t. 1. Sections I à X -- t. 2. Sections XI à XXVII -- t. 3. Sections XXVIII à XXXVIII et index.

Philosophe et penseur du politique, intellectuel marxiste et militant communiste, enseignant, directeur de collection... : à travers le rayonnement de son oeuvre et de sa personne, Louis Althusser a renouvelé la théorie politique et la philosophie de l'histoire, de Machiavel à Marx. Parmi ses contemporains, Michel Foucault exhorte : " Ouvrez les livres d'Althusser! ", Jacques Derrida évoque " la force rayonnante et provocante de sa pensée ", Gilles Deleuze salue l'" Althusser's Band ", et pour Roland Barthes, " (...) le seul modèle acceptable de la science est celui mis au jour par les études d'Althusser sur Marx ". Aliocha Wald Lasowski converse avec vingt écrivains et philosophes qui ont lu, rencontré, parfois travaillé avec Althusser, quand ils n'ont pas fait partie de ses proches. Où l'on mesure à quel point la pensée d'Althusser demeure d'une actualité brûlante. (shrink)

V.1. livres I-IV V.2. livres V-VII. V.3 livres VIII-X.

This article concerns the ways in which authors from various fields conceptualise the ethical issues arising in the conduct of research. We reviewed critically and systematically the literature concerning the ethics of conducting research in order to engage in a reflection about the vocabulary and conceptual categories used in the publications reviewed. To understand better how the ethical issues involved in conducting research are conceptualised in the publications reviewed, we 1) established an inventory of the conceptualisations reviewed, and 2) we (...) critically assessed them. We found that the publications reviewed mostly showed examples of descriptive ethics, in that most authors describe ethical issues without reflecting much on them, which could be explained both by 1) a lack of ethical education in research contexts, and 2) by the fact that we do not know what researchers know (or do not) about ethical issues. Additionally, the definitions identified in the publications are scarce and at times imprecise, but this seems more to point out the ethical vocabulary’s difficulties in certain contexts. Further, very few authors offer proper conceptualisations of the ethical issues arising in conducting research. When dealing with vast arrays of ethical issues to conceptualise, perhaps one ought to remember that some typologies already exist that could guide further reflection and help understand other realities for which the current ethical vocabulary may be lacking. We believe that combining the reviewed typologies, both with other well-developed typologies and critical reflection, could help support better ethical practice in conducting research. (shrink)

Before broaching our main subject, and exploring why, among all disorders of the mind, obsessive-compulsive disorders have a place apart, I would like to start from a dilemma that is well-known to historians interested in mental disorders. According to one approach, a mental illness X is considered as a bona fide or ‘genuine’ illness if, and only if, it originates from a disturbance of the brain. Its neurobiological form is in this case considered as invariant, whatever cultural veneer might give (...) it a different aspect in accord with historical and local settings. The assumption is that this veneer does not, properly speaking, have any deep grounding in reality... (shrink)

Summary This article explores the relations among three forms of representations (artistic, mental, and neural) and immersion, considered as an altered state of consciousness, in the context of literary reading. We first define immersive reading as an intensification of our embodied experience of literary representation, in accordance to neuropsychological studies about embodied cognition. We further consider the style of interpretation demanded by such immersive reading and its ethical and ecological underpinnings.

Ils sont suisse, canadien, belge, roumain ou encore français et se sont réunis à Montréal pour se pencher sur la notion de «limite» dans les travaux de Jean Ladrière. On le sait, l'oeuvre de Jean Ladrière se déploie, avec génie et originalité, dans bien des domaines: la physique, les mathématiques, la logique, les sciences du langage, la philosophie et la théologie. Les textes réunis dans ce volume tentent de penser les «articulations du sens» de cette notion de «limite», en prenant (...) la mesure des questionnements les plus contemporains, que ceux-ci émanent de perspectives scientiques, politiques, éthiques ou encore pratiques. (shrink)

Locke écrit à Molyneux qu’il veut donner à l’association des idées plus de portée encore qu’il ne l’a fait dans l’Essai. S’appuyant sur les textes politiques, pédagogiques, ainsi que sur Of the Conduct of the Understanding, nous y trouvons de fait à dépasser les applications courantes que l’on fait de l’association des idées lockienne (théorie de l’erreur, question de la maîtrise des passions) : nous nous risquons ainsi à montrer que le processus de liaison et d’association est en jeu au (...) niveau fondamental et biologique de l’existence humaine. L’opposition de l’adaptation et de l’inadaptation (cette dernière permettant de nommer et repérer les pathologies de l’association) fonctionne pour le vivant (1), mais aussi pour la description du soi (2). L’association des idées rend en effet difficile à l’esprit de s’approprier lui-même, de comprendre l’origine de ses propres pensées. Enfin, et c’est la troisième application de cette étude, si l’on se tourne du côté de l’expérience (3), alors que l’activité industrieuse et adaptée à l’expérience met la nature à notre disposition parce que nous y avons trouvé les bonnes liaisons, l’association d’idées nous fixe dans des liens stériles avec le monde et permet de comprendre ce qu’est la folie. Ainsi, à propos du vivant, du moi et de l’expérience humaine, l’association des idées apparaît comme le « scrupule sceptique auquel se heurte l’abandon confiant à la voie des idées ». (shrink)

Le constat que fait Spinoza dans le Traité de la réforme de l ’ entendement selon lequel on ne connaît ses parents que par ouï-dire fournit l’occasion de développer, à partir de l’exemple de la famille, la conception originale qu’offre le point de vue spinoziste sur les institutions. En reprenant une distinction que fait Julie Henry, on peut dire que la famille n’existe pas par nature, mais qu’elle est un effet naturel. L’univocité de la causalité et la diversité des causes (...) qui président à sa constitution permettent d’échapper à l’opposition nature – culture comme à toute tentative de réduire les phénomènes sociaux à des principes biologiques ou environnementaux. (shrink)

Writers and readers of literature are, among other things, biological entities that evolve under particular political (geographical/historical) conditions. A comparative study of certain texts by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) can help us establish a fruitful interpretation of this threefold link between literary art, biology and politics. However, careful analysis reveals that Heidegger remains too rooted in an old-world, nationalistic and anthropocentric paradigm. We will attempt to rethink Heidegger’s assumptions on the grounds that literature, a cultural practice, enables us to delineate our (...) natural environment. By reformulating Heidegger’s line of thought, we can more precisely address the plural structure of our biotic and political-literary experiences. (shrink)

H.-U. Wiemer opposes the image which Libanius gives of Constantine in his fifty-ninth oration (Panegyric of Constantius and Constans) to that which emerges from his later works, especially those of the Theodosian period when hostility is obvious, mirroring the opinion of pagan circles, who held this Emperor responsible for most of the calamities endured by the Empire in the fourth century. As the epideictic genre required, in 344/5 or in 348/9 the father had to be praised so that the sons (...) could be praised too. However, Wiemer claims that ‘the panegyric of 344/5 already foreshadows the critical view’, by remaining silent about Christianity, the founding of Constantinople, and the tax policy on the one hand, and on the other hand by clearly declaring Constantine responsible for the war against Persia, which troubled the entire reign of Constantius. I wish to supplement these remarks with a few others and to suggest that the portrait of Constantine inOration59 presents us with a case of ‘disguised intention’—a rhetorical proceeding based on ὑποδήλωσις and παραψόγους: the orator tries to convey a message that is different from his apparent intentions, even opposite to them. (shrink)

La critique du dualisme cartésien, c’est-à-dire du mythe de l’intériorité, a été menée à partir de deux positions philosophiques. La première cherche à réduire l’état mental à l’état neuronal défini par ses propriétés neurologiques et l’autre, celle de Wittgenstein, tente de faire disparaître le mystère des relations entre la pensée et le cerveau par une critique grammaticale du langage. La notion de survol absolu, notion centrale de la philosophie de Ruyer, permet de développer une conception non matérialiste de l’identité entre (...) état cérébral et état mental. De plus, cette conception montre que l’intériorité de l’état mental ne saurait être réduite à une erreur de catégorie. Mais cette thèse de l’identité de la conscience et du corps nécessite de développer une perspective radicalement nouvelle permettant de concevoir une conscience « étendue ». (shrink)

Diauxie is at the origin of research that led Jacques Monod, François Jacob, and André Lwoff to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965 for their description of the first genetic regulatory model. Diauxie is a term coined by Jacques Monod in 1941 in his doctoral dissertation that refers to microbial growth in two phases. In this article, we first examine Monod’s thesis to demonstrate how and why Monod interpreted diauxie as a phenomenon of enzyme inhibition or (...) suppression of adaptive enzymes. We also briefly investigate prior enzyme suppression studies, before Monod’s work, which indicate that he is the first person to observe diauxic growth. Second, we analyse Monod’s post-thesis publications throughout his scientific career, revealing that diauxic inhibition was a significant part of Monod’s scientific activities and greatly fascinated Monod until the end of his life. Paradoxically, Monod’s work and interest on diauxic inhibition are still neglected in historical recounts, focused mostly on Monod’s enzymatic adaptation studies. Indeed, we uncovered a statement by Monod’s colleague, Lwoff, who transformed a quotation from Monod by replacing the word phenomenon with enzymatic adaptation, which we believe has influenced historians. Finally, we offer hypotheses to explain why Lwoff altered Monod’s statement. (shrink)

Potential speech abilities constitute a key component in the description of the Neandertals and their relations with modern Homo Sapiens. Since Lieberman & Crelin postulated in 1971 the theory that “Neanderthal man did not have the anatomical prerequisites for producing the full range of human speech” their speech capability has been a subject of hot debate for over 30 years, and remains a controversial question. In this study, we first question the methodology adopted by Lieberman and Crelin, and we point (...) out articulatory and acoustic flaws in the data and the modeling. Then we propose a general articulatory-acoustic framework for testing the acoustic consequences of the trade-off between oral and pharyngeal cavities. Specifically, following Honda & Tiede, we characterize this trade-off by a Laryngeal Height Index corresponding to the length ratio of the pharyngeal cavity to the oral cavity. Using an anthropomorphic articulatory model controlled by lips, jaw, tongue and larynx parameters, we can generate the Maximal Vowel Space, which is a triangle in the F1 / F2 plane, the three point vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ being located at its three extremities. We sample the evolution of the position of the larynx from birth to adulthood with four different LHI values, and we show that the associated MVS are very similar. Therefore, the MVS of a given vocal tract does not depend on the LHI: gestures of the tongue body, lips and jaw allow compensations for differences in the ratio between the dimensions of the oral cavity and pharynx. We then infer that the vowel space of Neandertals was potentially no smaller than that of a modern human and that Neandertals could produce all the vowels of the world’s languages. Neandertals were no more vocally handicapped than children at birth are. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that the lowering of the larynx and a concomitant increase in pharynx size are necessary evolutionary pre-adaptations for speech. However, since our study is strictly limited to the morphological and acoustic aspects of the vocal tract, we cannot offer any definitive answer to the question of whether Neandertals could produce human speech or not. (shrink)

Current approaches to formal representation in biomedicine are characterized by their focus on either the static or the dynamic aspects of biological reality. We here outline a theory that combines both perspectives and at the same time tackles the by no means trivial issue of their coherent integration. Our position is that a good ontology must be capable of accounting for reality both synchronically (as it exists at a time) and diachronically (as it unfolds through time), but that these are (...) two quite different tasks, whose simultaneous realization is by no means trivial. The paper is structured as follows. We begin by laying out the methodological and philosophical background of our approach. We then summarize the structure and elements of the Basic Formal Ontology on which it rests, in particular the SNAP ontology of objects and the SPAN ontology of processes. Finally, we apply the general framework to the specific domain of biomedicine. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the concept of alienation should be mobilized to develop a ‘geo-social’ critique of the generic forms of life that sustain contemporary capitalist societies, in a time when the stability of the Earth system is increasingly at risk. I contend that retrieving the full heuristic potential of the concept demands engaging the fields where it has been traditionally discussed (notably social philosophy and environmental philosophy) to demonstrate how their insights on alienation can be fruitfully combined. (...) By putting greater emphasis on how society and nature are mutually embedded, this new approach to alienation highlights the anthropocentrism that critical theory has long conveyed and indicates how it could be at least partially corrected. (shrink)

We present the paradigm of categories-as-syntax. We briefly recall the even stronger paradigm categories-as-machine-language which led from -calculus to categorical combinators viewed as basic instructions of the Categorical Abstract Machine. We extend the categorical combinators so as to describe the proof theory of first order logic and higher order logic. We do not prove new results: the use of indexed categories and the description of quantifiers as adjoints goes back to Lawvere and has been developed in detail in works of (...) R. Seely. We rather propose a syntactic, equational presentation of those ideas. We sketch the (quasi-equational) categorical structures for dependent types, following ideas of J. Cartmell (contextual categories). All these theories of categorical combinators, together with the translations from -calculi into them, are introduced smoothly, thanks to the systematic use of– - an abstract variable-free notation for -calculus, going back to N. De Bruijn, – - a sequent formulation of the natural deduction. (shrink)

English summary: Ruyer argued that metaphysics spanned the spaces or gaps of knowledge that escaped from scientific teaching. Attentive to the latest scientific advancements, Ruyer produced a monism that placed a finalism attached to existing forms at the center of the universe, creating an original philosophical theology. After a brief biography, this book presents Ruyers work and thought, his principal texts in which he emerges as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. French description: Il y deux (...) manieres de se convaincre qu'on peut retirer une connaissance profonde de l'etude des sciences de la nature. Ou l'on croit que les sciences decrivent avec exactitude l'univers (et l'homme lui-meme). Ou l'on tient avec Ruyer qu'en suivant mot a mot, et pas a pas, les enseignements des sciences, on enjambe des espaces de connaissance qui leur echappent et qui sont l'objet de la metaphysique. Attentif aux dernieres avancees du savoir, Ruyer decouvre la possibilite de retourner le materialisme et de produire un monisme qui place au centre de l'univers, non plus la matiere, mais le finalisme attache aux formes existantes. Cette metaphysique qui est exposee notamment dans le Neo-finalisme, rejette le dualisme, se passe du sujet cartesien et aboutit a une theologie originale. Apres une breve biographie de Ruyer, le present ouvrage etudie les constantes et les evolutions de sa pensee, puis analyse ses oeuvres principales, ou l'on reconnaitra sans peine un des penseurs majeurs du XXe siecle. (shrink)