The classic essay on the "karesansui" garden by French art historian Berthier has now been translated by Graham Parkes, giving English-speaking readers a concise, thorough, and beautifully illustrated history of Zen rock gardens. 37 ...

In developmental lexical–gustatory synesthesia, specific words can trigger taste perceptions and these synesthetic associations are generally stable. We describe a case of multilingual lexical–gustatory synesthesia for whom some synesthesias were bidirectional as some tastes also triggered auditory word associations. Evoked concurrents could be gustatory but also tactile sensations. In addition to words and pseudowords, many voices were effective inducers, suggesting increased connections between cortical taste areas and both voice-selective and language-selective areas. Lasting changes in some evoked tastes occurred during childhood (...) suggesting that some plasticity can be present after the initial learning of associations. Inducers were often linked to taste concurrents phonologically or semantically, but also through identifiable childhood episodes . Several inducers were phonologically linked to episodic inducers suggesting a process of secondary acquisition for many inducers. Implications of these observations are discussed. (shrink)

Les auteurs de cet ouvrage se sont donné pour tâche de relire l'œuvre de Giorgio Agamben en refusant de la convertir en simple objet d'analyse. Ils essayent plutôt d'entendre " l'héritage de la puissance " à laquelle la littérature comme phénomène semble nous engager, en retraçant un chemin dont les haltes se situent au cœur de la méditation agambenienne sur notre époque : l'avènement possible d'un sujet qui descendrait d'une " puissance pure ", irréductible à l'identification, dépouillé de toute substance, (...) sinon du mouvement par lequel il s'approprie lui-même en tant que puissance sans objet. Chacun des auteurs tente ainsi de potentialiser certaines propositions d'Agamben à partir de ce qu'on appelle " littérature ". Comment, à l'heure où celle-ci semble faire l'épreuve d'une neutralisation de son destin historique, penser sa relation au temps messianique? Au moment où plusieurs œuvres se vouent au recueillement de l'innommé, de l'insignifiant et des heures mortes comme au seul territoire qui leur serait préservé, comment penser l'articulation philologique entre le reste et la résistance? Pourrait-on conférer à la littérature un statut d'exception politique, voire de zone d'anomie constitutive du politique? Avec la participation de Guillaume Asselin, Etienne Beaulieu, Jean-François Bourgeault, Georges- Leroux, Eric Méchoulan, Pierre Ouellet, Sarah Rocheville, Lionel Ruffel, Sylvano Santini et Jean-Pierre Vidal. (shrink)

Networks for the exchange and/or sharing of genetic data are developing in many countries. We focus here on the situations in the US and France. We highlight some recent and remarkable differences between these two countries concerning the mode of access to, and the storage and use of genetic data, particularly as concerns two-sided markets and dynamic consent or dynamic electronic informed consent. This brief overview suggests that, even though the organization and function of these two-sided markets remain open to (...) criticism, dynamic e-IC should be more widely used, especially in France, if only to determine its real effectiveness. (shrink)

Résumé Chez Samuel Beckett, François Morellet et KP Brehmer, l’art de la contrainte impose une trame formelle et logique pour mieux la trahir – l’altérer, la révéler –, renouvelant au passage l’économie de l’œuvre et son statut. Dans une double tradition littéraire et plastique, la mise au dehors du geste créateur et l’apparente désaffection des systèmes choisis produisent autant d’interférences symptomatiques dans l’œuvre et dans son contexte. Cet abandon agit comme le moyen paradoxal d’impliquer l’affect et d’ouvrir l’œuvre à (...) des résonances nouvelles. (shrink)

Guillaume d’Auvergne est l’un des auteurs les plus injustement méconnus du Moyen Âge. Sa pensée fut occultée par celles de ces grands théologiens un peu plus tardifs du XIIIe siècle, Albert le Grand, Thomas d’Aquin ou Bonaventure, qui lui doivent pourtant la première tentative de penser le christianisme au moyen de l’apport des textes grecs et arabes nouvellement traduits. Seul Roger Bacon reconnaît sa dette envers lui, mais en engageant une interprétation de ces thèses qui ajoutera encore à la (...) mécompréhension dont souffre toujours Guillaume. (shrink)

The acquisition and evolution of speech production, discourse and communication can be negatively impacted by brain malformations. We describe, for the first time, a case of developmental dynamic dysphasia (DDD) in a right-handed adolescent boy (subject D) with cortical malformations involving language-eloquent regions (inferior frontal gyrus) in both the left and the right hemispheres. Language evaluation revealed a markedly reduced verbal output affecting phonemic and semantic fluency, phrase and sentence generation and verbal communication in everyday life. Auditory comprehension, repetition, naming, (...) reading and spelling were relatively preserved, but executive function was impaired. Multimodal neuroimaging showed a malformed cerebral cortex with atypical configuration and placement of white matter tracts bilaterally and abnormal callosal fibers. Dichotic listening showed right hemisphere dominance for language and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) additionally revealed dissociated hemispheric language representation with right frontal activation for phonology and bilateral dominance for semantic processing. Moreover, subject D also had congenital mirror movements (CMM), defined as involuntary movements of one side of the body that mirror intentional movements of the other side. Transcranial magnetic stimulation and fMRI during voluntary unimanual (left and right) hand movements showed bilateral motor cortex recruitment and tractography revealed a lack of decussation of bilateral corticospinal tracts. Genetic testing aimed to detect mutations that disrupt the development of commissural tracts correlating with CMM (e.g., Germline DCC mutations) was negative. Overall, our findings suggest that DDD in subject D resulted from the underdevelopment of the left inferior frontal gyrus with limited capacity for plastic reorganization by its homologous counterpart in the right hemisphere. Corpus callosum anomalies probably contributed to hinder interhemispheric connectivity necessary to compensate language and communication deficits after left frontal involvement. (shrink)

(2012). DEL-sequents for regression and epistemic planning. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 337-367. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2012.736703.

Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) deals with the representation and the study in a multi-agent setting of knowledge and belief change. It can express in a uniform way epistemic statements about: 1. what is true about an initial situation 2. what is true about an event occurring in this situation 3. what is true about the resulting situation after the event has occurred. We axiomatize within the DEL framework what we can infer about (iii) given (i) and (ii). Given three formulas (...) φ,φ' and φ" describing respectively (i), (ii) and (iii), we also show how to build a formula φ ? φ' which captures all the information which can be inferred about (iii) from φ and φ'. We show how our results extend to other modal logics than K. In our proofs and definitions, we resort to a large extent to the normal form formulas for modal logic originally introduced by Kit Fine. In a companion paper (Aucher, 2012), we axiomatize what we can infer about (ii) given (i) and (iii), and what we can infer about (i) given (ii) and (iii), and show how to build two formulas φ ? φ" and φ' ? φ" which capture respectively all the information which can be inferred about (ii) from φ and φ", and all the information which can be inferred about (i) from φ' and φ". (shrink)

One way social scientists explain phenomena is by building structural models. These models are explanatory insofar as they manage to perform a recursive decomposition on an initial multivariate probability distribution, which can be interpreted as a mechanism. Explanations in social sciences share important aspects that have been highlighted in the mechanisms literature. Notably, spelling out the functioning the mechanism gives it explanatory power. Thus social scientists should choose the variables to include in the model on the basis of their function (...) in the mechanism. This paper examines the notion of ‘function’ within structural modelling. We argue that ‘functions’ ought to be understood as the theoretical underpinnings of the causes, namely as the role that causes play in the functioning of the mechanism. (shrink)

While Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is often seen to involve voluntary and deliberative approaches such as certification, governments have recently stepped into the picture through national legislation. France’s Law on Duty of Vigilance adopted in 2017 is a landmark case of such legislation. Years of voluntary CSR certification schemes led by Civil Society were replaced by a new philosophy of fighting for mandatory CSR controlled by a judge. We depict the change of mindset and the related change of roles inside (...) the coalition of Civil Society actors represents a Machiavellian Moment. The combination of collective civil society actors’ roles (namely nongovernmental organizations and labor unions) as Machiavellian _Virtue_ with disruptive events as Machiavellian _Fortuna_ made the law’s adoption possible. Based on this case study, we provide an analysis of civil society roles in the development of CSR-related legislation. (shrink)

Representing an epistemic situation involving several agents obviously depends on the modeling point of view one takes. We start by identifying the types of modeling points of view which are logically possible. We call the one traditionally followed by epistemic logic the perfect external approach, because there the modeler is assumed to be an omniscient and external observer of the epistemic situation. In the rest of the paper we focus on what we call the internal approach, where the modeler is (...) one of the agents involved in the situation. For this approach we propose and axiomatize a logical formalism based on epistemic logic. This leads us to formalize some intuitions about the internal approach and about its connections with the external ones. Finally, we show that our internal logic is decidable and PSPACE-complete. (shrink)

The Grand Challenges literature brings under its umbrella a wide variety of disjointed phenomena but runs the risk of reinventing the wheel as well as overlooking incremental progress and past work. To avert this, scholars need to (dis)connect (dis)similar issues, build on past research on these issues, and create opportunities for generalizability through theoretical examinations.

After observing that the truth conditions of connectives of non–classical logics are generally defined in terms of formulas of first–order logic, we introduce ‘protologics’, a class of logics whose connectives are defined by arbitrary first–order formulas. Then, we introduce atomic and molecular logics, which are two subclasses of protologics that generalize our gaggle logics and which behave particularly well from a theoretical point of view. We also study and introduce a notion of equi-expressivity between two logics based on different classes (...) of models. We prove that, according to that notion, every pure predicate logic with \ variables and constants is as expressive as a predicate atomic logic, some sort of atomic logic. Then, we prove that the class of protologics is equally expressive as the class of molecular logics. That formally supports our claim that atomic and molecular logics are somehow ‘universal’. Finally, we identify a subclass of molecular logics that we call predicate molecular logics and which constitutes its representative core: every molecular logic is as expressive as a predicate molecular logic. (shrink)

In update logic as studied by Baltag, Moss, Solecki and van Benthem, little attention is paid to the interpretation of an action by an agent, which is just assumed to depend on the situation. This is actually a complex issue that nevertheless complies to some logical dynamics. In this paper, we tackle this topic. We also deal with actions that change propositional facts of the situation. In parallel, we propose a formalism to accurately represent an agent's epistemic state based on (...) hyperreal numbers. In that respect, we use infinitesimals to express what would surprise the agents (and by how much) by contradicting their beliefs. We also use a subjective probability to model the notion of belief. It turns out that our probabilistic update mechanism satisfies the AGM postulates of belief revision. (shrink)

Guillaume Collett questions to what extent we can locate Deleuze within the Lacanian School during the late-1960s, prior to Guattari. In so doing, he offers a new, integrated reading of Deleuze's The Logic of Sense by understanding it as a 'psychoanalysis of sense', and gives a new interpretation of Deleuze's conception of philosophy itself. The Psychoanalysis of Sense shows that Deleuze was not merely aware of the debates animating the Lacanian School during the 1960s: he sought to contribute to (...) them. Emphasising his appropriation of the work of post-Lacanian Serge Leclaire, Collett explains how Deleuze constructed a more singular and immanent theory of the linguistic structure of the unconscious - granting the erogenous body a larger structuring role. (shrink)

Critical thinking is often taught with some emphasis on categories and operations of cognitive biases. The underlying thought is that knowledge of biases equips students to reduce them. The empirical evidence, however, doesn’t provide much support for this thought. We have previously argued that the emphasis on debiasing in critical thinking education is worth preserving, but in light of a more explicit and broader conception of debiasing. We now argue that this broader conception of debiasing strategies obliges critical thinking instructors (...) and curriculum designers to reflect on the teaching approaches that might facilitate the use of those strategies. We propose some teaching techniques to expand the scope of debiasing in the classroom—some untested, some only rarely and recently characterized as critical thinking strategies, rather than as pragmatic considerations in, e.g., design, engineering, marketing. These methods and others like them, we suggest, broaden the prospects for teaching a range of effective critical thinking techniques for debiasing. (shrink)

Unlike in physics, the category of thought experiment is not very common in biology. At least there are no classic examples that are as important and as well-known as the most famous thought experiments in physics, such as Galileo’s, Maxwell’s or Einstein’s. The reasons for this are far from obvious; maybe it has to do with the fact that modern biology for the most part sees itself as a thoroughly empirical discipline that engages either in real natural history or in (...) experimenting on real organisms rather than fictive ones. While theoretical biology does exist and is recognized as part of biology, its role within biology appears to be more marginal than the role of theoretical physics within physics. It could be that this marginality of theory also affects thought experiments as sources of theoretical knowledge. Of course, none of this provides a sufficient reason for thinking that thought experiments are really unimportant in biology. It is quite possible that the common perception of this matter is wrong and that there are important theoretical considerations in biology, past or present, that deserve the title of thought experiment just as much as the standard examples from physics. Some such considerations may even be widely known and considered to be important, but were not recognized as thought experiments. In fact, as we shall see, there are reasons for thinking that what is arguably the single most important biological work ever, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, contains a number of thought experiments. There are also more recent examples both in evolutionary and non-evolutionary biology, as we will show. Part of the problem in identifying positive examples in the history of biology is the lack of agreement as to what exactly a thought experiment is. Even worse, there may not be more than a family resemblance that unifies this epistemic category. We take it that classical thought experiments show the following characteristics: They serve directly or indirectly in the non-empirical epistemic evaluation of theoretical propositions, explanations or hypotheses. Thought experiments somehow appeal to the imagination. They involve hypothetical scenarios, which may or may not be fictive. In other words, thought experiments suppose that certain states of affairs hold and then try to intuit what would happen in a world where these suppositions are true. We want to examine in the following sections if there are episodes in the history of biology that satisfy these criteria. As we will show, there are a few episodes that might satisfy all three of these criteria, and many more if the imagination criterion is dropped or understood in a lose sense. In any case, this criterion is somewhat vague in the first place, unless a specific account of the imagination is presupposed. There will also be issues as to what exactly “non-empirical” means. In general, for the sake of discussion we propose to understand the term “thought experiment” here in a broad rather than a narrow sense here. We would rather be guilty of having too wide a conception of thought experiment than of missing a whole range of really interesting examples. (shrink)

Corporate codes of ethics, which have spread in the last decades, have shown a limited ability to foster ethical behaviors. For instance, they have been criticized for relying too much on formal compliance, rather than taking into account sufficiently agents and their moral development, or promoting self-reflexive behaviors. We aim here at showing that a code of ethics in fact has meaning and enables ethical progress when it is interpreted and appropriated with practical wisdom. We explore a model that represents (...) an uncommon organizational code of ethics: the monastic Rule of St. Benedict, written in the sixth century and still used today. Our empirical study—conducted in several monasteries living under this rule—shows that organization members interpret this rule, both hermeneutically and ethically, to adapt it to situations. They also appropriate this rule as a way of life and treat it as a dynamic framework that helps them to follow their purpose within their organization. This exceptional code actually offers an alternative model for practicing codes of ethics, in a virtue-ethical manner, beyond mere compliance with the text. The way in which reflexive and active agents practice the code, both individually and collectively, shapes their organizational experience and fosters their moral development. (shrink)