This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

La solution de Thomas d’Aquin au problème de l’intensification des qualités souffre d’une certaine instabilité et, dans la génération suivante, a été disloquée par les différentes contraintes qu’elle tentait de concilier. Cet article explore les réponses apportées par Gilles de Rome, Godefroid de Fontaines, Pierre d’Auvergne et Thomas de Sutton. Introduite par Godefroid, mais développée par Sutton, la notion de mode va jouer un rôle très important. La solution de Sutton, particulièrement, invite à une comparaison avec la théorie des modes (...) intrinsèques chez Duns Scot. (shrink)

Due to his innatist theory, James of Viterbo brings original answers to a number of late-thirteenth century questions concerning cognition. While he maintains a certain distinction between the soul and its faculties, and among these faculties, he rejects the Aristotelian distinction between agent and patient intellects. Thanks to its predispositions to knowing, the mind is able to be an agent for itself. Correlatively, James rejects the usual conception of abstraction. Neither does the intellect act on the phantasms, nor the phantasms (...) on the intellect. The intellect simply actualizes a conceptual scheme at the occasion of adequate sensory representations. Since the innate predispositions are the intrinsic principles of cognitive acts, James maintains with Giles of Rome the notion of intelligible species. But he agrees with Godfrey of Fontaines that an act of intellection is nothing else than the fully actualized species itself. He also concedes to Henry of Ghent that the form of an intelligible object need not be ontologically received in the intellect, but can just have an “objective” presence. Finally, thanks again to his theory of predispositions, he has an easy solution to the vexed problems of the knowledge of substance essences and of the self. (shrink)

“La Poésie Comme Exercice Spirituel” first appeared in a 1942 issue of Revue Fontaine edited by Jacques and Raissa Maritain and was subsequently republished in Wah’s 1948 text Poésie, Pensée, Perception, published by Calmann-Lévy. The following is a translation of the Fontaine version. I have noted all of the variations from the latter version in the notes. As I emphasize in my commentary, the piece is a notable display of Wahl’s eclectic range of influences. Most importantly, it shows (...) the extent to which his interest in radical empiricism and process metaphysics informs his creative approach to the intersection of poetics and metaphysics. These interests are not explicitly named in the essay, and yet their influence is pervasive. The essay also includes several moments of substantial resonance with the work of Gilles Deleuze, as noted in the commentary. (shrink)

La base no 215 de Delphes, qui est située en face du trésor des Siphniens, peut être datée du IIe s. av. n. è. Monument familial, elle portait à l’origine trois statues féminines. Au Ier s. av. n. è., on a ajouté les statues de deux hommes, apparemment de la même famille de Naupacte. La base a aussi servi à l’affichage de décrets honorant surtout des Étoliens. La niche qui l’encadre est dans un état très tardif, mais son histoire remonte (...) haut car elle contient un bassin situé dans l’axe du grand réseau hydraulique du sanctuaire et qui doit avoir appartenu à une fontaine. Le mur de fond a été reconstruit plus d’une fois. Dans un état ancien, il a pu porter certains des décrets cités plus haut. La niche pourrait être appelée «étolienne ». (shrink)

Cet ouvrage, le deuxième de la collection « Lire le xviie siècle » aux éditions Garnier, propose une lecture interdisciplinaire des contes de Perrault dont l’objectif est bien précisé dans une riche introduction. Il s’agit au travers, d’une part, d’une approche littéraire et comparatiste, d’autre part d’une analyse linguistique, d’appréhender les contes de Perrault comme des discours singuliers où tous les choix linguistiques font sens, à l’opposé du réductionnisme structural qui ramène les c...

Cet ouvrage, le deuxième de la collection « Lire le xviie siècle » aux éditions Garnier, propose une lecture interdisciplinaire des contes de Perrault dont l’objectif est bien précisé dans une riche introduction. Il s’agit au travers, d’une part, d’une approche littéraire et comparatiste, d’autre part d’une analyse linguistique, d’appréhender les contes de Perrault comme des discours singuliers où tous les choix linguistiques font sens, à l’opposé du réductionnisme structural qui ramène les c..

In French schools, La Fontaine is presented as “the height of French culture,” but he was only marginally inspired by French poets. His main sources were Spanish and Italian authors, as well as classics of both the Occident and Orient. In this way La Fontaine exemplifies, for Serres, a general pattern in which “cultures grow at the crossroads of other cultures.” One's identity develops out of numerous contacts with others, by learning from them and assimilating some of their (...) qualities—by being open to, not isolated from, the rest of the world. The non-French genealogy of the fables puts in doubt the entrenched concept of identity as involving separation and isolation.Their genealogy also sets a limit on political and moralistic interpretations of La Fontaine's stories. At school, pupils are taught that the Lion stands for the King, the Fox for the Nobles, the Lamb for the Poor. But is it possible, Serres asks, that so many poets from diverse times and places have been describing “the same society with the same hierarchies submitted to the same laws”? As for moralistic readings, Serres shows that for each fable there is a counterfable in which the winner becomes the loser. The Wolf that eats the Lamb in one fable is killed by the Hunter in another. In “The Two Mules,” the animal loading the salt is murdered by bandits, whereas in “The Ass with a Load of Sponges and the Ass with a Load of Salt,” it is the latter that survives. In other words, the fables illustrate how beings metamorphose into one another: the Wolf (the attacker) can appreciate and play the role of the Lamb (the victim) when chased by the Hunter; salt can lead to death or to freedom, depending on the circumstances. The fables, taken together, offer a collection of behaviors that we, humans and animals, are capable of: our “so-called moralities,” Serres explains, “don't speak about ethics, but about ethology.”The fables offer as well a “palimpsest [that] lies silently in our bodies and our practices.” Serres speculates that the oldest forms of the fables were not spoken, but gesticulated; they mimed animal behaviors. By imitating them, we humans not only learned about the animals we were observing and living with but also about the potentialities of our own bodies. If La Fontaine became the epitome of French culture by assimilating elements of other cultures, then it was by embodying animal behaviors that we became human. (The omnipresence of prepositions in the fables—next to, in front of, under, above—suggests that the body underpins the stories. Those little words, which Serres analyzes minutely in a long chapter, locate each body in relation to those of other beings.)Serres was planning to write a book about La Fontaine as early as 1997. In his notebooks, he scribbled possible titles, all of which are evocative: “Archaeology of Miming,” “Anthropology of Simulation,” “The Fabulous Bodies of Animals,” “The Scale and the Net.” Sadly, he died in 2019 when his work on the manuscript was progressing. He had not yet settled on a definitive title, nor had he decided the order of the chapters and sections. Jean-Charles Darmon, who was allowed to edit the work, faced chapters that were almost completed but others consisting of a single line suggesting a main idea. (The blanks are often about a type of fable never defined or described: “fables of representation.”) In spite of its incompleteness, this book intermingles systematic analysis, textual and historical contextualization, and philosophical speculation—in it, we find the conceptual inventiveness, the lexical and etymological alertness, and above all the joyfulness that characterize the whole of Serres's extraordinary oeuvre. (shrink)

An hommage to Gad Freudenthal, this volume offers studies on the history of science and on the role of science in medieval and early-modern Jewish cultures, investigating various aspects of processes of knowledge transfer and scientific cross-cultural contacts,.

In modern economics, the use of sympathy and empathy shows significant ambiguity. Sympathy has been used in two different senses. First, it refers to cases where the concern for others directly affects an individual's own welfare . Second, the term has served the purposes of welfare economics, where it is associated with interpersonal comparisons of the extended sympathy type, that is, comparisons between one's own situation in a social state and someone else's in a different social state . On the (...) other hand, empathy has been used interchangeably with sympathy either to render the idea of interdependent utility functions , or to convey the imaginative process of imagining oneself in someone else's place. (shrink)

The first of the three major thirteenth-century Hebrew encyclopedias of science and philosophy, the Midrash ha-Hokhmah presents a survey of philosophy and mathematical sciences. Originally written in Arabic, the author, Judah ben Solomon ha-Cohen, who was inspired by Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, translated his own work into Hebrew in the 1240s in Italy when he was in the service of Frederick II. The part on natural philosophy edited and translated in this volume is the first Hebrew text to draw (...) extensively on Averroes' commentaries on Aristotle. Over several chapters, Resianne Fontaine explores Judah's ambivalent attitude towards Aristotelian philosophy. (shrink)

"Le propos de Geneviève Gavignaud-Fontaine s'inscrit dans l'actualité d'une économie mondialement globalisée, et de sociétés ébranlées en leur tréfonds. L'ouvrage et composé de deux parties. La première retrace le cheminement intellectuel et spirituel de Thomas d'Aquin en son temps, ce qui conduit à souligner la spécificité de la méthode et de la pensée thomasiennes. Questionner le réel pour le comprendre, passer outre les apparences du monde présent, chercher dans le passé tant la part d'explication causale qu'il contient que la (...) part d'éternité qu'il transmet, et travailler à connaître l'essence des choses : voilà un programme qui ne saurait laisser indifférent! À partir de la conception thomiste de la justice (volonté vertueuse), la deuxième partie analyse d'abord les causes profondes des faits dont les conséquences minent les sociétés, puis explique pourquoi les actuels propositions intellectuelles et programmes politiques échouent à faire obstacle aux injustes misères humaines du présent début de siècle. Parties des États-Unis.dès les années 1'970 et répandues outre-Atlantique, les successives 'nouvelles théories de la justice' s'essoufflent avec le temps." --. (shrink)

The first of its kind, this book provides a full account of 'referential expressions' in language. It offers an integrated framework, which combines perspectives from functional grammar and cognitive linguistics with psycholinguistic evidence. It is essential reading for academic researchers in syntax, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics.

Résumé Le marché des produits kasher connaît depuis quelques années un développement contre-intuitif. Divers rapports d’étude, présentant la certification comme une « martingale », invitent les professionnels de l’agroalimentaire à rapidement labelliser leur offre commerciale. La pertinence de cette recommandation est ici testée. Une approche prospective originale des trajectoires du marché est proposée, assise sur une étude prospective de l’évolution du champ sémantique qui les sous-tend. L’idée est ainsi retenue selon laquelle la cinématique du marché est fonction d’une dynamique sémantique. (...) La méthode d’investigation retenue croise socio-linguistique et socio-anthropologie. On montre que le terme kasher prend aujourd’hui des sens variés, se charge d’ambivalences et d’ambiguïtés qui dessinent un horizon complexe d’opportunités et de menaces. (shrink)

The thirteenth-century Hebrew texts that discuss salinity all ultimately go back to Aristotle's treatment of the subject in the Meteorology. However, in these Hebrew texts the question of what exactly makes the sea salty is answered in diverging ways. The oldest of them, the Otot ha-Shamayim, being the Hebrew translation of the Arabic paraphrase of the Meteorology, proposes various causes of the sea's salinity, to wit, the dry exhalation, the action of heat, and the admixture of an earthy substance. This (...) is due partly to Aristotle's own ambiguity, and partly to the fact that his Greek commentators interpreted his words in different ways. Two later encyclopedias, the Midrash ha-Hokhma and the De'ot ha-Philosofim base their expositions of salinity on Ibn Rushd, whose two commentaries on the Meteorology contain various theories. The first encyclopedia opts for the action of heat as the major cause in producing saltiness, whereas the second attempts to explain in which way the various causes are interrelated by advisedly combining Ibn Rushd's accounts. (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.

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

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)

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