This work takes into account three Cartesian manuals diffused in 17th century France ; Jacques Rohault, Traité de physique ; Pierre-Sylvain Régis, Cours entier de philosophie, ou système general selon les principes de M. Descartes contenant la logique, la metaphysique, la physique et la morale ) in order to question if the development of an empirical attitude in the scientific research influenced their approaches to the study of motion. The article intends to deepen the role that these authors give to (...) God in the physical structure of the universe with the purpose of investigating whether their analysis of motion is untainted by the metaphysical component or on what terms it remains linked to it. (shrink)

The Système de philosophie by Pierre Sylvain Régis can be considered as the achievement both of the scientific liveliness of the Académie des Sciences in the 17th century and of its fruitful relationship with the Royal Society. Since it aims to shape the new conception of the universe in terms of a system, the Système represents one of the most mature achievements of Cartesian philosophy and it is characterized by an empirical interpretation of Descartes’ thought. The Système therefore reflects two (...) important phenomena occurring in the Europe of the 17th century: the scientific revolution and the proliferation of Academies. In fact, this ambitious work could be undertaken with the support of the Académie des Sciences and the Journal des Sçavants. My paper will analyse the French context by focusing to outline the role which the Académie de France had both in France, as the medium of dissemination of the new philosophy despite censorship, and abroad, in particular through the relationship with the Royal Society in England. I aim to analyse the role of the Journal des Sçavants as a means to share ideas other than by correspondence and as a trait d’union between “rationalist France” and “empiricist England”. I intend to question whether it is possible to establish a connection between the empirical interpretation of French Cartesianism, the consolidation of the Académie de France and the employment of new means of academic communication. The paper will show that the second half of 17th century France represents a remarkable exception to the conventional picture, which states that in 17th century Europe, following the success of a mechanistic interpretation of reality, two philosophical school clashed: rationalism, predominating on the continent, and empiricism, in England. (shrink)

Any form of overt communication, be it gestural or linguistic, involves pragmatic skills. This article investigates the social–cognitive foundations of pragmatic development from infancy to late childhood and argues that it is driven by, among other things, the emergence of the capacities to assess the communicator's competence (e.g. perceptual access, epistemic states) and honesty. We discuss the implications of this proposal and show how it sheds new light on the developmental trajectory of a series of pragmatic phenomena, with a specific (...) focus on the development of irony comprehension. (shrink)

One of the most mature achievements of the Cartesian philosophy is the aim to diffuse Descartes’ thought among a wider audience by presenting his philosophy in an encyclopedic way. A relevant contribution in this field is Pierre Sylvain Régis’s Système. Régis’s contribution consists both in reconciling the new scientific discoveries with les principes de Monsieur Descartes by combining them into a scholarly manual whose aim is to stimulate the ars inveniendi and in recognizing the relevance of Arnauld’s and Nicole’s L’art (...) de penser as manual of Cartesian logic. In an article published on the «Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa», pp. 517-55: L’«Art de penser» nella logica del «Système» di Régis) I analysed Régis’s logic in order to point out that, even if L’art de penser represents its only source, La logique of the Système has not to be considered as a mere compendium of the Port-Royal Logique, but as a revision of the latter according to a specific philosophical system, characterized by the empirical interpretation of Descartes’s philosophy. In this paper I provide a synopsis of the comparison between the logic of the Système and the Logique of Port-Royal, in order to resume in a schematic way the results of my research. (shrink)

Late medieval theories of language and contemporary philosophy of language have been compared on numerous occasions. Here, we would like to compare two debates: that between the nature of Virtus sermonis , on the medieval side—focusing on a statute published in 1340 by the Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris and its opponents—and, on the contemporary side, the on-going discussion on the semantics-pragmatics distinction and how the truth-value of an utterance should be established. Both the statute and Gricean (...) pragmatics insist on the importance of taking into account the speaker's intention and the context in establishing the signification of an utterance. Yet, upon closer examination, a more convincing parallel might be drawn between the statute's position and current theories in truth-conditional pragmatics. Focusing on a few aspects of the statute that seem to find a counterpart within contemporary pragmatics, we try to show how the issues they give rise to converge, but also diverge. (shrink)

In the rubber hand illusion one’s hand is hidden, and a fake hand is visible. We explored the situation in which visual information was available indirectly in a mirror. In the mirror condition, compared to the standard condition , we found no reduction of the RHI following synchronised stimulation, as measured by crossmanual pointing and by a questionnaire. We replicated the finding with a smaller mirror that prevented visibility of the face. The RHI was eliminated when a wooden block replaced (...) the fake hand, or when the hand belonged to another person or mannequin. We conclude that awareness of the reflection is the critical variable, despite the distant visual localisation of the hand in a mirror and the third-person perspective. Stimuli seen in a mirror activate the same response as stimuli seen in peripersonal space, through knowledge that they are near one’s body. (shrink)

Franke, Dulcinati and Pouscoulous also examine a form of covert lying, by considering to what extent speakers use implicatures to deceive their addressee. The participants in their online signaling game had to describe a card, which a virtual coplayer then had to select. When the goal was to deceive rather than help the coplayer, participants produced more false descriptions (overt lies), but also more uninformative descriptions (covert lies by means of an implicature). [73].

In everyday conversation, messages are often communicated indirectly, implicitly. Why do we seem to communicate so inefficiently? How speakers choose to express a message (modulating confidence, using less explicit formulations) has been proposed to impact how committed they will appear to be to its content. This commitment can be assessed in terms of accountability – is the speaker held accountable for what they communicated? – and deniability – can the speaker plausibly deny they intended to communicate it? We investigated two (...) factors that may influence commitment to implicitly conveyed messages. In a preregistered online study, we tested the hypothesis that the degree of meaning strength (strongly or weakly communicated) and the level of meaning used by the speaker (an enrichment or a conversational implicature) modulate accountability and plausible deniability. Our results show that both meaning strength and level of meaning influence speaker accountability and plausible deniability. Participants perceived enrichments to be harder to deny than conversational implicatures, and strongly implied content as more difficult to deny than weakly implied content. Furthermore, participants held the speaker more accountable to content conveyed via an enrichment than to content conveyed via an implicature. These results corroborate previously found differences between levels of meaning (enrichment vs. implicature). They also highlight the largely understudied role of meaning strength as a cue to speaker commitment in communication. (shrink)

In the distant future, a thousand years after "The Seven Days of Fire"—the holocaust that rapacious industrialization spawned—the earth is a wasteland of sterile deserts and toxic jungles that threaten the survival of the few remaining human beings. This is the world of Hayao Miyazaki's film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. In this film, Miyazaki offers a vision of an alternative to the violent quest for dominion that has brought about this environmental degradation, through the struggle of the (...) young princess of the Valley of the Wind, Nausicaä. As a messianic figure, I contend the shōjo Nausicaä offers a beneficial estrangement from common conceptions of the gospel and opens up the ecological significance of Christ's message of non-violence. Exploring the ecological and pacific aspects of the gospel through this figure, I argue, may provide a helpful lens for examining our own distorting visions in this age of war and environmental crisis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I Listen Like Nausicaa to NPR KATIE HARTSOCK “Kwame wants to show me the Pru River... Young girls and women wash clothes along the banks.” —“River Blindness Robbed Him of His Sight But Not His Independence,” Morning Edition As if we stood with no one between us, not your translator or my handmaidens. Why should a young thing like me want a man oceans older, trailing a goddess who (...) gussies him up to take the years off. I’ll go online to read the radio story, posted with pictures of your cloudy face. “The trick,” you say, “to gardening blind is planting in straight lines.” Your hands in dirt, knowing by feel the cardinal directions, work alone. I’m rinsing the silks of my soaped-up trousseau for an abstract husband, in the river you reel your fish from, waters that breed the black fly whose parasitic bite pricked you, quick as a paper cut from a book of murder ballads, before you reached the age to marry. I could have brought cloths, those last days you could see, when you saw worms swim across your eyes, to swathe your itching, long ago, beyond all laws, before a state-mandated pill ended the disease. “I sleep and wake on my own.” But that is just what a king would say, washed up naked at my feet arion 26.3 winter 2019 and hiding histories of desire with a leaf. Our separate selves stay separate. No one suspects a thing as we walk, at a distance I decide, away from the river that rose to our thighs with its necessities, like laundry or longing, and its cataracts of other lives, disrobing. 34 i listen like nausicaa to npr... (shrink)

This discussion concentrates on the meaning of Nausicaa's words in lines 286–8, in particular on the force of the phrase κα δ' λλ κτλ. and the sense of the verb μσγηται. On the latter Hainsworth comments, ‘In later usage the simple verb in such a context is used as a euphemism for the sexual act. The line must have sounded most odd to the classical age.’ Thus he translates ‘associate with’, citing Odyssey 7.247 as an exact parallel; since, in that (...) place, the verb refers to nothing more than ordinary human intercourse , with no further connotations, one must conclude that Hainsworth sees no innuendo whatever in 6.288. (shrink)

This discussion concentrates on the meaning of Nausicaa's words in lines 286–8, in particular on the force of the phrase κα δ' λλ κτλ. and the sense of the verb μσγηται. On the latter Hainsworth comments, ‘In later usage the simple verb in such a context is used as a euphemism for the sexual act. The line must have sounded most odd to the classical age.’ Thus he translates ‘associate with’, citing Odyssey 7.247 as an exact parallel; since, in that (...) place, the verb refers to nothing more than ordinary human intercourse, with no further connotations, one must conclude that Hainsworth sees no innuendo whatever in 6.288. (shrink)

« Le temps des jeunes filles » grecques est d'abord défini par son terme : le mariage auquel elles sont destinées et dans le cadre duquel, devenues épouses, elles rempliront, pour leur famille et pour la cité, leur fonction de mères. Du temps du jeu à celui du mariage il n'y a qu'un pas ; sitôt pubère, la fillette, désormais parthenos, c'est-à-dire « jeune fille », ou « vierge en attente du mariage » est offerte aux regards, dans le cadre (...) des fêtes religieuses publiques, surtout si elle est de famille « bien née ». Les jeunes filles, en tant que groupe d'âge, sont en effet partie intégrante de la communauté civique, à l'égal des garçons, avec qui elles participent aux choeurs et aux processions. A la fois précieuses, pour l'avenir qu'elles ont pour fonction d'assurer, et vulnérables, elles sont à ces deux titres investies par l'imaginaire de la cité qui construit autour d'elles des histoires qui en font des victimes souvent glorieuses, en fort contraste avec le destin d'épouses et de mères « au foyer » qui les attend dans la cité réelle. (shrink)

« Le temps des jeunes filles » grecques est d'abord défini par son terme : le mariage auquel elles sont destinées et dans le cadre duquel, devenues épouses, elles rempliront, pour leur famille et pour la cité, leur fonction de mères. Du temps du jeu à celui du mariage il n'y a qu'un pas ; sitôt pubère, la fillette, désormais parthenos, c'est-à-dire « jeune fille », ou « vierge en attente du mariage » est offerte aux regards, dans le cadre (...) des fêtes religieuses publiques, surtout si elle est de famille « bien née ». Les jeunes filles, en tant que groupe d'âge, sont en effet partie intégrante de la communauté civique, à l'égal des garçons, avec qui elles participent aux choeurs et aux processions. A la fois précieuses, pour l'avenir qu'elles ont pour fonction d'assurer, et vulnérables, elles sont à ces deux titres investies par l'imaginaire de la cité qui construit autour d'elles des histoires qui en font des victimes souvent glorieuses, en fort contraste avec le destin d'épouses et de mères « au foyer » qui les attend dans la cité réelle. (shrink)

O presente trabalho procurará apontar olhares sobre o corpo de Odisseu, herói e protagonista da segunda obra homérica, a partir da perspectiva do narrador e da personagem Nausícaa, a princesa dos Feaces. Assim, demonstrar-se-ão, ainda que sucintamente, as metamorfoses sofridas pelo corpo de Odisseu ao longo da obra homérica, as quais o fazem transitar entre o ‘proscrito e o príncipe’. Para tanto, buscar-se-á através da análise do Canto VI, o momento em que se dá o encontro de Odisseu e (...) Nausícaa, a qual toma-o como mendigo ou estrangeiro enviado por Zeus, devido ao estado daquele, isto é, nu e totalmente desprovido, o que contrasta com o tempo imediatamente posterior, no qual o herói, ao cuidar do corpo, torna-se digno, pela fala da própria Nausícaa, de tornar-se seu marido. (shrink)

Etymologicum Magnum s.v. ἔγχος :ὁ δὲ Σοφοκλῆς τὴν σφαῖραν ἔγχος κέκληκεν, οἶον ‘τὸ δ’ ἔγχος ἐν ποσὶ κυλίνδεται’.Sophocles has called a ball egkhos, as in ‘and the egkhos rolls to feet’. The quoted fragment is generally assigned to Sophocles' Nausicaa. This suggestion dates back to nineteenth-century scholarship, is found in the editions of Pearson and Radt, and has been accepted by LSJ. Certainly, the Nausicaa will have included a version of the famous scene in which the Phaeacian princess and her (...) maidens enjoy a game of ball. Pearson thought it probable that the words are part of Odysseus' speech at the court of Alcinous, in which he would have recalled Nausicaa's misdirected cast. The feet, on this view, are Odysseus' own. According to Welcker, Odysseus calls the ball an ἔγχος, ‘because it reached him like a missile’. This is awkward: an ἔγχος is properly a thrusting spear and, at any rate, the quality of being thrown does not enter into the immediate image, as the fragment's object is said to reach someone's feet rolling. (shrink)

It weighs in at a bit more than five pounds; its dimensions demand a cradle. Yet this book is a handsome and welcome achievement despite its bulk. Its reproduction of the 1922 text, its maps and photos of 1904 Dublin; its list of minor characters in Ulysses; its bibliography of scholarship, both old and new; its timeline of Joyce's life, and its exemplary detailed annotations of the text: everything, harvested from the best sources, has been brought together to create the (...) largest volume dedicated to Joyce scholarship ever produced—a book that celebrates the first printing of Joyce's masterpiece. Given its weight and size, its classroom utility is likely limited; given its monumentality, it is a proper hundred-year tribute.What is wholly original about the book's contents are the essays that preface each of the eighteen episodes of the masterpiece. That Joycean scholarship grows upon itself is amply demonstrated by the sophistication and weight of learning the eighteen writers can now display. Almost fifty years have passed since Clive Hart and David Hayman edited a volume with a similar aim. Each of the new essays reveals just how much more there is now to know and say about Ulysses, how much more there is to praise in how Joyce conceived the book, how much more there is to teach, and how unlikely it is that Joycean scholarship will ever be diminished in either its curiosity or its energy. Given the increasing complexity and density of such accumulated knowledge, it is a pleasure to witness the economy and precision shown by so many of the writers. In particular, Robert Spoo's writing about “Nestor,” Maud Ellmann's writing about “Lotus Eaters,” and Vicki Mahaffey's writing about “Nausicaa” demonstrate how concision can make for valuable illumination.But there is a problem with where these essays are positioned. Coming before each of the episodes they introduce, they might condition the mind of a reader new to Ulysses to look upon those episodes as no more than demonstrations of what the scholars think. Catherine Flynn, the book's editor, emphasizes the need of such professional interpretation when she describes the plight of anyone “struggling through Ulysses” and “the key challenges facing the reader.” She is right about how hard it is for any new reader to “get” the book, but the placement of the essays is at odds with her claim that “grappling with the novel's challenges, the reader is pushed toward one of the most important rewards of reading Ulysses: thinking independently.” The prefaces may well impede the reader from thinking independently.Professor Flynn's focus on challenge and difficulty is widely shared throughout the Joycean community and has become a fundamental preoccupation in Joyce scholarship. Taking Joyce's mastery as a given, many Joyceans assume a Talmudic stance in believing, to quote Spinoza, that “the intellectual love of a thing consists in understanding its perfections.” Facing the formidable Joyce, they turn and turn again to explication. They subscribe to the dictum that the youthful Joyce himself, perhaps self-mockingly, set down: “A man of genius makes no mistake. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” But is Ulysses free of error?Fritz Senn, writing about “Ithaca,” does not put himself in opposition to Joyce but in opposition to the presumed inerrancy of Joyce. He argues that the episode displays a troubling disjunction between what Joyce intended to do in the episode and what he did. Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen that in the episode “not only will the reader know everything and know it in the baldest and coldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze.” But readers do not, indeed, get to know all they should, or see all they should see. Senn notes that they “learn next to nothing about Bloom's mother, his birthday, or the exact nature of his father's suicide, although they do learn a lot about such things as the junk in a drawer, the Dublin water supply system, and the addresses of Dublin shops.” Senn asks: “What does the meeting of the two characters amount to? Will it change Stephen so that he might become the author of the book he is in? Does Bloom find a son? Does he become the father that Stephen is supposed to be looking for? The impassive episode does not seem to answer, or to care.” But these are questions about which many a reader might care.Joyce named “Ithaca” as his favorite among the episodes. Senn demonstrates by his care and attentiveness that he too admires it. But by not limiting himself to dutiful reverence, he instead critically examines the Joycean text. His tribute to Joyce is both unsparing and generous.Equally attentive and yet incisive is Katherine O'Callaghan in her examination of “Sirens.” She recognizes the experimental daring of Joyce's strategy of “conveying music through language” in that episode. But her analysis, as penetrating as it is learned, does not leave the reader persuaded that the episode is entirely successful. As she observes, “the reluctance of the musical art to bend to the critical written voice” is a “stumbling block.”Another problematic experiment, “Oxen of the Sun,” which Joyce himself described as “the most difficult episode... both to interpret and to execute,” presents its commentator, Sarah Davison, with the task of explaining how its grandiose mixture of parody, plagiarism, and sheer celebration of myriad English prose styles over the centuries can function without, as she says, “wrongfooting and dissatisfying readers” who assume that the episode “enacts a historical progression only to find themselves disorientated by so many different echoes and cadences.”Were Joycean scholars more devoted to critical judgment than to explication—even when they are faced with the spectacular imposition of genius—the common reader would more likely find fellowship, and less intimidation, when reading a book that is not a sacred text but a human document, written with the extraordinary self-imposed challenges, as well as the problematic results, that only a most extraordinary human could make. 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This new study challenges traditional ways of reading Plato by showing that his philosophy and political theory cannot be understood apart from a consideration of the literary or aesthetic features of his writing. More specifically, it shows how Plato’s well-known cosmological dialogues—the _Phaedrus, Timaeus, _and _Critias_—are structured using several books of the _Odyssey _as their shared source text. While there has recently been much scholarly discussion of the relation between poetry and philosophy in Plato’s dialogues, little of it addresses questions (...) central to thoroughgoing literary criticism. Planinc’s work is unique in that it shows the significance of Plato’s extensive refiguring of key episodes in the _Odyssey_ for an interpretation of his political philosophy. Plato’s cosmological dialogues are almost always discussed topically. The _Timaeus _is picked through for its theological or scientific doctrines; the _Critias _is reduced to its Atlantis story, or puzzled over because of its ostensible incompleteness; and the _Phaedrus_ is read for its parallels to modern understandings of erotics or rhetoric. The dialogues are not usually considered in relation to one another, and then only in the context of developmental schemes primarily concerned with distinguishing periods in Plato’s metaphysical doctrines. Planinc argues that the main literary features of the _Phaedrus,_ _Timaeus,_ and _Critias _are taken from books 6 to 9 of the _Odyssey,_ the largest part of the story of Odysseus’s stay with the Phaeacians, from the time he swims to shore and encounters Nausicaa to the time he reveals his identity and begins recounting his earlier travels after hearing Demodocus’s songs. By exploring the full range of the many charming and intriguing things the dialogues present in this literary context, he shows that they are a coherent, unified part of Plato’s corpus. _Plato through Homer_ takes a radically new approach to Plato’s texts that illuminates their literary and philosophic significance and highlights their enduring appeal. (shrink)

The German poet Barbara Köhler's 2007 poem-cycle Niemands Frau [Nobody's Wife] is more than a feminist response to Homer's Odyssey. In shifting the focus from the escapades of the hero Odysseus to the web of women characters that populates Homer's epic poem – Nausicaa, Circe, the Sirens, Helen, Ino Leucothea, the shades of the dead women whom Odysseus meets in Hades, and “Nobody’s wife” Penelope – Köhler also undertakes a grammatical shift: from the masculine singular pronoun “er” to the polyvalent (...) pronoun “sie” that denotes the feminine singular, the gender-unmarked plural and the formal “you.” “Sie” acts as the “quantum linguistic particle” that transports the reader from a world analogous to that conceived by Newtonian physics into a quantum universe of plural probabilities. Köhler's work explores the difference in power dynamics that results from this transformation, generating intriguing ways of reconceiving subjectivity, relationality, rationality, and authorship. Taken at their word, the poems open up a prospect of no longer insisting on the sovereign individual subject and his linear modes of narration, inheritance, calculation and grammatical proposition. (shrink)