Ce livre est la première biographie consacrée à l'une des plus grandes figures intellectuelles et politiques du XXe siècle : Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997). Jeune résistant grec révolutionnaire menacé de mort par les staliniens, il arrive en France à l'âge de vingt-trois ans, alors que l'engouement pour l'URSS est à son zénith. Il contribue alors à créer, avec Claude Lefort et Jean-François Lyotard, l'une des branches les plus vivaces de la gauche radicale, « Socialisme ou Barbarie », qui deviendra (...) ensuite une revue mythique et l'une des grandes influences de Mai 68, notamment par sa critique de gauche des régimes dits « communistes ». Économiste, philosophe, psychanalyste, militant politique, Castoriadis est l'auteur d'une œuvre essentielle pour quiconque s'intéresse à la question de l'institution hors du cadre de l'État, dont il traite dans ce que l'on peut considérer comme l'un des maîtres ouvrages du XXe siècle, L'Institution imaginaire de la société (1975). Il n'a en effet cessé, en croisant l'analyse historienne et l'approche psychanalytique, de s'attacher à penser la conquête de l'autonomie comme condition de l'approfondissement démocratique. Fruit d'une enquête menée auprès d'une centaine de témoins, cet ouvrage permet enfin de lever le voile sur cette figure hors norme et trop méconnue, qui est restée marginale jusqu'au bout, malgré son élection comme directeur d'études à l'EHESS au début des années 1980. Celui en qui Pierre Vidal-Naquet voyait un « génie », et Edgar Morin un « Titan de l'esprit », est pourtant très certainement appelé, en ces temps de grandes turbulences des souverainetés établies, à devenir l'un des penseurs-clés du XXIe siècle. (shrink)

Alors qu’il était précepteur en Suisse, le jeune Hegel traduisit minutieusement un libelle révolutionnaire dénonçant l’oppression que les autorités bernoises exerçaient sur le Pays de Vaud. Il publia ces Lettres de Jean-Jacques Cart à son retour en Allemagne, en 1798, sous le couvert d’un anonymat qu’il ne leva jamais. Derrière le caractère anecdotique de cette première publication, on peut déceler des enjeux qui conduisirent à l’instauration de l’idéalisme spéculatif. Le motif de la lutte pour la reconnaissance, en particulier, semble (...) y trouver sa première apparition. Plus fondamentalement cette première publication éclaire le travail d’élaboration stylistique conduisant progressivement au système, avec, à l’horizon, la question de la portée pratique de la philosophie. (shrink)

Les relations de la machine et de la pensée sont aussi anciennes qu'énigmatiques, toujours en attente d'une solution. C'est un mythe dont s'abreuve la philosophie. Il est ici repris en fonction de notre conjoncture, la science-fiction avec Matrix, la logique et l'ordinateur avec Turing, enfin l'élaboration théorique avec le cognitivisme et la non-philosophie. Ces essais ont été élaborés dans un même esprit au sein d'une équipe dont les jeunes philosophes partagent le désir commun de renouveler le style philosophique par une (...) discipline de philo-fiction. -/- The relationship between the machine and thought is as old as it is enigmatic, always awaiting a solution. It's a myth that philosophy feeds on. Here it is revisited in the context of our current situation: science fiction with Matrix, logic and the computer with Turing, and theoretical development with cognitivism and non-philosophy. These essays have been drawn up in the same spirit by a team of young philosophers who share a common desire to renew the philosophical style through a discipline of philo-fiction. (shrink)

Le cannabis est envisagé ici comme un instrument de la politique d’aménagement des territoires, au sens où R. Neuburger évoque les territoires de l’intime. Ceci permet la création de nouvelles narrations qui permettent de sortir de l’impasse où le cannabis est le problème pour les parents alors que c’est la solution pour le jeune. Deux vignettes cliniques illustrent cette métaphore et les opportunités qu’elle offre pour la thérapie.

Au fil d'une carrière commencée il y a près d'un demi-siècle, Jean Audouze a tout connu de la science, depuis la recherche en laboratoire jusqu'aux négociations internationales, en passant par la direction de grandes institutions. D'Hubert Reeves à François Mitterrand, il a travaillé avec les plus grands. Alors que sévit une "guerre contre la science", il nous raconte à l'aide de nombreuses anecdotes la science au quotidien et surtout nous explique pourquoi il faut la défendre. C'est la mission qu'il (...) confie aux jeunes scientifiques d'aujourd'hui et à tous ceux pour qui la curiosité et la passion d'apprendre constituent les plus beaux des défauts. (shrink)

Hierdie boek is n inleiding tot moderne denkrigtings wat alle fasette van die staat betref. Dit verduidelik die verbintenis tussen die huidige proses van staatsvorming in Suid-Afrika en die tradisionele faktore wat dit elders in die w reld aangehelp het.

The authors constructed an algorithm that relates leaf contour to the ratio between the two parts of the leaf using the function θ’=nθm, wherem is the allometric exponent. Using this model, it is possible to simulate the contour of symmetrical or asymmetrical leaves. The authors hypothesize that the portion of the leaf contour that agrees with the simulation is linked to a constraint imposed by the initial asymmetry of the leaf primordium. The final shape of the leaf results more from (...) a summation of cumulative processes through time than from a single process. In the analysis of foliar allometry, it is important to take into consideration the different phases of leaf development, since the nature of the allometric constants may change from one phase to the next, even though their numerical value may remain the same. (shrink)

In plant morphology, most structures of vascular plants can easily be assigned to pre-established organ categories. However, there are also intermediate structures that do not fit those categories associated with a classical approach to morphology. To integrate the diversity of forms in the same general framework, we constructed a theoretical morphospace based on a variety of modalities where it is possible to calculate the morphological distance between plant organs. This paper gives emphasis on shoot, leaf, leaflet and trichomes while ignoring (...) the root. This will allow us to test the hypothesis that classical morphology (typology) and dynamic morphology occupy the same theoretical morphospace and the relationship between the two approaches remains a question of weighting of criteria. Our approach considers the shoot (i.e. leafy stem) as the basic morphological structural unit. A theoretical data table consisting of as many lines as there are possible combinations between different modalities of characters of a typical shoot was generated. By applying a principal components analysis (PCA) to these data it is possible to define a theoretical morphospace of shoots. Typical morphological elements (shoots, leaves, trichomes) and atypical structures (phylloclades, cladodes) including particular cases representing ‘exotic’ structures such as the epiphyllous appendages of Begonia and ‘water shoot’ and ‘leaf’ of aquatic Utricularia were placed in the morphospace. The more an organ differs from a typical shoot, the further away it will be from the barycentre of shoots. By giving a higher weight to variables used in classical typology, the different organ categories appear to be separate, as expected. If we do not make any particular arbitrary choice in terms of character weighting, as it is the case in the context of dynamic morphology, the clear separation between organs is replaced by a continuum. Contrary to typical structures, “intermediate” structures are only compatible with a dynamic morphology approach whether they are placed in the morphospace based on a ponderation compatible with typology or dynamic morphology. The difference in points of view between typology and continuum leads to a particular mode of weighting. By using an equal weighting of characters, contradictions due to the ponderation of characters are avoided, and the morphological concepts of continuum’ and ‘typology’ appear as sub-classes of ‘process’ or ‘dynamic morphology’. (shrink)

Cet article analyse quelques dispositifs proposés par différents artistes contemporains qui placent la présence physique de l’artiste, ainsi que sa coprésence avec les spectateurs, au cœur de leur expérimentation et de leur pouvoir de suggestion. Cela pose des questions troublantes mais suggestives sur ce qu’est la présence dans un monde de médialisation ubiquitaire, et sur ce que l’être-là-ensemble apporte à la circulation des images, des sons et des octets d’information.

Cette méditation en première personne tourne autour de l’antique et grande question : Que faire? et s’appuie sur le texte des Essais de Montaigne. La question du « faire » y est interrogée et relancée par-delà le « produire » et la production qui, aujourd’hui, plus que jamais, risquent de l’emporter et de l’engloutir tandis qu’est brossé un portrait chinois (taoïste!) de celui dont Nietzsche disait si bien : « c’est à lui que je m’attacherais si l’on me donnait pour (...) tâche de faire de cette terre une patrie ». (shrink)

Du temps du confinement et de la dévastation qui affectent si profondément notre sens de la temporalité, la philosophie aurait-elle quelque chose à dire? L’occasion en tout cas de relire quelques textes d’Aristote et d’Augustin et d’essayer de nous orienter dans Être et temps de Heidegger en nous interrogeant sur l’expression avoir le temps au moment où, pour chacun, s’amenuise le temps qui reste.

Comment écrire sur Bataille sans s’épargner et se mettre soi-même hors jeu sinon en entrant dans le jeu de ce qu’on appellera, en un sens majeur, la parodie ? Dans ce retour, dans cet éternel retour des pensées et des mots – dans cette déconstruction créatrice qu’est la réécriture – Bataille n’y entra-t-il pas lui même en écrivant sur Nietzsche ?

The prevalent view in animal ethics is that speciesism is wrong: we should weigh the interests of humans and non-humans equally. Shelly Kagan has recently questioned this claim, defending speciesism against Peter Singer’s seminal argument based on the principle of equal consideration of interests. This critique is most charitably construed as a dilemma. The principle of equal consideration can be interpreted in either of two ways. While it faces counterexamples on the first reading, it makes Singer’s argument question-begging on the (...) second. In response, Singer has grasped the first horn of this dilemma and tried to accommodate Kagan’s apparent counterexamples. In my opinion, this attempt is unpersuasive: the principle of equal consideration is inconsistent with common-sense intuitions on Kagan’s cases. Worse, Singer’s argument begs the question anyway. It therefore faces two serious objections. This is not to say that there is nothing wrong with speciesism, however. In the second half of the paper, I propose another, better argument against speciesism, which I argue is immune to both objections. According to this other argument, speciesism is wrong because it involves discriminating on the basis of a merely biological property. (shrink)

In May 1968, Gilles Deleuze was an established philosopher teaching at the innovative Vincennes University, just outside of Paris. Félix Guattari was a political militant and the director of an unusual psychiatric clinic at La Borde. Their meeting was quite unlikely, yet the two were introduced in an arranged encounter of epic consequence. From that moment on, Deleuze and Guattari engaged in a surprising, productive partnership, collaborating on several groundbreaking works, including _Anti-Oedipus_, _What Is Philosophy?_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_. (...) class='Hi'>François Dosse, a prominent French intellectual known for his work on the Annales School, structuralism, and biographies of the pivotal intellectuals Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Chaunu, and Michel de Certeau, examines the prolific if improbable relationship between two men of distinct and differing sensibilities. Drawing on unpublished archives and hundreds of personal interviews, Dosse elucidates a collaboration that lasted more than two decades, underscoring the role that family and history—particularly the turbulent time of May 1968—play in their monumental work. He also takes the measure of Deleuze and Guattari's posthumous fortunes and the impact of their thought on intellectual, academic, and professional circles. (shrink)

Animal ethicists have been debating the morality of speciesism for over forty years. Despite rather persuasive arguments against this form of discrimination, many philosophers continue to assign humans a higher moral status than nonhuman animals. The primary source of evidence for this position is our intuition that humans’ interests matter more than the similar interests of other animals. And it must be acknowledged that this intuition is both powerful and widespread. But should we trust it for all that? The present (...) paper defends a negative answer to that question, based on a debunking argument. The intuitive belief that humans matter more than other animals is unjustified because it results from an epistemically defective process. It is largely shaped by tribalism, our tendency to favor ingroup members as opposed to outgroup members. And this influence is distortive for two reasons. First, tribalism evolved for reasons unrelated to moral truths; hence, it would at best produce true moral beliefs accidentally. Second, tribalism generates a vast quantity of false moral beliefs, starting with racist beliefs. Once this intuition is discarded, little evidence remains that speciesism is morally acceptable. (shrink)

-- t. 2. Origines médiévales de la science.

Diversity of evidence is widely claimed to be crucial for evidence amalgamation to have distinctive epistemic merits. Bayesian epistemologists capture this idea in the variety-of-evidence thesis: ceteris paribus, the strength of confirmation of a hypothesis by an evidential set increases with the diversity of the evidential elements in that set. Yet, formal exploration of this thesis has shown that it fails to be generally true. This article demonstrates that the thesis fails in even more circumstances than recent results would lead (...) us to expect. Most importantly, it can fail whatever the chance that the evidential sources are unreliable. Our results hold for two types of degrees of variety: reliability independence and testable aspect independence. We conclude that the variety-of-evidence thesis can, at best, be interpreted as an exception-prone rule of thumb. (shrink)

Moral error theorists face the so-called “now-what problem”: what should we do with our moral judgments from a prudential point of view if these judgments are uniformly false? On top of abolitionism and conservationism, which respectively advise us to get rid of our moral judgments and to keep them, three revisionary solutions have been proposed in the literature: expressivism, naturalism, and fictionalism. In this paper, I argue that expressivism and naturalism do not constitute genuine alternatives to abolitionism, of which they (...) are in the end mere variants—and, even less conveniently, variants that are conform to the very spirit of abolitionism as formulated by its proponents. The main version of fictionalism, by contrast, provides us with a recommendation to which abolitionists cannot consistently subscribe. This leaves us with only one revisionary solution to the now-what problem. (shrink)

In this highly insightful analysis of Western and Chinese concepts of efficacy, François Jullien subtly delves into the metaphysical preconceptions of the two civilizations to account for diverging patterns of action in warfare, politics, and diplomacy. He shows how Western and Chinese strategies work in several domains (the battlefield, for example) and analyzes two resulting acts of war. The Chinese strategist manipulates his own troops and the enemy to win a battle without waging war and to bring about victory (...) effortlessly. Efficacity in China is thus conceived of in terms of transformation (as opposed to action) and manipulation, making it closer to what is understood as efficacy in the West. Jullien’s brilliant interpretations of an array of recondite texts are key to understanding our own conceptions of action, time, and reality in this foray into the world of Chinese thought. In its clear and penetrating characterization of two contrasting views of reality from a heretofore unexplored perspective, A Treatise on Efficacy will be of central importance in the intellectual debate between East and West. (shrink)

Il est assez rare qu’un concept philosophique s’échappe de l’arène académique. C’est pourtant le cas du concept de spécisme, qui a fait une entrée remarquée dans la sphère publique au cours de la dernière décennie. Il est désormais au cœur du débat de société sur nos devoirs envers les animaux non humains. Hélas, ce concept et les enjeux qu’il soulève sont souvent mal compris. Nombreux sont les auteurs qui contestent sa légitimité alors qu’ils le maitrisent mal. D’autres l’utilisent plus volontiers (...) sans toutefois mieux le comprendre. Les confusions qui entourent cette notion l’empêche de contribuer à la discussion autant qu’elle le pourrait. Le présent ouvrage entend remédier à cet état de faits en donnant de la notion de spécisme une présentation à la fois assez précise pour rendre justice aux discussions philosophiques dont elle fait l’objet et suffisamment claire pour être accessible à quiconque s’intéresse au statut moral des animaux. Il se divise en deux parties. La première aborde des questions ontologiques : Qu’est-ce exactement que le spécisme ? À quelles conditions existe-t-il ? Ces conditions sont-elles remplies dans les faits ? Quant à la seconde, elle porte sur des questions éthiques : Le spécisme peut-il être justifié ? Faut-il au contraire le condamner au même titre que le racisme et le sexisme ? (shrink)

Yona Waksman, Véronique François Vers une redéfinition typologique et analytique des céramiques byzantines du type Zeuxippus Ware p. 629-724 La vaisselle de table du type Zeuxippus Ware fait a priori partie des catégories de céramiques byzantines les mieux connues. Très largement diffusée sur les territoires de l'Empire byzantin mais aussi dans toute la Méditerranée et en mer Noire, à la fin du XIIe siècle et au début du XIIIe, elle sert couramment de « marqueur » des niveaux archéologiques pour (...) cette époque. Ces dernières années, la multiplication des découvertes et les difficultés d'attribution au groupe initial ont montré les limites de la typologie établie en 1968 par A. H. S. Megaw. Aussi nous a-t-il semblé nécessaire de reconsidérer cet ensemble suivant le point de vue des analyses chimiques de la pâte permettant de rassembler sur des bases plus sûres des vases correspondant à une même production. Cette étude à grande échelle propose une mise au point sur la question en mettant en parallèle les caractéristiques typologiques et stylistiques et les compositions chimiques et minéralogiques des pâtes d'un large échantillonnage de Zeuxippus Ware et assimilées ainsi que des échantillons de productions locales associées sur des sites choisis à travers toute la Méditerranée et la mer Noire. (shrink)

In this highly insightful analysis of Western and Chinese concepts of efficacy, François Jullien subtly delves into the metaphysical preconceptions of the two civilizations to account for diverging patterns of action in warfare, politics, and diplomacy. He shows how Western and Chinese strategies work in several domains (the battlefield, for example) and analyzes two resulting acts of war. The Chinese strategist manipulates his own troops and the enemy to win a battle without waging war and to bring about victory (...) effortlessly. Efficacity in China is thus conceived of in terms of transformation (as opposed to action) and manipulation, making it closer to what is understood as efficacy in the West. Jullien’s brilliant interpretations of an array of recondite texts are key to understanding our own conceptions of action, time, and reality in this foray into the world of Chinese thought. In its clear and penetrating characterization of two contrasting views of reality from a heretofore unexplored perspective, A Treatise on Efficacy will be of central importance in the intellectual debate between East and West. (shrink)

This enlarged edition of Mario Bunge's Dictionary of Philosophy is a superb reference work for both students and professional philosophers.

According to philosophical orthodoxy, the parties to moral or legal disputes genuinely disagree only if their uses of key normative terms in the dispute express the same meaning. Recently, however, this orthodoxy has been challenged. According to an influential alternative view, genuine moral and legal disagreements should be understood as metalinguistic negotiations over which meaning a given term should have. In this paper, we argue that the shared meaning view is motivated by much deeper considerations than its recent critics recognize, (...) and that much would be lost in opting for the explanation of normative disputes as metalinguistic negotiations. (shrink)

Research on employees’ responses to corporate social responsibility has recently accelerated and begun appearing in top-tier academic journals. However, existing findings are still largely fragmented, and this stream of research lacks theoretical consolidation. This article integrates the diffuse and multi-disciplinary literature on CSR micro-level influences in a theoretically driven conceptual framework that contributes to explain and predict when, why, and how employees might react to CSR activity in a way that influences organizations’ economic and social performance. Drawing on social identity (...) theory and social exchange theory, we delineate the different but interdependent psychological mechanisms that explain how CSR can strengthen the employee–organization relationship and subsequently foster employee-related, micro-level outcomes. Contributions of our framework to extant literature and potential extensions for future research are then discussed. (shrink)

Common sense has it that animals matter considerably less than humans; the welfare and suffering of a cow, a chicken or a fish are important but not as much as the welfare and suffering of a human being. Most animal ethicists reject this “speciesist” view as mere prejudice. In their opinion, there is no difference between humans and other animals that could justify such unequal consideration. In the opposite camp, advocates of speciesism have long tried to identify a difference that (...) would fit the bill, but they have consistently seemed to fail. In light of this, some naturally began to appeal to Moorean arguments: the case against speciesism must be flawed somehow, these philosophers maintain, because speciesism is supported by a strong and widespread intuition. This chapter draws on recent findings in social psychology to criticize this defence of speciesism. It argues that the strong and widespread intuition that humans count more than animals is epistemically defective because it is causally shaped by a pair of irrelevant influences: cognitive dissonance and tribalism. Accordingly, it is no suitable basis for a Moorean argument. (shrink)

À partir d’une étude qualitative comparée en France et au Québec, nous montrons dans cet article que la phase d’intégration des nouvelles recrues aides-soignantes dans les organisations gériatriques françaises et québécoises est une phase complexe d’expérimentation du métier, où elles intègrent des normes collectives de rythmes de travail. Le collectif de travail, par la voix d’une « ancienne », juge de la capacité des nouvelles recrues à respecter ces rythmes et transmet des stratégies de régulation créées localement et indispensables pour (...) répondre aux prescriptions contradictoires. La situation actuelle d’intensification du travail vécue dans les organisations gériatriques françaises et québécoises conduit néanmoins à une fragilisation dangereuse des collectifs, voire à une individualisation du rapport aux enjeux organisationnels. Une telle individualisation peut conduire les nouvelles recrues à subir une souffrance éthique consécutive au fait d’accomplir des actes moralement condamnables pour parvenir à respecter les normes temporelles. (shrink)

Diversity of evidence is widely claimed to be crucial for evidence amalgamation to have distinctive epistemic merits. Bayesian epistemologists capture this idea in the variety-of-evidence thesis: ceteris paribus, the strength of confirmation of a hypothesis by an evidential set increases with the diversity of the evidential elements in that set. Yet, formal exploration of this thesis has shown that it fails to be generally true. This article demonstrates that the thesis fails in even more circumstances than recent results would lead (...) us to expect. Most importantly, it can fail whatever the chance that the evidential sources are unreliable. Our results hold for two types of degrees of variety: reliability independence and testable aspect independence. We conclude that the variety-of-evidence thesis can, at best, be interpreted as an exception-prone rule of thumb. (shrink)

A defence of the 'pragmatic' theory of anaphora (which stresses the analogy between anaphora and deixis) against an argument put forward by Gareth Evans.

The moral error theory holds that moral claims and beliefs, because they commit us to the existence of illusory entities, are systematically false or untrue. It is an open question what we should do with moral thought and discourse once we have become convinced by this view. Until recently, this question had received two main answers. The abolitionist proposed that we should get rid of moral thought altogether. The fictionalist, though he agreed we should eliminate moral beliefs, enjoined us to (...) replace them with attitudes that resemble to some extent the attitudes we have towards pieces of fiction. But there is now a third theory on the market: conservationism, the view that we should keep holding moral beliefs, even though we know them to be false. (According to a fourth theory, ‘substitutionism’, we should modify the content of our moral claims in such a way that they become true.) Putting abolitionism (and substitutionism) aside, our aim is to assess the plausibility of conservationism as an alternative to the – relatively dominant – fictionalism that we find in the literature. Given the difficulty of finding a conservationist view that is both (i) plausible and (ii) not merely a terminological variant of fictionalism, we will argue that conservationism fails to constitute a plausible alternative to fictionalism, at least insofar as it purports to be an alternative view as to what we should do with our moral thoughts. (shrink)

We provide a Kripke semantics for a STIT logic with the "next" operator. As the atemporal group STIT is undecidable and unaxiomatizable, we are interested in strict fragments of atemporal group STIT. First we prove that the satisfiability problem of a formula of the fragment made up of individual coalitions plus the grand coalition is also NEXPTIME-complete. We then generalize this result to a fragment where coalitions are in a given lattice. We also prove that if we restrict the language (...) to nested coalitions the satisfiability problem is NP-complete if the number of agents is fixed and PSPACE-complete if the number of agents is variable. Finally we embed individual STIT with the "next" operator into a fragment of atemporal group STIT. (shrink)

Many people believe that human interests matter much more than the like interests of non-human animals, and this “speciesist belief” plays a crucial role in the philosophical debate over the moral status of animals. In this paper, I develop a debunking argument against it. My contention is that this belief is unjustified because it is largely due to an off-track process: our attempt to reduce the cognitive dissonance generated by the “meat paradox”. Most meat-eaters believe that it is wrong to (...) harm animals unnecessarily, yet they routinely and deliberately behave in ways that cause great unnecessary suffering to animals. As recent research suggests, this practical inconsistency puts them in an unpleasant state of dissonance, which they try to escape by resolving the paradox. And they do so in part by adopting the speciesist belief—if animal suffering matters much less than human suffering, then harming animals cannot be so wrong after all. Since this belief-forming process does not track moral truth, I conclude that we are not justified in believing that human interests matter more than the similar interests of non-humans. (shrink)

The variety-of-evidence thesis has been criticized by Bovens and Hartmann. This article points to two limitations of their Bayesian model: the conceptualization of unreliable evidential sources as randomizing and the restriction to comparing full independence to full dependence. It is shown that the variety-of-evidence thesis is rehabilitated when unreliable sources are reconceptualized as systematically biased. However, it turns out that allowing for degrees of independence leads to a qualification of the variety-of-evidence thesis: as Bovens and Hartmann claimed, more independence does (...) not always imply stronger confirmation. (shrink)

The moral error theory has become increasingly popular in recent decades. So much so indeed that a new issue emerged, the so-called “now-what problem”: if all our moral beliefs are false, then what should we do with them? So far, philosophers who are interested in this problem have focused their attention on the mode of the attitudes we should have with respect to moral propositions. Some have argued that we should keep holding proper moral beliefs; others that we should replace (...) our moral beliefs with fictional attitudes, beliefs in natural facts, or conative attitudes. But all these philosophers have set aside an important question about the content of these attitudes: which moral propositions, and more generally which moral theory, should we accept? The present paper addresses this neglected issue, arguing that moral error theorists should adopt a utilitarian moral fiction. In other words, they should accept the set of moral principles whose general acceptance would maximize overall well-being. (shrink)

This article forms part of a study which was inspired by the ever-growing need for significance expressed both by my life coaching and pastoral therapy clients as well as the need for existential meaning reported both in the lay press and academic literature. The study reflected on a life that matters with a group of co-researchers in a participatory action research relationship. The study has been positioned within pastoral theology and invited the theological discourse into a reflection of existential meaning. (...) Adopting a critical relational constructionist epistemology, the research was positioned within a postmodern paradigm. The implications for meaning and research were explored and described. This article tells the story of how spirituality was positioned in the narratives of meaning by my fellow researchers. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhat does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of (...) the representational practice within which the thought or utterance is located. In thus favoring a “relational model” in metasemantics, we share Ronald Dworkin's goal of explaining fundamental legal disagreements, and also his reliance on constructive interpretation. But what we delineate is a far more general and explanatorily resourceful metasemantics than what Dworkin articulated, which also bypasses some controversial implications for the nature of law that Dworkin alleged. (shrink)

Following a controversy over the construction of a waste incinerator in the Fos-sur-Mer industrial area, residents pointed to the lack of knowledge of the industry’s cumulative impact on their health and environment. Under pressure, some of their elected representatives supported the creation of an independent scientific organization, the Ecocitizen Institute for Pollution Awareness. Its objective was to conduct localized scientific research on the effects of pollution and to lobby the administration to change its regulatory practices. This paper examines the efforts (...) made to ensure that the “undone science” gets done, by focusing on the specificities of this industrialized site. We look at a participatory biomonitoring experiment that aimed to document pollution in the Gulf of Fos where scientists working for the IECP accepted anglers’ requests and switched from an acknowledged sentinel species to another species. We tell the many stories that were shared with us about how conger qualified as a more suitable “cosmopolitical fish” in the study of pollution. Elaborating on actor–network theory and multispecies ethnographies, we discuss the appropriateness of congers as the newly appointed sentinel species. We argue that this demonstrates the importance of the “ecology of relations” in maintaining the livability of the area. (shrink)