La relecture des pratiques d’un tel Service, pour le diocèse de Coutances et dans les dix dernières années, révèle l’importance d’une situation sociale et ecclésiale ainsi que des interprétations et réorientations engagées. Reprenant successivement les termes désignant ce Service, l’article évoque plusieurs exigences d’articulation : entre communautés et diocèse, entre requêtes spécifiques selon les ministères et requêtes communes à tous les acteurs pastoraux, enfin entre la diversité des demandes de formation et le souci d’un projet pastoral de formation.

Der Pilot und Priester, Assumptionist und Byzantinist Christopher Walter hat einen neuen unschätzbaren Beitrag zur byzantinischen Geschichte geliefert. Als Schüler von André Grabar und Kollege von Vitalien Laurent verwaltet er die reiche Wissenschaftstradition der Assumptionisten und Bollandisten. Sein grosses Wissen über Theologie, Kirchengeschichte, Patristik und Kunstwissenschaft vermittelt er in einer angenehmen fliessenden Sprache. In dieser Arbeit webt er einen kunstfertigen Gobelin und verbindet die christliche Frühgeschichte mit dem vom antiken Heroenkult übertragenen Märtyrerkult in einem tiefgreifenden Versuch, die Historizität der Kriegerheiligen (...) zu fixieren. Er bringt den kultischen Aspekt der Armee in einer Darstellung zum Leben, die sich oft zu einem spannenden Detektivroman entwickelt. Endlich können wir den beliebtesten Kriegerheiligen in einen festeren Griff bekommen, den Archistrategos, den Erzengel Michael, mit den himmlischen Heerscharen zu seiner Verfügung, zur Verteidigung der ecclesia militans und des irdischen Imperiums neben anderen Kriegerheiligen, die die Standarten der Tagmaeinheiten schmückten. (shrink)

Longtemps oubliées des études consacrées au monachisme féminin, mais également de celles sur les chartreux, les moniales cartusiennes ont fait l’objet, depuis les années 2000, de plusieurs travaux dont ceux d’Augustin Devaux, de Nathalie Nabert ou encore le colloque Moines et moniales dans l’ordre des Chartreux : l’apport de l’archéologie, paru en 2007 sous la direction de Martine Valdher. L’ouvrage de Quentin Rochet est le fruit de la publication d’un master 2, soutenu à l’université Lumière...

La nature est en danger. Notre nature humaine est peut-être en danger. Existerait-il une " loi naturelle " avec laquelle nul être humain ne pourrait transiger, sauf à risquer de se dénaturer? Sur fond de bouleversements planétaires, les philosophes du droit et les moralistes reprennent aujourd'hui cette question qui signe notre noblesse. Mais, sous couvert d'une métaphysique passée au crible du Bas-Empire par les scolastiques de l'islam, du judaïsme et de la chrétienté, des réponses de principe ne font-elles pas régresser (...) la pensée vers des archétypes dont le souffle des Evangiles et les progrès des sciences nous avaient délivrés? Pour enrichir ces débats qui engagent l'avenir du modèle occidental, Elisabeth Dufourcq en explore les origines. Elle replace dans leur temps les évolutions de saint Thomas d'Aquin et des maîtres qu'il cite. Elle les confronte avec les mises en garde d'autres penseurs puissants, tels saint Albert le Grand, saint Bonaventure et Roger Bacon. Novateur et passionnant. (shrink)

Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy focuses on chance and scripted encounters as sites of tensions and alliances where new forms, ideas, meanings, interpretations, and theories can emerge. By moving beyond the realm of traditional hermeneutics, Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene have compiled a volume that vitally illustrates how reading encounters represented in artefacts, texts, and films is a vibrant and dynamic mode of encountering and interpreting. With contributions from esteemed academics such as Christie McDonald, Pierre Saint-Amand, Susan (...) Suleiman, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, this book is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, musicology and film studies. It uses examples chiefly from French culture and covers the Early Modern era to the twentieth century while providing a thorough and representative array of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches. (shrink)

Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy focuses on chance and scripted encounters as sites of tensions and alliances where new forms, ideas, meanings, interpretations, and theories can emerge. By moving beyond the realm of traditional hermeneutics, Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene have compiled a volume that vitally illustrates how reading encounters represented in artefacts, texts, and films is a vibrant and dynamic mode of encountering and interpreting. With contributions from esteemed academics such as Christie McDonald, Pierre Saint-Amand, Susan (...) Suleiman, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, this book is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, musicology and film studies. It uses examples chiefly from French culture and covers the Early Modern era to the twentieth century while providing a thorough and representative array of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches. (shrink)

Mobsters and others engaged in risky forms of social coordination and coercion often communicate by saying something that is overtly innocuous but transmits another message ‘off record’. In both ordinary conversation and political discourse, insinuation and other forms of indirection, like joking, offer significant protection from liability. However, they do not confer blanket immunity: speakers can be held to account for an ‘off record’ message, if the only reasonable interpreta- tions of their utterance involve a commitment to it. Legal liability (...) for speech in the service of criminal behavior displays a similar profile of significant protection from indirection along with potential liability for reasonable interpretations. Specifically, in both ordinary and legal contexts, liability depends on how a reasonable speaker would expect a reasonable hearer to interpret their utterance in the context of utter- ance, rather than on the actual speaker’s claimed communicative intentions. (shrink)

The form of the Metaphysical Diary elaborated by Gabriel Marcel between 1914 and 1943 displays an original style characterized by discontinuity, interruptions, “events” of writing each marked by a date. Therefore, where can continuity be found? Does continuity lie in the existential situation of the subject or in the subject’s ontological unity? If the Metaphysical Diary leads to metaphysical philosophy, to understand Gabriel Marcel’s choice of writing-style at the beginning of his work, one should rather start from this metaphysical philosophy.

We sley Salmon, in his influential and detailed book, Four Decades of Scientific Explanation, argues that the pragmatic approach to scientific explanation, “construed as the claim that scientific explanation can be explicated entirely in pragmatic terms” (1989, 185) is inadequate. The specific inadequacy ascribed to a pragmatic account is that objective relevance relations cannot be incorporated into such an account. Salmon relies on the arguments given in Kitcher and Salmon (1987) to ground this objection. He also suggests that Peter Railton’s (...) concepts of the ideal explanatory text and explanatory information (Railton 1981) can provide what the pragmatic approach lacks. This suggestion is not a conclusion of course; we read it as the promotion of part of a research program aimed at forging a greater consensus on scientific explanation-an admirable goal. However, we do not see the pragmatic approach as inadequate. We will show that a synthetic account inspired by Salmon’s adaptation of Railton would be equivalent to van Fraassen’s pragmatic account in three respects: accepting or rejecting requests for explanation; the practice of giving scientific explanations; and the evaluation of the goodness of explanations. We include all three under the general rubric of explanatory “practice.” Admittedly these are not the only three features by which an account of explanation might be evaluated. Roughly, we mean to show that a synthetic account cannot do a better job of accounting for the scientific practices which are of importance to the constructive empiricist, and therefore no argument can be presented to the constructive empiricist to convince her that by her own standards the synthetic account is superior. (shrink)

In recent years, the integration of philosophical with scientific theorizing has started to yield new insights. This chapter surveys some recent philosophical and empirical work on the nature and structure of action, on conscious agency, and on our knowledge of actions.

‘Feminist logic’ may sound like an impossible, incoherent, or irrelevant project, but it is none of these. We begin by delineating three categories into which projects in feminist logic might fall: philosophical logic, philosophy of logic, and pedagogy. We then defuse two distinct objections to the very idea of feminist logic: the irrelevance argument and the independence argument. Having done so, we turn to a particular kind of project in feminist philosophy of logic: Valerie Plumwood's feminist argument for a relevance (...) logic. Plumwood's work serves as our primary case study as we turn to the project of considering three different ways we might understand her argument and revisionist arguments like it: as a priori theorizing, as ameliorative conceptual engineering, or as instances of anti-exceptionalist approaches to logic. After arguing that the anti-exceptionalist approach seems to provide the most promising means of understanding the kind of project undertaken in a feminist challenge to classical logic, we briefly address the consequences that this might have for logic instruction. Here, we argue for the perhaps unexpected conclusion that feminist programs ought to offer more, not less, instruction in logic for those who take interest. (shrink)

Readings in Health Care Ethics provides a wide-ranging selection of important and engaging contributions to the field of health care ethics. The second edition adds a chapter on health care in Canada, and the introduction has been expanded to include discussion of a new direction in feminist naturalized ethics. The book presupposes no prior knowledge, only an interest in the bioethical issues that are shaping our world.

Root, branch, and blossom, attention is intertwined with epistemology. It is essential to our capacity to learn and decisive of the evidence we obtain, it influences the intellectual connections we forge and those we remember, and it is the cognitive tool whereby we enact decisions about inquiry. Moreover, because it is both an epistemic practice and a site of agency, attention is a natural locus for questions about epistemic morality. This article surveys the emerging epistemology of attention, reviewing the existing (...) literature and sketching avenues for future investigation. It also argues for a reorientation of epistemology itself. This argument is the focus of Section 1. Section 2 briefly reviews philosophical accounts of attention, Section 3 focuses on issues in traditional, individualistic epistemology, and Section 4 turns to social epistemology. (shrink)

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

Der Tagungsband zielt auf Grundsatzliches in der Verwendung von Begriffen ab und versteht sich als Beitrag zu einer interdisziplinar gefuhrten Diskussion um Genese und Geltung von Kategorien in der gegenwartigen geistes-, kultur- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung. Ausgehend von einer vorlaufigen Differenzierung in metaphysische, analytische oder kulturhistorische Kategorien zeigen die versammelten Beitrage gerade die Verschranktheit und wechselseitige Abhangigkeit dieser Dimensionen auf. Kategorien als methodische Werkzeuge zur wissenschaftlichen Einordnung und Unterscheidung von beobachteten Phanomenen stehen neben Kategorien als Untersuchungsgegenstand der Begriffs- und Ideengeschichte und (...) werfen daruber hinaus die Frage nach der Kategorialitat in den Bedingungen menschlichen Denkens und den allgemeinen Aufbauprinzipien von Welt auf. Unterschiedliche theoretische und methodologische Ansatze sowie konkrete Anwendungsbeispiele aus Anglistik, Amerikanistik, Filmwissenschaft, Germanistik, Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Kunstwissenschaft, Philosophie und Sprachwissenschaft zeugen von der Brisanz des Themas. (shrink)

From antiquity, Galenic physicians extensively discussed the active powers of simple and compound drugs. In their views, simple drugs, that is, single ingredients, acted according to their material qualities and the properties of their substance. As for compound drugs, their efficacy resulted from the mutual interaction of their ingredients and their modes of preparation. In the late Renaissance, Galenic physicians and naturalists, such as Leonhart Fuchs and Pietro Andrea Mattioli, attempted to explain these pharmacological properties or “faculties” at the intersection (...) of medicine, botany, and natural philosophy. This chapter examines the case of the Italian physician and botanist Andrea Cesalpino. His pharmacological treatise De medicamentorum facultatibus [On the Faculties of Drugs, 1593] was particularly significant for its reception of ancient and medieval texts on drug properties, materia medica, and the role of the senses in the knowledge of bodies. (shrink)

Elisabeth Porter's guide to the development of feminist thought on ethics & moral agency surveys feminist debates on the nature of feminist ethics, intimate relationships, professional ethics, politics, sexual politics, abortion and reproductive choices.

A vital and timely contribution to the growing scholarship on the political thought of Alain Badiou.

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

La période périnatale suscite un bouleversement psychique de la famille où le passé, le présent et le futur s’entremêlent. Quand des traumatismes ont affecté des générations en amont, il est possible qu’un passé non élaboré resurgisse à la naissance d’un enfant. Des organisations défensives délétères se transmettent sans transformation. Une confusion des temps peut s’installer, entre passé et présent, obturant le futur, plongeant la nouvelle famille dans de la désorganisation, faisant apparaître des symptômes. Les autrices proposent un éclairage théorique, puis (...) des vignettes cliniques dont un accompagnement de thérapie familiale psychanalytique périnatale pour permettre à la nouvelle famille de se différencier et de construire un avenir détoxifié et « déconfusionné ». Le développement favorable de l’enfant et une parentalité plus harmonieuse peuvent en découler au bénéfice de tous. (shrink)

I compare two of Davidson's main discussions of metaphor. I argue, first, that despite some puzzling inconsistencies, the overall thrust of “What Metaphors Mean” is a radical form of noncogitivism, on which speakers of metaphors merely cause their hearers to perceive certain features in the world, but do not claim or implicate that things are any particular way. By contrast, in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” Davidson endorses a neo‐Gricean account of metaphor as a form of speaker's meaning. However, he (...) also now advocates a radical anticonventionalism about linguistic meaning in general, which threatens to undermine his new view of metaphor. Finally, I articulate and evaluate a neo‐Davidsonian view of metaphor, which retains as much as possible from both papers. (shrink)

Widmer sheds light on a neglected aspect of the Western philosophical tradition. Following an era of Hegelianism, the members of the neo-Kantian "Marburg School," such as Friedrich Albert Lange, Hermann Cohen, Rudolf Stammler, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer defended socialism or left-wing ideals on Kantian principles. In doing so, Widmer breaks with two mistaken assumptions. First, Widmer demonstrates that the left-Hegelian and Marxist traditions were not the only significant philosophical sources of socialist critique in nineteenth-century Germany, as the left-Kantians identified (...) problems of normativity that the left-Hegelians could not adequately address. Second, Widmer challenges the prevailing assumption that the political philosophies developed in the Marburg School can be comprehensively characterized as a unified school of "ethical socialism." By showing that they varied fundamentally regarding their political views and their philosophical foundations of socialism, Widmer fills a gap in the studies of neo-Kantianism that is long overdue. (shrink)

On a familiar and prima facie plausible view of metaphor, speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean another. A variety of theorists have recently challenged this view; they offer criteria for distinguishing what is said from what is merely meant, and argue that these support classifying metaphor within 'what is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I conclude by sketching how we might extract a (...) workable notion of 'what is said' from ordinary intuitions about saying. (shrink)

Ten years ago, one of us proposed a dynamic hierarchical model of intentions that brought together philosophical work on intentions and empirical work on motor representations and motor control (Pacherie, 2008). The model distinguished among Distal intentions, Proximal intentions, and Motor intentions operating at different levels of action control (hence the name DPM model). This model specified the representational and functional profiles of each type of intention, as well their local and global dynamics, and the ways in which they interact. (...) A core insight of the model was that action control is the result of integrated, coordinated activity across these levels of intention. Since the proposal of the model, empirical and theoretical works in philosophy and cognitive science have emerged that would seem to support and expand on this central insight. In particular, an updated understanding of the nature of sensorimotor processing and motor representations, as well as of how the different levels of intention and control interface and interact, allows for the further specification and precisification of the original DPM model. (shrink)

Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...) as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. (shrink)

I argue that we can reconcile two seemingly incompatible traditions for thinking about concepts. On the one hand, many cognitive scientists assume that the systematic redeployment of representational abilities suffices for having concepts. On the other hand, a long philosophical tradition maintains that language is necessary for genuinely conceptual thought. I argue that on a theoretically useful and empirically plausible concept of 'concept', it is necessary and sufficient for conceptual thought that a thinker be able to entertain many of the (...) potential thoughts produced by recombining her representational abilities apart from a direct confrontation with the states of affairs being represented. Such representational abilities support a cognitive engagement with the world that is flexible, abstract, and active. (shrink)

Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ”framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ”complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically (...) powerful because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech acts with assertoric force. (shrink)