Comprendre ce que les philosophes du XVIIe siècle entendaient par représentation est essentiel à l'intelligence de leurs conceptions des idées et de la vérité. Ce livre renouvelle notre approche du problème à travers des lectures de Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Pascal, en reliant leurs analyses philosophiques à leurs textes scientifiques. Les figures de la Dioptrique et de la Géométrie éclairent chez Descartes le contenu de l'idée sensible, le rapport du clair et du confus, la nature de la couleur et celle de (...) l'existence. Les anamorphoses de l'Essai sur l'entendement humain de Locke donnent à voir comment les idées renvoient aux choses. Et l'hexagramme pascalien raconte l'herméneutique des Pensées. La représentation classique s'avère l'effet d'une transformation qui affecte en même temps la science et la philosophie. À l'encontre des lectures qui ont insisté sur les filiations avec les pensées médiévales et tenté de réduire la nouveauté de la pensée classique, ce livre retrouve une thèse essentielle de Michel Foucault dans Les Mots et les Choses sur la rupture inaugurant l'âge classique. Mais il découvre dans cette rupture l'effet d'une opération matérielle, qui conduit à un nouveau mode d'existence concret des images et des signes dans les textes du savoir, analysable à l'intérieur de dispositifs textuels. Ce qui l'amène enfin à déplacer profondément les analyses de Foucault et à interroger les présupposés de son archéologie du savoir. (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)

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)

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 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)

The shape of hooks is of a taxonomic significance for cestoda. In order to characterize shape through numbers, a mathermatical model of drawings in two-dimensional space is proposed. This model is a synthetic one: first, it uses a large number of points on the edge of a hook-drawing as data; secondly, it enables to draw a specific hook by means of a computer after the parameters have been extracted from the data. The method does not use landmarks and therefore avoids (...) the difficulty of locating them. The ensuing discussion concerns description in common parlanceversus mathermatical language, the genesis of hooks and description in three-dimensional space. (shrink)

The question asked in this article is: what is a parasite?. Defining a parasite requires defining its host at the same time. A difficult question therefore arises about host-parasite relationships. The object of general parasitology is in fact to study the relationship between a host and its parasite. The initial question what is a parasite? has to be reformulated within a conceptual framework, that of relationship. This article is an attempt to transpose into parasitology some concepts which have been profitable (...) in the fields of physics and chemistry. The studies of R. Thom about the individual are also used. Concepts like that of field and principles like that of minimization are probably operational on a high level of organization. The description of host-parasite relationships could benefit from these concepts. (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)

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)

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)

Résumé Ce n’est pas seulement la théorie de la Décision qui permet de définir ce qu’on entend aujourd’hui par « évaluation », c’est aussi la théorie de l’Institution, chère à Maurice Hauriou, qui permet d’éclairer le concept d’« évaluer » ainsi que d’enrichir celui de « tiers partagé » de Nicolas Dodier.

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)

" Au gre des rangements a perte de vue de ma bibliotheque, j'ai fini par mettre ensemble Heraclite, Zhuangzi, Goethe, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Bachelard et Rimbaud. Leur point commun, c'est la comprehension (" prendre avec ") de la nature, qui leur donne l'image la plus sensee de l'existence : pour mesurer notre place dans l'univers, il faut d'abord entendre la place de l'univers en nous. Or cette imbrication semble oubliee voire gommee par la plupart des systemes philosophiques. Faut-il voir la quelque (...) rapport avec la destruction acceleree de la planete ou, parallelement, avec le manque d'enthousiasme general qui nous gagne? La nature, il en reste encore assez pour s'en meler. Alors, decouvrons le secret des vieilles cosmogonies et sollicitons nos auteurs un par un, les litterateurs et les visionnaires, la poignee de philosophes interesses, puis les erudits de l'ecologie si pleins de verdeur - afin de moissonner les recettes d'une attitude plus confortable. Elles risquent de surprendre. Car, a force de cerner l'intelligence du monde, on va voir que c'est un mystere a double tranchant. ". (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)

What makes a democratic school democratic? This question is answered using the example of the Swiss education system; the focus, however, is not on the usual pedagogic perspective of teaching democracy, but on the democratic organization of the education system. The discussion concentrates on two basic requirements for a democratic education organization: on the one hand, education for all under the equal rights premise calls for the definition of an educational minimum for all students. At the same time, defining this (...) minimum presupposes selection among the students. For part of the students are -- through the use of public funds -- being educated beyond the minimum; a situation which needs to be democratically legitimized. The selection is based on academic performance; as yet, a valuable alternative to this type of selection does not exist. On the other hand, it is essential in a democratic education organization that the authorities put in charge of certain responsibilities are democratically legitimized and controlled. The same applies to newly created authorities, such as principalships or autonomous schools, the introduction of which has been demanded repeatedly for some time now. (shrink)

Quantum theory has the property of “local tomography”: the state of any composite system can be reconstructed from the statistics of measurements on the individual components. In this respect the holism of quantum theory is limited. We consider in this paper a class of theories more holistic than quantum theory in that they are constrained only by “bilocal tomography”: the state of any composite system is determined by the statistics of measurements on pairs of components. Under a few auxiliary assumptions, (...) we derive certain general features of such theories. In particular, we show how the number of state parameters can depend on the number of perfectly distinguishable states. We also show that real-vector-space quantum theory, while not locally tomographic, is bilocally tomographic. (shrink)

L'expérience humaine du malheur est universelle, ce qui autorise à supposer qu'elle puisse être indissociable de la condition humaine. Pourtant, rares sont les philosophes qui, au lieu de l'assimiler a priori à une figure du Mal, pour lui opposer leurs consolations, se soient résolument efforcés de conceptualiser ce vécu déchirant. Ce sont plutôt les dramaturges, les poètes, des artistes, témoins irrécusables de la souffrance millénaire des hommes en proie aux pires malheurs, qui nous permettent d'en discerner les traits essentiels, l'imbrication (...) inextricable, imprévisible et funeste de ses composantes. Or, savoir pourquoi et comment le malheur nous défait, nous détruit, c'est découvrir, au-delà de ripostes illusoires, héroïques mais dérisoires, que la seule manière efficace de relever ce défi extrême consiste à entreprendre et reprendre, inlassablement, ce qui nous fait, nous construit en tant qu'êtres humains, à savoir nos œuvres culturelles. Ainsi, l'occasion antagoniste du malheur ne serait-elle pas l'expérience cruciale, l'épreuve décisive de notre humanité? (shrink)