that instead of considering ToM and interactionism as mutually exclusive (...) opponents, they should be integrated into a more comprehensive account of social cognition. We draw on dual process models of social cognition that contrast two different types of social cognitive processing. The first type (labeled Type 1) refers to process es that are fast, efficient, stimulus-driven, and relatively inflexible. The second type (labeled Type 2) refers to processes that are relatively slow, cognitively laborious, flexible, and may involve conscious control. We argue that while interactionism captures aspects of social cognition mostly related to Type 1 processes, ToM is more focused on those based on Type 2 processes. We suggest that real life social interactions are rarely based on either Type 1 or Type 2 processes alone. On the contrary, we propose that in most cases both types of processes are simultaneously involved and that social behavior may be sustained by the interplay between these two types of processes. Finally, we discuss how the new integrative framework can guide experimental research on social interaction. (shrink)

Most objectivist and dispositionalist theories of color have tried to resolve the challenge raised by color variations by drawing a distinction between real and apparent colors. This paper considers such a strategy to be fundamentally erroneous. The high degree of variability of colors constitutes a crucial feature of colors and color perception; it cannot be avoided without leaving aside the real nature of color. The objectivist theory of color defended in this paper holds that objects have locally many different objective (...) colors. Most color variations are then real and result from the extreme richness of color properties. (shrink)

Background: Informed consent in clinical research is mandated throughout the world. Both patient subjects and investigators are required to understand and accept the distinction between research and treatment.Aim: To document the extent and to identify factors associated with therapeutic misconception in a population of patient subjects or parent proxies recruited from a variety of multicentre trials .Patients and methods: The study comprised two phases: the development of a questionnaire to assess the quality of informed consent and a survey of patient (...) subjects based on this questionnaire.Results: A total of 303 patient subjects or parent proxies were contacted and 279 questionnaires were analysed. The median age was 49.5 years, sex ratio was 1 and 61% of respondents were professionally active. Overall memorisation of the oral or written communication of informed consent was good , and satisfaction with the process was around 70%. Therapeutic misconception was present in 70% of respondents, who expected to receive better care and ignored the consequence of randomisation and treatment comparisons. This was positively associated with the acuteness and severity of the disease.Conclusion: The authors suggest that the risk of therapeutic misconception be specifically addressed in consent forms as an educational tool for both patients and investigators. (shrink)