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 Drawing on unpublished archives and hundreds of personal interviews, Dosse elucidates a collaboration that lasted more than two decades, underscoring the role that family and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)

After a generous introduction to the subject, essays follow on transcendence and spirituality from a multidisciplinary and multifaith perspective: a focus on Abrahamic, Oriental, and African religions, a study of transcendence in Nazism, etc.

Étienne Pouliot | Résumé : On convient aisément que tout témoignage peut renvoyer à une expérience, passée ou du moins présupposée, ou encore qu’il peut véhiculer en quelque sorte un message. Il ne se réduit pas pour autant à n’être qu’une fenêtre sur autre chose, voire sur lui-même. En vérité, parce qu’il est avant tout parole, le témoignage constitue toujours et se constitue précisément en un certain ratage de l’expérience là représentée, du message là livré, du vécu là offert. (...) Un examen de certaines conditions épistémologiques de cet enjeu de la représentation au coeur du témoignage, en écho à la philosophie de Paul Ricoeur mais pour en signaler le point aveugle, permet d’élucider que cet enjeu y est second — ce qui ne signifie en rien : secondaire — par rapport à un enjeu herméneutique bien plus originaire, bien plus radical et fondamental que la représentation elle-même : celui de la parole. Au travers du témoignage, une parole atteste autant qu’elle efface. |: We all agree that witnessing may refer back to experience — to something from the past or at least to something that is presupposed — or that it may be the vehicle for some message. This does not mean that witnessing is merely a window onto something else, or onto itself. Indeed, because it is first and foremost “word”, it always stands as a reminder of its inability to represent what it purports to represent and as a failure to deliver the message it intends to deliver. This examination of some of the epistemological underpinnings of representation — which echoes the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur even as it points to a blind spot in his position — intends to show that the issue of representation comes second in witnessing and that a far more radical and fundamental issue — a hermeneutical one — also comes into play here. Thus witnessing, and more precisely the word that is witnessing, both attests to and obliterates itself. (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.

Cadherins are a multigene family of proteins which mediate homophilic calcium‐dependent cell adhesion and are thought to play an important role in morphogenesis by mediating specific intercellular adhesion. Different lines of experimental evidence have recently indicated that the site responsible for mediating adhesive interactions is localized to the first extracellular domain of cadherin. Based upon an analysis of the sequence of this domain, I show that cadherins can be classified into three groups with distinct structural features. Furthermore, using this sequence (...) information a phylogenetic tree relating the known cadherins was assembled. This is the first such tree to be published for the cadherins. One cadherin subtype, neural cadherin (N‐cadherin), shows very little sequence divergence between species, whereas all other cadherin subtypes show more substantial divergence, suggesting that selective pressure upon this domain may be greater for N‐cadherin than for other cadherins. Phylogenetic analysis also suggests that the gene duplications which established the main branches leading to the different cadherin subtypes occurred very early in their history. These duplications set the stage for the diversified superfamily we now observe. (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)

Cumulative technological culture (CTC) refers to the increase in the efficiency and complexity of tools and techniques in human populations over generations. A fascinating question is to understand the cognitive origins of this phenomenon. Because CTC is definitely a social phenomenon, most accounts have suggested a series of cognitive mechanisms oriented toward the social dimension (e.g., teaching, imitation, theory of mind, and metacognition), thereby minimizing the technical dimension and the potential influence of non-social, cognitive skills. What if we have failed (...) to see the elephant in the room? What if social cognitive mechanisms were only catalyzing factors and not thesufficient and necessaryconditions for the emergence of CTC? In this article, we offer an alternative, unified cognitive approach to this phenomenon by assuming that CTC originates in non-social cognitive skills, namely technical-reasoning skills which enable humans to develop the technical potential necessary to constantly acquire and improve technical information. This leads us to discuss how theory of mind and metacognition, in concert with technical reasoning, can help boost CTC. The cognitive approach developed here opens up promising new avenues for reinterpreting classical issues (e.g., innovation, emulation vs. imitation, social vs. asocial learning, cooperation, teaching, and overimitation) in a field that has so far been largely dominated by other disciplines, such as evolutionary biology, mathematics, anthropology, archeology, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

Illusionism about phenomenal consciousness is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, even though it seems to exist. This thesis is widely judged to be uniquely counterintuitive: the idea that consciousness is an illusion strikes most people as absurd, and seems almost impossible to contemplate in earnest. Defenders of illusionism should be able to explain the apparent absurdity of their own thesis, within their own framework. However, this is no trivial task: arguably, none of the illusionist theories currently on (...) the market is able to do this. I present a new theory of phenomenal introspection and argue that it might deal with the task at hand. (shrink)

Plato’s works have been the object of countless interpretations and recuperations ever since Greek antiquity. In the context of prenazi Germany, the writer Hans F.K. Günther published a work in defence of eugenic theories (aiming to improve man through authoritarian laws), allegedly based on the work of the Athenian philosopher and entitled Platon als Hüter des Lebens (“Plato as Protector of Life”). The present article tries to set forth what is at stake in that propaganda piece, its historical context, as (...) well as the disquieting implications of such an “appropriation” of classical philosophy to purely political ends. (shrink)

Phenomenal consciousness appears to be particularly normatively significant. For this reason, sentience-based conceptions of ethics are widespread. In the field of animal ethics, knowing which animals are sentient appears to be essential to decide the moral status of these animals. I argue that, given that materialism is true of the mind, phenomenal consciousness is probably not particularly normatively significant. We should face up to this probable insignificance of phenomenal consciousness and move towards an ethic without sentience.

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)

La philosophie bergsonnienne a rendu le monde de ses contemporains moins opaque, les aidant à lui trouver un sens. Si la France cartésienne coïncide avec les partisans de la démocratie parlementaire ancrée à gauche, celle de Bergson recrute ses plus gros bataillons dans la droite nationale, conservatrice, mais également dans une gauche antiparlementaire, révolutionnaire.

Illusionism about consciousness is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, but merely seems to exist. Embracing illusionism presents the theoretical advantage that one does not need to explain how consciousness arises from purely physical brains anymore, but only to explain why consciousness seems to exist while it does not. As Keith Frankish puts it, illusionism replaces the “hard problem of consciousness” with the “illusion problem.” However, a satisfying version of illusionism has to explain not only why the illusion (...) of consciousness arises, but also why it arises with its particular strength: Notably, why we are so deeply reluctant to recognize the illusory nature of consciousness. Explaining our strong intuitive resistance to illusionism means solving what I call the “illusion meta-problem,” which I think is a part of the illusion problem. In this paper, I argue that current versions of illusionism are unable to solve the illusion meta-problem. I focus on two of the most promising recent illusionist theories of consciousness, and I show why they fail to explain the peculiar reluctance we encounter whenever we try to accept that consciousness is an illusion. (shrink)

Я интерпретирую философские взгляды Вернера Гайзенберга как прагматизм и неметафизический реализм виттгенштайновского типа. «Замкнутая теория» – виттгенштайновское правило/концепт. В отличие от Бокулич, предпочитающей позицию Дирака относительно природы связей между различными физическими теориями, я отдаю предпочтение позиции Гайзенберга. Моя позиция, интерпретирующая Гайзенберга, также прямо противоположна позиции Поппера: критерием устоявшейся научной (замкнутой) теории является её нефальсифицируемость. -/- I interpret philosophical views of Werner Heisenberg as a pragmatism and non-metaphysical realism of a Wittgensteinian kind. The “closed theory” is a Wittgensteinian rule/concept. Unlike Alisa (...) Bokulich, favouring Dirac’s position about inter-theoretical relations, I favour Heisenberg’s one. My position, interpreting Heisenberg’s notion of a closed theory, is also in direct opposition to Popper’s one: the criterion of an established scientific (closed) theory is its non-falsifiability. (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)

Renowned philosopher and prominent French critic François Noudelmann engages the musicality of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes, all of whom were amateur piano players and acute lovers of the medium. Though piano playing was a crucial art for these thinkers, their musings on the subject are largely scant, implicit, or discordant with each philosopher's oeuvre. Noudelmann both recovers and integrates these perspectives, showing that the manner in which these philosophers played, the composers they adored, and the music (...) they chose reveals uncommon insight into their thinking styles and patterns. Noudelmann positions the physical and theoretical practice of music as a dimension underpinning and resonating with Sartre's, Nietzsche's, and Barthes's unique philosophical outlook. By reading their thought against their music, he introduces new critical formulations and reorients their trajectories, adding invaluable richness to these philosophers' lived and embodied experiences. The result heightens the multiple registers of being and the relationship between philosophy and the senses that informed so much of their work. A careful reader of music, Noudelmann maintains an elegant command of the texts under his gaze and appreciates the discursive points of musical and philosophical scholarship they involve, especially with regard to recent research and cutting-edge critique. (shrink)

Response to Alex Byrne's paper 'Knowing what I see'.

This article maintains that an important class of scientific generalizations should be reinterpreted: they have typically been understood as ceteris paribus laws, but are, in fact, generics. Four arguments are presented to support this thesis. One argument is that the interpretation in terms of ceteris paribus laws is a historical accident. The other three arguments draw on similarities between these generalizations and archetypal generics: they come with similar inferential commitments, they share a syntactic form, and the existing theories to make (...) sense of them are alike. Once these generalizations are properly understood as generics, the recent cognitive approach to generics can be extended to the study of the relevant sciences. The last section indicates ways in which this extension is fruitful for the two strands of research that we combine: the philosophy of science literature on generalizations and the semantics literature on generics. (shrink)

This article examines two theses formulated by Russo and Williamson in their study of causal inference in the health sciences. The two theses are assessed against evidence from a specific case in the social sciences, i.e., research on the institutional determinants of the aggregate unemployment rate. The first Russo–Williamson Thesis is that a causal claim can only be established when it is jointly supported by difference-making and mechanistic evidence. This thesis is shown not to hold. While researchers in my case (...) study draw extensively on both types of evidence, one causal claim out of the three analyzed is established even though it is exclusively supported by mechanistic evidence. The second Russo–Williamson Thesis is that standard accounts of causality fail to handle the dualist epistemology highlighted in the first Thesis. I argue that a counterfactual-manipulationist account of causality—which is endorsed by many philosophers as well as many social scientists—can perfectly make sense of the typical strategy in my case study to draw on both difference-making and mechanistic evidence; it is just an instance of the common strategy of increasing evidential variety. (shrink)

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)

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)

This paper analyzes recent attempts to reject reproduction with lineage formation as a necessary condition for evolution by means of natural selection :560–570, 2008; Stud Hist Philos Sci Part C Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci 42:106–114, 2011; Bourrat in Biol Philos 29:517–538, 2014; Br J Philos Sci 66:883–903, 2015; Charbonneau in Philos Sci 81:727–740, 2014; Doolittle and Inkpen in Proc Natl Acad Sci 115:4006–4014, 2018). Building on the strengths of these attempts and avoiding their pitfalls, it is argued that (...) a robust formulation of evolution by natural selection without reproduction can be established. The main contribution of this paper is a reformulation of Lewontin’s three principles stating that minimal evolution by natural selection occurs when two conditions are met in a population: fitness-related variation and memory. Paradigmatic evolution by natural selection, which can generate adaptations, takes place when an additional condition is present, namely regeneration. (shrink)