Like many interested in the gift, I have to confess to having always experienced a certain attraction for methodological individualism. Through its way of approaching social actors, methodological individualism introduces the actor's concern: what are the sound principles which account for the behaviour of the actors that are observed? This is the question which individualism compels us constantly to ask. Admittedly, its response is almost always the same: self-interest. As R.H. Frank wrote: Most [economists’] texts mention at the outset that (...) our rational choice model takes peoples’ tastes as given. They may be altruists, sadists, masochists; or they may be concerned solely with advancing their own material interests. But having said that, most texts then proceed to ignore all motives other than material self-interest.(Frank, 1994, p. xxiii). (shrink)

This article describes the conceptual framework within which knowledge about Africa was legitimized in eighteenth-century French philosophy. The article traces a shift or rupture in this conceptual framework which, at the end of the eighteenth century, led to the emergence of new conditions for knowledge legitimation that altered Europe's perception of Africa. The article examines these two conceptual frameworks within the context of a discussion of the social theory of the time, which categorized Africans first as savages, and then, with (...) the advent of our modern "style of reasoning," as primitives. The argument used to demonstrate this change in categorizations is historical. The greater part of the article analyzes in detail the principal social theory of Enlightenment philosophy, the stadial theory of society, with the aim of demonstrating how it determined what could be affirmed about Africa. The shift in the perception of Africans from savages to primitives involved an epistemological change in how societies were grasped. The article provides a greater understanding of the constitution of Africa as a cognitive construct, which is not only of theoretical concern; this construct shaped Europe's intervention in Africa, and continues to influence what we believe Africa is and should become. (shrink)

The anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in his famous exploration of the gift in "primitive" and archaic societies, showed that the essential aspect of the exchange of presents involved the establishment of a social tie that bound the parties together above and beyond any material value of the objects exchanged. He argued that these intangible mutual "debts" constituted the social fabric. Godbout and Caillé show that, contrary to the modern assumption that societies function on the basis of market exchange and the (...) pursuit of self-interest, the gift still constitutes the foundation of our social fabric. The authors describe the gift not as an object but as a social connection, perhaps the most important social connection because it creates a sense of obligation to respond in kind. They examine the gift in a broad range of cases such as blood and organ donation; volunteer work; the bonds between friends, couples, and family; Santa Claus; the interaction between performers and their audience; and the relation of the artist to society. Written in an engaging manner, The World of the Gift will appeal to anyone who is interested in how the world really operates. (shrink)

The author rereads Mauss’ “Essay on the Gift” to focus on the essential differences between the archaic gift and the modern gift, the first of which is the separation between people and things. In fact, if in so-called primitive societies the gift is a “total welfare” (religious, economic, social, political), in modern societies the circulation of things becomes autonomous and we find the gift in the sphere of primary ties and, only partially, in those of the market and the state. (...) The paradox of the gift, which Mauss emphasises, is its being a mélange of obligation and freedom: why do we in turn give when we receive something as a gift? This aspect – reciprocating the thing received – in Māori society is referred to as “hau” and contains the identity of the giver: the gift encloses, in a way, the self of the giver. For Mauss, even in modern society, presenting something to someone implies presenting something of the Self. Even when it comes to the gift between strangers, such as the gift of blood or the gift of organs, it expresses the social identity of the giver and the recipient, since it can be perceived as society’s recognition of a general gift or of the recipient’s belonging to this society. (shrink)

Moral or ethical questions are vital because they affect our daily lives: what is the best choice we can make, the best action to take in a given situation, and ultimately, the best way to live our lives? Health ethics has contributed to moving ethics toward a more experience-based and user-oriented theoretical and methodological stance but remains in our practice an incomplete lever for human development and flourishing. This context led us to envision and develop the stance of a “living (...) ethics”, described in this inaugural collective and programmatic paper as an effort to consolidate creative collaboration between a wide array of stakeholders. We engaged in a participatory discussion and collective writing process known as instrumentalist concept analysis. This process included initial local consultations, an exploratory literature review, the constitution of a working group of 21 co-authors, and 8 workshops supporting a collaborative thinking and writing process. First, a living ethics designates a stance attentive to human experience and the role played by morality in human existence. Second, a living ethics represents an ongoing effort to interrogate and scrutinize our moral experiences to facilitate adaptation of people and contexts. It promotes the active and inclusive engagement of both individuals and communities in envisioning and enacting scenarios which correspond to their flourishing as authentic ethical agents. Living ethics encourages meaningful participation of stakeholders because moral questions touch deeply upon who we are and who we want to be. We explain various aspects of a living ethics stance, including its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as some barriers to its enactment based on the reflections resulting from the collaborative thinking and writing process. (shrink)

Studies on transposable elements of the Ac family have led to different models for excision gap repair in either plants or Drosophila. Excision products generated by the plant transposable elements Ac and Tam3 imply a more or less straightforward ligation of broken ends; excision products of the Drosophila P element indicate the involvement of ‘double‐strand break’ (DSB) repair. Recent findings that excision products of Ac and Tam3 can also contain traces of the element ends indicate, however, that DSB repair might (...) be an alternative repair mechanism in plants. A functional DSB repair mechanism in plants can also be deduced from the observed rapid increases of Ac copy number during plant development and from the involvement of Ac in the generation of internal Ac deletions. On the other hand, alternative repair mechanisms may also be functional in Drosophila, because some of the ‘footprints’ generated upon P excision can be explained by a mechanism that has been postulated for excision gap repair in plants. It is concluded that plants and Drosophila can use similar repair mechanisms, but that the predominance of a certain repair mechanism is determined by the host. (shrink)

The animal that therefore I am (more to follow) -- But as for me, who am I (following)? -- And say the animal responded -- I don't know why we are doing this.

With a clear presentation, Ethics: Theory and Practice educates readers about ethical theory and has them apply what they learn to specific classic and contemporary moral problems (lying, cheating, establishing ethical business practices, honoring ethical obligations in medicine, etc.). Jacques P. Thiroux first wrote this text 1977 in order to educate readers about ethical theory and its applications in a way that beginning students could understand. The result was an accessible text that isn't too technical and doesn't plunge into (...) complex readings without sufficient background. The text is fully updated with global issues and non-Western ethical views. Keith W. Krasemann now continues Thiroux's efforts of making Ethical Ideas accesible to students. Besides updating the foundations of the text, Krasemann incoporates new and relevant material, most of which is often unique only to this text. (shrink)

This text proposes an evaluation of what remains of cinema in the age of the digital, and of an ever increased circulation between movie theatres and museums. Much has changed in the social and aesthetic status of cinema, at least since the appearance of video art; but cinema, in general, has not disappeared, quite to the contrary, and remains a very important social practice. Two important factors, however, have undergone deep changes: 1°, film no longer has the exclusivity of the (...) moving image, which it has to share with television and contemporary art; 2°, the recent hegemony of the digital image has driven film toward a massive return to the “Méliès path” of film art, that of a direct intervention on the film image. The contention here is that, though the art of film is obviously not what it was, it has kept a number of qualities which still make it the positive reference for any thinking of the moving image in general. The article puts forward three kinds of reasons to support this argument: 1°, cinema has invented a specific way to see moving images, resting on what is termed here the production of a gaze; 2°, time is essential to the film form itself; 3°, film is the only art which has developed an aesthetic of the encounter (with the real) – and the co-presence of these three ranges of value remain absolutely specific. (shrink)

This text proposes an evaluation of what remains of cinema in the age of the digital, and of an ever increased circulation between movie theatres and museums. Much has changed in the social and aesthetic status of cinema, at least since the appearance of video art; but cinema, in general, has not disappeared, quite to the contrary, and remains a very important social practice. Two important factors, however, have undergone deep changes: 1°, film no longer has the exclusivity of the (...) moving image, which it has to share with television and contemporary art; 2°, the recent hegemony of the digital image has driven film toward a massive return to the “Méliès path” of film art, that of a direct intervention on the film image. The contention here is that, though the art of film is obviously not what it was, it has kept a number of qualities which still make it the positive reference for any thinking of the moving image in general. The article puts forward three kinds of reasons to support this argument: 1°, cinema has invented a specific way to see moving images, resting on what is termed here the production of a gaze; 2°, time is essential to the film form itself; 3°, film is the only art which has developed an aesthetic of the encounter (with the real) – and the co-presence of these three ranges of value remain absolutely specific. (shrink)

This essay replies to some representative authors, canonic indeed, of the opposition to artificial intelligence : Hubert L. DREYFUS, with his study, systematic enough in its time, What Computers can't do. His phenomenological critic meets a numerous audience, even among computer scientists. Joseph WEIZENBAUM, research worker in artificial intelligence himself, gone over to the opposition with his book Computer Power and Human Reason. His objections are classically moral and anti-techno-scientific. The philosopher John R. SEARLE, whose book Mind, Brain and Science (...) reminds us most of the resistances of linguistic scientists against artificial intelligence, turning the real difficulties of formalization of language in ontological impossibilities. Terry WINOGRAD, another research worker of the early times of AI, and Fernando FLORES, former economy minister of Chile in 1973, both rebels against the computerization of the human's world - thanks to the phenomenological post-hedeggerian way of think -, in their common work, Understanding Computers and Cognition. Phenomenological philosophy has found the perfect target with AI, which embodies the image of science for the post-romantic thinking. This image can be perfectly symbolized by the frescos, choosen for the cover of this very book, situated on the walls of the Sorbonne University Library stairs! Againts the arguments of this running down romantical thinking, this book make the effort to answer on every point. But this work invites us to give up the intellectual illusions too, against which the method of cognitive sciences and information processing can be used as riddle. Incidentally, the approach of this critical method itself can be considered too as an automatic knowledge management try. (shrink)

A la fin du XIXe siècle, le progrès des sciences et des techniques parut ouvrir une ère de bonheur où l'homme, délivré des tâches serviles et de toutes les superstitions, serait enfin le maître de la nature et de son propre destin. Mais le XXe siècle ne tint pas ces promesses. Certes, le progrès des sciences a fait reculer la mortalité infantile et allonger l'espérance de vie. Les nouveaux moyens de communication ont permis la circulation rapide d'informations autour du globe. (...) Mais notre environnement est menacé par toutes sortes de déchets. La biologie a ouvert des voies effrayantes. l'automatisation a bouleversé le monde du travail. La nécessité de former des scientifiques pour créer et maîtriser ces nouveaux outils a fait reculer la culture classique. De tels changements ont obscurci les repères traditionnels, les esprits sont déroutés, le sens est en crise. A l'entrée du troisième millénaire, l'Académie d'Education et d'Etudes sociales ne pouvait laisser ces questions dans l'ombre : elles sont trop souvent l'objet de débats plus passionnés que fondés et raisonnés. La science menace-t-elle l'homme et son environnement? Pèse-t-elle sur la cohésion sociale et la démocratie? Quelle est sa place dans la culture, à côté de la philosophie? Comment le chrétien se situe-t-il dans ce monde scientifique et technique? Par une étude raisonnée de ces questions, l'AES souhaite délivrer un message d'espoir et de confiance, et contribuer à mettre le développement scientifique et technique au service de l'homme, suivant la parole de l'Ecclésiastique : " Le Très-Haut a donné à l'homme le savoir pour être glorifié dans ses merveilles " (17,8). (shrink)

L'anthropologie scientifique est plurielle. L'identification des gênes par le généticien grâce au séquençage du génome ne problématise pas l'humain de la même façon que l'ethnologue qui cherche à penser ensemble la mondialisation de la culture et le respect des différences. Comme ses principes explicatifs reposent sur la réduction du complexe au simple, une première alternative se fait jour : faut-il disjoindre la nature et l'homme qui deviennent étrangers. Ou bien réduire l'humain au biologique et de là au physique? Dans les (...) deux cas, il devient impossible de poser la question du sens sauf à dire que cette question, qui n'est pas un problème, relève de l'arriération ou de la débilité mentale. Qu'est-ce que l'homme comme objet de science? Cette formulation est dénoncée par l'anthropologie philosophique comme l'amnésie à combattre, celle qui fait toujours oublier qu'il y a un sujet de toute objectivation : " si l'on suppose un air de flûte, dit Socrate, il faut également supposer un musicien " Mais encore, demande l'anthropologie théologique, qu'est-ce que l'homme en tant que créé, eu égard à son origine divine, haute puissance de primitivité? Seconde alternative : la division entre anthropologies est-elle une survivance historique en passe de résorption ou une diffraction productive? Penser l'homme, à quelle instance cela revient-il? Cette question préalable est à la clef de ces Écrits. C'est la différence de leur modalité interrogative qui fait le sérieux du pluriel des anthropologies. Une philosophie de la nature fait retour aujourd'hui, qui rétablit la légitimité de l'analyse causale des processus naturels. Elle suppose que l'on peut interroger la nature même, y compris sur les opérations de l'esprit en restituant ce qu'il en est. Mais l'homme est tel qu'il est dans son être question de son être. Troisième alternative. Va-t-on reconnaître ou effacer la spécificité anthropologique au sein des grandes régions de la réalité? Ces trois alternatives sous-tendent le questionnement sur l'homme aujourd'hui. La vie et la mort de l'homme ne sont pas que des problèmes, car leur phénomène premier est de nous trouver sans réponse à leur question. Pour l'heure il appelle des reprises critiques et des reformulations consenties. Ainsi la recherche de la personne - ce que l'humain a à être - est à la jonction de trois anthropologies. L'enjeu de ces Écrits d'allure dialogique apparaît : un rapport multiple à la vérité, dont on ne peut ni affirmer (ni souhaiter) qu'il s'uniformise... (shrink)

" De quoi demain sera-t-il fait? " interroge Victor Hugo. Un philosophe, une historienne répondent au long d'un dialogue serré, exigeant. Pourquoi ont-ils choisi de faire ce livre ensemble? En raison d'une longue amitié, au nom d'une histoire commune, en vertu de la qualité d'un débat qui n'a jamais cessé entre eux depuis qu'à la fin des années soixante la jeune étudiante découvrit l'importance de ce penseur de quinze ans son aîné qui, avec d'autres, réveillait l'esprit critique de toute une (...) génération. Si les points de vue sont différents, l'héritage intellectuel est commun. Et c'est cet héritage qu'ils s'attachent à inventorier avant de circonscrire des enjeux majeurs de notre temps : comment penser la différence dans l'universel? La famille a-t-elle encore un avenir? La liberté se réduira-t-elle demain pour l'homme à l'intelligibilité des contraintes qui pèsent sur lui, ou le désir et l'imprévisible auront-ils encore leur place? Que nous dit la souffrance des animaux que nous massacrons? La page de la révolution est-elle définitivement tournée après l'échec du communisme? Est-il envisageable d'en finir une fois pour toutes avec la peine de mort? Quelles seront demain les formes nouvelles de l'antisémitisme et comment les combattre? L'échange s'achève sur un éloge de la psychanalyse, référence commune tout au long du dialogue. (shrink)

APARTHEID—may that remain the name from now on, the unique appellation for the ultimate racism in the world, the last of many.May it thus remain, but may a day come when it will only be for the memory of man.A memory in advance: that, perhaps, is the time given for this exhibition. At once urgent and untimely, it exposes itself and takes a chance with time, it wagers and affirms beyond the wager. Without counting on any present moment, it offers (...) only a foresight in painting, very close to silence, and the rearview vision of a future for which apartheid will be the name of something finally abolished. Confined and abandoned then to this silence of memory, the name will resonate all by itself. Reduced to the state of a term in disuse. The thing it names today will no longer be.But hasn’t apartheid always been the archival record of the unnameable?The exhibition, therefore, is not a presentation. Nothing is delivered here in the present, nothing that would be presentable—only, in tomorrow’s rearview mirror, the late, ultimate racism, the last of many. Jacques Derrida, professor of philosophy at the Ecole des hauts etudes en sciences socials in Paris, is the author of, among other works, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of Philosophy, and Dissemination. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry, “The Linguistic Circle of Geneva,” appeared in the Summer 1982 issue. Peggy Kamuf teaches French at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of Fiction of Feminine Desire. (shrink)

Les hommes sont-ils sujets ou assujettis à la structure objective du monde naturel et social ? Est-ce l’idéologie ou la critique de l’idéologie qui les fait sujets ? Les deux, selon Marx, car les hommes ne sont pas libres mais le deviennent à travers l’histoire, dialectiquement, en se libérant de la nécessité qui les conditionne. Depuis, le marxisme s’est scindé, un matérialisme objectif y affrontant un idéalisme subjectif, et aujourd’hui Althusser retourne le socialisme scientifique contre l’utopie communiste, à l’inverse d’Habermas. (...) Une critique scientiste de l’humanisme idéologique s’oppose alors à une critique humaniste de l’idéologie scientiste. Et s’il fallait plutôt critiquer ensemble humanisme et scientisme comme les deux versants contraires mais complémentaires d’un même rationalisme métaphysique et idéologique ?Are men subjects or are they subjected to objective structure of natural and social world ? Is it ideology or criticism of ideology which makes them subjects ? Both, according to Marx, because men aren’t but become free throught history, dialectically, being liberated from necessity which determines them. Since, marxism has been splitting up into an objective materialism fronting a subjective idealism, and today Althusser, at the opposite of Habermas, returns scientific socialism against communist Utopia. Then, a scienticist criticism of ideological humanism is opposed to a humanist criticism of scienticist ideology. So, shouldn’t we criticize both humanism and scienticism as two contrary but complementary sides of a single metaphysical - and ideological - rationalism ? (shrink)

Les textes presentes dans ce volume sont ceux des conferences prononcees en seance pleniere dans le cadre du XXVIe Congres international de Philosophie de Langue Francaise (ASPLF), consacre, pour marquer le quatrieme centenaire de la naissance de Descarte, au theme general L'esprit cartesien, et organise du 30 aout au 3 septembre 1996, en Sorbonne et au Palais de l'UNESCO, par la Societe Francaise de Philosophie. Le volume est complete par une version en langue francaise des contributions a un Hommage international (...) a Descartes, prononcees, dans leurs langues respectives, lors de la seance de cloture du Congres. Un CD-Rom (Windows) presentant la version integrale des Actes du Congres est joint a ce volume, dont il constitue le complement necessaire. (shrink)

The opposition between constraint and free necessity leads Spinoza's commentators to conceive of ethical liberation as a reconciliation with one's self against alienations due to external causes, and to confuse constraint with contrariety. Analysis of the word coactus in Spinoza's works shows that finite modes can't exist and can't free themselves without constraints, which are not always a source of contrariety. Such an analysis is close to those of Émile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu.

Limit cycles, because they are constituted of a periodic succession of states (discrete or continuous) constitute a good manner to store information. From any points of the state space reached after a perturbation or stimulation of the cognitive system storing this information, one can aim to join through a more or less long return trajectory a precise neighbourhood of the asymptotic trajectory at a specific moment (or a specific place) on the limit cycle, i.e. where the information of interest stands. (...) We propose that the isochronal fibration, initially imagined and described by A. T. Winfree may be an excellent way to connect directly those two locations. Each isochron is indeed the set of points in temporal phase with one single point of the attractor. The characterisation of the isochronal fibration of various dynamical systems is not easy and until now has principally only been done numerically but not analytically. By integrating the homogeneous solutions of the dynamical system we can solve this fibration in the case of the well known anharmonic pendulum. Other isochronal fibration on classical examples such as the van der Pol system and the non-symmetrical PFK limit cycle are obtained numerically and we also provide the first numerical study on 3-dimentional systems like the anharmonic pendulum with a linear relaxation on its third variable and the Lorenz attractor. The empirical approach seems us useful for dealing with the isochronal fibration which could constitute a powerful tool for understanding and controlling the dynamics of biological or biological-inspired systems. (shrink)

Albert Einstein et Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ne se sont jamais rencontrés, même par hasard. Dommage, car il aurait été passionnant de les entendre parler de Dieu... Cet essai ne cherche pas à imaginer une telle rencontre? il aborde la question de Dieu en prenant ces deux penseurs et savants du XXe siècle pour compagnons, pour inspirateurs. Le théologien peut en effet tirer leçon des sujets auxquels ils ont réfléchi, autant que des postures intellectuelles et spirituelles qui ont été les (...) leurs. La question du hasard (Dieu joue-t-il aux dés?) sert de fil conducteur à cette réflexion qui traite aussi du rôle de la théologie et de la place de la mystique, de l'attitude humaine face au réel et du défi de la mort. A l'école de ces deux hommes libres, cet essai ne prétend pas répondre définitivement aux sempiternelles questions : où est Dieu? qui est Dieu?, mais offrir et partager le témoignage d'un théologien qui doit tant à ceux qui ont consacré leur vie à la science et osé parler de Dieu. (shrink)

Résumé Cette question pointe vers des domaines encore mal définis du contexte des théologies contemporaines. Ce contexte est à peine esquissé : l’essai se concentre sur l’état classique de la théologie telle qu’elle est entendue communément, depuis son héritage patristique mâle et clérical. L’interrogation sonde ce corpus à l’aide des propositions faites par Henri Meschonnic et par Jacques Derrida.The title of this paper directs our attention towards as-yet uncharted domains in contemporary theology. However, this aspect of the paper is (...) only sketched out, as it is primarily concerned with theology as it is commonly understood, that is, the legacy of the male, clerical Fathers. This corpus is examined using propositions put forth by Henri Meschonnic and by Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

t. 1. Les années françaises, 1927-1940 -- t. 2. Les années américaines, 1941-1961.

t. 1. Psychologie et logique.--t. 2. Morale et métaphysique.

Disons que, pour m'en tenir au cadre, à la limite, j'écris ici quatre fois autour de la peinture. Quatre fois, dira-t-on autour de la peinture, donc dans les parages qu'on s'autorise, c'est toute l'histoire, à contenir comme les entours ou les abords de l'œuvre : cadre, passe-partout, titre, signature, musée, archive, discours, marché, bref partout où on légifère en marquant la limite, celle de la couleur même. Du droit à la peinture, voilà le titre ambitieux auquel j'aurais voulu accorder ce (...) livre, son trajet autant que son objet, leur trait commun, qui n'est autre, ni un ni indivible, que le trait lui-même. JD. (shrink)

Y a-t-il un art communiste? was given as a talk at the Grand Palais in Paris on 10 April 2019 on the occasion of a special exhibition, Red: Art and Utopia in the Land of the Soviets (Rouge: Art et utopie au pays des Soviets). The exhibition ran from 20 March 2019 to 1 July 2019. Red displayed works produced in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917 to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. This covers early experiments (...) by avant-garde artists such as Vladimir Mayokovsky and Kazimir Malevich, the grand-scale construction of public monuments, and the mass-produced art of Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. Like many of Jacques Rancière’s recent publications on art, this article closely engages the material of its source exhibit, and, in it, he addresses the full range of art staged by the Grand Palais, offering a direct and provocative confrontation with the question of whether there can be a communist art. (shrink)

La 4ème de couv. indique : "Le moujik de Chagall, qui s'avance parmi les fleurs, a-t-il en tête la cité idéale? Ou bien s'apprête-t-il à briser la machinerie des palais? Ainsi Rawls, qui propose l'"utopie réaliste" d'une société ordonnée selon la justice, apparaît-il d'abord comme le messager u monde d'en haut. Qui nous enseigne comment celui-ci s'édifie dans la prensée et subsiste dans l'Idée. Mais la justice n'est pas un idéal : c'est un impératif. L'idée de justice comprend l'exigence de (...) son instauration dans un monde injuste. Rawls donc, au regard des principes qu'il énonce et de la pratique politique qu'il légitime, est un penseur subversif. Qui, pourtant, se méconnaît. Et faiblit devant les conclusions qu'il devrait tirer des prémisses qui sont les siennes. Au point que sa pensée se trouve communément sollicitée et mobilisée au service de l'ordre établi. Force est donc de montrer point par point que ses concepts ont d'autres implications que celles qu'il leur prête, et sont appropriés à d'autres perspectives que celles qu'il envisage. Et que l'on peut, avec lui et grâge à lui, penser au-delà de lui et contre lui. On trouvera ici un exposé ordonné de sa "théorie de la jsutice", doublé d'une critique interne, qui est aussi une réception. L'objet ultime de ce livre n'est pas de proposer une alternative à la construction rawlsienne, mais de tirer de celle-ci quelques matériaux conceptuels pouvant servir à une telle entreprise.". (shrink)