A vital and underappreciated dimension of social interaction is the way individuals justify their actions to others, instinctively drawing on their experience to appeal to principles they hope will command respect. Individuals, however, often misread situations, and many disagreements can be explained by people appealing, knowingly and unknowingly, to different principles. On Justification is the first English translation of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's ambitious theoretical examination of these phenomena, a book that has already had a huge impact on (...) French sociology and is likely to have a similar influence in the English-speaking world. In this foundational work of post-Bourdieu sociology, the authors examine a wide range of situations where people justify their actions. The authors argue that justifications fall into six main logics exemplified by six authors: civic (Rousseau), market (Adam Smith), industrial (Saint-Simon), domestic (Bossuet), inspiration (Augustine), and fame (Hobbes). The authors show how these justifications conflict, as people compete to legitimize their views of a situation. On Justification is likely to spark important debates across the social sciences. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper1 is to rationalise why and how philosophy can help today’s managers in their daily practices. I will first explain why today’s managers particularly should engage themselves in profound and enduring dialogue with philosophers. To this end, I will present the close links between the major managerial activities and the major philosophical domains. In the second section, I will sketch out how such a dialogue can be facilitated. To this end, I will present some of the (...) methods and conditions used to ensure the success of the practice of philosophy in organisations. (shrink)

Misunderstanding of the dynamical behavior of the ventilatory system, especially under assisted ventilation, may explain the problems encountered in ventilatory support monitoring. Proportional assist ventilation (PAV) that theoretically gives a breath by breath assistance presents instability with high levels of assistance. We have constructed a mathematical model of interactions between three objects: the central respiratory pattern generator modelled by a modified Van der Pol oscillator, the mechanical respiratory system which is the passive part of the system and a controlled ventilator (...) that follows its own law. The dynamical study of our model shows the existence of two crucial behaviors, i.e. oscillations and damping, depending on only two parameters, namely the time constant of the mechanical respiratory system and a cumulative interaction index. The same result is observed in simulations of spontaneous breathing as well as of PAV. In this last case, increasing assistance leads first to an increase of the tidal volume (VT), a further increase in assistance inducing a decrease in VT, ending in damping of the whole system to an attractive fixed point. We conclude that instabilities observed in PAV may be explained by the different possible dynamical behaviors of the system rather than changes in mechanical characteristics of the respiratory system. (shrink)

Many countries are experimenting with planned (or quasi-) markets to discover if they can efficiently deliver health care in keeping with societal objectives. This paper examines the information requirements of this approach. Information is necessary in order to compare the performance of providers, to support billing, and to monitor access to care. It should be accurate, unambiguous, and resistant to manipulation. We draw on a project to find out how information on hospitalisation could be used in contracting in the British (...) National Health Service. We conclude that the existing British system fails to provide robust measures of how many patients are treated, for what conditions, and with what treatments. We identify some promising remedies, others that are more difficult, and some which may be impossible to implement in any planned market, given the uncertainty of clinical practice. (shrink)

Les articles réunis dans ce dossier proviennent pour l’essentiel de la journée d’étude organisée par Elisabetta Basso et Laurent Dartigues le 6 juin 2017 à l’ENS de Lyon, avec le soutien de l’Institut d’études avancées (Collegium) de Lyon, de l’UMR Triangle et de l’ENS de Lyon. Seul fait exception le texte d’Ugo Balzaretti, que nous avons eu plaisir à accueillir dans ce dossier. Cette journée d’étude s’inscrivait dans le contexte du projet de recherche intitulé « Rethinking anthropology in li...

We consider a computational model comparing the possible roles of and in phonetic decoding, demonstrating that these two routes can contain similar information in some communication situations and highlighting situations where their decoding performance differs. We conclude that optimal decoding should involve some sort of fusion of association and simulation in the human brain.

L’univers de Lucrèce (la summarum summa) est fragile. Hormis les agrégats divins dans les inter-mondes, tout y est mortel : l’âme humaine, le corps, le monde et les étoiles. Le sage cherche cependant une stabilité qu’il ne peut fonder sur un Principe unique, Bien, Premier moteur ou Providence de Zeus : il cherche donc des fondations pour que le bonheur soit possible au sein des moenia mundi, des « murailles du monde ». Comment comprendre cette image et plus généralement la (...) place de l’architecture dans le De natura rerum? sur quoi repose l’ataraxie du sage? (shrink)

Strabon n'est pas un philosophe stoïcien. En relisant l'ensemble de la Géographie, les traits stoïciens de sa méthode, de sa physique et de sa conception de l'existence humaine apparaissent bien minces. Il semble donc préférable de voir en lui un penseur éclectique dont le but principal est la description rigoureuse du monde habité.Strabo is not stoic philosopher. His Geography, his Method, his Physics and his conception of human life do not come across as not strongly stoic when they are patiently (...) read. It seems more appropriate to view him as an eclectic thinker whose main objective is the rigorous description of the inhabited world. (shrink)

_An original and insightful account of nature and our place in it from one of France's preeminent historians of philosophy._.

On the True Sense of Art collects essays by philosophers responding to John Sallis's Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art as well as his other works on the philosophy of art, including Force of Imagination and Logic of Imagination. Each of the chapters, by some of the leading thinkers in Continental philosophy, engages Sallis's work on both ancient and new senses of aesthetics--a transfiguration of aesthetics--as a beginning that is always beginning again. With a responsive essay by Sallis himself, (...) On the True Sense of Art forms a critical introduction to the thought of this generation's most important aesthetician. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of the earth. I center this effort on a reading of the figure of animality in the writings of Nietzsche and Bataille. I begin by accepting one of the decisive questions (die Entscheidungen) that Heidegger poses in the Beiträge zur Philosophie: "Whether nature is degraded to the exploitative place of calculation and furnishing and to an opportunity to 'have an experience' or whether nature as the self-closing Earth bears the opening of a world without image." (...) In an attempt to think the Earth, I argue that the human as a natural kind emerges in denial or flight from animality. Animality renders natural kinds porous. It does not congeal into a categorically delimitable operation, but rather interrupts and multiplies such operations. Moreover, they multiply them with what Nietzsche called "transvaluative" force. Animality contests the closure of a discourse on kinds of animals. (shrink)

Résumé Où va la peinture est un livre de Laurent Marissal qui se présente à la fois comme un traité sur la peinture et comme une œuvre peinte. Les actions qu’il relate sont elles-mêmes revendiquées comme des actions picturales. L’article s’interroge sur ces usages hétérodoxes de la notion de « picturalité », tout d’abord au niveau de la mise en forme narrative du livre, puis à celui des actions que cette forme a pour dessein de relater. Une dernière partie (...) étudie la relation du travail de Laurent Marissal avec le courant du narrative art. (shrink)

This is the first volume of a two-volume project whose aim is to publish all the known Middle English manuscript translations of the French Somme le mi, a thirteenth-century manual of religious instruction offering teaching on the Decalogue, the seven deadly sins and their remedies, compiled by the Dominican friar Laurent of Orleans. The project extends and deepens our knowledge of the influence of this popular French text, known today only from the versions entitled The Ayen bite of Inwit (...) and The Book of Vices and Virtues, published in 1866 and 1942, respectively. This volume presents the versions extant in BL MSS Royal 18. A. x and Add. 37677; the second will cover the versions in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 494, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1286, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Musaeo 23. The texts of both volumes have been prepared with the help of the recently-published edition of the French text, a circumstance from which the earlier English editions were unable to benefit. It is likely that the versions edited here for the first time will make a considerable contribution to our understanding of the processes of textual transmission and to that of translation itself in English literary circles of the fifteenth century. (shrink)

These are short reflections on Ueda Shizuteru’s collection of essays, written in German, called Wer und was bin ich? Zur Phänomenologie des Selbst im Zen-Buddhismus. I read and respond to them as a way of paying my respects to this great thinker by locating the space of transformative philosophical encounter that his writing enacts and invites.

Wirth beschreibt in diesem Buch Volkstum und Weltmacht in der Geschichte, im Original 1904 erschienen.

This article argues that many situations in social life can be analyzed by their requirement for the justification of action. It is in particular in situations of dispute that a need arises to explicate the grounds on which responsibility for errors is distributed and on which new agreement can be reached. Since a plurality of mutually incompatible modes of justification exists, disputes can be understood as disagreements either about whether the accepted rule of justification has not been violated or about (...) which mode of justification to apply at all. The article develops a grammar of such modes of justification, called orders of worth (grandeur), and argues that the human capacity for criticism becomes visible in the daily occurrence of disputes over criteria for justification. At the same time, it is underlined that not all social situations can be interpreted with the help of such a sense of justice, which resides on a notion of equivalence. Regimes of love, of violence or of familiarity are systematically distinct from regimes of justification. (shrink)

Rules are often stated in a negated manner (“no trespassing”) rather than in an affirmative manner (“stay in your lane”). Here, we build on classic research on negation processing and, using a finger‐tracking design on a touchscreen, we show that following negated rather than affirmative rules is harder as indicated by multiple performance measures. Moreover, our results indicate that practice has a surprisingly limited effect on negated rules, which are implemented more quickly with training, but this effect comes at the (...) expense of reduced efficiency. Only affirmative rules are thus put into action efficiently, highlighting the importance of tailoring how rules are communicated to the peculiarities of the human mind. (shrink)