Artificial intelligence has often been seen as an attempt to reduce the natural mind to informational processes and, consequently, to naturalize philosophy. The many criticisms that were addressed to the so-called “old-fashioned AI” do not concern this attempt itself, but the methods it used, especially the reduction of the mind to a symbolic level of abstraction, which has often appeared to be inadequate to capture the richness of our mental activity. As a consequence, there were many efforts to evacuate the (...) semantical models in favor of elementary physiological mechanisms simulated by information processes. However, these views, and the subsequent criticisms against artificial intelligence that they contain, miss the very nature of artificial intelligence, which is not reducible to a “science of the nature”, but which directly impacts our culture. More precisely, they lead to evacuate the role of the semantic information. In other words, they tend to throw the baby out with the bath-water. This paper tries to revisit the epistemology of artificial intelligence in the light of the opposition between the “sciences of nature” and the “sciences of culture”, which has been introduced by German neo-Kantian philosophers. It then shows how this epistemological view opens on the many contemporary applications of artificial intelligence that have already transformed—and will continue to transform—all our cultural activities and our world. Lastly, it places those perspectives in the context of the philosophy of information and more particularly it emphasizes the role played by the notions of context and level of abstraction in artificial intelligence. (shrink)

A number of criticisms of a recent paper byare made. (1) In attempting to assess the observational adequacy of story grammars, they state that a context‐free grammar cannot handle discontinuous elements; however, they do not show that such elements occur in the domain to which the grammars apply. Further, they do not present adequate evidence for their claim that there are acceptable stories not accounted for by existing grammars and that the grammars will accept nonstories such as procedures. (2) They (...) state that it has been proven that under natural conditions children cannot learn transformational grammars, which is a misrepresentation of the learnability proofs which have been offered. (3) Most important, they take an unduly narrow approach to story understanding by claiming that people only understand story content and do not have knowledge of story structure which is useful in comprehension or memory. Counterevidence from the literature is cited which indicates that such knowledge is both useful and used, and a number of methods for assessing the psychological adequacy of structural models are discussed. (shrink)

Speech is a perceptuo-motor system. A natural computational modeling framework is provided by cognitive robotics, or more precisely speech robotics, which is also based on embodiment, multimodality, development, and interaction. This paper describes the bases of a virtual baby robot which consists in an articulatory model that integrates the non-uniform growth of the vocal tract, a set of sensors, and a learning model. The articulatory model delivers sagittal contour, lip shape and acoustic formants from seven input parameters that characterize (...) the configurations of the jaw, the tongue, the lips and the larynx. To simulate the growth of the vocal tract from birth to adulthood, a process modifies the longitudinal dimension of the vocal tract shape as a function of age. The auditory system of the robot comprises a “phasic” system for event detection over time, and a “tonic” system to track formants. The model of visual perception specifies the basic lips characteristics: height, width, area and protrusion. The orosensorial channel, which provides the tactile sensation on the lips, the tongue and the palate, is elaborated as a model for the prediction of tongue-palatal contacts from articulatory commands. Learning involves Bayesian programming, in which there are two phases: specification of the variables, decomposition of the joint distribution and identification of the free parameters through exploration of a learning set, and utilization which relies on questions about the joint distribution. Two studies were performed with this system. Each of them focused on one of the two basic mechanisms, which ought to be at work in the initial periods of speech acquisition, namely vocal exploration and vocal imitation. The first study attempted to assess infants’ motor skills before and at the beginning of canonical babbling. It used the model to infer the acoustic regions, the articulatory degrees of freedom and the vocal tract shapes that are the likeliest explored by actual infants according to their vocalizations. Subsequently, the aim was to simulate data reported in the literature on early vocal imitation, in order to test whether and how the robot was able to reproduce them and to gain some insights into the actual cognitive representations that might be involved in this behavior. Speech modeling in a robotics framework should contribute to a computational approach of sensori-motor interactions in speech communication, which seems crucial for future progress in the study of speech and language ontogeny and phylogeny. (shrink)

This article defends the principle of non-establishment against 21st-century projects of political religion, constitutional theocracy and political theology. It is divided into two parts. The first part, published in special issue 39.4–5 of Philosophy and Social Criticism, proceeds by constructing an ideal type of political secularism, and then discussing the innovative American model of constitutional dualism regarding religion that combined constitutional protection for the freedom of religious conscience and exercise with the principle of non-establishment. It then critically assesses the integrationist (...) approach –disguised as a concern for pluralism and fairness – as an alternative to this framework. The integrationist approach challenges ‘separation’ and political secularism in a subtle attack on the non-establishment principle, aimed at drastically narrowing its scope. Successes of this approach in recent Supreme Court jurisprudence and politics, have triggered a response by liberal egalitarians. I address this response – the equal liberty model – in this second part, arguing that although on the right track, it fails to find a middle ground between political secularism and integration. Instead, by abandoning the discourse of separation, it plays into populist integrationist hands without delivering on the promise of providing a coherent standard for deciding cases. The article proposes a third approach, one that does not throw out the non-establishment baby with the strict separationist bathwater and that wholeheartedly endorses political secularism, a sine qua non for 21st-century constitutional democracy. Equal liberty properly construed can help provide criteria for determining when an accommodation, a regulation or no regulation of religion by the state is appropriate. But it must be supplemented by other values – democratic and civil republican. The article concludes with a typology of the forms of regulation that are warranted under the conditions of the contemporary regulatory state, now the target and prize of politicized religion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Peter McGehee and the Erotics of Gay Self-RepresentationRaymond-Jean Frontain (bio)Novelist Peter McGehee was a beautiful man who—at the height of what Brad Gooch terms “the Golden Age of Promiscuity”—knew he was a beautiful man.1 Coming of age in the early 1970s when American gay men consciously set about refashioning their image, Peter’s dress was always striking, whether he was playing the slut or the dandy. Members of his (...) close circle of friends, dubbed “the Quinlan Family,” regularly twitted him for preening in the mirror, and one close friend reports that Peter could not pass a reflective surface without stopping to examine his image.2 Peter’s narcissism was further empowered by his talent as a photographer. He began taking pictures while in high school when his mother, an English teacher who advised both the school newspaper and yearbook, recruited him to serve as the staff photographer for both publications. And he continued taking photos—in particular, making self-portraits—until at least his early thirties (see Illustration 1).3 Click for larger view View full resolution1.Self-portrait by Peter McGehee. The hairstyle is identical to the one in the portrait that appears on the cover of the Stubblejumper Press edition of Beyond Happiness, suggesting that this photo was taken around 1985 when Peter was twenty-nine or thirty years old. Courtesy of the Estate of Peter McGehee.[End Page 115] Click for larger view View full resolution2.Self-portrait by Peter McGehee in mascara and woman’s top, circa 1981. Courtesy of Fiji Robinson.It should not come as a surprise that McGehee’s life and career are characterized by an ongoing and extraordinarily rich experimentation with modes of self-presentation. Peter was adept at making wacky collages that employ photographs and images culled from newspapers or magazines to serve as invitations, announcements to friends, and handbills for his performance activities. Under carefully controlled circumstances, Peter and his male friends donned female drag with Peter fashioning for himself a persona, “Princess Marie,” and signing himself as the same in letters to friends written in the royal first-person plural (see Illustration 2). When performing as the only male with two female partners in the Quinlan Sisters, a musical revue that he founded and for which he wrote the songs, he was generally identified in the program as “Marie Quinlan, the Sister with the Difference” (see Illustration 3).Peter experimented with personae even in his journals, where one might expect to find a less theatricalized self. Beginning in 1986, however, numerous entries are composed as letters that begin “Dear Winsome” (a word defined by the American Heritage College Dictionary as “charming, often in a childlike or naive way”—a manner that Peter liked to adopt), “Dear Winnie” (which is most likely a familiarization of the former), “Dear Timmy” (a name synonymous with naive wholesomeness for American baby boomers who were raised watching the television drama Lassie on Sunday evenings), and the matronly and delightfully dowdy “Dear Mrs. Hackensack.”4 Like Joe Orton, McGehee apparently even wrote letters to the local newspaper under a matronly female pseudonym in which he commented wryly on public matters that concerned him.5 [End Page 116] Click for larger view View full resolution3.Publicity photograph of Peter with Wendy Coad and Fiji Robinson as the Quinlan Sisters, circa 1982. Courtesy of Fiji Robinson.But clearly it was his fiction that offered McGehee the most satisfying opportunity for creative self-fashioning. It is the first rule of the creative writing class that a writer must write from, and of, what he knows if his writing is to have authority. But in his blurring of the line between fiction and autobiography Peter followed the lead established by Christopher Isherwood in The Berlin Stories (1935–39) and, more importantly, Christopher and His Kind (1976)—and pursued by Peter’s senior contemporaries Edmund White and Felice Picano—in which the autobiographer writes of himself in the third person in order to study himself with an almost brutal detachment, or in which the fictional protagonist is a barely disguised version of the writer’s self to the point of... (shrink)

While there is an extensive literature on the tendency to mimic emotional expressions in adults, it is unclear how this skill emerges and develops over time. Specifically, it is unclear whether infants mimic discrete emotion-related facial actions, whether their facial displays are moderated by contextual cues and whether infants’ emotional mimicry is constrained by developmental changes in the ability to discriminate emotions. We therefore investigate these questions using Baby-FACS to code infants’ facial displays and eye-movement tracking to examine infants’ (...) looking times at facial expressions. Three-, 7-, and 12-month-old participants were exposed to dynamic facial expressions of a virtual model which either looked at the infant or had an averted gaze. Infants did not match emotion-specific facial actions shown by the model, but they produced valence-congruent facial responses to the distinct expressions. Furthermore, only the 7- and 12-month-olds displayed negative responses to the model’s negative expressions and they looked more at areas of the face recruiting facial actions involved in specific expressions. Our results suggest that valence-congruent expressions emerge in infancy during a period where the decoding of facial expressions becomes increasingly sensitive to the social signal value of emotions. (shrink)

Domestic violence is one of the most common forms of violence against women. Domestic violence during pregnancy is associated with adverse perinatal and maternal outcomes. We aimed to assess whether domestic violence was associated with mode of delivery, low birthweight and preterm birth in two sites in Nepal. In this prospective cohort study we consecutively recruited 2004 pregnant women during antenatal care at two hospitals between June 2015 and September 2016. The Abuse Assessment Screen was used to assess fear and (...) violence. Having ever experienced either fear or violence was defined as any domestic violence. Obstetric outcomes were obtained from hospital records for 1381 women, selecting singleton pregnancies only. Mode of delivery was assessed as birth by cesarean section or not. A birthweight of less than 2500 g was defined as low birthweight and preterm birth as birth before completion of 37 weeks gestation. Descriptive and multiple logistic regression analyses were performed to assess associations. Twenty percent of the women reported any domestic violence. Among all 1381 women, 37.6% gave birth by cesarean section. Of those women who delivered by cesarean section, 84.7% had an emergency cesarean section. Less than 10% of the babies were born prematurely and 13.5% were born with low birthweight. We found no significant association between exposure to any domestic violence during pregnancy and risk of a low birthweight baby or birth by cesarean section. However, having experienced both violence and fear was significantly associated with giving birth to a preterm infant [aOR 2.33 ]. Domestic violence is common in Nepal. This is a potential risk factor for severe morbidity and mortality in newborns. We found that the risk of having a preterm baby was higher for pregnant women who experienced both fear and violence. This should be recognized by the health sector. In this study, no significant differences were found in the rate of cesarean section nor low birthweight for women who had experienced any domestic violence compared to those who did not. (shrink)

The perfect books for the true book lover, Penguin’s Great Ideas series features twelve more groundbreaking works by some of history’s most prodigious thinkers. Each volume is beautifully packaged with a unique type-driven design that highlights the bookmaker’s art. Offering great literature in great packages at great prices, this series is ideal for those readers who want to explore and savor the Great Ideas that have shaped our world.

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the most important French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. His impact has been felt across many disciplines: sociology; cultural studies; art theory and politics. This volume presents a diverse selection of interviews, conversations and debates which relate to the five decades of his working life, both as a political militant, experimental philosopher and teacher. Including hard-to-find interviews and previously untranslated material, this is the first time that interviews with Lyotard have been presented as (...) a collection. Key concepts from Lyotard's thought – the differend, the postmodern, the immaterial – are debated and discussed across different time periods, prompted by specific contexts and provocations. In addition there are debates with other thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, which may be less familiar to an Anglophone audience. These debates and interviews help to contextualise Lyotard, highlighting the importance of Marx, Freud, Kant and Wittgenstein, in addition to the Jewish thought which accompanies the questions of silence, justice and presence that pervades Lyotard's thinking. (shrink)

Contents include a note on the translation, introduction by Peter Gay, and a bibliography.

The last and most poignant of these essays is The Intruder, Nancys philosophical meditation on his heart transplant.

Presents a series of the Wellek Library lectures given in May of 1986 entitled: Clouds, Touches, and Gaps.

The possible and revelation -- The saturated phenomenon -- Metaphysics and phenomenology: a relief for theology -- "Christian philosophy": hermeneutic or heuristic? -- Sketch of a phenomenological concept of the gift -- What cannot be said: Apophasis and the discourse of love -- The banality of saturation -- Faith and reason.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right represents a turning point in the philosophy of law and the state. In 14 original essays, this volume compiles a collaborative commentary that offers a differentiated interpretation of this controversial classic in legal philosophy. Ideally suited for seminar courses.

Discourse on the sciences and the arts -- Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men -- Discourse on political economy -- On the social contract -- The state of war.

In Made for Happiness, Jean Vanier examines the basis for modern moral philosophy and its role in our lives today. Having discovered through his work with the intellectually disabled the degree to which our society is divided, and our values misplaced, Vanier invites us to read with fresh eyes theories of happiness written 2,400 years ago.

The book will be an indispensable resource for anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and the social sciences.

According to a well-known view in the philosophy of mind, intentional attitudes by their very nature satisfy requirements of rationality (e.g. Davidson 1980; Dennett 1987; Millar 2004). This view (which I shall call Constitutivism) features prominently as the ‘principle of minimal rationality’ in de Sousa’s monograph The Rationality of Emotion (1987). By explicating this principle in terms of the notion of the formal object of an attitude, de Sousa articulates an interesting and original version of Constitutivism, which differs in important (...) respects from other extant versions. In this paper, I explore this version of Constitutivism against the background of recent developments in the theory of rationality and make explicit its ramifications for the long-standing dispute over whether the mind is essentially normative. My focus will be on how to conceive of the form of the rationality requirements that attitudes as such must satisfy according to this principle. I argue that, although de Sousa seems officially to endorse a structuralist conception of rationality, according to which these requirements are requirements of coherence, his considerations on formal objects suggest that they are more aptly conceived in terms of a reasons-responsive conception of rationality. I further argue that which of these two readings we choose makes a significant difference to the prospect of vindicating the essential normativity of mind by invoking the principle of minimal rationality. (shrink)

It is sometimes alleged that the study of emotion and the study of value are currently pursued as relatively autonomous disciplines. As Kevin Mulligan notes, “the philosophy and psychology of emotions pays little attention to the philosophy of value and the latter pays only a little more attention to the former.” (2010b, 475). Arguably, the last decade has seen more of a rapprochement between these two domains than used to be the norm (cf. e.g. Roeser & Todd 2014). But there (...) still seems to be considerable potential for exchange and dialogue if the situation is compared with their intimate relationship in central strands of early realist phenomenology. The philosopher perhaps most representative of this ecumenical approach is Husserl’s early student Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977). From the very early stages of his philosophical career, Hildebrand has developed one of the most original, comprehensive and nuanced accounts of emotions at whose core is a detailed examination of their connection to value. While his central concern with the ethical significance of our affective life is in many ways continuous with Scheler’s work and draws crucially on Reinach’s philosophy of mind, Hildebrand’s own reflections considerably expand on and substantially modify the picture of the ontology and normative role of emotions defended by these authors. In this article, I reconstruct Hildebrand’s view of emotions with a particular focus on those aspects which represent his most distinctive contribution to this subject. (shrink)

Presque vingt ans après sa parution, Etant donné (Puf, 1997) a, au-delà des premiers débats, imposé la question du donné et de la donation. Etant donné. Reprise reprend et prolonge ces nouvelles interrogations. D'abord la question de la réduction : définit-elle vraiment le principe dernier de la phénoménologie? Si tel était le cas, la formule " autant de réduction, autant de donation " peut-elle se justifier (en discussion avec la critique de Michel Henry)? Ensuite, la reconnaissance du donné comme instance (...) première et dernière de la phénoménalité peut-elle encore faire droit à l'herméneutique (en discussion avec Hans-Georg Gadamer)? Dans ce cas, comment se déplie le pli de la donation avec la manifestation? Et encore, le monde peut-il se manifester comme l'un des phénomènes donnés, et même comme la totalité du donné? Ou ne faut-il pas lui reconnaître une donation par exception, celle de la possibilité de toute donation (sur la ligne de Jan Patocka)? Enfin, la reprise du phénomène à partir de la donation n'impose-t-elle pas de substituer décidément au modèle de l'objet, constitué à l'identique et pour lui, celui de l'événement, qui surgit à partir de soi seul, sans cause ni a priori (en faisant droit à Claude Romano)? (shrink)

The perfect crime -- The spectre of the will -- The radical illusion -- Trompe-l'œl genesis -- The automatic writing of the world -- The horizon of disappearance -- The countdown -- The material illusion -- The secret vestiges of perfection -- The height of reality -- The irony of technology -- Machinic snobbery -- Objects in this mirror -- The Babel syndrome -- Radical thought -- The other side of the crime -- The world without women -- The surgical (...) removal of otherness -- The "laying-off" of desire -- The new victim order -- Indifference and hatred -- The revenge of the mirror people. (shrink)

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) was one of the greatest philosophers of his era. He was also at the center of some of the century's darkest, most complex historical events. In this magisterial book, Grondin appraises Gadamer's life and achievement. 30 illustrations.

Lyotard is considered one of the most brilliant and influential of French post-structuralist thinkers. Published in 1974 by Minuit, Économie libidinale is, of all his work to date, the most creative in its mode of writing and in its theorizing: a stunning, dense, brilliant piece in which Lyotard, ranging from Marxist and Freudian theory to contemporary arts, argues that political economy is charged with passions and, reciprocally, that passions are infused with the political.

Jean-Paul Sartre: Mind and Body, Word and Deed celebrates Sartre's polyvalence with an examination of Sartrean philosophy, literature, and politics. In four distinct yet related sections, twelve scholars from three continents examine Sartre's thought, writing and action over his long career. "Sartre and the Body" reappraises Sartre's work in dialogue with other philosophers past and present, including Maine de Biran, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Didier Anzieu. "Sartre and Time" offers a first-hand account by Michel Contat of Sartre and Beauvoir working (...) together, and a "philosophy in practice" analysis by François Noudelmann. "Ideology and Politics" uses Sartrean notions of commitment and engagement to address modern and contemporary politics, including insights into Castro, De Gaulle, Sarkozy and Obama. Finally, an important but neglected episode of Sartre's life the visit that he and Beauvoir made to Japan in 1966 is narrated with verve and humour by Professor Suzuki Michihiko, who first met Sartre during that visit and remained in touch subsequently. Taken together, these twelve chapters make a strong case for the continued relevance of Sartre today. (shrink)

The phenomenological origins of the concept of givenness -- Remarks on the origins of Gegebenheit in Heidegger's thought -- Substitution and solicitude: how Levinas re-reads Heidegger -- Sketch of a phenomenological concept of sacrifice.

This new collection gathers 23 highly insightful yet previously difficult-to-find interviews with Baudrillard, ranging over topics as diverse as art, war, technology, globalisation, terrorism and the fate of humanity. From familiar themes to the less well understood aspects of his thought, these interviews give you an overview of Baudrillard's ideas - without the jargon typical of written texts. Read as Baudrillard himself discusses, explains and elaborates on his ideas, making this collection essential for understanding many of his other works.

Tous les textes publiés dans l'ouvrage parlent directement de l'œuvre de Jean-Michel Berthelot. La première partie, " Sociologie de Jean-Michel Berthelot ", rassemble les contributions restituant des traits de son œuvre à l'aide d'études de cas précis ou de panoramas plus larges, et balise des domaines de recherche dans lesquels il s'est illustré : sociologie de l'éducation, du corps, des sciences, épistémologie des sciences sociales. La deuxième partie rend compte des perspectives ouvertes par ses travaux et de la (...) manière dont des chercheurs ont mis en œuvre ses réflexions pour leurs propres recherches. Il s'agit donc de restituer la façon dont on peut faire de la sociologie " avec " Jean-Michel Berthelot - à l'aide de ses travaux et des jalons qu'ils posent. La troisième partie est biographique en restituant l'itinéraire académique, intellectuel et humain de Berthelot, que ce soit son parcours universitaire et social, notamment à l'ENS durant mai 68, ou encore sa période " toulousaine " où sa carrière universitaire a débuté et qui en constitue une partie essentielle. Dirigé par Jean-Christophe Marcel et Olivier Martin, cet ouvrage rassemble les contributions de collaborateurs, d'anciens étudiants ou de proches collègues de Jean-Michel Berthelot. (shrink)

Un temps, Michel Foucault a été lu comme un archéologue du savoir et un homme d'archives, abandonnant par instants sa réserve pour répondre à l'urgence des luttes. La lecture des cours au Collège de France suggère pourtant que sa politique ne peut être réduite au désordre des circonstances. Elle appartient de plein droit à l'histoire de la vérité quand elle rencontre celle du gouvernement de soi-même et des autres. Comment sommes-nous gouvernés? Quel est en nous le ressort caché de la (...) servitude? Pouvons-nous être gouvernés et nous gouverner autrement? Rechercher et dire la vérité peut-il nous altérer et, avec nous, le monde auquel nous appartenons? Pour répondre à ces questions, Foucault se déplace de l'époque moderne à l'Antiquité et privilégie tour à tour les rapports de pouvoir disséminés dans toute la société, les stratégies politiques qui les organisent et le travail éthique qui permet l'" inservitude " volontaire. Au terme de ce voyage que la mort a interrompu, la volonté de vérité devient le courage de se transformer et de transformer le monde, le principe d'une expérience spirituelle dont la politique est la pierre de touche. Ces déplacements dessinent un nouveau paysage politique dont ce livre établit la cartographie, pour que d'autres, après Foucault, puissent reprendre le voyage. (shrink)

This is the first English translation published of Jean-Luc Nancy's acclaimed consideration of the law's most pervasive principles in the context of actual systems and contemporary institutions, power, norms, laws.

Contrary to what many interpretations claim, according to Bayle faith does not completely eliminate reason. It intervenes to reveal factual truths that can only be known through revelation (for example, that God allowed Adam and Eve to sin). To these factual truths can be applied a rational principle (an axiomatic and evident one, according to Bayle, which he calls a "common notion"), namely, that "what God does is well done." God allowed sin, so we must think it was justified, even (...) if we don't understand why. This approach is what I call, cum grano salis, Pierre Bayle's theodicy. (shrink)

Jean-Marc Ferry est titulaire de la Chaire de Philosophie de l'Europe de l'Université de Nantes, professeur honoraire en Science politique et Philosophie morale à l'Université libre de Bruxelles, auteur notamment des Puissances de l'expérience (1991), l'une des oeuvres les plus importantes récemment publiées dans le champ de la philosophie sociale et politique, de la philosophie tout court (Paul Ricoeur), La Question de l'État européen (2001), Les Grammaires de l'intelligence (2004), La Raison et la Foi (2016).

The purposes of writing -- The itinerary of a thought -- Vietnam : imperialism and genocide -- Czechoslovakia : the socialism that came in from the cold -- France : masses, spontaneity, party -- Kierkegaard : the singular universal -- Mallarmé : the poetry of suicide -- Tintoretto : St. George and the dragon -- The man with the tape-recorder -- Psychoanalytic dialogue -- Reply to Sartre--Pontalis -- Reply to Sartre--Pingaud -- A plea for intellectuals -- A friend of the (...) people. (shrink)

Dans ce grand article paru en 1984, Jean-Claude Chamboredon livre la meilleure synthèse des débats qui se sont fait jour sur les liens entre la vie et l'oeuvre d'Emile Durkheim. Il permet de comprendre comment la sociologie française fut la science républicaine par excellence – c’est-à-dire aussi ce que doit la France à une tradition intellectuelle juive sécularisée.

In Vodou Cosmology and the Haitian Revolution in the Enlightenment Ideals of Kant and Hegel, Vivaldi Jean-Marie begins with an interpretation of the rise of Vodou practices in Saint-Domingue which is sensitive to the social, spiritual and cultural challenges of the slaves communities in Saint-Domingue, later Haiti. He shows effectively that Vodou cosmology emerged as a spiritual, social and cultural technology for the enslaved to overcome the dissonance and brutality of slavery in Saint-Domingue. Vodou Cosmology thus assumes the tripartite (...) role of spiritual, social and cultural compass for slaves who, concurrently with the development of Vodou, managed to establish a common ethos. Furthermore, to situate the rise of Vodou cosmology within the larger discourse of the Enlightenment and argue that it heralded a radical Enlightenment in the African diaspora, Jean-Marie compares and contrasts some aspects of the philosophies of Kant and Hegel with the social, spiritual and cultural experience of the enslaved communities of Saint-Domingue. This comparison shows that Kant and Hegel's depiction of African Negroes' mores and their religious practices in the colonies fails to capture that Vodou cosmology was both a mechanism of resistance and the medium to restore their social, spiritual, and cultural identity against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade. Also, he elaborates the Enlightenment's conception of African Negroes as commercial currency and specifically Hegel's view of slavery in the colonies as the manifestation of divine providence. He concludes that the significance of the Haitian Revolution lies in the fact that it ascribed freedom to people of African descent in the diaspora and is thus implicit in later themes of black freedom. The Haitian Revolution ties blackness with freedom and mapped out a radical enlightenment in the European colonies. (shrink)