A number of attempts have been made to conceptualise legal reasoning along falsificationist lines. This paper criticises a recent one by Bernhard Schlink. After familiarising the reader with falsificationism, I argue that falsificationism is premised on an epistemological asymmetry between singular observation statements and universal hypotheses, and that absent such an asymmetry in the context of statutory interpretation, framing jurisprudence in falsificationist terms is unwarranted and misleading. To get off the ground, legal falsificationism would need to combine with some kind (...) of broadly intuitionist moral cognitivism, but even then, it would still misrepresent what is going on in legal reasoning. The arguments in this paper apply mutatis mutandis to all falsificationist theories of legal and ethical reasoning. I point to some by Albert, Canaris and Larenz. (shrink)

Les éditions et traductions représentent une part très importante du travail des philosophes français du XIXe siècle. Loin d’être envisagées comme des tâches subalternes, celles-ci sont comprises par leurs auteurs comme des œuvres elles-mêmes philosophiques. Dans cet article, nous montrons que pour pouvoir les considérer comme telles, il faut pouvoir identifier les raisons qui poussent l’auteur à s’intéresser à celui qu’il édite ainsi que les effets qu’il attend de sa publication dans le champ philosophique. En nous concentrant sur le cas (...) de Blaise Pascal dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, nous mettons en évidence la manière dont la question de son intégration au « canon » de la philosophie a conduit des philosophes étrangers, voire hostiles à sa pensée, à l’éditer : Ernest Havet et Léon Brunschvicg. Alors, il ne s’agissait pas pour eux de se déclarer « contre » Pascal, mais d’intégrer, en en pensant les spécificités, une édition de ses textes à leur propre projet philosophique. (shrink)

Pascal semble toujours s’être tenu dans les marges de l’historiographie philosophique. Cette situation tient d’abord à la méfiance explicite qu’il nourrit à l’égard des « philosophes ». Mais elle s’explique aussi par l’influence d’un acteur décisif dans l’institutionnalisation de la discipline : Victor Cousin. Pour le montrer, nous étudions les effets produits sur le long terme par la construction d’une « figure philosophique » qui articule, sous le nom de Pascal, des textes et un contenu philosophique spécifique, en (...) se focalisant sur sa réception chez Havet, Brunschvicg et Heidegger. Un tel retour historique permet de mettre en évidence des points aveugles dans notre interprétation de ce que peut être la philosophie de Pascal, voire dans notre conception de ce qui constitue l’en dehors de la philosophie en général. Il offre en outre un éclairage original sur les opérations de sélection qui ont présidé à la constitution de ce que nous appelons notre « modernité » philosophique. (shrink)

Deleuze and the Social is the first book to focus on the implications of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's thinking on the social sciences and organisation. This book is concerned with the most basic notions of 'the social'. It seeks both to comprehend the 'multiplicity' of the social--in Deleuzian terms, the 'becoming' of the social itself; and it seeks to develop a new social analytical practice. Each of the newly commissioned chapters aims to show the strength of as well (...) as practice the radicalism of a Deleuzian and Guattarian approach to social science and organisation studies. Deleuze and the Social is a book about order, subjectivity, art, capitalism and the construction of a social ontology. It avoids scholasticism by foregrounding its authors' shared concern for practical issues. How is social order constituted? How is resistance possible between the rush of capitalism and the overcoding of the State? How are thinking and living possible? (shrink)

Previous chapter The Bypass of Ideas and its Cost We now realize how elaborate the ethics outlined by Deleuze and Guattari was. It was a remarkable piece of philosophical ingineering which provided a number of valuable insights into the good life from a fundamentally rhuthmic perspective. It is therefore precious to us who are now facing a completely fluid world dominated by modern technologies of communication and transport, and neoliberal capitalism. This does not mean however that it - Philosophie – (...) Nouvel article. (shrink)

Previous chapter As usual, the theory of the State and economics presented in Chapter 13 was strictly correlated with the theory of agency, power and the war machine that had just been introduced in the preceding chapter. It was the exact counterpart, this time seen from the political and economic context, of the rhuthmic approach of politics advocated previously. It suggested a kind of rhuthmic description of the negative as well as positive conditions under which any rhuthmic - Économie classique (...) et marxiste – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Previous chapter Intermediate Forms of State – Royal State, Machinic Processes and Economic Flows Because of this relation between city-State and decoding processes, capitalism could seem at first more likely to emerge in cities. But Deleuze and Guattari cited the French historian Fernand Braudel who argued to the contrary. Towns usually remained, they noted, below this new threshold. “They anticipated capitalism” but they also “warded it off.” Could it not be said that capitalism - Économie classique et marxiste – Nouvel (...) article. (shrink)

Previous chapter Intermediate Forms of State – Royal State, Decoded Groups and Long-Distance Trade This analysis allowed Deleuze and Guattari to refer back to back Marx's and Weber's theories of State. On the one hand, “State violence” did not “rest with the mode of production”: Marx himself had to recognize that this violence “operate[d] through the State” and preceded and “ma[de] possible the capitalist mode of production itself.” Hence the very particular character of State violence: it is very - Économie (...) classique et marxiste – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Previous chapter The Transformations of Capitalism and the Nation-State in the 20th Century Politics, Deleuze and Guattari emphasized, is based on “experimentation, groping in the dark, injection, withdrawal, advances, retreats.” It basically deals with a form of struggle similar to that existing in science between “intuitionism,” “problematic conception of science,” “working in the undecidable and the fugitive,” on the one hand, and “axiomatics,” “theorematic conception of geometry,” “reordering - Économie classique et marxiste – Nouvel article.

Previous chapter Towards a Rhuthmic Politics? The last two sections of the chapter were devoted to a description of the politics that would best correspond to the political, social and economic rhuthmic conditions that had been analyzed previously. This politics was to be based on the concept of “minority.” “Ours is becoming the age of minorities,” Deleuze and Guattari declared as a preamble to their argument. The term, yet, was not referring to a quantitative qualification: a majority of - Économie (...) classique et marxiste – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Previous chapter It is striking that one of the most fundamental issues of our study—one of those that will explain both the commonalities and the insurmountable fractures within the rhythmic constellation—already appears in the very first pages of A Thousand Plateaus, which tackle a famous question raised by Aristotle in his founding work Poetics: that of mímêsis. As one may remember, Aristotle did not conceive of literature as a mere imitation or reproduction of reality by poets, but - Philosophie – (...) Nouvel article. (shrink)

Previous chapter Rhizome as Rhuthmos of Thought This deconstruction of modernist critiques was naturally meant to introduce the reader to their own kind of writing and theory: the “rhizomatic approach” which was thus presented as a way to radicalize what modernist writers and thinkers, including Heidegger, had announced without being able to achieve: a way of writing and doing theory that would be really immanent in the flux. It was no longer a question of mimicking the multiplicity and the - (...) Philosophie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Previous chapter Living Individuals as Machines Endowed With Changing Territorialities Let us turn now to the problem of individuation. For Deleuze and Guattari, we remember, any existing concrete system appeared, from the ontological viewpoint, as a “machinic assemblage” of “intensive processes” that had to deal, on one side, with the actual strata and layers within which it had appeared and, on a second side, with the solicitations coming from the virtual “plane of consistency” or “body - Philosophie – Nouvel article.

Previous chapter The Social and Semiotic Stratum Deleuze and Guattari finally reached the “third” and most discussed “grouping of strata”: the social and semiotic one. They immediately rejected its definition “by a human essence” and proposed to define it, like the other main strata, as generated “by a new distribution of content and expression”. In this stratum, content, which in the organic stratum knew - Philosophie – Nouvel article.

Previous chapter Sign Without Signifier Nor Signifiance The rest of the chapter was dedicated to the establishment of a theory of sign that would be consistent with the view on ontology, theory of evolution, and paleoanthropology presented previously, and which would prepare the two following chapters devoted to linguistics and semiotics. As a matter of fact, once “expression,” “articulation,” “stratification,” and “territoriality” had been duly presented and elaborated, one could wonder if the - Philosophie – Nouvel article.

Previous chapter After tackling methodology, cosmo-ontology, theory of language, cultural studies, sociology and political theory, it was time to face the burning question of ethics. In Chapter 6 and Chapter 10, Deleuze and Guattari developed the famous notion of “Body without Organs” or “BwO,” which had only been introduced quickly in several of the previous chapters and which provided an ontological basis for the theory of becoming. Based on that, they described what might be the best kind - Philosophie – (...) Nouvel article. (shrink)

Previous chapter How to Become Animal? Chapter 10 elaborated further the contribution of Chapter 6. Destratifying the body, the language and the subjectivity in order to get closer to the becoming itself required to overcome one's own “human condition,” that is, so to say, to “become animal.” Deleuze and Guattari first engaged a critique of Levi-Strauss' structuralist conception of myths concerning the relationship between humans and animals, especially in totemism, and a defense of Jung's - Philosophie – Nouvel article.

Previous chapter Flowing Multiplicities and Fibers Since the flowing multiplicities had no substantial being based either on “differentiated elements” or a “common center of unification,” they were constituted by a certain “number of dimensions” or enclosed in a supple “envelop.” But they were, at the same time, “transforming themselves into each other.” The flux of the being was therefore simultaneously composed of molecules in constant motion and of changing aggregates which constantly - Philosophie – Nouvel article.

In a fine essay on agricultureAgriculturein Flaubert’sFlaubert, GustaveBouvard et Pécuchet, Jean Gayon shows how much knowledge of the biology and agronomy of his time FlaubertFlaubert, Gustave is able to display. He also suggests that Flaubert’sFlaubert, Gustaveinterest in Pouchet’sPouchet, Félix-Archimède views on spontaneous generationSpontaneous generation is connected to romantic theories of life and matter, and to his lifelong interest in the nature of stupidity.

In 1980, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari published what would become their most famous book: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The result of seven years of hard labor, this new work was intended to expand the reflection they had initiated in their first four-handed book Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972 with the same subtitle. By deepening the notions of “flow” and “desire” but going this time beyond the sole discussion of Freudianism and Marxism, it provided a completely - Philosophie – (...) Nouvel article. (shrink)

Charting a genealogy of the modern idea of the self, Felix Ó Murchadha explores the accounts of self-identity expounded by key Early Modern philosophers, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume and Kant. The question of the self as we would discuss it today only came to the forefront of philosophical concern with Modernity, beginning with an appeal to the inherited models of the self found in Stoicism, Scepticism, Augustinianism and Pelagianism, before continuing to develop as a subject of philosophical (...) debate. Exploring this trajectory, The Formation of the Modern Self pursues a number of themes central to the Early Modern development of selfhood, including, amongst others, grace and passion. It examines on the one hand the deep-rooted dependence on the divine and the longing for salvation and, on the other hand, the distancing from the Stoic ideal of apatheia, as philosophers from Descartes to Spinoza recognised the passions as essential to human agency. Fundamental to the new question of the self was the relation of faith and reason. Uncovering commonalities and differences amongst Early Modern philosophers, Ó Murchadha traces how the voluntarism of Modernity led to the sceptical approach to the self in Montaigne and Hume and how, by way of Hamann and Jacobi's reception of Hume, this sceptical strand, in turn, culminated in Kant's rational faith. More than a history of the self in philosophy, The Formation of the Modern Self inspires a fresh look at self-identity, uncovering not only how our modern idea of selfhood developed but just how embedded the concept of self is in external considerations: from ethics, to reason, to religion. (shrink)

Der Band nimmt gewisse, mit dem Begriff Theurgie assoziierte Wandlungen innerhalb des spätantiken Neuplatonismus in den Blick. Theurgie wird vor allem als Suche nach immanenten Medien zur Verkörperung göttlicher Kräfte verstanden. Entgegen dem häufig kolportierten Bild vom weltflüchtigen Platonismus zielt die von Iamblichos und seinen Nachfolgern verfochtene Philosophie, so die Grundthese, auf Integration der körperlich-materiellen Wirklichkeitsebenen ab und das Endziel der Philosophie wird stärker unter dem Gesichtspunkt einer positiven Teilhabe am demiurgisch-kosmogonischen Werk begriffen. Diese Aufwertung von Körperlichkeit wird anhand verschiedener (...) Aspekte – z. B. dem Symbolbegriff, der „göttlichen Materie", aber auch des feinstofflichen Ochema-Pneuma-Konzepts – in ihrer Relevanz für das spirituelle Gesamtprofil der theurgischen Neuplatoniker erstmals umfassender untersucht. Abgerundet wird die Studie durch einen Vergleich mit ähnlichen Tendenzen im nicht-dualistischen Śivaismus von Kaschmir. (shrink)

We investigated the competition between automatic and controlled processes in a word stem completion task. Prime-display duration and the prime-target interval were manipulated. On each trial a masked prime was displayed briefly, followed either immediately or after a delay by a word stem. The subjects were required to complete each stem with the first word that came to mind, to report any prime they could identify, and not to give as completion any identified prime. By the assumption that automatic processes (...) require less stimulus input and can be completed faster than consciously controlled processes we expected a stronger performance contribution from automatic processes with the shorter prime-display durations and in the immediate stems condition. The results confirmed this expectation. The findings highlight that consciously controlled processes require more time to run their course than unconscious automatic processes. (shrink)

Relying on aesthetic testimony seems problematic. For instance, it seems problematic for me to simply believe or assert that The Velvet Underground's debut album The Velvet Underground and Nico (1964) is amazing solely because you have told me so, even though I know you to be an honest and competent music critic. But why? After all, there do not seem to be similar reservations regarding testimony from many other domains. In this paper, I will argue that relying on aesthetic testimony (...) seems problematic because we are attached to an ideal of aesthetic authenticity and feel that living up to this ideal is anathema to simply relying on aesthetic testimony. (shrink)

Marx says of alienated labor that it does not "belong" to the worker, that it issues in a product that does not belong to her, and that it is unfulfilling, unfree, egoistically motivated, and inhuman. He seems to think, moreover, that the first of these features grounds all the others. All of these features seem quite independent, however: they can come apart; they share no obvious common cause or explanation; and if they often occur together this seems accidental. It is (...) not clear, then, how Marx's concept of alienated labor could possess the strong unity which he takes it to have. I defend a reinterpretation of the concept which explains this unity. The various features of alienated labor, I argue, all follow from a single, hitherto underappreciated feature of its formal motivational structure: the fact that such labor is motivated not by its product but by an incentive. (shrink)

Many philosophers, following Williamson (The Philosophical Review 105(4): 489–523, 1996), Williamson (Knowledge and its Limits, Oxford, Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2000), subscribe to the constitutive rule account of assertion (CRAA). They hold that the activity of asserting is constituted by a single constitutive rule of assertion. However, in recent work, Maitra (in: Brown & Cappelen (ed). Assertion: new philosophical essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), Johnson (Acta Analytica 33(1): 51–67, 2018), and Kelp and Simion (Synthese 197(1): 125–137, 2020a), Kelp and (...) Simion (in: Goldberg (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Assertion, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020b) aim to show that, for all the most popular versions of the constitutive rule of assertion proposed in the literature, asserting is not an activity constituted by a single constitutive rule and that therefore CRAA is very likely false. To reach this conclusion, they all present a version of what can be dubbed the engagement condition objection. That is, they each propose a necessary condition on engaging in rule-constituted activities. Then they argue that, for all the most popular versions of the constitutive rule of assertion proposed in the literature, one can make assertions without satisfying this condition. In response, I present a counterexample that shows that the proposed engagement conditions lead to coun- terintuitive results, and I propose an alternative that better captures our intuitions. Then I argue that this alternative engagement condition is compatible with all the most popular versions of the constitutive rule of assertion. (shrink)

Since its origin, bioethics has attracted the collaboration of few social scientists, and social scientific methods of gathering empirical data have remained unfamiliar to ethicists. Recently, however, the clouded relations between the empirical and normative perspectives on bioethics appear to be changing. Three reasons explain why there was no easy and consistent input of empirical evidence into bioethics. Firstly, interdisciplinary dialogue runs the risk of communication problems and divergent objectives. Secondly, the social sciences were absent partners since the beginning of (...) bioethics. Thirdly, the meta‐ethical distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ created a ‘natural’ border between the disciplines. Now, bioethics tends to accommodate more empirical research. Three hypotheses explain this emergence. Firstly, dissatisfaction with a foundationalist interpretation of applied ethics created a stimulus to incorporate empirical research in bioethics. Secondly, clinical ethicists became engaged in empirical research due to their strong integration in the medical setting. Thirdly, the rise of the evidence‐based paradigm had an influence on the practice of bioethics. However, a problematic relationship cannot simply and easily evolve into a perfect interaction. A new and positive climate for empirical approaches has arisen, but the original difficulties have not disappeared. (shrink)

How does one arrive at a life in politics and policy? What happens to one's ideals when confronted with the reality that the only way to get things done in Washington is compromise? Who are the men and women who help shape our national agenda, and what drives their work? Dispatches From the Eastern Front provides fascinating, intensely personal, yet universal answers to these central questions. Recounting four decades inside Washington politics, Gerald Felix Warburg brings remarkable candor to a (...) most unusual memoir. An idealistic California baby boomer transported to the intimidating world of Capitol Hill policymaking at a young age, Warburg finds himself working to reform nuclear energy, strategic arms control, and foreign policy. As his access and power grow, greater challenges loom: how to maintain principles while cutting deals, and how to balance public purpose with private interests. An eclectic career reveals the slow and often painful development of emotional intelligence for work at the highest reaches of the public arena. (shrink)

Presents results of free‐recall experiments conducted in France, Gabon and Nepal, to test predictions of a cognitive model of religious concepts. The world over, these concepts include violations of conceptual expectations at the level of domain knowledge (e.g., about ‘animal’ or ‘artifact’ or ‘person’) rather than at the basic level. In five studies we used narratives to test the hypothesis that domain‐level violations are recalled better than other conceptual associations. These studies used material constructed in the same way as religious (...) concepts, but not used in religions familiar to the subjects. Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed a distinctiveness effect for such material. Experiment 3 shows that recall also depends on the possibility to generate inferences from violations of domain expectations. Replications in Gabon (Exp. 4) and Nepal (Exp. 5) showed that recall for domain‐level violations is better than for violations of basic‐level expectations. Overall sensitivity to violations is similar in different cultures and produces similar recall effects, despite differences in commitment to religious belief, in the range of local religious concepts or in their mode of transmission. However, differences between Gabon and Nepal results suggest that familiarity with some types of domain‐level violations may paradoxically make other types more salient. These results suggest that recall effects may account for the recurrent features found in religious concepts from different cultures. (shrink)

In moral and political philosophy, collective obligations are promising “gap-stoppers” when we find that we need to assert some obligation, but can not plausibly ascribe this obligation to individual agents. Most notably, Bill Wringe and Jesse Tomalty discuss whether the obligations that correspond to socio-economic human rights are held by states or even by humankind at large. The present paper aims to provide a missing piece for these discussions, namely an account of the conditions under which obligations can apply to (...) loose collections of agents that do not qualify as collective agents in their own right. I first explain the notion of joint obligations of loose collections of agents as opposed to collective obligations of collections of agents that are collective agents in their own right, and argue that the conditions under which agents can jointly have obligations are the conditions under which they are jointly able to do what is required. I then build on Virginia Held’s seminal work on the moral responsibility of “random collections” to develop such conditions for joint ability. My discussion shows that collections of individuals can more easily be subject to moral obligations than previously assumed. It also shows that putative joint obligations need to be carefully time-indexed, and that it is largely an empirical question whether a given collection can be subject to a moral obligation to perform a given joint action at a particular time. (shrink)

Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...) study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

When several agents together produce suboptimal outcomes, yet no individual could have made a difference for the better, Act Consequentialism counterintuitively judges that all involved agents act rightly. I address this problem by supplementing Act Consequentialism with a requirement of modal robustness: Agents not only ought to produce best consequences in the actual world, but they also ought to be such that they would act optimally in certain counterfactual scenarios. I interpret this Modally Robust Act Consequentialism as Act Consequentialism plus (...) a requirement of moral virtue, namely, to reliably act rightly and to act rightly for the right reasons. (shrink)

We can hardly know for certain how strongly a scholarly discipline like history is able to affect politics and society, popular views and morals. Whatever its impact, it's influence also varies from epoch to epoch. During a few decades of the nineteenth century, historians were overwhelmed by so many questions and by such high expectations that there existed a large public space for them that they merely had to occupy. At other times, they have had to conquer this space first (...) if they wanted to gain continued attention.To be sure, a differentiation has to be introduced: any society has particular interests, e.g., in parts of its more recent past or in events that society sees as having something like a “mythical quality” about then, events that represent a major divide, that are deeply imprinted on that society's memory, that have attained a special role through tradition. There is, of course, always a space commanding wider public attention for these aspects. However, they are no more than small specks on the large canvas of history. (shrink)

Who should be recognized as a refugee? This article seeks to uncover the normative arguments at the core of legal and philosophical conceptions of refugeehood. It identifies three analytically dist...

What is political about political refugeehood? Theorists have assumed that refugees are special because their specific predicament as those who are persecuted sets them aside from other “necessitous strangers.” Persecution is a special form of wrongful harm that marks the repudiation of a person's political membership and that cannot—contrary to certain other harms—be remedied where they are. It makes asylum necessary as a specific remedial institution. In this article, I argue that this is correct. Yet, the connection between political membership, (...) its repudiation, and persecution is far from clear. Drawing on normative political thought and research on autocracies, repression, and migration studies, I show that it is political oppression that marks the repudiation of political membership and leads to various forms of repression that can equally not be remedied at home. A truly political account moves away from persecution and endorses political oppression as the normative pillar of refugeehood and asylum. (shrink)