Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is the most famous philosopher you've likely never heard of. In 1984, Parfit published what was, and is still, hailed by many philosophers as a work of genius - one of the most cited works of philosophy since World War II, Reasons and Persons. At its core, he argued that we should be concerned less with our own interests and more with the common good. His book brims with brilliant argumentative detail and stunningly inventive thought experiments that (...) challenged contemporary views about what it means to be a person, why one should forego concern for oneself as an identity that persists over time, what it means to act on the basis of reasons, and what we owe to future generations. Parfit also - unfashionably at the time - believed in a kind of grand unified theory of morality, what he called theory x, a non-religious ethical theory wherein all the major moral theories were converging from different sides on the same mountaintop. Parfit has had an enormous influence not only on philosophy, but also beyond, particularly amongst those in the fields of climate ethics, poverty relief, and charitable giving. In this book, the first-full scale biography of Parfit, Dave Edmonds tells the story of the thinker that many philosophers consider the most important moral philosopher of the last century. Edmonds' rendering of the man in full skilfully illuminates the person behind the acclaimed philosopher. Despite Parfit's extraordinary mind, outward appearances suggest his was also an extraordinarily uneventful life - one largely spent in cloistered institutions from Eton to Oxford and one seemingly monomaniacally devoted to ideas. Edmonds' aim is to show how this son and grandson of missionaries went from a genial and outgoing history student to a captivating, yet monkish philosopher singularly devoted to saving morality. In doing so, Edmonds makes Parfit's profound, but often impenetrable, ideas accessible to a broad audience and gives life and body to the thoughts of a seemingly pure thinker that captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. (shrink)

Fields of enquiry. Rome Harré on What is social science -- Toby Miller on Cultural studies -- Lawrence Sherman on Criminology -- Jonathan Haidt on Moral psychology -- Robert J. Shiller on Behavioural economics -- Births, deaths and human population. Sarah Franklin on the Sociology of reproductive technology -- Ann Oakley on Women's experience of childbirth -- Sarah Harper on the Population challenge for the 21st century -- Steven Pinker on Violence and human nature -- Social science through different lenses. (...) Gregory Clark on Names -- Robin Dunbar on Dunbar numbers -- David Goldblatt on the Sociology of football -- Trevor Marchand on Craft -- Bruce Hood on the Supernatural -- Doreen Massey on Space -- Politics and social science. Craig Calhoun on Protest movements -- Danny Dorling on Inequality -- Kate Pickett on the Case for equality. (shrink)

Plato and the Power of Images addresses ways Plato has used images and the ways to understand their status as images, particularly how an image resembles what it represents and how to avoid mistaking that image for what it represents.

La 4e de couverture indique : "Cet ouvrage est écrit à quatre mains et porte sur la relation entre création artistique et sciences de la cognition. L'ouvrage propose deux approches de l'expérience esthétique. Une approche en troisième personne mobilisant des modèles propres aux systèmes dits auto-organisateurs issus de la biologie dédiée à la réception des œuvres d'art et une approche en première personne rendant compte par auto-analyse d'une pratique artistique vécue qui s'appuie également sur de tels systèmes, systèmes eux-mêmes liés (...) aux concepts d'émergence et de complexité". (shrink)

This book explores the view that normative behaviour is part of a complex of social mechanisms, processes and narratives that are constantly shifting. From this perspective, norms are not a kind of self-contained social object or fact, but rather an interplay of many things that we label as norms when we 'take a snapshot' of them at a particular instant. Further, this book pursues the hypothesis that considering the dynamic aspects of these phenomena sheds new light on them. The sort (...) of issues that this perspective opens to exploration include: Of what is this complex we call a "social norm" composed of? How do new social norms emerge and what kind of circumstances might facilitate such an appearance? How context-specific are the norms and patterns of normative behaviour that arise? How do the cognitive and the social aspects of norms interact over time? How do expectations, beliefs and individual rationality interact with social norm complexes to effect behaviour? How does our social embeddedness relate to social constraint upon behaviour? How might the socio-cognitive complexes that we call norms be usefully researched? (shrink)

When first published twenty years ago, The Logic of Medicine presented a new way of thinking about clinical medicine as a scholarly discipline as well as a profession. Since then, advances in research and technology have revolutionized both the practice and theory of medicine. In this new, extensively rewritten edition, Dr. Murphy includes changes to show how these different areas of scholarship may affect details of "the logic of medicine" without compromising its fundamental coherence. New to this edition are discussions (...) of the challenge of the flood of new empirical data, new ideas in genetics, molecular biology, homeostasis, pathogenesis, cancer, aging, and Alzheimer's disease. Murphy also comments on such new theoretical topics as dynamic systems, chaos, and fractals and their impact on the burgeoning fields of philosophy and practice of medicine. Written with medical students in mind, the book includes a glossary, many new examples, and problems for solutions with comments on each. An entirely new chapter deals with modeling. Clinicians and researchers will also find the principles thought-provoking and illuminating. (shrink)

Voilà un ouvrage d’une grande originalité, si grande qu’un spécialiste aussi consommé de la biologie aristotélicienne que Pierre Pellegrin – qui préface le livre – peut écrire (p. 10) : « Mes années d’études ne me donnent pas plus de compétence que n’en a n’importe quel lecteur nouveau du corpus biologique aristotélicien pour apprécier un travail aussi neuf ». Quant à moi, je ne saurais mieux faire, pour en donner une première idée, que d’emprunter quelques phrases à cette préface : (...) « […] l.. (shrink)

On se souvient peut-être de la parution au début de l’année 2008 du livre de Sylvain Gougenheim, Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel – Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne (Le Seuil, Paris, 2008), des recensions laudatives dont cet ouvrage fit l’objet dans de grands quotidiens (le Monde, le Figaro), et de la polémique qui s’ensuivit. Cette polémique et l’ouvrage qui l’a suscitée semblent aujourd’hui déjà oubliés, les projecteurs de l’actualité, comme on dit, s’étant braqués sur d’autres obje..

Dans un passage de Physique iii (7, 207b15-21), Aristote s’exprime d’une manière qui suppose valide l’implication suivante : « Si une grandeur peut être infinie en puissance, une telle grandeur peut aussi être infinie en acte ». Cette implication a intrigué les commentateurs tant anciens et médiévaux que modernes. Ces derniers se sont en général bornés à constater que l’implication n’est pas logiquement valide, sans expliquer comment et en quel sens Aristote avait pu la tenir pour telle. En rapprochant le (...) passage précité d’un autre passage de Physique iii (6, 206b16-27), le présent article en propose une interprétation qui semble lever toutes les difficultés. Au Moyen Age, le sens de l’implication a été très discuté, et l’interprétation proposée ici a été vue et soutenue par plusieurs commentateurs : on l’étudie chez quelques-uns de ceux-ci en situant leur position dans le cadre du débat médiéval sur la question, notamment en référence aux deux interprétations alors fameuses proposées par Averroès. (shrink)

At the moment of its decline, we clearly see that painting in oils developed an original poetics, and one that was all of a piece, throughout a renascent and modern West. From its birth and during a development lasting half a millennium we see it— in Florence, Bruges, Venice, Rome, Toledo, Nuremberg, Amsterdam and Paris—attentive to the sources of signification: languages, rites, myths, theater, tools, techniques and sciences and the urban context that wove them all together. In each case, for (...) one or the other of them, it brought a new relationship to the way of life and then left them to their social order of assimilation, keeping the initial contact for those who would be interested. It studded the West with centers of production that carried the practice and knowledge of art to their limits; engaged with the collective imagination, it punctuated history with decisive works, in which the desire to paint takes action and explains it. Marked by an impatience for change, oil painting revealed itself in a rapport with creativity akin to the other works of civilization. It is at the level of the bases of invention of the imaginary—which are in any expression the most profound structures—that the unfolding of oil painting is tightly bound. The establishment of modern national languages, the orderly rise, around a syntax and because of architecture, sculpture, music, song, tragedy, the systematic construction of scientific and technical expression, arose and grew quickly in importance in Western Europe during the same centuries as painting and with reciprocal correspondence. Dürer “who was the first to publish a treatise in which is collected all knowledge having to do with the expression of forms… wrote in his native tongue and in so doing was revealed as the creator of technical and scientific German.”. (shrink)

The productions of goods and the laws governing their exchange are no longer enough to account for the economic reality with regard to which the idea of crisis is generally invoked. The psychological, intellectual and moral motivations that support the activity of production are seen today as more and more decisive factors but ones that are evasive. Thus the stakes that would govern economic crises (but are they not something else?) must be sought on new ground, around mental incitements, ethical (...) references, networks of obligations that take the question of crisis beyond the economic domain, that would pose it in terms of civilizations. (shrink)

Games, festivals, folklore, a derivation of them, and artistic expression are manifestations of symbolic invention. To compare them is to bring out the differences in the order of the symbolic production and have, as a consequence, a differentiated perception of the way they function. It is also to put them into a perspective of filial relationship. In fact, a genealogy appears with the processes that regulate the passage from one to the other of these means of expression. Through the successive (...) dissipation of structural stabilizations that are in turn play, festival and folklore, a generative order of complexity is established of which art, with its dynamics open to all expressive invention, is the end result. Finally, it is to discover at the end of the process the literary text, conceived as a work of art, surrounded by expression and preceded by it, appearing from then on according to one of the precepts of the theory of the text, as a production “of society and history” and as issuing from the social phenomenon in its entirety. “I am not only undertaking a study of a sociology of games,” wrote Roger Caillois. “My idea is to lay the foundations for a sociology beginning with games.” We would say of a sociology in which we would be permitted to glimpse the achievement of the task of explaining the entire social phenomenon itself. (shrink)

There are, it is said nowadays, “Renaissances,” in order to emphasize the diversity of expressions in this period of civilization and because of the concern for restoring the originality of the historical situations experienced at that time by the peoples of Europe. It is true that from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries, the Renaissance touched many areas in order to provide a response to challenges of the times. But even though these responses were varied, the world view was the (...) same. (shrink)

“Given the fact that the consciousness of man is a linguistic consciousness, all models superimposed on consciousness, including art, can be understood as secondary modeling systems, “ wrote Yuri Lotman in Introduction à la structure du texte artistique.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)