C’est en tant que catégorie de l’entendement que Durkheim aborde le temps. Restituer son approche du temps ainsi que celle de ses disciples, en particulier Henri Hubert, conduit à interroger les fondements de sa sociologie de la connaissance. Le sociomorphisme, dynamique structurante des représentations collectives, constitue la principale intuition de la sociologie durkheimienne de la connaissance. Après avoir rendu compte des acceptions multiples de ce concept, nous montrerons qu’il est inopérant pour une partie importante des catégories dont Durkheim prétend expliquer (...) la genèse, en particulier celle du temps. Cette investigation de la pensée du fondateur conduira ainsi à une remise en cause de sa pertinence globale. L’instabilité conceptuelle de la notion de représentations collectives, la dualité du psychisme humain ainsi que le rôle prépondérant accordé par Durkheim à l’effervescence sociale dans sa théorie du sacré constitueront les lieux de convergence critique de cet article.Time is approached by Durkheim as a category of understanding. Reconstructing this approach, like that of his disciples, in particular Henri Hubert, results in questioning the bases of his sociology of knowledge. Sociomorphism, as a structuring dynamics of collective representations, constitutes the main intuition of Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge. After outlining the various meanings of this concept, we show that it proves ineffectual for an important part of the categories whose genesis Durkheim claims to explain – in particular that of time. This investigation of Durkheim’s thought leads to a general questioning of its relevance. The conceptual instability of collective representations, the duality of human psyche, as well as the leading role Durkheim attached to social effervescence in his thesis of the sacred, constitute the knot of critical convergence of this article. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans Anabases. Traditions et réceptions de l'Antiquité, n° 20, 2014. Nous remercions Pascal Payen, la revue Anabases et Juliette Lormier de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Résumé : Cet article propose d'analyser deux entreprises de traduction en hexamètres français : celle des Travaux et des Jours d'Hésiode par Jean-Antoine de Baïf dans ses Étrénes de poézie fransoeze an vers mezurés, et celle de l'Iliade d'Homère par Philippe Brunet. Il s'agit de resituer ces (...) - Poétique et Études littéraires – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Adoption of an 'ethics of reversibility' can seem fashionably enlightened, even democratic, but appears less radical when issues of power are opened up. Adopting the motif of keeping , this paper sets its questioning of an on-going individuation of ethics within the context of an insidious reduction of institutional mores to business parlance. Keeping Derrida's 'philosophy of reversals' in view, the discussion resists the double bind of attempts to make higher-level decisions ever more 'irreversible' on the one hand, while devolving (...) ethical responsibilities for outcomes downwards on the other. In criss-crossing, back and forth, on variations of these themes, the aim of the paper is to contest a division of moral labour in which the more powerful style themselves as 'not for turning', while those dispossessed of authority are left to vacillate within the market agendas of flexibility and transparency. (shrink)

Adoption of an ‘ethics of reversibility’ can seem fashionably enlightened, even democratic, but appears less radical when issues of power are opened up. Adopting the motif of keeping, this paper sets its questioning of an on‐going individuation of ethics within the context of an insidious reduction of institutional mores to business parlance. Keeping Derrida's ‘philosophy of reversals’ in view, the discussion resists the double bind of attempts to make higher‐level decisions ever more ‘irreversible’ on the one hand, while devolving ethical (...) responsibilities for outcomes downwards on the other. In criss‐crossing, back and forth, on variations of these themes, the aim of the paper is to contest a division of moral labour in which the more powerful style themselves as ‘not for turning’, while those dispossessed of authority are left to vacillate within the market agendas of flexibility and transparency. (shrink)

Emotions might contribute to our being rational cognitive agents. Anxiety – and more specifically epistemic anxiety – provides an especially interesting case study into the role of emotion for adaptive cognition. In this paper, I aim at clarifying the epistemic contribution of anxiety, and the role that ill-calibrated anxiety might play in maladaptive epistemic activities which can be observed in psychopathology. In particular, I argue that this emotion contributes to our ability to adapt our cognitive efforts to how we represent (...) the practical factors relevant to the task at hand, by sig- naling the need for increased cognitive processing and evidence gathering in high- stakes situations. I hypothesize that dysfunctional or ill-calibrated epistemic anxiety might play an important role in the motivation driving persons with obsessive- compulsive disorder (OCD) to invest high amounts of cognitive resources into the resolution of apparently simple and innocuous questions. As I argue, OCD might be conceived as a case in which epistemic anxiety is inappropriately elicited, represent- ing these as high-stakes questions, and inadequately signaling a need for cognition. In this paper, I thus make use of the concept of (epistemic) anxiety as developed in the philosophy of emotion and in epistemology, to propose an account of the role of anxiety in the pathological doubt that is central to obsessive-compulsive disorder. (shrink)

Our philosophical understanding of mental illness is being shaped by neuroscience. However, it has the paradoxical effect of igniting two radically opposed groups of philosophical views. On one side, skepticism and denialism assume that, lacking clear biological mechanisms and etiologies for most mental illnesses, we should infer they are constructions best explained by means of social factors. This is strongly associated with medical nihilism: it considers psychiatry more harmful than benign. On the other side of the divide, naturalism and reductionism (...) are on the look for failures in the biological functioning of the organism whenever a genuine mental illness occurs. Psychiatry as currently practiced, accordingly, exhibits the gaps of an ongoing research programme; a yet to be completed neuroscience would link mental illnesses with identifiable biological mechanisms. Both sides of this divide claim to be fostered by scientific discoveries and advances in neuroscience, when taken at face value. Against this background, we argue instead for a modest view. To that end, we draw attention to some nuances in the scientific realism debate. While contending that neuroscientific theories and models aim to provide true representations of their target systems, and can justifiably claim to have attained some, we argue that our confidence should not be placed beforehand in specific features of these scientific representations. Hence, it would be unwarranted to extract morals for psychiatry from posits (or their absence) in neuroscientific explanations of mental illnesses. To illustrate our position, we examine some recent discoveries in neuroscience concerning bipolar disorder. We conclude by linking our topic to a broader issue in the philosophy of medicine: insofar as psychiatry is a biomedical specialty, its classifications of health and disease are guided by pragmatic concerns, as well as by scientific discoveries. (shrink)

L’analyse en termes de politique criminelle de la responsabilité pénale contemporaine permet d’observer les mouvements qui la travaillent de l’intérieur, en particulier son éclatement qui l’expose aux incohérences, mais aussi de l’extérieur, spécialement son expansion qui la confronte à ses propres limites.

Rousseau avait tout lieu, dans la controverse qui oppose au xviii e siècle partisans et pourfendeurs des voyages d’éducation, de prendre position contre ces voyages, suivant en cela les déclarations de Béat de Muralt, qu’il approuvait dans une large mesure. Nous constatons pourtant qu’en abordant « la question des voyages », l’auteur de l’Émile se voit obligé, tout en condamnant cette « mode », à la manière de Muralt, d’opérer un glissement théorique et de conférer à l’expérience du voyage, comme (...) expérience critique de la pluralité et de la liberté, une place essentielle dans son système, place rendue nécessaire par sa théorie des affects politiques. (shrink)

Juliette Roussin | : Cet article a pour objet d’interroger la tendance actuelle des démocraties à s’entourer d’institutions indépendantes au fort degré de compétence en vue de limiter et de corriger les défaillances éventuelles des corps démocratiques élus et représentatifs. La légitimité démocratique de ces institutions contre-majoritaires leur viendrait, selon certains théoriciens de la démocratie, de ce qu’elles offrent la possibilité de contester les décisions collectives lorsque celles-ci sont mauvaises ou injustes, contribuant ainsi à l’amélioration globale des performances du (...) régime démocratique. À partir notamment d’une lecture des travaux de Philip Pettit sur la démocratie contestataire et d’une réflexion sur l’approche épistémique défendue par David Estlund, nous questionnons au contraire le caractère démocratique de ces formes institutionnelles de contestation et montrons que, tant qu’elles ne font pas l’objet d’un contrôle démocratique plus étroit, elles peuvent être interprétées comme des modes de contestation de la démocratie plutôt que comme des instruments de son amélioration. | : This paper investigates a current tendency among democracies to appeal to highly competent independent institutions in order to constrain and amend the potential deficiencies of elected and representative democratic bodies. According to some democratic theorists, these counter-majoritarian institutions enjoy democratic legitimacy because they allow the contestation of ill-devised or unjust collective decisions, and hence contribute to the global improvement of democratic results. Based on a reading of Philip Pettit’s work on contestatory democracy and of David Estlund’s epistemic approach, the paper questions the democratic nature of these institutional forms of contestation and shows that, as long as they are not subjected to tighter democratic control, these institutions can be interpreted as ways of contesting democracy rather than as implements for its improvement. (shrink)

This article analyses a recent discourse of responsibility that accompanies states’ foreign aid provision. States adopt this discourse of National Social Responsibility to show their complian...

Feeling confused can sometimes lead us to give up on the task, frustrated. What is less emphasized is that confusion may also promote happy (epistemic) endings to our inquiries. It has recently been argued that confusion motivates effortful investigative behaviors which can help us acquire hard-to-get epistemic goods (DiLeo et al., 2019; D’Mello & Graesser, 2012). While the motivational power of confusion and its benefits for learning has been uncovered in recent years, the exact nature of the phenomenon remains obscure. (...) In this paper we attempt to shed light on the nature and epistemic value of an experience we are all familiar with: the experience of being confused at an object, a statement, etc. We first review the psychological literature on confusion, where it is most often considered to be an epistemic emotion. We then propose a refined account of confusion, by drawing on the literature on metacognitive or noetic feelings, both in psychology and in the philosophy of mind. In particular, we claim that confusion centrally involves the experience of the limits of one’s cognitive capacities, because it results from a monitoring of our cognitive activities as we encounter a cognitive obstacle while processing a given content. Finally we show how our account may explain findings about the role of the experience of confusion in motivating deeper inquiry into complex problems and bringing about epistemic success in these cases. (shrink)

English summary: Taking into account the relevant and mostly contemporary ango-american debates concering collective intentionality, the author eximanes what it means to share reasons and other intentional states such as thoughts and emotions. The guiding question of the dissertation is in what way and to what extent morality and therefore self-consciousness can be understood as conditions of possibility for the sharing of mental states, especially reasons. The dissertation is a contribution mainly to fields of research in practical philosophy (normative ethics (...) and moral psychology) and in social philosophy (collective intentionality analysis) and rational choice theory. German description: Juliette Gloors Monographie fragt aus hauptsachlich analytischer Perspektive und unter spezieller Berucksichtigung der einschlagigen anglo-amerikanischen Debatten, was es bedeutet, Grunde und andere intentionale Einstellungen zu teilen. Die Leitfrage der Untersuchung lautet, inwiefern Moral und damit Selbstbewusstsein als Bedingungen der Moglichkeit solchen Teilens begriffen werden konnen. Die Dissertation ist ein Beitrag zur Forschung innerhalb des Gebiets der Praktischen Philosophie (insbesondere der normativen Ethik) und der Sozialphilosophie (speziell im Bereich der Kollektiven Intentionalitat). (shrink)

In this thesis, I elaborate and defend Donald Davidson's account of knowing one's own mental states that exhibit first-person authority. To that end, I place Davidson's account among others in the philosophical landscape concerning self-knowledge. Next, I examine his response to philosophical challenges that arise from mental content externalism and self-deception. Finally, I draw some insights froms Davidson's account to the broader aims of epsitemology.

How epigenetic mechanisms regulate genome output and response to stimuli is a fundamental question in development and disease. Past decades have made tremendous progress in deciphering the regulatory relationships involved by correlating aggregated (epi)genomics profiles with global perturbations. However, the recent development of epigenetic editing technologies now enables researchers to move beyond inferred conclusions, towards explicit causal reasoning, through 'programing’ precise chromatin perturbations in single cells. Here, we first discuss the major unresolved questions in the epigenetics field that can be (...) addressed by programable epigenome editing, including the context‐dependent function and memory of chromatin states. We then describe the epigenetic editing toolkit focusing on CRISPR‐based technologies, and highlight its achievements, drawbacks and promise. Finally, we consider the potential future application of epigenetic editing to the study and treatment of specific disease conditions. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a good thinker? Which virtues work together in someone who possesses good intellectual character? Although recent research on virtues has highlighted the benefits of individual intellectual virtues, being an excellent thinker is likely a function of possessing multiple intellectual virtues. Specifically, a good thinker would both recognize one’s intellectual shortcomings and possess an eagerness to learn driven by virtues such as love of knowledge, curiosity, and open-mindedness. Good intellectual character may only successfully manifest when (...) individuals possess not just one or a few intellectual virtues, but a larger set of such virtues to different degrees. However, little is currently known about what combination of virtues are necessary for good thinking. We argue that it is important to identify and clarify the nature of the good thinker and outline a profile methodology for achieving this goal. This approach characterizes the good thinker in terms of a profile of multiple intellectual virtues. Understanding this profile can allow greater insight into the extent to which people possess such a profile, and the potential for societal benefits of educating for these qualities. (shrink)

We work in set theory ZF without axiom of choice. Though the Hahn-Banach theorem cannot be proved in ZF, we prove that every Gateaux-differentiable uniformly convex Banach space E satisfies the following continuous Hahn-Banach property: if p is a continuous sublinear functional on E, if F is a subspace of E, and if f: F → ℝ is a linear functional such that f ≤ p|F then there exists a linear functional g : E → ℝ such that g extends (...) f and g ≤ p. We also prove that the continuous Hahn-Banach property on a topological vector space E is equivalent to the classical geometrical forms of the Hahn-Banach theorem on E. We then prove that the axiom of Dependent choices DC is equivalent to Ekeland's variational principle, and that it implies the continuous Hahn-Banach property on Gateaux-differentiable Banach spaces. Finally, we prove that, though separable normed spaces satisfy the continuous Hahn-Banach property, they do not satisfy the whole Hahn-Banach property in ZF+DC. (shrink)

Una de las bifurcaciones en el debate contemporáneo sobre la legitimidad de la democracia explora si ésta ofrece ventajas distintivamente epistémicas frente a otras alternativas políticas. Quienes defienden la tesis de la democracia epistémica afirman que la democracia es instrumentalmente superior o equiparable a otras formas de organización política en lo que concierne a la obtención de varios bienes epistémicos. En este ensayo presento dos (grupos de) argumentos a favor de la democracia epistémica, que se inspiran en resultados formales: el (...) teorema del jurado de Condorcet [TJC] y el teorema ‘diversidad supera habilidad’ [DSH]. Pese a su gran atractivo, sostengo que estos argumentos son incapaces de respaldar dicha tesis: no brindan razones para considerar que la democracia es epistémicamente superior (o equiparable) a algunas alternativas políticas no democráticas. En su lugar, sugiero que, sin requerir un cambio radical en nuestras formas de organización política, la epistemología democrática –el estudio de las ‘circunstancias epistémicas de la democracia’– puede ofrecer valiosas lecciones de sobre cómo optimizar, en nuestra situación, instituciones y procedimientos de toma de decisiones. Para ello, primero distingo entre varias maneras de evaluar procedimientos de toma de decisión colectiva. Argumento que, al considerarlos como formas de organización política, un factor importante en la evaluación de tales procedimientos involucra asuntos fácticos sobre los cuales puede aspirarse a obtener o promover algunos bienes epistémicos. En este contexto, presento algunos de los argumentos más importantes a favor de la democracia epistémica. A continuación, reúno algunas de las objeciones sobre la aplicabilidad de dichos argumentos y ofrezco razones independientes para dudar de que ofrezcan apoyo a la tesis de la democracia epistémica. Finalmente, defiendo que la epistemología democrática puede desempeñar un papel significativo en la legitimación de formas de organización colectiva que podrían denominarse ‘democráticas’. (shrink)

Cet article analyse le risque de corruption que les arrêts Citizens United de 2010 et l’apparition des Super-PACs font peser sur le système électoral états-unien. Lors de la dernière campagne présidentielle, plus de 730 millions de dollars ont été investis dans des publicités électorales par de riches contributeurs et des entreprises privées regroupés en Super-PACs. Nous montrons que cet afflux d’argent consacré à des publicités politiques expose la démocratie américaine à trois formes de « corruption grise », en favorisant la (...) banalisation de pratiques contestables et en troublant la frontière entre ce qui est licite et ce qui ne l’est pas. (1) Déplafonné, le soutien financier aux candidats risque de s’apparenter à de la subornation; (2) certaines des techniques publicitaires employées semblent réduire l’exercice de conviction démocratique à une tentative de corruption de l’électeur; (3) enfin les immenses inégalités d’influence politique que ce système de financement induit participent de la corruption des affaires démocratiques en favorisant leur captation par un petit nombre d’individus fortunés. Nous mettons en évidence que le refus systématique de la Cour Suprême d’envisager ces phénomènes comme des vecteurs de corruption se fonde sur une conception discutable de la démocratie comme système de libre concurrence pour le pouvoir politique. Comprendre la démocratie à partir de son impératif d’égalité permet à l’inverse de rendre visible la corruption à laquelle son système de financement électoral expose la démocratie américaine. (shrink)

Entre avril et mai 1994, au couvent de Sovu au Rwanda, plusieurs milliers de Tutsi sont assassinés par des miliciens avec la complicité de la mère supérieure des lieux, sœur Gertrude. En 2001 à Bruxelles, la cour d’assises la juge et la condamne pour son implication dans les massacres. À partir des archives des transcriptions du procès, l’article revient sur la façon dont s’exerçait son autorité au sein du couvent au moment du génocide. Sa défense adopte une stratégie genrée et (...) cherche à éloigner la sœur de la possibilité même de l’engagement dans la violence. Mais les témoignages des victimes attestent l’intégration de la religieuse aux réseaux politiques locaux et la manière dont elle a mobilisé les ressources à sa disposition pour exclure de la sphère de protection du couvent les Tutsis s’y étant réfugiés. (shrink)

El estudio de los trabajos escolares de la memoria viene renovándose desde hace años gracias a la comprensión de las especificidades de los sentidos propios elaborados por los sujetos. Este enfoque aspira a vincular los fundamentos teóricos de esos trabajos y su desempeño práctico, en aras de una caracterización más realista y de la contribución a la prevención (el popularmente conocido como nunca más). Para ahondar en esta línea, se propone aquí un análisis de cinco entrevistas en profundidad realizadas a (...) estudiantes secundarios en dos escuelas de La Plata en 2018, con los objetivos generales de delinear sus sentidos propios en relación con su cotidianidad (y no sólo con preceptos y mandatos) y explorar los intercambios e implicaciones prácticas entre los aspectos cognitivos, ético-morales y emocionales. Para ello me he centrado en las múltiples relaciones entre distintas temporalidades, inspirado por el concepto de conciencia histórica. He apreciado la divergencia entre interpretación y justificación, la influencia de distintos factores y tramas de relaciones de la cotidianidad escolar y el despliegue de complejos intercambios entre pasado, presente y futuro para afrontar una situación hipotética, con decisivas implicaciones teóricas para una educación emancipadora. (shrink)

How does doubt come about? What are the mechanisms responsible for our inclinations to reassess propositions and collect further evidence to support or reject them? In this paper, I approach this question by focusing on what might be considered a distorting mirror of unreasonable doubt, namely the pathological doubt of patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Individuals with OCD exhibit a form of persistent doubting, indecisiveness, and over-cautiousness at pathological levels (Rasmussen and Eisen in Psychiatr Clin 15(4):743–758, 1992; Reed in Obsessional (...) experience and compulsive behaviour: a cognitive-structural approach, Academic Press, Cambridge, 1985; Tolin et al. in Cogn Ther Res 27(6):657–669, 2003). I argue that the failure in OCD is of an affective nature, involving both excessive epistemic anxiety and hyperactive feelings of uncertainty. I further argue that our adaptive disposition to inquire about the right matters—that is, about propositions which are both epistemically risky and imply harmful possibilities—might depend on these affective mechanisms. (shrink)

Learning from a text–picture multimedia document is particularly effective if learners can link information within the text and across the verbal and the pictorial representations. The ability to create a mental model successfully and include those implicit links is related to the ability to generate inferences. Text processing research has found that text cohesion facilitates the generation of inferences, and thus text comprehension for learners with poor prior knowledge or reading abilities, but is detrimental for learners with good prior knowledge (...) or reading abilities. Moreover, multimedia research has found a positive effect from adding visual representations to text information, particularly when implementing signaling, which consists of verbal or visual cues designed to guide attention to the pictorial representation of relevant information. We expected that, as with text-only documents, struggling readers would benefit from high text cohesion and that signaling would foster inference generation as well. Further, we hypothesized that better learning outcomes would be observed when text cohesion was low and signaling was present. Our first experimental study investigated the effect of those two factors on three levels of comprehension. Participants were adolescents in prevocational schools, where some of the students are struggling readers. The results showed a trend in favor of high cohesion, but with no significant effect, a significant positive effect of cross-representational signaling on comprehension from local inferences, and no interaction effect. A second experiment focused on signaling only and attention toward the picture, with collection of eye-tracking data in addition to measures of offline comprehension. As this study was conducted with university students, who are expected to have higher reading abilities and thus are less likely to benefit from high cohesion, the material was presented in its low cohesive version. The results showed no effect of conditions on comprehension performances but confirmed differences in processing behaviors. Participants allocated more attention to the pictorial representation in the CRS condition than in the no signaling condition. (shrink)

D'où la démocratie tire-t-elle sa valeur? De ce que le plus grand nombre y exerce le pouvoir politique? Ou bien de la protection des droits et des libertés que ses institutions législatives, exécutives et judiciaires y garantissent à chaque personne? Connu en France en tant que philosophe du droit, penseur du libéralisme et des fondements de la justice sociale, Ronald Dworkin a aussi développé une conception originale de la démocratie. Pour lui, la démocratie n'est pas une procédure, mais une communauté, (...) organisée autour des principes de participation, de réciprocité et d'indépendance éthique. Ces principes politiques et moraux sous-tendent la constitution et informent les relations entre ses citoyens. C'est pourquoi l'opposition entre autogouvernement et protection des libertés relève d'une fausse alternative : les juges constitutionnels, en particulier, qui ont la charge d'interpréter le sens et l'étendue des droits, ne s'opposent pas à la réalisation de l'idéal démocratique. Au contraire : pour Dworkin, leur rôle est d'assurer que la communauté se gouverne conformément à ses principes et demeure, ainsi, une démocratie authentique. (shrink)

Quelles sont les implications de la philosophie de Condorcet pour les théories épistémiques de la démocratie? Ces dernières réduisent souvent l’argument épistémique de Condorcet en faveur de la démocratie au théorème du jury. Or le philosophe montre que c’est seulement quand elle devient le vecteur de l’indépendance politique, économique et intellectuelle des citoyens que ses vertus épistémiques se font jour. En se concentrant sur les procédures de décision susceptibles de favoriser de bons résultats politiques, les approches contemporaines ne proposent qu’une (...) analyse partielle des embarras démocratiques, et se privent de bases pour un argument épistémique plausible en faveur de la démocratie. (shrink)

En décadas recientes se ha considerado que una formulación adecuada del autoconocimiento (AC) debería ser consistente con la tesis del externalismo (E). Michael McKinsey es uno de los personajes que ha enfatizado con mayor ahínco que la conjunción de ambas posturas es inconsistente. En este trabajo defiendo la idea de que las objeciones presentadas por McKinsey no afectan de manera importante la formulación davidsoniana de la autoridad de la primera persona (AC3) en conjunción con (E); señalo, además, que si no (...) pudiera hacerse una reconstrucción à la Davidson de (AC3) desde la postura de McKinsey sería en virtud de las diferencias metodológicas, semánticas, epistemológicas y ontológicas entre ambos autores, y no debido a que esta reconstrucción en sí misma sea incompatible con el externalismo. (shrink)

Benoîte Groult n’aime pas la bande dessinée. « Le neuvième art », qu’elle associe aux albums illustrés de son enfance, évoque à ses yeux des récits conventionnels et peu féministes, dont le parangon est Bécassine. Ce « préjugé » constitue l’un des leitmotivs de la bande dessinée que Catel Muller, illustratrice et scénariste, consacre à l’essayiste et romancière féministe Benoîte Groult. Co-auteure avec José-Louis Bocquet, d’une « bio graphique » d’Edith Piaf (2005), de Kiki de Montparnasse (2...