This article tacks back towards the idealist side of the argument, in a spirited defence of critical humanism against the radical symmetry of ANT. Vandenberghe argues that the critique of reification and the ethics of emancipation require us to go beyond the `flat ontology' of ANT and its intermediate level of sociotechnical networks towards a more stratified view of social reality, which is able to account for the determining effect of broader generative but invisible structures of domination. Reasserting the categorical (...) distinction between the ontological regions inhabited by humans and nonhumans, he develops a critical opposition between the gift economy, which emphasizes qualitative relations of reciprocity between humans and which tends towards the personalization of things, and the commodity economy, which objectifies things as property, promotes the reification of persons, and turns them into strategically operating `humants'. This model is critically applied to ANT by suggesting that its `fetishist' attribution of social power to nonhumans effectively results from a failure to account for the emergent properties of the broader relational and cultural systems in which they are embedded, and which overdetermine the blackboxed object worlds which ANT has described. (shrink)

Individual identity and the multiplicity of cultural factors that “influence” the individual obviously raise the question of who we are as persons. But it is equally obvious that such individual reality is temporal, thereby constituting individual history. The latter seems to be like a Heraclitean flux where change is the only constant. In other words, since we never cease to change—even imperceptibly—shouldn’t we conclude that we never remain identical to ourselves in such a process of becoming? To use a concept (...) put forward by Ricœur, Idem-Identity, as stable and substantial sameness, appears to be an illusion, as we are the history of our actions and experiences, a history that continues to shape... (shrink)

Max Weber and Georg Simmel are considered as ideal-typical founders of sociology. Whereas Simmel pleaded for a large conception of sociology, which would include the epistemological and metaphysical issues as well, Max Weber explicitly excluded philosophical questions from the domain of sociology. A philosophical reading of Max Weber's sociology, which uncovers his philosophy in the margins of his sociological texts, shows, however, that his sociology is predicated on a disenchanted Weltanschauung, a decisionistic ideology and a nominalist epistemology. Key Words: critical (...) theory • decisionism • disenchantment • epistemology • foundations • nominalism • philosophy • realism • Simmel • sociology • value-freedom • Weber. (shrink)

Although the meaning of «phenomenology» significantly differs from Fichte to Henry, it is nonetheless a similar problem that both thinkers encounter since they both can be read as conceiving of the absolute as life, i.e. as that which essentially and necessarily escapes the power of the concept as well as that of sight. If life is according to its very essence invisible, then it must remain outside the realms of intuition and discourse. On the other hand, life is precisely what (...) a phenomenology of life as a philosophical discourse is aiming at. By placing the recognition of the absolute in the center of their approach, both Henry’s material phenomenology and Fichte’s phenomenology – presented in his 1804 Wissenschaftslehre Zweiter Vortrag – raise the question of the conditions of possibility enabling such knowing and recognition. From an ethical point of view, however, the decisive question, that of the existential form that this recognition could take in the realm of action, remains open. (shrink)

Comment une phénoménologie de la vie est-elle possible? Telle est la question que Michel Henry pose à l’égard de sa propre démarche, au moment où celle-ci rencontre l’aporie qu’elle avait elle-même suscitée à travers sa critique de la pensée, c’est-à-dire, aussi et surtout, à travers sa critique du voir de l’intentionnalité. En effet, si la vie est par essence invisible, elle doit se dérober à toute vue et, ainsi, à tout discours qui prétendrait la saisir. Or, c’est là justement ce (...) que prétend faire une phénoménologie de la vie en tant qu’elle est philosophie et “qu’un ouvrage de philosophie n’est autre qu’une série d’intuitions ou d’évidences se voulant liées selon des enchaînements nécessaires et formulées dans des propositions dont la donation – la lecture ou l’écriture – demande elle-même au voir, au Logos grec, sa possibilité.” Il s’agit évidemment d’un problème essentiel, puisque c’est par la réponse qui lui sera donnée que seront décidés, du même coup, la légitimité et la possibilité de la phénoménologie de la vie elle-même. (shrink)

Perruchet & Vinter do not fully resolve issues about the role of consciousness and the unconscious in cognition and learning, and it is doubtful that consciousness has been computationally implemented. The cascade-correlation (CC) connectionist model develops high-order feature detectors as it learns a problem. We describe an extension, knowledge-based cascade-correlation (KBCC), that uses knowledge to learn in a hierarchical fashion.

El presente artículo compara los discursos teóricos y las interpretaciones de las realidades subnacionales, enfocándose en algunos de sus aspectos socioeconómicos, políticos y culturales. Argumenta que los territorios sub-nacionales pueden ser considerados bajo un ángulo glocalista o bien bajo el ángulo de un empoderamientode las poblaciones locales; que la descentralización política no es, en si misma, portadora de un avance democrático, y que el desarrollo local y regional, la descentralización política y las identidades colectivas son tres componentes que contribuyen a (...) la valorización de los territorios. (shrink)

We suggest that the framework proposed by Vigil is useful in laboratory contexts but might come up short for in vivo social interactions. Emotions result from cost-benefits trade-offs but are not solely generated at the individual level to establish emotional social spheres. In organizational contexts, emotion expression can be a constitutive part of a professional activity, and observed sex differences might vanish.

This paper examines the correspondence and contacts between Galileo and a number of French intellectuals. It demonstrates that exchanges between Galileo and those Frenchmen did much to stimulate an interest in new scientific ideas in France, especially in astronomy; for example, Galileo provided a number of good telescopic lenses that did much to establish observational astronomy in France. The Frenchmen for their part provided Galileo with considerable useful information. Several were very active in his support after the condemnation of 1633 (...) and in publishing his later works. The paper further demonstrates the extent of the network of intellectuals who corresponded with Galileo and each other across Europe in the early seventeenth century. (shrink)