Quels sont les liens entre la relation au lieu que développent des individus et leur « concernement » à propos de phénomènes qualifiés de « risques » sur ce même lieu? Afin de répondre à cette question, un état de l’art précise tout d’abord le concept de « concernement » en qualifiant différentes modalités ainsi que le concept de « relation au lieu » et ses différentes dimensions. Sur la base de ces précisions, et à partir des données issues de (...) différentes enquêtes menées sur les littoraux français, une analyse est ensuite menée pour explorer empiriquement les liens entre différentes dimensions de la relation au lieu et les modalités de concernement vis-à-vis des risques fluviaux et côtiers. Les résultats montrent des liens négatifs entre les dimensions symboliques et émotionnelles de la relation au lieu et un concernement qualifié de passif, ainsi que des liens positifs entre la relation symbolique au lieu et un concernement dit actif. Ces relations sont enfin discutées par rapport aux implications de ce type de résultats dans des processus de gouvernance. What are the links between the ‘sense of place’ of individuals and their ‘concern’ about coastal phenomena described as ‘risk-generating’ on French coasts? A state of the art specifies the concept of ‘sense of place’ and its several dimensions as well as the notion of ‘concern’ and its modalities. Based on these clarifications, as well as on data from a range of surveys conducted on French coastal and estuarine areas, we empirically characterize the dimensions of sense of place and their links with the modes of environmental concern. The results show negative links between the symbolic and emotional dimensions of relation to place and a concern qualified as passive, as well as positive links between the symbolic dimension of relation to place and a so-called active concern. We discuss these relationships as well as their consequences for coastal and territorial risk governance. (shrink)

This study examines the multiple dimensions of the agdal system, a traditional Berber form of environmental management that regulates access to communal natural resources so as to allow the regeneration of natural resources. In fact, this ingenious system of agro-pastoral land rotation is ultimately beneficial for the conservation of the bio-physical environment, the performance of the present-day local economy and the maintenance of prevailing social cohesion and cultural coherence. Hence, agdals constitute a key element for the reinforcement of the sustainability (...) of existing agro-pastoral societies and ecosystems, but need to be better understood in order to explore necessary adaptations in the changing world of today. (shrink)

This study examines the multiple dimensions of the agdal system, a traditional Berber form of environmental management that regulates access to communal natural resources so as to allow the regeneration of natural resources. In fact, this ingenious system of agro-pastoral land rotation is ultimately beneficial for the conservation of the bio-physical environment, the performance of the present-day local economy and the maintenance of prevailing social cohesion and cultural coherence. Hence, agdals constitute a key element for the reinforcement of the sustainability (...) of existing agro-pastoral societies and ecosystems, but need to be better understood in order to explore necessary adaptations in the changing world of today. (shrink)

We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the frontiers of modern thought that divided the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, value from fact, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature still claim any cogency? In _Nature as Event_, Didier Debaise shows how new narratives and cosmologies are necessary to rearticulate that which until now had been separated. Following (...) William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic approach to nature. What would happen if we attributed subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and nonhuman? Why should we not consider aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood to be exclusively limited to the human? (shrink)

What does it mean to be a morally good person? It can be tempting to think that it is simply a matter of performing certain actions and avoiding others. And yet there is much more to moral character than our outward actions. We expect a good person to not only behave in certain ways but also to experience the world in certain ways within.

Nicola Lacey presents a new approach to the question of the moral justification of punishment by the State. She focuses on the theory of punishments in context of other political questions, such as the nature of political obligation and the function and scope of criminal law. Arguing that no convincing set of justifying reasons has so far been produced, she puts forward a theory of punishments which places the values of the community at its centre.

What is a horizon? A line where land meets sky? The end of the world or the beginning of perception? In this brilliant, engaging, and stimulating history, Didier Maleuvre journeys to the outer reaches of human experience and explores philosophy, religion, and art to understand our struggle and fascination with limits—of life, knowledge, existence, and death. Maleuvre sweeps us through a vast cultural landscape, enabling us to experience each stopping place as the cusp of a limitless journey, whether he (...) is discussing the works of Picasso, Gothic architecture, Beethoven, or General Relativity. If, as Aristotle said, philosophy begins in wonder, then this remarkable book shows us how wonder—the urge to know beyond the conceivable—is itself the engine of culture. (shrink)

In order to describe the logic of morality, "contractualist" philosophers have studied how individuals behave when they choose to follow their moral intuitions. These individuals, contractualists note, often act as if they have bargained and thus reached an agreement with others about how to distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation. Using this observation, such philosophers argue that the purpose of morality is to maximize the benefits of human interaction. The resulting "contract" analogy is both insightful and puzzling. On (...) one hand, it captures the pattern of moral intuitions, thus answering questions about human cooperation: why do humans cooperate? Why should the distribution of benefits be proportionate to each person's contribution? Why should the punishment be proportionate to the crime? Why should the rights be proportionate to the duties? On the other hand, the analogy provides a mere as-if explanation for human cooperation, saying that cooperation is "as if" people have passed a contract-but since they didn't, why should it be so? To evolutionary thinkers, the puzzle of the missing contract is immediately reminiscent of the puzzle of the missing "designer" of life-forms, a puzzle that Darwin's theory of natural selection essentially resolved. Evolutionary and contractualist theory originally intersected at the work of philosophers John Rawls and David Gauthier, who argued that moral judgments are based on a sense of fairness that has been naturally selected. In this book, Nicolas Baumard further explores the theory that morality was originally an adaptation to the biological market of cooperation, an arena in which individuals competed to be selected for cooperative interactions. In this environment, Baumard suggests, the best strategy was to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation in a fair way, so that those who offered less than others were left out of cooperation while those who offered more were exploited by their partners. It is with this evolutionary approach that Baumard ultimately accounts for the specific structure of human morality. (shrink)

What makes someone responsible for a crime and therefore liable to punishment under the criminal law? Modern lawyers will quickly and easily point to the criminal law's requirement of concurrent actus reus and mens rea, doctrines of the criminal law which ensure that someone will only be found criminally responsible if they have committed criminal conduct while possessing capacities of understanding, awareness, and self-control at the time of offense. Any notion of criminal responsibility based on the character of the offender, (...) meaning an implication of criminality based on reputation or the assumed disposition of the person, would seem to today's criminal lawyer a relic of the 18th Century. In this volume, Nicola Lacey demonstrates that the practice of character-based patterns of attribution was not laid to rest in 18th Century criminal law, but is alive and well in contemporary English criminal responsibility-attribution. Building upon the analysis of criminal responsibility in her previous book, Women, Crime, and Character, Lacey investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century. Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal approach, this volume evidences how the theory behind criminal responsibility has shifted over time. The character and outcome responsibility which dominated criminal law in the 18th Century diminished in ideological importance in the following two centuries, when the idea of responsibility as founded in capacity was gradually established as the core of criminal law. Lacey traces the historical trajectory of responsibility into the 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility and the discourse of responsibility as founded in risk are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law. These ideas of criminal responsibility are explored through an examination of the institutions through which they are produced, interpreted and executed; the interests which have shaped both doctrines and institutions; and the substantive social functions which criminal law and punishment have been expected to perform at different points in history. (shrink)

Shortlisted for the 2005 British Academy Book prize, Nicola Lacey's entrancing biography recounts the life of H.L.A. Hart, the pre-eminent legal philosopher of the twentieth century. Following Hart's life from modest origins as the son of Jewish tailor parents in Yorkshire to worldwide fame as the most influential English-speaking legal theorist of the post-War era, the book traces his successive metamorphoses; from Yorkshire schoolboy to Oxford scholar, from government intelligence officer to Professor of Jurisprudence, from awkward batchelor to family figurehead. (...) In the tradition of Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, Nicola Lacey paints an absorbing picture of intellectual and psychological development, of a mind struggling to cope with intellectual self-doubt, uncertain sexuality, a difficult marriage and an anti-semitic society. In depicting the evolution of Hart's life and mind, Lacey provides a vivid recreation of both the intellectual and social climate of Oxford in the post-War era. (shrink)

This study investigates the social–psychological mechanisms leading individuals in organizations to engage in environmental citizenship behaviors, which entail keeping abreast of, and participating in, the environmental affairs of a company. Informed by the corporate greening and organizational behavior literature, we suggested that an employee’s level of involvement in the management of a company’s environmental impact was the overt manifestation of his or her discretionary sense of commitment to environmental concerns in the work context, and that such commitment developed through the (...) interplay of individual, organizational, and supervisory factors. Our general findings support the idea that when environmental protection is valued and encouraged by the company and line managers, organization members are more likely to experience a volitional sense of attachment and responsibility to corporate environmental goals and values, which is enacted through citizenship behaviors. We also expected that individual ecological beliefs would strengthen the environmental commitment of employees via identification with, and adherence to, the socially responsible cause embodied by the organization and its managerial staff. But it did not. On the contrary, the data indicated that corporate environmental policy is more likely to influence an employee’s level of environmental commitment when he or she holds weak versus strong personal ecological beliefs. Theoretical and managerial implications of our findings are discussed. (shrink)

In the present article, I discuss Husserl’s analysis of the genesis of action in the Husserliana edition Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. My aim is to clarify how a “voluntary action” has its...

This book provides an extensive treatment of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness. Nicolas de Warren uses detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, some only recently published in German, to examine Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity. He traces the development of Husserl's thinking on the problem of time from Franz Brentano's descriptive psychology, and situates it in the framework of his transcendental project as a whole. Particular discussions include the significance of time-consciousness for other (...) phenomenological themes: perceptual experience, the imagination, remembrance, self-consciousness, embodiment, and the consciousness of others. The result is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

The commentary raises political questions about the ways in which data has been constituted as an object vested with certain powers, influence, and rationalities. We place the emergence and transformation of professional practices such as ‘data science’, ‘data journalism’, ‘data brokerage’, ‘data mining’, ‘data storage’, and ‘data analysis’ as part of the reconfiguration of a series of fields of power and knowledge in the public and private accumulation of data. Data politics asks questions about the ways in which data has (...) become such an object of power and explores how to critically intervene in its deployment as an object of knowledge. It is concerned with the conditions of possibility of data that involve things, language, and people that together create new worlds. We define ‘data politics’ as both the articulation of political questions about these worlds and the ways in which they provoke subjects to govern themselves and others by making rights claims. We contend that without understanding these conditions of possibility – of worlds, subjects and rights – it would be difficult to intervene in or shape data politics if by that it is meant the transformation of data subjects into data citizens. (shrink)

Although it is usually assumed that in Michel Foucault’s work biopolitics is a politics which has life for its object, a closer analysis of the courses he gave at the Collège de France on this topic, as well as of the other seminars and papers of this period, shows that he took a quite different direction, restricting it to the regulation of population. The aim of this article is to return to the origins of the concept and to confront the (...) issue of life as such. This implies four shifts with respect to Foucault’s theory: Politics is not only about the rules of the game of governing, but also about its stakes. More than the power over life, contemporary societies are characterized by the legitimacy they attach to life. Rather than a normalizing process, the intervention in lives is a production of inequalities. The politics of life, then, is not only a question of governmentality and technologies, but also of meaning and values. The discussion is grounded on a series of empirical investigations conducted in France and South Africa on how life and lives are treated in our world. (shrink)

Many of us, even on our happiest days, struggle to quiet the constant buzz of anxiety in the background of our minds. All kinds of worries--worries about losing people and things, worries about how we seem to others--keep us from peace of mind. Distracted or misled by our preoccupations, misconceptions, and, most of all, our obsession with ourselves, we don't see the world clearly--we don't see the world as it really is. In our search for happiness and the good life, (...) this is the main problem. But luckily there is a solution, and on the path to understanding it, we can make use of the rich and varied teachings that have developed over centuries of Buddhist thought. With clarity and compassion, Nicolas Bommarito explores the central elements of centuries of Buddhist philosophy and practice, explaining how they can improve your life and teach you to live without fear. Mining important texts and lessons for practical guidance, he provides a friendly guide to the very practical goals that underpin Buddhist philosophy. After laying out the basic ideas, Bommarito walks readers through a wide range of techniques and practices we can adopt to mend ingrained habits. Rare for its exploration of both the philosophy that motivates Buddhism and its practical applications, this is a compassionate guide to leading a good life that anyone can follow. (shrink)

This monograph proposes a new way of implementing interaction in logic. It also provides an elementary introduction to Constructive Type Theory. The authors equally emphasize basic ideas and finer technical details. In addition, many worked out exercises and examples will help readers to better understand the concepts under discussion. One of the chief ideas animating this study is that the dialogical understanding of definitional equality and its execution provide both a simple and a direct way of implementing the CTT approach (...) within a game-theoretical conception of meaning. In addition, the importance of the play level over the strategy level is stressed, binding together the matter of execution with that of equality and the finitary perspective on games constituting meaning. According to this perspective the emergence of concepts are not only games of giving and asking for reasons, they are also games that include moves establishing how it is that the reasons brought forward accomplish their explicative task. Thus, immanent reasoning games are dialogical games of Why and How. (shrink)

Le livre de Jean-Luc Gouin se présente comme une introduction à la philosophie de Hegel. Il cherche à retrouver ce qu'il y a de vivant dans cette pensée, à retrouver les débats et les nécessités qui l'animent. L'ambition de l'ouvrage est de mettre en perspective ce qui, en deçà des différentes propositions ou domaines, constitue la pensée hégélienne, ce qui en est le véritable moteur, de «déceler une certaine structure mouvante dans l'ensemble de l'œuvre du penseur». Dès lors, il s'écarte (...) à la fois d'une recherche sur un domaine particulier, comme la conception hégélienne de l'État ou du Droit, et d'une présentation générale de l'œuvre. Il vise plutôt à s'installer dans le mouvement même de la pensée hégélienne, dans cet élément «vivant» qui structure et traverse l'ensemble des domaines. L'auteur revient à plusieurs reprises sur sa volonté de «présenter dialectiquement la dialectique. Mieux: hégéliennement l'hégélianisme». La dialectique a souvent été posée, à juste titre, comme cet élément du mouvement hégélien, comme ce qui traverse et donne sens à l'ensemble de l'œuvre. Mais il faut alors ajouter, pour J.-L. Gouin, que c'est à partir d'un ensemble de concepts que la dialectique peut jouer ce rôle et c'est donc plutôt à une «constellation», à une «structure» qu'il faut se référer. «Cette structure se cristallise autour de quatre notions fondamentales. Il s'agit des notions de Sujet, de Négativité, de Résultat et de Réconciliation». (shrink)

The processing of emotional nonlinguistic information in speech is defined as emotional prosody. This auditory nonlinguistic information is essential in the decoding of social interactions and in our capacity to adapt and react adequately by taking into account contextual information. An integrated model is proposed at the functional and brain levels, encompassing 5 main systems that involve cortical and subcortical neural networks relevant for the processing of emotional prosody in its major dimensions, including perception and sound organization; related action tendencies; (...) and associated values that integrate complex social contexts and ambiguous situations. (shrink)

We present in this paper a novel ontological theory of events whose central tenet is the Aristotelian distinction between the object that changes and the actual subject of change, which is what we call an individual quality. While in the Kimian tradition events are individuated by a triple ⟨ o, P, t ⟩, where o is an object, P a property, and t an interval of time, for us the simplest events are qualitative changes, individuated by a triple ⟨ o, (...) q, t ⟩, where q is an individual quality inhering in o or in one of its parts. Detaching the individuation of events from the property they exemplify results in a fine-grained theory that keeps metaphysics and semantics clearly separate, and lies between the multiplicative and the unitarian approaches. We discuss then the way language refers to events, observing that, in most cases, event descriptions refer to complex, cognitively relevant clusters of co-occurring qualitative changes, which exhibit a synchronic structure depending on the way they are described. Contra Bennett, who famously argued that the semantics of event names ultimately depends on “local context and unprincipled intuitions”, we show how the lexicon provides systematic principles for individuating such clusters and classifying them into kinds. Finally, we address some open challenges in the semantics of locative and manner modifiers. (shrink)