For the past two decades, Einstein's Hole Argument (which deals with the apparent indeterminateness of general relativity due to the general covariance of the field equations) and its resolution in terms of "Leibniz equivalence" (the statement that pseudo-Riemannian geometries related by active diffeomorphisms represent the same physical solution) have been the starting point for a lively philosophical debate on the objectivity of the point-events of space-time. It seems that Leibniz equivalence makes it impossible to consider the points of the space-time (...) manifold as physically individuated without recourse to dynamical individuating fields. Various authors have posited that the metric field itself can be used in this way , but nobody so far has considered the problem of explicitly distilling the "metrical fingerprint" of point-events from the gauge-dependent elements of the metric field. Working in the Hamiltonian formulation of general relativity, and building on the results of Lusanna and Pauri (2002), we show how Bergmann and Komar's "intrinsic pseudo-coordinates" (based on the value of curvature invariants) can be used to provide a physical individuation of point-events in terms of the true degrees of freedom (the "Dirac observables") of the gravitational field, and we suggest how this conceptual individuation could in principle be implemented with a well-defined empirical procedure. We argue from these results that point-events retain a significant kind of physical objectivity. (shrink)

Based upon the proceedings of the First International Conference on the History of General Relativity, held at Boston University's Osgood Hill Conference Center, North Andover, Massachusetts, 8-11 May 1986, this volume brings together essays by twelve prominent historians and philosophers of science and physicists. The topics range from the development of general relativity (John Norton, John Stachel) and its early reception (Carlo Cattani, Michelangelo De Maria, Anne Kox), through attempts to understand the physical implications of the theory (Jean Eisenstaedt, Peter (...) Havas) and to quantize it (Peter G. Bergmann), to elaborations of the theory into a unified theory of electromagnetism and gravitation (Vladimir P. Vizgin, Michel Biezunski), and considerations of its cosmological extensions (Pierre Kerszberg, George F.R. Ellis). This is the first volume to survey many of the most important questions in the history of general relativity, with many of the contributions drawing upon such original resources as the Einstein Archive. It is hoped that it will stimulate much-needed further research in this hitherto neglected area. (shrink)

Influential philosopher Michel Serres’s foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres’s arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue—creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought. Michel Serres is professor in history of science at the Sorbonne, professor of Romance languages at Stanford University, and author of several books, including _Genesis._ Lawrence R. Schehr is (...) professor of French at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. His books include _Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal _. (shrink)

Michel Serres is one of the most influential living theorists in European philosophy. This volume makes available a work which has a foundational place in the development of chaos theory, representing a tour de force application of the principles underlying Serres' distinctive philosophy of science.

An interview with Michel Foucault in 1979 that was never published during his lifetime and was recently rediscovered in the archives. The interview, appearing for the first time in English and in its complete form, marks one of Foucault’s final public discussions of the contentious topic of the Iranian Revolution. In particular, Foucault clarifies what he means by “political spirituality” and addresses the respective relations between religion, revolution, and self-transformation.

Biogea is a mixture of poetry, philosophy, science, and biography exemplary of the style that has made Michel Serres one of the most extraordinary thinkers of his age. His philosophical and poetic inquiry sings in praise of earth and life, what he names singularly as Biogea. In these times when species are disappearing, when catastrophic events such as earthquakes and tsunamis impale the earth, Serres wonders if anyone “worries about the death pangs of the rivers.” And for Serres, one (...) can ask the same question of philosophy as the humanities increasingly find themselves in need of defenders. Today, all living organisms discover themselves part of this Biogea. “Today we have other neighbors, constituents of the Biogea: the sea, my lover; our mother, the Earth, becomes our daughter; this beautiful breeze which inspires the spirit, a spiritual mistress; our light friends, the fresh and flowing waters.”. (shrink)

In this reflection on the relation between nature and culture, Michel Serres relates the present environmental catastrophe to pollution generated by humanity's efforts to appropriate.

BackgroundMoral distress is a phenomenon that can lead to an imbalance of the mind and body. There are many coping strategies to overcome the obstacles that lead the subject to this condition. Some coping strategies are capable of being achieved through the cultivation of moral resilience.AimThe aim is to identify the strategies of moral resilience in the nursing management of University Hospitals in Brazil.Research designThe research design is the qualitative study with discursive textual analysis.Participants and research context: 44 nurse managers (...) and nurses in leadership positions participated in a total of 30 University Hospitals in Brazil. Data were collected online, using a questionnaire with open questions.Ethical considerationsThe Ethics Committee approved the study. Participants received information about the research, agreed to respond to the questionnaire, and were guaranteed anonymity.FindingsPersonal adaptive strategies (intrapersonal and interpersonal) and organizational collaborative strategies (intrinsic and transformational management) emerged from this process. The intrapersonal strategies involved elements of rationality, flexibility, rebalancing practices, moral courage, and detachment. The interpersonal strategies addressed support networks, team involvement, and dialog. Organizational strategies dealt with actions which reorient ethical infrastructure, ethical education, and psychological protection, as well as fostering dialogical relationships, empowerment, and cooperation.ConclusionFrom the perspective of social historical construction, it is understood that developing personal and organizational strategies is essential to cultivating moral resilience. (shrink)

World-renowned philosopher, Michel Serres writes a text in praise of the body and movement, in praise of teachers of physical education, coaches, mountain guides, athletes, dancers, mimes, clowns, artisans, and artists. This work describes the variations, the admirable metamorphoses that the body can accomplish. While animals lack such a variety of gestures, postures, and movements, the fluidity of the human body mimics the leisure of living beings and things; what's more, it creates signs. Already here, within its movements and (...) metamorphoses, the mind is born. The five senses are not the only source of knowledge: it emerges, in large part, from the imitations the plasticity of the body allows. In it, with it, by it knowledge begins. (shrink)

In publications in 1914 and 1918, Einstein claimed that his new theory of gravity somehow relativizes the rotation of a body with respect to the distant stars and the acceleration of the traveler with respect to the stay-at-home in the twin paradox. What he showed was that phenomena seen as inertial effects in a space-time coordinate system in which the non-accelerating body is at rest can be seen as a combination of inertial and gravitational effects in a space-time coordinate system (...) in which the accelerating body is at rest. Two different relativity principles play a role in these accounts: the relativity of non-uniform motion, in the weak sense that the laws of physics are the same in the two space-time coordinate systems involved; what Einstein in 1920 called the relativity of the gravitational field, the notion that there is a unified inertio-gravitational field that splits differently into inertial and gravitational components in different coordinate systems. I provide a detailed reconstruction of Einstein's rather sketchy accounts of the twins and the bucket and examine the role of these two relativity principles. I argue that we can hold on to but that is either false or trivial. (shrink)

With this profound final work, completed in the days leading up to his death, Michel Serres presents a vivid picture of his thinking about religion—a constant preoccupation since childhood—thereby completing Le Grand Récit, the comprehensive explanation of the world and of humanity to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life. Themes from Serres's earlier writings—energy and information, the role of the media in modern society, the anthropological function of sacrifice, the role of scientific knowledge, the problem (...) of evil—are reinterpreted here in the light of the Old Testament accounts of Isaac and Jonah and a variety of Gospel episodes, including the Three Wise Men of the Epiphany, the Transfiguration, Peter's denying Christ, the Crucifixion, Emmaus, and the Pentecost. Monotheistic religion, Serres argues, resembles mathematical abstraction in its dazzling power to bring together the real and the virtual, the natural and the transcendent; but only in its Christian embodiment is it capable of binding together human beings in such a way that partisan attachments are dissolved and a new era of history, free for once of the lethal repetition of collective violence, can be entered into. (shrink)

This volume is the first systematic presentation of the work of Albert Einstein, comprising fourteen essays by leading historians and philosophers of science that introduce readers to his work. Following an introduction that places Einstein's work in the context of his life and times, the book opens with essays on the papers of Einstein's 'miracle year', 1905, covering Brownian motion, light quanta, and special relativity, as well as his contributions to early quantum theory and the opposition to his light quantum (...) hypothesis. Further essays relate Einstein's path to the general theory of relativity and the beginnings of two fields it spawned, relativistic cosmology and gravitational waves. Essays on Einstein's later years examine his unified field theory program and his critique of quantum mechanics. The closing essays explore the relation between Einstein's work and twentieth-century philosophy, as well as his political writings. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the importance of biological and social networks in Whitehead's philosophy. This exploration will involve a consideration of pluridisciplinarity in Whitehead, including a consideration of the relationship between scientific understanding and philosophical thinking, the question of method in Whitehead's thought, and the crucial distinctions between mechanism and organicism and between nature lifeless and nature alive.

In The Contemplation of the World, eminent French theorist Michel Maffesoli pursues and extends his project of decoding contemporary societies.

Le vocabulaire du problème et de la problématisation envahit le champ de l'éducation et de la formation. (...) Il importe donc de poser la question dans sa radicalité : qu'est-ce qu'un problème? Que veut dire problématiser? On s'efforcera de retracer la genèse plurielle du paradigme du problème à travers les philosophies de John Dewey, de Gaston Bachelard, de Gilles Deleuze et de Michel Meyer qui toutes s'efforcent d'imaginer des alternatives au dilemme de Menon et à ses avatars modernes. Comment (...) penser la recherche et l'apprentissage autrement que comme réminiscence? Quel rôle y jouent le questionnement la problématisation? Peut-on imaginer - contre toutes les théories de la connaissance de la modernité - une épistémologie, voire une logique de la découverte, de l'invention? Et une pédagogie du problème? (shrink)

La science a-t-elle toujours été au service de la vérité? Si elle a été entravée au cours de l'Histoire par le pouvoir politique ou religieux, elle s'est parfois aussi rangée d'elle-même du côté du pouvoir, jusqu'à se dévoyer. Jusqu'à trahir ses propres idéaux. A partir de la révolution industrielle, la science moderne a changé de voie, se mettant au service d'entreprises de destruction industrielle. S'abandonnant à une nouvelle tentation de Faust, concédant un pouvoir illimité à la technique, elle fabrique un (...) ordre artificiel du monde dont l'être humain n'est plus qu'un appendice. Des entraves religieuses et politiques aux délires scientifiques les plus fous, Michel Faucheux brosse un tableau historique des dévoiements de la science. Mise en garde contre les dérives mais confiance renouvelée : c'est ce paradoxe que tente de résoudre l'auteur, en décryptant la science au prisme de la morale. (shrink)

English summary: This commentary of Plato's Euthydemus demonstrates its place as the clearest text for understanding the relationship between Platonism and Sophism. French description: De tous les dialogues de Platon, l'Euthydeme est peut-etre le plus exclusivement consacre a l'elucidation de la relation du platonisme avec la sophistique. Ce qu'on a pris pour indigence de son contenu, c'est l'acuite avec laquelle la forme y est consideree. Formalisme moral de Socrate, formalisme eristique des sophistes: dans la lecon d'eristique donnee a Socrate apparait, (...) plus clairement peut-etre que dans aucun texte antique, la logique propre au discours sophistique, celle-la meme a laquelle a affaire dans sa totalite le texte platonicien. La sophistique, et Platon avec elle, relevent d'un regime de discours pre-aristotelicien, et c'est dans la pratique de ce discours que demande a etre reinscrite la tant galvaudee ironie socratique. (shrink)

Michel Senellart Cet article propose une réponse à la critique adressée par G. Agamben, dans Le Règne et la Gloire (2008), à la généalogie foucaldienne de la gouvernementalité. En cherchant dans la pensée chrétienne des premiers siècles la matrice d’une conception nouvelle du pouvoir comme gouvernement des hommes — « économie » ou conduite des âmes —, Foucault aurait méconnu la signification proprement théologique, au sein du dispositif trinitaire, du mot oikonomia. Nous voudrions montrer, à partir d’une relecture du (...) 2e Discours (362) de Grégoire de Nazianze (329-390), dont Foucault tire le concept d’une « économie des âmes », que cette idée ne présuppose nullement la référence au schéma trinitaire et renvoie bien davantage au modèle du « patronage » romain, couplé à la figure sacerdotale du bon berger. Cette analyse conduira, en outre, à rappeler le lien de la « direction des âmes » avec le paradigme médical. (shrink)

In 1980, Michel Foucault began a vast project of research on the relationship between subjectivity and truth, an examination of conscience, confession, and truth-telling that would become a crucial feature of his life-long work on the relationship between knowledge, power, and the self. The lectures published here offer one of the clearest pathways into this project, contrasting Greco-Roman techniques of the self with those of early Christian monastic culture in order to uncover, in the latter, the historical origin of (...) many of the features that still characterize the modern subject. They are accompanied by a public discussion and debate as well as by an interview with Michael Bess, all of which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, where Foucault delivered an earlier and slightly different version of these lectures. Foucault analyzes the practices of self-examination and confession in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the first centuries of Christianity in order to highlight a radical transformation from the ancient Delphic principle of “know thyself” to the monastic precept of “confess all of your thoughts to your spiritual guide.” His aim in doing so is to retrace the genealogy of the modern subject, which is inextricably tied to the emergence of the “hermeneutics of the self”—the necessity to explore one’s own thoughts and feelings and to confess them to a spiritual director—in early Christianity. According to Foucault, since some features of this Christian hermeneutics of the subject still determine our contemporary “gnoseologic” self, then the genealogy of the modern subject is both an ethical and a political enterprise, aiming to show that the “self” is nothing but the historical correlate of a series of technologies built into our history. Thus, from Foucault’s perspective, our main problem today is not to discover what “the self” is, but to try to analyze and change these technologies in order to change its form. (shrink)

Les Leçons d'histoire de la philosophie du droit sont un jalon fondamental de la philosophie du droit de Michel Villey. Elles ambitionnent de construire une synthèse des apports nécessaires et successifs de l'histoire de la philosophie : " Il ne suffit plus de s'installer dans le sillage du seul Thomas, celui de Kant ou celui de Comte ; mais toutes ces doctrines ensemble sont les données de notre problème. Seule aura chance d'être acceptée par le corps social, seule pourra (...) devenir efficace, seule sera vraie la philosophie qui aura su réunir et réconcilier, sans en sacrifier aucun, ces aspects encore dispersés de la tradition. " A l'heure en particulier où les juges retrouvent progressivement leur rôle social fondamental, les juristes doivent relire ces développements qui leur confèrent collectivement le lourd privilège de réaliser la Justice, non pas idéale, mais simplement possible et concrète. (shrink)

The Introduction highlights the three main themes of the book: (1) the ontological and epistemological status of everyday human consciousness, (2) the distribution of consciousness in the natural world, and (3) panpsychism. The individual contributions to the book are summarized and related literature is briefly discussed.

BackgroundClinical ethics case consultations (CECCs) provide a structured approach in situations of ethical uncertainty or conflicts. There have been increasing calls in recent years to assess the quality of CECCs by means of empirical research. This study provides detailed data of a descriptive quantitative and qualitative evaluation of a CECC service in a department of cardiology and intensive care at a German university hospital.MethodsSemi-structured document analysis of CECCs was conducted in the period of November 1, 2018, to May 31, 2020. (...) All documents were analysed by two researchers independently.ResultsTwenty-four CECCs were requested within the study period, of which most (n = 22; 92%) had been initiated by physicians of the department. The patients were an average of 79 years old (R: 43–96), and 14 (58%) patients were female. The median length of stay prior to request was 12.5 days (R: 1–65 days). The most frequent diagnoses (several diagnoses possible) were cardiology-related (n = 29), followed by sepsis (n = 11) and cancer (n = 6). Twenty patients lacked decisional capacity. The main reason for a CECC request was uncertainty about the balancing of potential benefit and harm related to the medically indicated treatment (n = 18). Further reasons included differing views regarding the best individual treatment option between health professionals and patients (n = 3) or between different team members (n = 3). Consensus between participants could be reached in 18 (75%) consultations. The implementation of a disease specific treatment intervention was recommended in five cases. Palliative care and limitation of further disease specific interventions was recommended in 12 cases.ConclusionsTo the best of our knowledge, this is the first in-depth evaluation of a CECC service set up for an academic department of cardiology and intensive medical care. Patient characteristics and the issues deliberated during CECC provide a starting point for the development and testing of more tailored clinical ethics support services and research on CECC outcomes. (shrink)

Israël se veut un État « juif et démocratique » puisant ses valeurs de liberté, d’égalité et de justice dans le message biblique autant que dans les Lumières européennes. Né de la réalisation d’une idéologie « profane » – le sionisme – qui a été élaborée puis véhiculée par des militants non religieux et souvent athées, Israël tire néanmoins l’essentiel..

Cet article a pour objet de montrer la nouveauté du traitement varignonien du mouvement des projectiles dans les milieux résistants par rapport au traitement de ce problème présenté entre autres par Newton dans les Principia. Aussi, après avoir analysé cursivement différentes Propositions du Livre II des Principia, nous étudierons plus spécialement, dans les Mémoires présentés par Varignon à l'Académie Royale des Sciences entre 1707 et 1711, la mise en place de l'expression d'une ‘Proposition générale’. Nous montrerons ensuite sur quelques cas (...) particuliers en quel sens on peut dire que l'étude du mouvement des projectiles dans les milieux résistants se réduit alors, pour l'essentiel, à de simples questions d'intégration et de différentiation.SummaryThe aim of this article is to show the novelty of Varignon's treatment of the motion of projectiles in resisting media in comparison with the treatment of this problem presented, among others, by Newton in the Principia. Also, having briefly analysed the various propositions of Book II of the Principia, we shall study more particularly, in the memoirs presented to the Académie Royale des Sciences by Varignon between 1707 and 1711, the setting up of the expression of a ‘general proposition’. Next, on the basis of some particular cases, we show the sense in which we can say that the study of the motion of projectiles in resisting media is thereby reduced essentially to simple questions of integration and differentiation. (shrink)