Dans les années 1920, la théologie de Barth est centrée sur la thématique de la prédication, à la fois point de départ et point d'impact de sa réflexion. Dieu parle, l'Homme écoute. Notre analyse portera sur la possibilité d'une telle audition croyante de la Parole de Dieu, dont Barth affirme la réalité avec force comme seule issue à l'angoisse existentielle humaine qui étreint ses auditeurs, selon le pasteur de Safenwil, et les pousse à se presser " malgré tout " au (...) pied de sa chaire. Nous essaierons également de déterminer la forme concrète que Barth entend donner à sa prédication, à une époque où il s'agit moins pour lui de prêcher " le texte " que de proclamer la résolution en Christ de la contradiction et de l'interrogation dans lesquelles la présence de Dieu place l'Homme. In the twenties, Barth's theology took its start and found its accomplishment in the question of the proclamation of God's Word. God speaks, Man listens. We shall try here to understand why, according to our author, such a faithful listening is possible. According to Barth it is the only solution of man's existential anguish, which explains why women and men go on coming to listen to the sermon. We shall also try to determine what form Barth gave to this preaching, at a time when he would put Man under the weight of the contradiction and interrogation caused by God's presence, and proclaim how Christ's revelation solves it, rather than explain each word of the biblical text. (shrink)

En réponse aux questions de Philippe Cardon, et indépendamment de remarques de détail, brièvement discutées, l�auteur se réjouit de se voir décerner un certificat de non barthisme. Il s�étonne par contre de la grande naïveté de Philippe Cardon, dont le projet théologique lui semble s�apparenter à un retour massif à Barth, traité de manière littérale et orthodoxe. L�auteur demeure attaché, au contraire, à une reconstruction critique non seulement de la pensée de Barth, mais de l�ensemble de (...) la théologie contemporaine, d�où quelques observations sur les débats actuels au sujet de l�avenir de la théologie académique. (shrink)

This paper argues that in some explanations mathematics are playing an explanatory rather than a representational role, and that this feature unifies many types of non-causal or non-mechanistic explanations that some philosophers of science have been recently exploring under various names. After showing how mathematics can play either a representational or an explanatory role by considering two alternative explanations of a same biological pattern—“Bergmann’s rule”—I offer an example of an explanation where the bulk of the explanatory job is done by (...) a mathematical theorem, and where mechanisms involved in the target systems are not explanatorily relevant. Then I account for the way mathematical properties may function in an explanatory way within an explanation by arguing that some mathematical propositions involving variables non directly referring to the target system features constitute constraints to which a whole class of systems should comply, provided they are describable by a mathematical object concerned by those propositions. According to such “constraint account”, those mathematical facts are directly entailing the explanandum, as a consequence of such constraints. I call those explanations “structural”, because here properties of mathematical structures are accounting for the explanandum; various kinds of mathematical structures thereby define various types of structural explanations. (shrink)

Besides mechanistic explanations of phenomena, which have been seriously investigated in the last decade, biology and ecology also include explanations that pinpoint specific mathematical properties as explanatory of the explanandum under focus. Among these structural explanations, one finds topological explanations, and recent science pervasively relies on them. This reliance is especially due to the necessity to model large sets of data with no practical possibility to track the proper activities of all the numerous entities. The paper first defines topological explanations (...) and then explains why topological explanations and mechanisms are different in principle. Then it shows that they are pervasive both in the study of networks—whose importance has been increasingly acknowledged at each level of the biological hierarchy—and in contexts where the notion of selective neutrality is crucial; this allows me to capture the difference between mechanisms and topological explanations in terms of practical modelling practices. The rest of the paper investigates how in practice mechanisms and topologies are combined. They may be articulated in theoretical structures and explanatory strategies, first through a relation of constraint, second in interlevel theories, or they may condition each other. Finally, I explore how a particular model can integrate mechanistic informations, by focusing on the recent practice of merging networks in ecology and its consequences upon multiscale modelling. (shrink)

In abstract argumentation, each argument is regarded as atomic. There is no internal structure to an argument. Also, there is no specification of what is an argument or an attack. They are assumed to be given. This abstract perspective provides many advantages for studying the nature of argumentation, but it does not cover all our needs for understanding argumentation or for building tools for supporting or undertaking argumentation. If we want a more detailed formalization of arguments than is available with (...) abstract argumentation, we can turn to structured argumentation, which is the topic of this special issue of Argument and Computation. In structured argumentation, we assume a formal language for representing knowledge and specifying how arguments and counterarguments can be constructed from that knowledge. An argument is then said to be structured in the sense that normally, the premises and claim of the argument are made explicit, and the relationship between the premises and claim is formally defined (for instance, using logical entailment). In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of the approaches covered in this special issue on structured argumentation. (shrink)

This volume handles in various perspectives the concept of function and the nature of functional explanations, topics much discussed since two major and conflicting accounts have been raised by Larry Wright and Robert Cummins’s papers in the 1970s. Here, both Wright’s ”etiological theory of functions’ and Cummins’s ”systemic’ conception of functions are refined and elaborated in the light of current scientific practice, with papers showing how the ”etiological’ theory faces several objections and may in reply be revisited, while its counterpart (...) became ever more sophisticated, as researchers discovered fresh applications for it. Relying on a firm knowledge of the original positions and debates, this volume presents cutting-edge research evincing the complexities that today pertain in function theory in various sciences. Alongside original papers from authors central to the controversy, work by emerging researchers taking novel perspectives will add to the potential avenues to be followed in the future. Not only does the book adopt no a priori assumptions about the scope of functional explanations, it also incorporates material from several very different scientific domains, e.g. neurosciences, ecology, or technology. In general, functions are implemented in mechanisms; and functional explanations in biology have often an essential relation with natural selection. These two basic claims set the stage for this book’s coverage of investigations concerning both ”functional’ explanations, and the ”metaphysics’ of functions. It casts new light on these claims, by testing them through their confrontation with scientific developments in biology, psychology, and recent developments concerning the metaphysics of realization. Rather than debating a single theory of functions, this book presents the richness of philosophical issues raised by functional discourse throughout the various sciences.​ Content Level » Research Keywords » Causal role theory of functions - Determination of content - Ecosystem selection - Etiological theory of function - Evolutionary biology - Functional explanations - Historical concepts in biology - Larry Wright - Neurosciences - New mechanism - Selected effects functions - Systemic theory of functions - William Wimsatt Related subjects » Anthropology & Archaeology - Epistemology & Philosophy of Science - Evolutionary & Developmental Biology - Neuroscience - Philosophy TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction.- Section I. Biological functions and functional explanations: genes, cells, organisms and ecosystems.- Part 1.A. Functions, organization and development in life sciences.- Chapter 1. William C. Wimsatt. Evolution and the Stability of Functional Architectures.- Chapter 2. Denis M. Walsh. Teleological Emergence: The Autonomy of Evo-Devo.- Chapter 3. Jean Gayon. Does oxygen have a function, or: where should the regress of biological functions stop?.- Part 1.B. Functional pluralism for biologists? Chapter 4. Frédéric Bouchard. How ecosystem evolution strengthens the case for functional pluralism.- Chapter 5. Robert N. Brandon. A general case for functional pluralism.- Chapter 6. Philippe Huneman. Weak realism in the etiological theory of functions.- Section 2. Section II. Psychology, philosophy of mind and technology: Functions in a man’s world.- Part 2.A. 2A. Metaphysics, function and philosophy of mind.- Chapter 7. Carl Craver. Functions and Mechanisms in Contemporary Neuroscience.- Chapter 8. Carl Gillett. Understanding the sciences through the fog of ”functionalism.’.- 2.B. Philosophy of technology, design and functions.- Chapter 9. Fran¸ coise Longy. Artifacts and Organisms: A Case for a New Etiological Theory of Functions.- Chapter 10. Pieter Vermaas and Wybo Houkes. Functions as Epistemic Highlighters: An Engineering Account of Technical, Biological and Other Functions.- Epilogue.- Larry Wright. Revising teleological explanations: reflections three decades on. (shrink)

Animal research suggests that central serotonergic neurons are involved in behavioral suppression, particularly anxiety-related inhibition. The hypothesis linking decreased serotonin transmission to reduced anxiety as the mechanism in the anxiolytic activity of benzodiazepines conflicts with most clinical observations. Serotonin antagonists show no marked capacity to alleviate anxiety. On the other hand, clinical signs of reduced serotonergic transmission (low 5-HIAA levels in the cerebrospinal fluid) are frequently associated with aggressiveness, suicide attempts, and increased anxiety. The target article attempts to reconcile such (...) human and animal findings by investigating whether anxiety reduction or increased impulsivity is more Likely to account for animal behavioral changes associated with decreased serotonergic transmission. The effects of manipulating central serotonin in experimental anxiety paradigms in animals (punishment, extinction, novelty) are reviewed and compared with the effects of antianxiety drugs. Anxiety seems neither necessary nor sufficient to induce control by serotonergic neurons on behavior. Further evidence suggests that behavioral effects of anxiolytics thought to be mediated by decreases in anxiety are not caused by the ability of these drugs to reduce serotonin transmission. Blockade of serotonin transmission, especially at the level of the substantia nigra, results in a shift of behavior toward facilitation of responding. This behavioral shift is particularly marked when there is competition between acting and restraining response tendencies and when obstacles prevent the immediate attainment of an anticipated reward. It is proposed that serotonergic neurons are involved not only in behavioral arousal but also in enabling the organism to arrange or tolerate delay before acting. Decreases in serotonin transmission seem to be associated with the increased performance of behaviors that are usually suppressed, though not necessarily because of the alleviation of anxiety, which might contribute to the suppression. (shrink)

In the tradition of quantified modal logic, it was assumed that significantly different linguistic systems underlie reference to individuals, to times and to ‘possible worlds’. Various results from recent research in formal semantics suggest that this is not so, and that there is in fact apervasive symmetrybetween the linguistic means with which we refer to these three domains. Reference to individuals, times and worlds is uniformly effected through generalized quantifiers, definite descriptions, and pronouns, and in each domain grammatical features situate (...) the reference of terms as near, far or ‘further’ from the actual or from a reported speech act. We outline various directions in which a program ofontological symmetrycould be developed, and we offer in theAppendixa symmetric fragment developed in a logic that can be seen as a compromise between an extensional and an intensional system. (shrink)

Critical notice on: Raymond Ruyer, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, translated by Amélie Berger-Soraruff, Andrew Iliadis, Daniel W. Smith, and Ashley Woodward, with an introduction by Ashley Woodward (Lanham/London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), xxvii-214 pages.

Ecology in principle is tied to evolution, since communities and ecosystems result from evolution and ecological conditions determine fitness values. Yet the two disciplines of evolution and ecology were not unified in the twentieth-century. The architects of the Modern Synthesis, and especially Julian Huxley, constantly pushed for such integration, but the major ideas of the Synthesis—namely, the privileged role of selection and the key role of gene frequencies in evolution—did not directly or immediately translate into ecological science. In this paper (...) I consider five stages through which the Synthesis was integrated into ecology and distinguish between various ways in which a possible integration was gained. I start with Elton’s animal ecology, then consider successively Ford’s ecological genetics in the 1940s, the major textbook Principles of animal ecology edited by Allee et al., and the debates over the role of competition in population regulation in the 1950s, ending with Hutchinson’s niche concept and McArthur and Wilson’s Principles of Island Biogeography viewed as a formal transposition of Modern Synthesis explanatory schemes. I will emphasize the key role of founders of the Synthesis at each stage of this very nonlinear history. (shrink)

As of Volume 9 (1994/95) John Benjamins Publishing Company is the official publisher of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics, the annual publication of the Linguistic Society of Belgium. Each volume is topical and includes selected papers from the international meetings organised by the LSB.

The informational content conveyed by utterances has two sources:meaning as it is encoded in words and rules of semantic composition (often called literal or semantic meaning) and further inferences that may be obtained by reasoning on the speaker's motives (the conjunction of these inferences with the literal meaning is often called the strengthened or pragmatic meaning of the sentence). While in simple cases the difference can seem obvious enough, in general this is not so, and the investigation of the semantics–pragmatics (...) interface has proven to be one of the most vibrant areas of research in contemporary studies of meaning. We will survey three domains – scalar implicatures, presuppositions, and conventional implicatures – in which there are considerable empirical benefits to be obtained from this enterprise. However, it is also of foundational and methodological interest: knowledge of semantic meaning is part of knowledge of language; by contrast, pragmatic inferences are derived in part from the assumption that the speaker obeys certain rules of behavior – typically ones dictated by rationality (which may, for instance, lead to the maximization of the utility of an utterance to the speaker or to others). Owing to foundational interest in the interaction between language and reasoning, the study of the semantics– pragmatics interface originated in philosophy; however, it quickly became a central topic within linguistics and psycholinguistics, and the convergence of results from these last two fields has resulted in rich cross-disciplinary exchanges. For reasons of space, we do not consider psycholinguistic results in this survey, but it should be said at the outset that they have changed the face of the field by providing new and more reliable data (for instance, on processing and language acquisition) and sometimes by challenging data that had too quickly become solidified on the basis of unsystematic introspection alone. -/- As we will see, the debates are more open than ever. Scalar implicatures, which were usually considered a staple of pragmatic reasoning, have recently been reassigned to the semantics or even to the syntax by proponents of locally computed implicatures (‘localists’ for short). (shrink)

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was born in Landshut, Bavaria, the son of Paul Johann Anselm, a renowned legal theorist who had been called from Jena by the king of Bavaria to modernize the kingdom’s penal code. Feuerbach’s brothers all became distinguished scholars in their fields and his nephew Anselm a renowned classicist painter. After enrolling in theological studies in Heidelberg, Feuerbach became enthralled in Hegel’s philosophy and moved to Berlin to study with him. He presented his dissertation in 1828 at the (...) university of Erlangen and began his career there as a young Privat Dozent. Posterity has associated Feuerbach’s name to his anthropological critique of religion, presented in the 1841 The Essence of Christianity. Yet his writings touched on many other areas of philosophy. His life-long interest in religion arose from his attempt to solve the classical, fundamental questions of philosophy, of the human being’s place in the world, the relationships between thinking and being, reason and nature, mind and body, and the epistemological implications entailed in answering these questions. (shrink)

‘Statisticalists’ argue that the individual interactions of organisms taken together constitute natural selection. On this view, natural selection is an aggregated effect of interactions rather than some added cause acting on populations. The statisticalists’ view entails that natural selection and drift are indistinguishable aggregated effects of interactions, so that it becomes impossible to make a difference between them. The present paper attempts to make sense of the difference between selection and drift, given the main insights of statisticalism; basically, it will (...) disentangle the various kinds of indistinguishability between selection and drift that happen within biology, by examining the epistemological and metaphysical nature of the distinction between selection and drift. It will be based on a ‘difference-making account’ of selection. The first section will explicate the inscrutability of selection and drift, its various types in the statisticalist writings, and its implications. The second section specifies concepts of natural selection and drift in the difference making account of selection I am using, and shows that one can derive from this the statistical signatures of selection and drift. On this basis I focus on one sort of indistinguishability issue about selection and drift, which I call epistemic opacity, and explain why it mostly affects small populations. The last section explains why epistemic opacity does not raise an genuine epistemic problem for evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous nous efforçons de circonscrire le champ de problèmes à partir duquel Bataille et Queneau peuvent être situés l’un par rapport à l’autre, mais aussi l’un et l’autre par rapport à Kojève et à sa lecture de Hegel dans les années 1930. Ce champ problématique apparaît polarisé par les thématiques du Désir et de l’Histoire. À partir de là, nous montrons comment les spéculations philosophiques et littéraires de Bataille sur l’expérience-limite le conduisent à dédialectiser et, finalement, à (...) détéléologiser le Désir et à substituer à la perspective kojévienne d’une Sagesse post-historique le thème d’un érotisme transgressif. De son côté, Queneau offre une contestation plus nuancée du kojévisme dans le contexte de fictions littéraires où la conception kojévienne de l’Histoire se trouve ironisée, et finalement relativisée. (shrink)

This paper is based on the archives of Michel Foucault collected (since 2013) at the Manuscripts Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Our investigation focuses in particular on a complete manuscript, until now totally unknown and entitled ‘ Phénoménologie et psychologie’ (‘Phenomenology and Psychology’). This manuscript could be the first project for a thesis devoted to ‘The Notion of the “World” in Phenomenology’, written around 1953–4, at the same time as a manuscript on Binswanger and existential psychiatry (...) and as a manuscript on philosophical anthropology. We aim to show the importance that phenomenology seems to have held for Foucault at the beginning of the 1950s and in particular the role that it could have played in Foucault’s distancing himself from a naturalist psychology and a philosophy of consciousness to which he opposes a philosophy of the world, of being and of language. Foucault thus discovers a truth of the phenomenology which rests on the radicality of the transcendental gesture and on the access to an ontology gathering the being, the meaning and the language. (shrink)

This paper interprets the two pages devoted in the Critique of Pure Reason to a critique of Leibniz’s view of organisms as infinitely organized machines. It argues that this issue of organisms represents a crucial test-case for Kant in regard to the conflicting notions of space, continuity and divisibility held by classical metaphysics and by criticism. I first present Leibniz’s doctrine and its justification. In a second step, I explain the general reasoning by which Kant defines the problem of the (...) Antinomies, and then I specify the case of the Second Antinomy. Then, I ask why the organism raises specific issues for Kant’s solution of the Second Antinomy, and why it sheds light on the nature of Leibniz’s metaphysical assumptions about organisms. The last section considers this critique of Leibniz from the perspective of Kant’s future theory of organisms in the third Critique, specifying its role in the development of a Kantian view of organisms with regard to the changes occurring at the same time in the life sciences. (shrink)

L’ambiguïté qui existe entre l’interprétation du principe de différence par le maximin ou par le leximin est reconsidérée. Le maximin satisfait seulement le principe de Pareto-faible (x>y ssi chaque composante de x > la composante correspondante de y), tandis que le leximin satisfait le principe de Pareto-fort. À la différence du maximin, le leximin n’est pas représentable par des courbes d’indifférence. Dans la position originelle, le choix leximin l’emporterait sur le choix maximin ((2, 4) > (2,3)), qui semble plus proche (...) des formulations de Rawls. Plusieurs solutions de l’ambiguïté sont évoquées, notamment celle que propose Alain Boyer, qui consiste à distinguer le maximin et le principe de différence en précisant que le second est le premier couplé à une règle tierce, la minimisation de l’inégalité. Cette solution, qui s’appuie par ailleurs sur un raisonnement suspect de Rawls sur la possibilité de trouver un troisième vecteur en enlevant n au plus riche, ce qui semble présupposer, comme le fait Boyer, que l’existence du fisc redistributeur est reconnue comme une possibilité dans la position originelle, est jugée insuffisante, en ce qu’elle ne vaut que pour le cas de deux individus (même si Rawls parle de deux classes). On suggère d’utiliser, pour les cas où le nombre des individus ou des classes est >2, un critère tel que la variance. Mais cela s’avère toujours insuffisant, et non justifiable dans la position originelle, et l’on fait appel à la théorie de la décision proposée par Gilboa et Schmeidler (1989 ; 1997) pour suggérer, par exemple, que le choix juste à faire entre (1, 2, 3) et (0, 3, 3) se porte sur le second état (où le plus pauvre a moins que dans l’autre cas). Cette règle demeure cependant plus proche du maximin (généralisé) que du leximin, peut être rapprochée de ce que l’on appelle le prioritarisme, et peut donc conserver une coloration appréciablement rawlsienne. (shrink)

We sketch several variants of so-called “semantic externalism”, which we take to be prototypically embodied by Wittgenstein, Kripke and Burge respectively. Then, drawing inspiration from Putnam, we show how aspects of these different kinds of semantic externalism can be articulated with each other in the case of natural kind terms, and we suggest that this analysis could be extended to a larger set of words. When that is done, we turn to the core part of the paper, which consists in (...) a thorough discussion of the forms of “semantic deference” that can plausibly be associated with each brand of externalism. We suggest that the debates over the kinds of semantic externalism characteristic of different kinds of words can be clarified by investigating the kind of semantic deference they call for. (shrink)

Axel Honneth, célèbre théoricien allemand de la reconnaissance qui s’inscrit dans la filiation de l’École de Francfort et notamment de Jürgen Habermas, et Jacques Rancière, éminent penseur français de la mésentente qui a rompu avec la tradition althussérienne, sont deux figures centrales du paysage intellectuel contemporain. Leurs pensées se situent dans deux traditions distinctes, mais elles ont toutes deux à voir avec le marxisme pris au sens large, qu’elles considèrent sous un angle critique. Les deux penseurs portent intérêt à des (...) domaines spécifiques au sein de la philosophie et hors d’elle. S’ils partagent tous deux un souci du domaine politique, Axel Honneth se meut dans la philosophie sociale, la philosophie morale et la philosophie du droit ; il fait un usage important et réfléchi des sciences sociales. Jacques Rancière se tourne, pour sa part, vers l’histoire, l’esthétique et la littérature. Mais une confrontation entre leurs deux pensées paraît s’imposer, tant leurs modèles sont influents dans le champ des sciences sociales, de la théorie politique et de la philosophie critique aujourd’hui. Il s’agit de savoir si les paradigmes qu’ils mettent en avant pour critiquer la société, pour rendre raison de son évolution et des transformations qui doivent la rendre plus juste ou plus libre, le paradigme de la reconnaissance et celui de la mésentente, sont concurrents, s’ils sont exclusifs l’un de l’autre, ou s’ils sont compatibles. (shrink)

Recently some philosophers have emphasized a potentially irreconcilable conceptual antagonism between the statistical characterization of natural selection and the standard scientific discussion of natural selection in terms of forces and causes. Other philosophers have developed an account of the causal character of selectionist statements represented in terms of counterfactuals. I examine the compatibility between such statisticalism and counterfactually based causal accounts of natural selection by distinguishing two distinct statisticalist claims: firstly the suggested impossibility for natural selection to be a cause (...) acting upon populations and secondly the conceptualization that all evolutionary causes occur at the level of interactions between individual organisms. I argue that deriving the latter from the former involves supplementary assumptions concerning precisely what causation is. I critically examine two of these assumptions purportedly preventing natural selection being regarded as a cause: the locality claim and the modularity claim. I conclude that justifying the strongest version of statisticalism—i.e. evolutionary causation only occurs at the level of individual interactions between organisms—would require further metaphysical arguments that are likely to be deemed highly problematic. Additionally, I argue that such a metaphysical position would be considered incongruous with both our scientific and ordinary use of the concepts of causality and explanation as employed within our everyday epistemological framework. (shrink)

O texto aqui traduzido foi publicado originalmente na Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, em janeiro de 1901. Trata-se de um dos artigos publicados por Alain, pseudônimo utilizado por Émile Chartier. A tradução foi realizada pelo Grupo de Tradução do Departamento de Filosofia da Universidade de Brasília, coordenado pelo Professor Philippe Lacour. O grupo se propõe a traduzir regularmente obras de filosofia ainda inéditas em língua portuguesa e disponibilizá-las em periódicos de acesso livre. O trabalho de tradução é produzido (...) de maneira colaborativa através da plataforma digital TraduXio (https://traduxio.org/). (shrink)

Le Conseiller d'Etat ou Recueil général de la politique moderne est l'un des grands traités politiques du XVIIe siècle. Son auteur, Philippe de Béthune, diplomate réputé et fin connaisseur de la vie publique, a écrit un livre étonnant de philosophie politique, de stratégie, d'économie et d'urbanisme. Œuvre d 'un homme de cour, habitué à côtoyer les princes, il est le produit de la réflexion et de l'expérience d'un personnage singulier, mais aussi d'une époque insolite de mutation entre deux mondes, (...) - celui de la Renaissance, des guerres de religion et des troubles de la Ligue, et celui de l'absolutisme monarchique et de l'État moderne, - marquée par une transformation profonde des valeurs politiques et morales. Personnalité peu commune, qui a voyagé à travers toute l'Europe, qui par deux fois a été ambassadeur à Rome et qui a bénéficié d'une longévité remarquable, Philippe de Béthune est le frère puîné de Sully Il naît sous Charles IX, commence sa carrière comme mignon, dans l'entourage de Joyeuse, l'archi-favori d'Henri III, sert Henri lV Louis XIII, Richelieu et termine sa vie sous le ministériat de Mazarin. Publié en 1633, avec l'accord du cardinal ministre, Le Conseiller d'Etat n 'a jamais été réédité depuis 1684. Cette nouvelle édition est précédée d'une longue introduction sur l'art politique de la première moitié du XVlle siècle et le paysage mental de l'époque. (shrink)

The text translated here was originally published in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in November 1899. It is one of the articles published by Alain, pseudonym used by Émile Chartier. The translation was performed by the Translation Group of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Brasilia, coordinated by Professor Philippe Lacour. The group proposes to regularly translate works of philosophy still unpublished in Portuguese and make them available in open access journals. The translation work is (...) produced collaboratively through the digital platform TraduXio (https://traduxio.org/). (shrink)

Emotions are traditionally considered to be brief states that last for seconds or a few minutes at most. However, due to pioneering theoretical work of Frijda and recent empirical studies, it has become clear that the duration of emotions is actually highly variable with durations ranging from a few seconds to several hours, or even longer. We review research on determinants of emotion duration. Three classes of determinants are identified: features related to the (a) emotion-eliciting event (event duration and event (...) appraisal), (b) emotion itself (nature of the emotion component, nature of the emotion, and emotion intensity), and (c) emotion-experiencing person (dispositions and emotion regulatory actions). Initial evidence on the psychological and neural mechanisms that underlie their effects is discussed. (shrink)

Le texte traduit ici a été publié dans la Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale en janvier 1901. Il s’agit d’une chronique d’Alain, pseudonyme utilisé par Émile Chartier, dans lequel il cherche à affirmer que la Raison serait l’instrument le plus efficace d’un ordre social donné. La Raison serait donc le vrai Dieu et il serait juste de dire qu’on lui doit un Culte. La traduction a été réalisée par le Groupe de Traduction du Département de Philosophie de l’Université de (...) Brasilia, coordonné par le Professeur Philippe Lacour. Le groupe se propose de traduire régulièrement des ouvrages de philosophie encore inédits en langue portugaise et de les rendre disponibles dans des périodiques en accès libre. Le travail de traduction est produit de manière collaborative via la plate-forme numérique Traduxio (https://traduxio.org/). (shrink)

The unification problem in a normal modal logic is to determine, given a formula.

Natural selection is often envisaged as the ultimate cause of the apparent rationality exhibited by organisms in their specific habitat. Given the equivalence between selection and rationality as maximizing processes, one would indeed expect organisms to implement rational decision-makers. Yet, many violations of the clauses of rationality have been witnessed in various species such as starlings, hummingbirds, amoebas and honeybees. This paper attempts to interpret such discrepancies between economic rationality and biological rationality. After having distinguished two kinds of rationality we (...) introduce irrationality as a negation of economic rationality by biologically rational decision-makers. Focusing mainly on those instances of irrationalities that can be understood as exhibiting inconsistency in making choices, i.e. as non-conformity of a given behaviour to axioms such as transitivity or independence of irrelevant alternatives, we propose two possible families of Darwinian explanations that may account for these apparent irrationalities. First, we consider cases where natural selection may have been an indirect cause of irrationality. Second, we consider putative cases where violations of rationality axioms may have been directly favored by natural selection. Though the latter cases seem to clearly contradict our intuitive representation of natural selection as a process that maximizes fitness, we argue that they are actually unproblematic; for often, they can be redescribed as cases where no rationality axiom is violated, or as situations where no adaptive solution exists in the first place. (shrink)

La relation entre la philosophie et la théologie est coexistensive au mouvement du penser de Martin Heidegger. Elle n'a pas seulement fait l'objet d'une Conférence en 1927. Elle ne saurait constituer non plus un simple thème de relecture de son œuvre. Après la publication, ces deux dernières décennies, de plusieurs textes majeurs de l'auteur, restés longtemps inconnus, à l'heure du renouvellement des recherches sur ses origines sociales et intellectuelles, la question appelait un nouvel examen. Philippe Capelle met en relief (...) les trois topiques fondamentales de cette relation philosophie et théologie scripturaire, philosophie et ontothéologie, pensée de l'être et attente du dieu, ainsi que les différentes étapes de leur thématisation. Il analyse le rapport de Heidegger à la tradition théologique en faisant valoir un triple point de vue l'enracinement dans la culture catholique ; la dette vis-à-vis des schèmes fondamentaux des théologies catholique et (surtout) protestante, ainsi que de leurs principaux fondateurs : saint Paul, saint Augustin, la scolastique médiévale, Luther, Bultmann ; la provenance qui autorise paradoxalement la sortie jamais achevée de la théologie chrétienne. Rejetant toute interprétation théologique de la pensée heideggerienne, il interroge enfin le thème du " retrait " comme motif herméneutique central et comme pivot d'une approche renouvelée des rapports entre la philosophie et la théologie. (shrink)

Two decades ago, Rolf Landauer (1991) argued that “information is physical” and ought to have a role in the scientific analysis of reality comparable to that of matter, energy, space and time. This would also help to bridge the gap between biology and mathematics and physics. Although it can be argued that we are living in the ‘golden age’ of biology, both because of the great challenges posed by medicine and the environment and the significant advances that have been made—especially (...) in genetics and molecular and cell biology—we feel that information as an essential aspect of life has been neglected, or at least misunderstood. We therefore summon Maxwell’s Demon and its distant relative the ratchet, and apply these to biology. (shrink)

Promoting recovery has become more and more important in the care of patients with severe mental disorders such as psychosis. Recovery is a personal process of growth involving hope, self-identity, meaning in life, and responsibility. Obviously, these components pertain, at least in part, to a psychotherapeutic care perspective. Yet, up to now, recovery has mainly been taken into account in transforming health services and as a general framework for supportive therapy. Existential phenomenology abdicates a theoretical stance and considers issues such (...) as death anxiety, isolation, responsibility, and meaning. Thus, it is likely to provide some insight into the psychotherapeutic aspects of recovery. Furthermore, existential psychotherapy allows powerful insights for adopting a recovery-oriented attitude and to provide useful themes for discussing issues allowing patients to gain meaning and hope. This paper describes these elements to give clinicians insights into this complex topic. (shrink)

We introduce and study a variety of modal logics of parallelism, orthogonality, and affine geometries, for which we establish several completeness, decidability and complexity results and state a number of related open, and apparently difficult problems. We also demonstrate that lack of the finite model property of modal logics for sufficiently rich affine or projective geometries (incl. the real affine and projective planes) is a rather common phenomenon.

Long before his last book, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, was published in early 1971, Richard M. Titmuss , a professor of social administration at the London School of Economics, had been a major figure in the debates over the welfare state. The Gift Relationship was the culmination of an eventful relationship with the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank that advocated the extension of rational pricing to social services. By arguing that the British system (...) of blood procurement and distribution, based on free giving within the National Health Service, was more efficient than the partly commercialized American system, Titmuss intended to signal the dangers of the increasing commercialization of society. What made for the impact of his book, however, was not merely its argument that transfusion‐transmitted infections were much more common with paid than with voluntary donors, but also its reflections on what it is that holds a society together. And here Titmuss argued that a “socialist” social policy, by encouraging the sense of community, played a central role. The eclecticism of Titmuss’s work, together with its strong ethical and political flavor, makes it a rich and original account of the “social” at a time when heated debates over social policy, both in Britain and in the United States, raised the question of the division of labor among the social sciences. (shrink)