Cet article vise à analyser les racines biologiques et psychopathologiques de l’antisémitisme. Il privilégie la notion de dialectique afin de comprendre la transition de l’anti-judaïsme à l’antisémitisme comme passage d’une opposition d’essence spirituelle et religieuse à un rejet d’ordre national et racial. Historiquement, ce passage est contemporain de l’émergence de la biologie de la race qui a, entre autres, cristallisé les thèmes majeurs d’une tradition mythique, ayant, pendant des siècles, structuré l’identité occidentale. L’antisémitisme proprement dit, dont le terme n’apparaît qu’en (...) 1873, a transformé une opposition dialectique à l’altérité juive en ce qu’Adorno a appelé la « dialectique négative », visant à résoudre définitivement la « question Juive » par la suppression de son objet. A travers une analyse historicoconceptuelle, cet article suggère une nouvelle approche de la genèse du racisme et de l’antisémitisme nazi, d’une part, et des rapports entre la science et l’éthique, d’autre part. (shrink)

Décrivant les grandes lignes de l’avant-projet de révision des lois de bioéthique de 1994, le Premier ministre de l’époque, Lionel Jospin, s’est exprimé en faveur de l’autorisation des recherches sur l’embryon humain. Il cherchait alors à devancer les objections possibles en opposant la recherche fondamentale à la réflexion philosophique et tentait de préciser la question suivante :..

Nous souhaitons analyser la nature des relations dialectiques et complexes que la réalité biologique du VIH entretient avec, d’une part les manifestations psychiques et psychopathologiques, et d’autre part les représentations sociales du sida, qui stigmatisent le corps sidéen, par le biais de procédures discriminatoires souvent présentées comme prophylactiques. L’approche pragmatique..

This work constitutes the Proceedings of the Bar-Ilan International Symposium on the topic ?Sense and Nonsense in Philosophy and Psychopathology.? The symposium was held at Bar-Ilan University (Israel) from June 7-8, 1993, with lectures given in three languages (English, Hebrew and French). Through this symposium an outline of a philosophy of psychopathology related to biology and ethics was presented. It is now clear, especially from clinical experience, that the notions of sense and nonsense cannot be grasped directly, but must be (...) constructed through a reflective process connected with concepts. Furthermore, since psychopathology is for the most part concerned with the disturbance of intersubjective experience, it is directly related to ethics. For this reason, as clearly illustrated by this symposium, psychopathology could provide an excellent basis for philosophical interrogation. (shrink)

Approximately three decades ago the question was first answered whether parasitoids are able to assess the number or origin of eggs in a host for a solitary parasitoid, Leptopilina heterotoma, by fitting theoretically derived distributions to empirical ones. We extend the set of different theoretically postulated distributions of eggs among hosts by combining searching modes and abilities in assessing host quality. In the models, parasitoids search either randomly (Poisson) (1) or by vibrotaxis (Negative Binomial) (2). Parasitoids are: (a) assumed to (...) treat all hosts equally, (b) able to distinguish them in unparasitised and parasitised hosts only, (c) able to distinguish them by the number of eggs they contained, or (d) able to recognise their own eggs. Mathematically tractable combinations of searching mode (1 and 2) and abilities (a,b,c,d) result in seven different models (M1a, M1b, M1c, M1d, M2a, M2b and M2c). These models have been simulated for a varying number of searching parasitoids and various mean numbers of eggs per host. Each resulting distribution is fitted to all theoretical models. The model with the minimum Akaike's information criterion (AIC) is chosen as the best fitting for each simulated distribution. We thus investigate the power of the AIC and for each distribution with a specified mean number of eggs per host we derive a frequency distribution for classification.Firstly, we discuss the simulations of models including random search (M1a, M1b, M1c and M1d). For M1a, M1c and M1d the simulated distributions are correctly classified in at least 70% of all cases. However, in a few cases model M1b is only properly classified for intermediate mean values of eggs per host. The models including vibrotaxis as searching behaviour (M2a, M2b and M2c) cannot be distinguished from those with random search if the mean number of eggs per host is low. Among the models incorporating vibrotaxis the three abilities are detected analogously as in models with random search. (shrink)

Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Imagerie Ce´re´brale (LENA), Hoˆpital de La Salpeˆtrie`re, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

L'originalite du present recueil reside surtout dans le fait qu'il reflete dans toute sa diversite le champ mondial de l'attention philosophique au langage. Au lieu de se confiner dans un territoire particulier - que ce soit celui de l'hermeneutique allemande ou celui de l'analytisme anglo-saxon par exemple - il s'offre, tout au contraire, comme espace de confrontation authentiquement philosophique (et non de debat technique a l'interieur d'une ecole ou d'une tendance) dans lequel des pensees des langages se cotoient et se (...) rencontrent venues des horizons les plus heterogenes (informatique, theologique, hermeneutique, analytique, pragmatique, ideologique,...). Cette riche diversite manifeste aussi l'extraordinaire interet de la pensee contemporaine pour le langage, interet qui fonde peut-etre la veritable specificite de la philosophie du XXe siecle. (shrink)

"One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy." -- J. Hillis Miller, Yale University Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. Thirty (...) years later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable. (shrink)

Of laws in general -- Of laws directly derived from the nature of government -- Of the principles of the three kinds of government -- That the laws of education ought to be relative to the principles of government -- That the laws given by the legislator ought to be relative to the nature of government -- Consquences of the principles of different governments, with respect to the simplicity of civil and criminal laws, the form of judgements, and inflicting of (...) punishments -- Consquences of the different principles of the three governments, with respect to sumptuary laws, luxury, and the condition of women -- Of the corruption of the principles of the three governments -- Of the laws in the relation they bear to defensive force -- Of laws, in the relation they bear to offensive force. (shrink)

Last year at VSS, Bullot, Droulez & Pylyshyn reported studies using a Modified Traveling Salesman Paradigm in which a virtual vehicle had to visit up to 10 targets once and only once, and in which the invisible targets were identified only by line segments pointing from the vehicle toward each target. We hypothesized that subjects used two distinct strategies: A “location-based strategy”, which kept track of where targets were located in screen coordinates, and a “segment-based strategy” that kept track of (...) which segments corresponded to visited targets. We report new studies that further explore these two strategies. Subjects passively observed a computer-controlled virtual vehicle that visited a number of targets. Two forms of display were used: an “Allocentric” display, in which the vehicle moved and the targets remained fixed in screen coordinates, and an “Egocentric” display, in which the vehicle's position on the screen remained fixed while the targets moved -- as if the environment were being viewed by an observer on the vehicle. At the end of each trial, the directional segments were extended to the edge of the screen and subjects were asked to perform two tasks by referring to these segments. In the “status task” observers had to indicate for each segment whether the corresponding target had been visited or not. In the “locating task” they had to locate each target along its directional segment. Performance on these two tasks measures the use of the two hypothesized strategies. Results showed that observers do well on the status task with 4 or 6 targets in both display conditions, but do poorly on the locating task, especially in the egocentric condition when there are more targets. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that in the egocentric condition the MTSP task is carried out primarily by segment-tracking, which can be viewed as a deictic strategy. (shrink)