Recent research on thick terms like “rude” and “friendly” has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like “friendly” and “courageous” can be more easily canceled than the evaluative content of negative terms like “rude” and “selfish”. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick (...) terms but also for thin terms such as “good” or “bad” (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect indicates a pervasive asymmetry between positive and negative evaluative terms. (shrink)

Praised as a panacea for resolving all societal issues, and self-evidently presupposed as technological innovation, the concept of innovation has become the emblem of our age. This is especially reflected in the context of the European Union, where it is considered to play a central role in both strengthening the economy and confronting the current environmental crisis. The pressing question is how technological innovation can be steered into the right direction. To this end, recent frameworks of Responsible Innovation (RI) focus (...) on how to enable outcomes of innovation processes to become societally desirable and ethically acceptable. However, questions with regard to the technological nature of these innovation processes are rarely raised. For this reason, this paper raises the following research question: To what extent is RI possible in the current age, where the concept of innovation is predominantly presupposed as technological innovation? On the one hand, we depart from a post-phenomenological perspective to evaluate the possibility of RI in relation to the particular technological innovations discussed in the RI literature. On the other hand, we emphasize the central role innovation plays in the current age, and suggest that the presupposed concept of innovation projects a techno-economic paradigm. In doing so, we ultimately argue that in the attempt to steer innovation, frameworks of RI are in fact steered by the techno-economic paradigm inherent in the presupposed concept of innovation. Finally, we account for what implications this has for the societal purpose of RI. (shrink)

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, (...) which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)

This book presents an academic introduction, presentation and argument of stakeholder theory as as a model for strategic management of business firms and corporations and public organizations and institutions. The concept of stakeholder is generally used for the parties that affect or are affected by the activities of private or public organizations. Stakeholders are those interested parties who, other than shareholders, have a connection with the activities of a corporation, a firm or an organization. The reference to the stakeholders refers (...) to a conception of a business firm as founded on negotiated governance, where the maximization of the value for the shareholder is not the ultimate criterion. In this model the stakes and the interests that are not those of shareholders or investors, and which go beyond capital and include civil society, are important. This book presents this theory and makes it known as an ethical model for strategic management that is both concrete and useful for developing democracy in the firm, and making it possible to present elements of a social contract in the context of global capitalism. (shrink)

La 4e de couverture indique : "Georges Canguilhem nous laisse une oeuvre marquée par une exigeante lucidité et une grande rectitude morale. Ce livre se limite à analyser ses recherches sur la biologie et la médecine. L'apport majeur de Canguilhem porte sur l'histoire des idées médicales des origines jusqu'au début du XXe siècle. Il avait l'intention, et c'est ainsi que certains cherchent à le lire, de donner à ses recherches une dimension à la fois médicale et philosophique. En fait, il (...) nous propose un regard anthropologique sur la médecine, un regard qui lui est extérieur, et qui ne réussit pas à saisir la réalité humaine, sociale, culturelle et finalement médicale de la maladie. Il tirait de ses recherches des spéculations et des critiques sur la médecine contemporaine, en général surannées, car il n'avait pas compris la mutation profonde dont elle était, sous ses yeux, l'objet, car lui ont manqué les connaissances, l'expérience et le jugement clinique, qui eurent été nécessaires pour réaliser son ambition. Il a mal compris les concepts de normes, de normal et d'anormal en médecine". (shrink)

This book about philosophy of medicine bestows a bottom-up and not a top-down approach. It starts from clinical medicine and epidemiology, analyzing their interrelations with philosophical instruments. The book criticizes the constant search for generalities and the essentialism that too often characterizes this discipline, which results in philosophers of medicine dialoguing with each other without direct contact with medical science. In the light of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy, this book proposes an approach to the philosophy of medicine based on the quorum (...) of language, what Wittgenstein calls family resemblances. In this way the author establishes a philosophy of medicine that is closely related to the medical clinic and to public health and as such avoids armchair philosophy. “Don’t think, but look", wrote Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Lucien Sève (1926–2020) was one of the foremost Marxist theoreticians of the Parti Communiste Français. An indomitable opponent of both structural and humanist Marxism, his 1973 article reprinted below represents the core of his conception of alienation. For Sève, whilst the mature Marxism of Das Kapital is fundamentally distinct from the speculative humanism of the 1844 Manuscripts in placing capital, not abstract labour, at the heart of alienation, this reinforces, rather than replaces, the role of alienation at the centre (...) of Marx’s mature thought, and hence of Marxism itself. (shrink)

Lucien Pelletier | Résumé : Cet article montre comment la philosophie du jeune Ernst Bloch, sous l’inspiration de Nietzsche, de Simmel et des mouvements de libre pensée du début du 20e siècle en Allemagne, s’est constituée comme une refonte de la conception eckhartienne de la naissance de Dieu dans l’âme. Diverses psychologies descriptives qui s’élaboraient alors, et la logique de l’origine de Hermann Cohen telle que relue par Oswald Weidenbach, ont procuré à Bloch des moyens conceptuels pour repenser la (...) mystique de Maître Eckhart sous une forme non théiste. |: This article describes how the young Ernst Bloch, under the inspiration of Nietzsche, Simmel and the free thought movements in early 20th-C. Germany, elaborated his philosophy as a recasting of the Eckhartian conception of the birth of God in the soul. Various descriptive psychologies that were then arising, and Hermann Cohen’s logic of the origin such as re-read by Oswald Weidenbach, gave Bloch conceptual means to re-think Meister Eckhart’s mysticism in a non-theistic form. (shrink)

Government has come to mean governance. This article investigates this change, which, through an investigation of Foucault’s concept of governmentality, it will show to be a substantial modification of the concept of government.By the late 1970s, Foucault had begun to construct a political philosophy shorn of traditional power structures. He replaced these with the concept of governmentality, of which the “governmental rationality of liberalism” is one form. In this rationality, the government is no longer the final instance, but is rather (...) a process of structuring a field of action.Government ceases to be a specific method of organisation; the concept of governmentality is hence amorphous and is not limited to liberalism. But liberalism instituted a radical change: a hitherto unpracticed permeability between reasons of state and reasons of the market. Liberalism is characterised by frugal government. However, the check against excess in government does not emerge, as it did in other forms, through the rule of law or the balance of power of nations, both external to liberal rationality.Seeing the transactional economic model as the model of good governance, liberalism is frugal by its own nature. Unlimited economic productive power, necessary for the continuance of the liberal state, entails limited government, and anything that would limit economic transactions must limit from outside.Other rationalities, such as moral or judicial rationalities, are thus external to the nature of liberal rationality – they play no role in the only test liberalism uses to validate its actions: economic effect. This new rationality, which emerges in the middle of the 18th century as new concept of government, is the emergence of the political economy. (shrink)

Première introduction au séminaire de 1978-1979 de Michel Foucault au Collège de France. Depuis la mort de Michel Foucault en 1984, de nombreuses exégèses ou critiques de sa pensée ont été écrites. La publication en 1999 de Dits et Ecrits a suscité de nouvelles interprétations des textes de Foucault mettant son travail en perspective. Ainsi de l'éthique et de la biopolitique. Cependant à isoler éthique et biopolitique, on risquerait de ne pas prendre la mesure de l'apport de Foucault. Peut-on en (...) effet rendre autonomes l'éthique et la question de la subjectivation d'une philosophie politique? Peut-on comprendre le concept de biopolitique sans le relier à sa réflexion sur le libéralisme? La biopolitique, selon Foucault, est la technologie politique du libéralisme naissant. Elle vise à améliorer ses performances jusqu'au déclin de sa raison d'être. Un libéralisme sans liberté interroge l'obstination avec laquelle Foucault tente de proposer de nouvelles catégories de philosophie politique qui ne soient pas l'exclusive d'une philosophie du pouvoir. En effet, l'introduction du terme de libéralisme est concomitante de la création de concepts comme ceux de biopolitique, de gouvernementalité. L'instauration de ces notions est complexe car elle renvoie à une lecture inédite du libéralisme qui n'est pas considérée comme une doctrine, ni comme une construction d'un système dont la liberté serait le centre, non plus qu'un idéal politique, voire une idéologie dominante. Pour Foucault, il s'agit d'une effectuation d'un type de rationalité qui met en œuvre une technologie politique spécifique. (shrink)

In this landmark work of economic sociology, Lucien Karpik introduces the theory and practical tools needed to analyze markets for singularities. Singularities are goods and services that cannot be studied by standard methods because they are multidimensional, incommensurable, and of uncertain quality. Examples include movies, novels, music, artwork, fine wine, lawyers, and doctors. Valuing the Unique provides a theoretical framework to explain this important class of products and markets that for so long have eluded neoclassical economics. With this innovative (...) theory--called the economics of singularities--Karpik shows that, because of the uncertainty and the highly subjective valuation of singularities, these markets are necessarily equipped with what he calls "judgment devices"--such as labels, brands, guides, critics, and rankings--which provide consumers with the credible knowledge needed to make reasonable choices. He explains why these markets are characterized by the primacy of competition by qualities over competition by prices, and he identifies the conditions under which singularities are constructed or are in danger of losing their uniqueness. After demonstrating how combinations of the numerous and multiform judgment devices can be used to identify different market models, Karpik applies his analytical tools to the functioning of a large number of actual markets, including fine wines, movies, luxury goods, pop music, and legal services. (shrink)

Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated manner to refer to actions in the zone of moral indifference, (...) whereas negative terms cannot be so interpreted. (shrink)

Les progrès scientifiques ont creusé un fossé entre médecine universitaire et médecine pratique. Les relations humaines entre malades et médecins sont allées en s'appauvrissant. Aussi convient-il de réintroduire dans le dialogue thérapeutique le sujet perdu de la médecine, la personne du malade. C'est la seule voie pour parer au danger de déshumanisation qui menace les institutions hospitalières et l'art de guérir tout entier. Le but de ce livre est de combler le fossé entre les deux médecines en proposant une formation (...) psychologique appropriée du praticien. Lucien Israël est agrégé de médecine et de psychiatrie, professeur de Psychiatrie à l'Université de Strasbourg et Chef de service au Centre Hospitalier de Strasbourg. (shrink)

This article introduces a new pragmatic framework for dual character concepts and their expressions, offering an alternative to the received lexical‐semantic view. On the prevalent lexical‐semantic view, expressions such as “philosopher” or “scientist” are construed as lexical polysemes, comprising both a descriptive and a normative dimension. Thereby, this view prioritizes established norms, neglecting normative expressions emerging in specific contexts. In contrast, the pragmatic view integrates pragmatic modulation as a central element in explaining context‐dependent dual character concepts and expressions. This not (...) only accounts for a wider range of phenomena but also addresses several theoretical shortcomings of the lexical view. (shrink)

Le concept d’ Aufhebung, repris par Marx de Hegel et réélaboré par lui, pose un problème notoire de traduction. Lucien Sève conteste le principe de sa traduction systématique par « abolition », pratique aujourd’hui constante, et plaide pour le recours en nombre de cas au mot « dépassement », position que Patrick Theuret dénonce dans un livre comme un révisionnisme sémantique et politique. Étudiant de près la question telle qu’elle se pose dans les Grundrisse, Lucien Sève montre que (...) la traduction par dépassement est maintes fois imposée par le texte même. Sémantiquement, il n’est pas vrai que dépassement fasse perdre de vue le « travail du négatif ». Politiquement, réduire la conception marxienne de la révolution à une abolition la mutile gravement. Question de vive actualité, quand l’obsolescence patente du capitalisme en appelle non à une révolution à l’ancienne mais à un dépassement de nouvelle sorte. (shrink)

Many American readers like to regard Alexis de Tocqueville as an honorary American and democrat--as the young French aristocrat who came to early America and, enthralled by what he saw, proceeded to write an American book explaining democratic America to itself. Yet, as Lucien Jaume argues in this acclaimed intellectual biography, Democracy in America is best understood as a French book, written primarily for the French, and overwhelmingly concerned with France. "America," Jaume says, "was merely a pretext for studying (...) modern society and the woes of France." For Tocqueville, in short, America was a mirror for France, a way for Tocqueville to write indirectly about his own society, to engage French thinkers and debates, and to come to terms with France's aristocratic legacy. By taking seriously the idea that Tocqueville's French context is essential for understanding Democracy in America, Jaume provides a powerful and surprising new interpretation of Tocqueville's book as well as a fresh intellectual and psychological portrait of the author. Situating Tocqueville in the context of the crisis of authority in postrevolutionary France, Jaume shows that Tocqueville was an ambivalent promoter of democracy, a man who tried to reconcile himself to the coming wave, but who was also nostalgic for the aristocratic world in which he was rooted--and who believed that it would be necessary to preserve aristocratic values in order to protect liberty under democracy. Indeed, Jaume argues that one of Tocqueville's most important and original ideas was to recognize that democracy posed the threat of a new and hidden form of despotism. (shrink)

This article offers a novel account of a key concept in Hannah Arendt’s political thought: amor mundi. In political theory’s ethical turn, theorists have increasingly turned to amor mundi as a source of ethical guidance and inspiration for politics. However, in doing so, they have elided Arendt’s distinct understanding of care. This article recovers Arendt’s understanding of amor mundi as care for the world by reconstructing the central concerns of her dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and tracing them to the (...) “Crisis” essays of Between Past and Future. It shows that amor mundi emerges in the dissertation as part of a question: if love is our fundamental orientation toward the world, how can we love the world without instrumentalizing it? The two “Crisis” essays provide the following answer: if love is to avoid—and perhaps militate against—the instrumentalization of the world, it must take the form of care. Following this analysis, this article contends that the contribution of amor mundi to the ethical turn is best understood, not as the ethos needed to guide action in the political realm, but as a key pre- or nonpolitical ethos needed to conserve the world where politics takes place—and thus the very possibility of politics. (shrink)

The concept of ‘world visions’, first elaborated in the early work of Georg Lukàcs, is used here as a tool whereby the similarities between Pascal’s Pensées and Kant’s critical philosophy are contrasted with the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume. For Lucien Goldmann, a leading exponent of the most fruitful method of applying Marxist ideas to literary and philosophical problems, the ‘tragic vision’ marked an important phase in the development of European thought from rationalism and empiricism to (...) the dialectical philosophy of Hegel, Marx and Lukàcs. The book is not a collection of isolated essays on Kant, Pascal, Racine, the status of the legal nobility in seventeenth-century France and the exact nature of the religious movement known as Jansenism, but an attempt to formulate, by an examination of these different topics, a general approach to the problems of philosophy, of literary criticism, and of the relationship between thought and action in human society. (shrink)

Résumé Ces pages dactylographiés ont été conçues par l’historien comme l’introduction d’un livre à écrire. Souvent ainsi, il traçait une ébauche qui tenait lieu ensuite d’introduction. Ici, il indique l’état d’une vaste enquête historiographique tout en récusant à la fois le tropisme historiographique et l’histoire des idées. Son attention au caractère concret des tâches des historiens, en leur temps, ouvre ici une perspective proprement épistémologique. Au passage il se démarque de la notion d’« outillage mental » tel qu’il l’avait employée (...) ailleurs dans les mêmes années. (shrink)

La théorie lockienne de la perception a été lue tantôt comme une forme de représentationnalisme, tantôt comme relevant d'un réalisme direct n'impliquant pas d'entité intermédiaire entre l'esprit et les choses. Cet article entreprend de clarifier cette question à partir des analyses de l'Essai sur la distinction et la confusion des idées. Celles-ci interrogent à la fois la nature de l'idée comme image et le fait qu'elle n'est déterminée que lorsque l'esprit lui donne un nom. Pour faire comprendre ce dernier point, (...) Locke utilise la métaphore de l'anamorphose en peinture, et plus particulièrement de l'anamorphose cylindrique. En reliant cette métaphore aux théories de la perspective du XVIIe siècle, à la camera obscura de l'esprit, et enfin à l'optique du XVIIe siècle, l'article parvient à plusieurs conclusions. Faire de l'idée une image ne conduit jamais Locke à voir en elle un objet qui s'interpose entre l'esprit et les choses. Une idée comme celle de sense data est étrangère à sa pensée. Si Locke ne met jamais en doute la réalité du monde extérieur, c'est que pour lui l'idée nous donne d'emblée accès à une extériorité, qu'il s'agit de déterminer. Enfin, la perception lockienne ne relève pas d'un modèle sémantique dont l'origine serait à trouver dans Descartes et qui préparerait celui de l'empirisme du XVIIIe siècle, faisant de l'idée un signe. Elle se rapprocherait plutôt, paradoxalement, de l'idée austinienne du silence des sens. (shrink)

La théorie lockienne de la perception a été lue tantôt comme une forme de représentationnalisme, tantôt comme relevant d'un réalisme direct n'impliquant pas d'entité intermédiaire entre l'esprit et les choses. Cet article entreprend de clarifier cette question à partir des analyses de l'Essai sur la distinction et la confusion des idées. Celles-ci interrogent à la fois la nature de l'idée comme image et le fait qu'elle n'est déterminée que lorsque l'esprit lui donne un nom. Pour faire comprendre ce dernier point, (...) Locke utilise la métaphore de l'anamorphose en peinture, et plus particulièrement de l'anamorphose cylindrique. En reliant cette métaphore aux théories de la perspective du XVIIe siècle, à la camera obscura de l'esprit, et enfin à l'optique du XVIIe siècle, l'article parvient à plusieurs conclusions. Faire de l'idée une image ne conduit jamais Locke à voir en elle un objet qui s'interpose entre l'esprit et les choses. Une idée comme celle de sense data est étrangère à sa pensée. Si Locke ne met jamais en doute la réalité du monde extérieur, c'est que pour lui l'idée nous donne d'emblée accès à une extériorité, qu'il s'agit de déterminer. Enfin, la perception lockienne ne relève pas d'un modèle sémantique dont l'origine serait à trouver dans Descartes et qui préparerait celui de l'empirisme du XVIIIe siècle, faisant de l'idée un signe. Elle se rapprocherait plutôt, paradoxalement, de l'idée austinienne du silence des sens. (shrink)

The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that (...) ‘reasonable’ is predicted to be an evaluative term in the majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and challenges descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term—at least given the way we operationalize the latter. Interestingly, other expressions often used interchangeably in jury instructions (e.g. ‘careful,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘prudent,’ etc), however, are predicted to be descriptive. This indicates a discrepancy between the intended use of the term ‘reasonable’ and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the court room. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wisdom's Flowering Cherry:William Johnston's Charismatic ZenLucien Miller Click for larger view View full resolutionIn 1976, when I was about to leave Taiwan after a sabbatical in Taiwan, I happened upon a tattered poster on a telephone pole: [End Page 133]CHRISTIAN-ZEN RETREAT DIRECTOR: WILLIAM JOHNSTON, S.J. ST. BENEDICT'S CONVENT, TAMSUI, TAIWANSunday-FridayI knew that Father Johnston was the well-known Irish Jesuit theologian at Sophia University in Tokyo, widely honored for his (...) studies of mysticism and his major contributions to the development of Buddhist-Christian encounter. I was totally intrigued. Instantly, I decided to attend the retreat.1day oneI was late when I arrived at Saint Benedict's chapel, where the retreat was underway, announcing my presence with a mighty thud of its door to a full gathering of retreatants sitting silently in the pews. Suddenly, here I was, the sole layman among a group of Catholic priests and sisters, most of them American-born, who were serving as missionaries in Taiwan. I looked and felt like a misfit, especially since Father Johnston had to wait to begin the retreat because of me. The chapel setting was Far Eastern in its simplicity and decor. Square in shape, it had a low altar in its center, about a foot and a half high. A plain, muted oil lamp hung to one side, softly gleaming in the semidarkness of late afternoon. Tatami mats and cushions were placed on the spacious floor around the front and two sides of the altar, so that after today's introduction, participants could sit on cushions according to zazen form and face the altar.As I dashed into a pew and looked up, I experienced a Catholic's shock. To my utter surprise, Father Johnston appeared in black Japanese yukata robes, instead of a priest's black suit. He bowed deeply before the altar, where he placed the Eucharist in a ciborium in plain view instead of in the tabernacle where it belonged. Turning to face us, he sat zazen style with his legs crossed on a Zen cushion with the ciborium behind his back. There was no "In the Name of the Father" or "let us pray." We simply maintained a long silence. In imitation of Japanese monks, many of the religious women and men retreatants were wearing robes, while the priests among them had on cassocks. Everyone but me had dressed appropriately for a Zen sesshin. I guessed many were fellow neophytes like me, as we all awkwardly sat zazen with legs crossed as best we could. We would quickly discover together that, for the uninitiated Westerner, zazen would initially prove a painful affair.Father Johnston was partly bald with longish hair at the temples, bushy white eyebrows, and wore a gray-brown beard and radiant smile. While born in Ireland and definitely Irish, you could tell by his clothing, carriage, and bearing that he had been profoundly touched by Japanese culture and language through his long years in Japan. Nonetheless, you readily knew by his sparkling blue eyes amidst his ruddy complexion that the Irish remained in the Japanese.I had brought my Zen sitting cushion all the way from my home in Pelham, MA, to Taiwan, and had practiced daily morning zazen in our Japanese-styled residence while teaching and researching at Tunghai University near Taichung. But feeling late and a bit shy about being up front with esteemed Father Johnston and among the clergy and [End Page 134] religious, I placed my cushion at the back of the chapel, sat down, and crossed my legs. Father Johnston noticed that I was off by myself, and came over. "Good," he laughed, complimenting my sitting posture. "But pretty hard to sit on a marble floor!"He explained to the participants that the schedule he set would be followed beginning the next morning, and that it was entirely voluntary. You could practice crosslegged zazen on your cushion and mat on the chapel floor or sit in the pews. The general atmosphere would be both disciplined, Zen-style, and relaxed. "Please keep silence at all times," he requested. Morning zazen was very early—from... (shrink)

Land Tenure, Fiscal Policy, and Imperial Power in Medieval Syro-Egypt. By Daisuke Igarashi. Chicago Studies on the Middle East, vol 10. Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, University of Chicago, 2015. Pp. vi + 264. $79.