A treaty to regulate the global antimicrobial commons can be appropriately framed around the model provided by multilateral environmental agreements. At the same time, it is not clear that a comprehensive treaty is the only possible entry point and other options, such as an agreement on technology transfer or funding may be apt starting points. Any legal instrument adopted to regulate the global antimicrobial commons needs to reflect the global South-North dichotomy and integrate the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (...) and respective capabilities. Further, it would need to go beyond environmental instruments that have been structured around the sovereign interests of negotiating states even when dealing with issues of global concern, such as climate change. The proposed legal instrument would also need to be based not just on the precautionary principle as a marker of the necessity to address the negative environmental and health impacts, but also be based on the interests of patients and integrate concerns raised in terms of the human right to health. (shrink)

English summary: Nietzsche is sometimes called a philosopher-prophet, but no one has heretofore examine both his prophetic dimension and philosophical power together. This unique study demonstrates that Nietzsche was the first futurologist, that the future was a real concern for him, and that even his genealogical works should be read as an investigation turned towards the future of man and civilization. The five studies included offer a new face to Nietzsche that future researchers will undoubtedly need to take into account. (...) French description: Nietzsche a parfois ete qualifie de philosophe-prophete. Mais ses interpretes se sont divises en deux grandes categories: ceux qui ont concentre leur regard sur la dimension prophetique de l'oeuvre en sous-estimant la puissance du philosophe, et ceux qui ont tente de decrypter la philosophie de Nietzsche en negligeant sa dimension prophetique. Auteur d'une these de Doctorat d'Etat es-Lettres consacree au futur dans l'oeuvre de Nietzsche, Philippe Granarolo n'en avait publie sous une forme remaniee que la troisieme partie (L'Individu eternel / L'experience nietzscheenne de l'eternite, Vrin, 1993), et il ne nous avait fait entrevoir sa lecture de Nietzsche que par le biais d'articles et de quelques opuscules. Avec ce volume, Nietzsche: cinq scenarios pour le futur, il se decide enfin a mettre a la portee du public cultive son approche originale du philosophe auquel il a consacre plus de trente-cinq annees de sa vie. Pour lui, Nietzsche est moins un prophete que le premier des futurologues. Il demontre de facon convaincante que le futur a bien ete la preoccupation essentielle, et meme le souci quasi unique de Nietzsche, les oeuvres genealogiques elles-memes devant etre lues comme des recherches tournees vers l'avenir de l'homme et de la civilisation. Les cinq scenarios mis en exergue par Philippe Granarolo offrent au corpus nietzscheen un nouveau visage qu'il sera sans doute difficile aux futurs interpretes de negliger. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage rend compte de la théorie générale de la communication spontanée des dispositions affectives développée par Spinoza, qui plonge ses racines dans la théorie de la perception et la physiologie corporelle et finit par déterminer les normes de l'action rationnelle, aussi bien éthiques que politiques.

L’objet de cet article est d’éclairer les rapports qu’entretiennent le droit naturel et l’économie dans la pensée de F. Bastiat. On montre que le statut de la raison humaine occupe une place centrale dans cette articulation. On met également en évidence les tensions entre le mécanisme de répartition des droits de propriété soumis à une procédure de concurrence et le respect de la loi naturelle. A cet égard, F. Bastiat définit la liberté comme la capacité à utiliser la raison.The aim (...) of this paper is to throw a new light on the close relations between natural rights and economics in F. Bastiat’s thought. We show that the human reason status holds a central place in this articulation. We also underscore the problematic compatibility between the natural rights allocation mechanism based on a competition process and the natural law. We explain how F. Bastiat comes to grips with this tension. He proposes to define the notion of liberty as the faculty of using human reason. (shrink)

We develop a formal semantic analysis of the alarm calls used by Campbell’s monkeys in the Tai forest and on Tiwai island —two sites that differ in the main predators that the monkeys are exposed to. Building on data discussed in Ouattara et al. :e7808, 2009a; PNAS 106: 22026–22031, 2009b and Arnold et al., we argue that on both sites alarm calls include the roots krak and hok, which can optionally be affixed with -oo, a kind of attenuating suffix; in (...) addition, sentences can start with boom boom, which indicates that the context is not one of predation. In line with Arnold et al., we show that the meaning of the roots is not quite the same in Tai and on Tiwai: krak often functions as a leopard alarm call in Tai, but as a general alarm call on Tiwai. We develop models based on a compositional semantics in which concatenation is interpreted as conjunction, roots have lexical meanings, -oo is an attenuating suffix, and an all-purpose alarm parameter is raised with each individual call. The first model accounts for the difference between Tai and Tiwai by way of different lexical entries for krak. The second model gives the same underspecified entry to krak in both locations, but it makes use of a competition mechanism akin to scalar implicatures. In Tai, strengthening yields a meaning equivalent to non-aerial dangerous predator and turns out to single out leopards. On Tiwai, strengthening yields a nearly contradictory meaning due to the absence of ground predators, and only the unstrengthened meaning is used. (shrink)

The Pareto principle states that if the members of society express the same preference judgment between two options, this judgment is compelling for society. A building block of normative economics and social choice theory, and often borrowed by contemporary political philosophy, the principle has rarely been subjected to philosophical criticism. The paper objects to it on the ground that it indifferently applies to those cases in which the individuals agree on both their expressed preferences and their reasons for entertaining them, (...) and those cases in which they agree on their expressed preferences, while differing on their reasons. The latter are cases of "spurious unanimity", and it is normatively inappropriate, or so the paper argues, to defend unanimity preservation at the social level for them, so the Pareto principle is formulated much too broadly. The objection seems especially powerful when the principle is applied in an ex ante context of uncertainty, in which individuals can disagree on both their probabilities and utilities, and nonetheless agree on their preferences over prospects. (shrink)

Stalnaker ( 1978 ) made two seminal claims about presuppositions. The most influential one was that presupposition projection is computed by a pragmatic mechanism based on a notion of ‘local context’ . Due to conceptual and technical difficulties, however, the latter notion was reinterpreted in purely semantic terms within ‘dynamic semantics’ (Heim 1983 ). The second claim was that some instances of presupposition generation should also be explained in pragmatic terms . But despite various attempts, the definition of a precise (...) ‘triggering algorithm’ has remained somewhat elusive. We discuss possible extensions of both claims. First, we offer a reconstruction of ‘local contexts’ which circumvents some of the difficulties faced by Stalnaker’s original analysis. We preserve the idea that local contexts are computed by a pragmatic mechanism that aggregates the information that follows from an incomplete sentence given the global context; but we crucially rely on a modified notion of entailment (‘R-entailment’), whose plausibility should be assessed on independent grounds. Second, we speculate that local contexts might prove necessary (though by no means sufficient) to understand how some presuppositions are triggered. In a nutshell, we suggest that a presupposition is triggered when the semantic contribution of an expression to its local context is in some sense ‘heterogeneous’. Without giving an analysis of the latter notion, we note that this architecture implies that presuppositions should be triggered on the basis of the meaning that an expression has relative to its local context (what we call its ‘local meaning’); we sketch some possible consequences of this analysis. (shrink)

Sign languages are known to display the same general grammatical properties as spoken languages, but also to make greater use of iconic mechanisms. In Schlenker et al.’s ‘Iconic Variables’ :91–149, 2013), it was argued that loci can have an iconic semantics, in the sense that certain geometric relations among loci are preserved by the interpretation function. Here we ask whether plural and height specifications of loci display the formal behavior of phi-features in remaining uninterpreted in focus- and ellipsis-constructions. Data from (...) ASL and LSF show that plural and height specifications may indeed remain uninterpreted in these constructions; furthermore, there are cases in which a single high locus is construed iconically and left uninterpreted in the course of ellipsis resolution. We argue that our data are compatible with two theories. According to the Strong View, plural and height specifications of loci display exactly the behavior of spoken language features. According to the Weak View, our data just show that plural and height specifications share the behavior of features and other non-assertive elements in being separable from the referential terms they specify. Our LSF data are compatible with the Weak View; our ASL data might provide support for the Strong View. While our aim is merely to open the debate about the featural status of iconic specifications, the question is of some importance: if features are innate and primitive elements of grammar, and if some of them have an intrinsically geometric semantics, the signed modality might play a greater role than is usually thought at the very core of Universal Grammar. (shrink)

Judgment aggregation theory, or rather, as we conceive of it here, logical aggregation theory generalizes social choice theory by having the aggregation rule bear on judgments of all kinds instead of merely preference judgments. It derives from Kornhauser and Sager’s doctrinal paradox and List and Pettit’s discursive dilemma, two problems that we distinguish emphatically here. The current theory has developed from the discursive dilemma, rather than the doctrinal paradox, and the final objective of the paper is to give the latter (...) its own theoretical development along the line of recent work by Dietrich and Mongin. However, the paper also aims at reviewing logical aggregation theory as such, and it covers impossibility theorems by Dietrich, Dietrich and List, Dokow and Holzman, List and Pettit, Mongin, Nehring and Puppe, Pauly and van Hees, providing a uniform logical framework in which they can be compared with each other. The review goes through three historical stages: the initial paradox and dilemma, the scattered early results on the independence axiom, and the so-called canonical theorem, a collective achievement that provided the theory with its specific method of analysis. The paper goes some way towards philosophical logic, first by briefly connecting the aggregative framework of judgment with the modern philosophy of judgment, and second by thoroughly discussing and axiomatizing the ‘general logic’ built in this framework. (shrink)

The paper analyses economic evaluations by distinguishing evaluative statements from actual value judgments. From this basis, it compares four solutions to the value neutrality problem in economics. After rebutting the strong theses about neutrality (normative economics is illegitimate) and non-neutrality (the social sciences are value-impregnated), the paper settles the case between the weak neutrality thesis (common in welfare economics) and a novel, weak non-neutrality thesis that extends the realm of normative economics more widely than the other weak thesis does.

Kant’s analysis of the concept of natural purpose in the Critique of judgment captured several features of organisms that he argued warranted making them the objects of a special field of study, in need of a special regulative teleological principle. By showing that organisms have to be conceived as self-organizing wholes, epigenetically built according to the idea of a whole that we must presuppose, Kant accounted for three features of organisms conflated in the biological sciences of the period: adaptation, functionality (...) and conservation of forms..Kant’s unitary concept of natural purpose was subsequently split in two directions: first by Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, that would draw on the idea of adaptative functions as a regulative principle for understanding in reconstituting and classifying organisms; and then by Goethe’s and Geoffroy’s morphology, a science of the general transformations of living forms. However, such general transformations in nature, objects of an alleged ‘archaeology of nature’, were thought impossible by Kant in the §80 of the Critique of judgment. Goethe made this ‘adventure of reason’ possible by changing the sense of ‘explanation’: scientific explanation was shifted from the investigation of the mechanical processes of generation of individual organisms to the unveiling of some ideal transformations of types instantiated by those organisms. (shrink)

This paper offers an ethnomethodological exploration of fun in Go, the timely delivery of a ‘Monkey Jump’, and its lingering relevance to science studies. In Go terms, the paper makes a ‘pincer’ move: on the one hand, it explores the analytic potential of ‘fun’ for ethnographic purposes and, on the other hand, it questions its manifest abandonment in some quarters of science studies. In particular, the paper challenges their “curious seriousness” :69–78, 1990) whenever grand ontological claims are mixed up with (...) suspended empirical inquiry. That said, the latter criticism does not take the form of a scholarly exercise in conceptual clarification, but remains part and parcel of the author’s ethnography of playing amateur Go, including his dealing with and delivery of a Monkey Jump and reading of Go literature and replaying of professional games. The key point of the paper, then, is to demonstrate the heuristic interest of adopting a practitioner’s stance, not only for understanding a technical domain such as Go in its own terms, but also for launching a phenomenological critique of analytic discretion in science studies. Therefore, the second part of the paper re-examines, from an amateur Go player’s stance, Latour and Woolgar’s Go analogy in and for Laboratory Life —an early exemplar of science studies’ ontological bent. (shrink)

Previous neural network models of concept learning were mainly implemented with supervised learning schemes. However, studies of human conceptual memory have shown that concepts may be learned without a teacher who provides the category name to associate with exemplars. A modular neural network architecture that realizes concept acquisition through two functionally distinct operations, categorizing and naming, is proposed as an alternative. An unsupervised algorithm realizes the categorizing module by constructing representations of categories compatible with prototype theory. The naming module associates (...) category names to the output of the categorizing module in a supervised mode. In such a modular architecture, the interface between the modules can be conceived of as an “information relay” that encodes, constrains, and propagates important information. Five experiments were conducted to analyze the relationships among internal conceptual codes and simple conceptual and lexical development. The first two experiments show a prototype effect and illustrate some basic characteristics of the system. The third experiment presents a bottom‐up model of the narrowing down of children's early lexical categories that honors mutual exclusivity. The fourth experiment introduces top‐down constraints on conceptual coding. The fifth experiment exhibits how hierarchical relationships between concepts are learned by the architecture, and also demonstrates how a spectrum of conceptual expertise may gradually emerge as a consequence of experiencing more with certain categories than with others. (shrink)

The paper has a twofold aim. On the one hand, it provides what appears to be the first game-theoretic modeling of Napoleon’s last campaign, which ended dramatically on 18 June 1815 at Waterloo. It is specifically concerned with the decision Napoleon made on 17 June 1815 to detach part of his army against the Prussians he had defeated, though not destroyed, on 16 June at Ligny. Military historians agree that this decision was crucial but disagree about whether it was rational. (...) Hypothesizing a zero-sum game between Napoleon and Blücher, and computing its solution, we show that it could have been a cautious strategy on the former's part to divide his army, a conclusion which runs counter to the charges of misjudgement commonly heard since Clausewitz. On the other hand, the paper addresses methodological issues. We defend its case study against the objections of irrelevance that have been raised elsewhere against “analytic narratives”, and conclude that military campaigns provide an opportunity for successful application of the formal theories of rational choice. Generalizing the argument, we finally investigate the conflict between narrative accounts – the historians' standard mode of expression – and mathematical modeling. (shrink)

An introduction to semantics for the general reader. How things mean, from animal communication to music.

Epistemic logics are essential to the design of logical systems that capture elements of reasoning about knowledge. In this paper, we study the computability of unifiability and the unification types in several epistemic logics.

We investigate the conflict between the ex ante and ex post criteria of social welfare in a new framework of individual and social decisions, which distinguishes between two sources of uncertainty, here interpreted as an objective and a subjective source respectively. This framework makes it possible to endow the individuals and society not only with ex ante and ex post preferences, as is usually done, but also with interim preferences of two kinds, and correspondingly, to introduce interim forms of the (...) Pareto principle. After characterizing the ex ante and ex post criteria, we present a first solution to their conflict that extends the former as much possible in the direction of the latter. Then, we present a second solution, which goes in the opposite direction, and is also maximally assertive. Both solutions translate the assumed Pareto conditions into weighted additive utility representations, and both attribute to the individuals common probability values on the objective source of uncertainty, and different probability values on the subjective source. We discuss these solutions in terms of two conceptual arguments, i.e., the by now classic spurious unanimity argument and a novel informational argument labelled complementary ignorance. The paper complies with the standard economic methodology of basing probability and utility representations on preference axioms, but for the sake of completeness, also considers a construal of objective uncertainty based on the assumption of an exogeneously given probability measure. JEL classification: D70; D81. (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 emotion-eliciting event, emotion itself, and emotion-experiencing person. (...) Initial evidence on the psychological and neural mechanisms that underlie their effects is discussed. (shrink)

This is the outline: 1. Introduction : organicisme et personnalisme 2. Un effort pour philosopher sur tout 3. La théologie et la question de l’infra-substantiel 3.1 Un schème de pensée qui pose problème 3.2 Le statut de l’immortalité 4. Substance, personne et cosmos.

Nudge is a concept of policy intervention that originates in Thaler and Sunstein's (2008) popular eponymous book. Following their own hints, we distinguish three properties of nudge interventions: they redirect individual choices by only slightly altering choice conditions (here nudge 1), they use rationality failures instrumentally (here nudge 2), and they alleviate the unfavourable effects of these failures (here nudge 3). We explore each property in semantic detail and show that no entailment relation holds between them. This calls into question (...) the theoretical unity of nudge, as intended by Thaler and Sunstein and most followers. We eventually recommend pursuing each property separately, both in policy research and at the foundational level. We particularly emphasize the need of reconsidering the respective roles of decision theory and behavioural economics to delineate nudge 2 correctly. The paper differs from most of the literature in focusing on the definitional rather than the normative problems of nudge. (shrink)

This article presents the Arabic text of al-Q's short geometric treatise, The Book of the centres of the tangent circles on lines, by the method of analysis, with translation and a mathematical commentary. In this treatise al-Q solves by analysis an ordered set of eight problems where the goal is to locate, on a given line, the centre of a circle which is tangent to two given elements, which may be points, straight lines or circles. For example, in the first (...) problem he wanted to find the centre of a circle which contains two given points. In fact, al-Q establishes the locus of the solutions, and this locus can be a straight line or a conic. The treatise is reminiscent of one of the purposes of al-Q's work on the perfect compass, namely to assign to the conics the status of regular lines. (shrink)

Dumézil’s trifunctional theory applied to the only grail plot in Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal proves to be neither faithful nor worthy of credit. Philological, historical, cultural, cognitive and narratological arguments raise critical objections and question its artificial character. In fact, the incidental episode of the grail functions as a narrative drawer in a plot belonging to the global tale ATU 910B (Good precepts) relating to the part of the work regarding Perceval.

La naissance du CRI à Grenoble doit être replacée dans le contexte intellectuel de la nouvelle critique des années 1960. Les trois courants dominants du matérialisme historique, de la psychanalyse freudienne et du structuralisme ont alors été dépassés par le CRI au profit d’un « nouvel esprit anthropologique » qui privilégiait la réalité sensible des images au détriment des idéologies réductrices. Les intellectuels des villes ont perdu le lien charnel avec une civilisation rurale et un mode de vie ayant façonné (...) notre langue, nos croyances et nos fêtes, ainsi que des artisanats séculaires. Le médiéviste peut encore retrouver le lien avec cette mémoire du temps. Mais s’il n’a pas conservé une âme païenne et un esprit paysan, il est condamné à la posture post-moderne. Penser la culture occidentale en contournant ou ignorant le Moyen Âge n’est qu’une imposture. Un exemple de longue vie des images montre l’importance des relais culturels qui relativise toute théorie préconçue des archétypes. The birth of the CRI in Grenoble is replaced in the intellectual context of new criticism of the 1960s. The three mainstream have been overtaken by the CRI in favour of a “new anthropological spirit” that emphasizes the sensible reality of images at the expense of reducing ideologies. The modern scholars of the cities have lost the carnal connection with a rural civilization and a way of life that have shaped our language, our ancient beliefs and feasts and also centuries-old handicrafts. The medievalist can find the link with this memory of time. But if he has lost a pagan soul and a spirit of peasant, he is sentenced to a post-modern posture. Thinking Western culture in bypassing or ignoring the middle ages appears like a mere sham. An example of long-life images stresses the importance of cultural relays against all preconceived theory of the archetypes. (shrink)

It is already known that unifiable formulas in normal modal logic |$\textbf {K}+\square ^{2}\bot $| are either finitary or unitary and unifiable formulas in normal modal logic |$\textbf {Alt}_{1}+\square ^{2}\bot $| are unitary. In this paper, we prove that for all |$d{\geq }3$|⁠, unifiable formulas in normal modal logic |$\textbf {K}+\square ^{d}\bot $| are either finitary or unitary and unifiable formulas in normal modal logic |$\textbf {Alt}_{1}+\square ^{d}\bot $| are unitary.

Previous neural network models of concept learning were mainly implemented with supervised learning schemes. However, studies of human conceptual memory have shown that concepts may be learned without a teacher who provides the category name to associate with exemplars. A modular neural network architecture that realizes concept acquisition through two functionally distinct operations, categorizing and naming, is proposed as an alternative. An unsupervised algorithm realizes the categorizing module by constructing representations of categories compatible with prototype theory. The naming module associates (...) category names to the output of the categorizing module in a supervised mode. In such a modular architecture, the interface between the modules can be conceived of as an “information relay” that encodes, constrains, and propagates important information. Five experiments were conducted to analyze the relationships among internal conceptual codes and simple conceptual and lexical development. The first two experiments show a prototype effect and illustrate some basic characteristics of the system. The third experiment presents a bottom‐up model of the narrowing down of children's early lexical categories that honors mutual exclusivity. The fourth experiment introduces top‐down constraints on conceptual coding. The fifth experiment exhibits how hierarchical relationships between concepts are learned by the architecture, and also demonstrates how a spectrum of conceptual expertise may gradually emerge as a consequence of experiencing more with certain categories than with others. (shrink)

RésuméDans son traité intituléLe Planisphère, Ptolémée présente une méthode pour représenter une sphère sur un plan, selon des principes compatibles avec ce qu'on nomme aujourd'hui la projection stéréographique. Mais cette dernière ne sera traitée mathématiquement, en tant que telle, que bien plus tard, au IXẹsiècle, dans l'œuvre d'al-Farghānī qui démontrera notamment la propriété fondamentale de cette projection. Ce n'est qu'au Xesiècle qu'al-Qūhī et Ibn Sahl écriront une première théorie générale des projections de la sphère. Cet article analyse les raisons qui (...) permettent d'affirmer que Ptolémée n'a pas conçu mathématiquement de projection, et que cette conception n'a pu être possible qu'avec l'aide de la définition de la surface conique telle qu'Apollonius l'a exposée dans sesConiques. (shrink)

The development of geometrical analysis in the 10th century was partly inspired by the reception of the works of Apollonius, which Arab mathematicians translated as early as the preceding century. Al-Qūhī contributed to this development by writing several collections of problems dealing with Apollonian themes and solved by the method of analysis; however, it seems that they do not all occupy the same place in his work. The author gives here the edition, translation, and mathematical commentary of a short work, (...) entitled The determination of two straight lines from a point along a known angle, which presents the particularity of providing problems as geometrical lemmas to other studies. Indeed, al-Qūhī uses two of these lemmas in more complex constructions which belong to his Treatise on the art of the astrolabe. In this same treatise on the astrolabe, as well as in his Treatise on the perfect compass, this scholar also uses as lemmas several problems solved in another of his works, entitled The generation of points on straight lines according to ratios of which the terms are surfaces. This work is unfortunately lost, and all that remains of it are the traces which subsist in other treatises in which it has been used. This study seems to be necessary if one wishes to understand the organization of the work of al-Qūhī, a mathematician of the first rank who was representative of his time. (shrink)

Self-awareness is viewed here as the phenotypic expression of an interaction between genes and the environment. Brain and behavioral development of fetuses and newborn infants are a rich source of information regarding what might constitute minimal self-awareness. Research indicates that newborns have feeling experience. Unlike automata, they do not just sense and respond to proximal stimulations. In light of the explosive brain growth that takes place inside and outside of the womb, first signs of feeling as opposed to sensing experience (...) are discussed. Feeling experience is considered as the necessary condition for having minimal self-awareness. Both would co-emerge in development. However, minimal self-awareness is rapidly supplemented with an awareness that is not just perceptual, but also conceptual and ethical, primarily defined in relation to and by others. (shrink)

In this note, we reconstruct some results of the DRT analysis of presupposition projection within the theory of local contexts of Schlenker (2009). The latter offered a way to annotate every sentence with variables that denote the various local context sets that play a crucial role in Heim’s satisfaction theory (Heim 1983). In standard satisfaction theories, a presupposition must be entailed by its local context. Here we allow a presupposition to be indexed with other local contexts, and we propose, following (...) van der Sandt (1992) and Zeevat (1992), that presuppositions are preferably anaphoric to the highest possible context. The resulting analysis emulates some desirable results of DRT—notably its solution to the ‘Proviso Problem’ (Geurts 1999). But it arguably improves on DRT in some respects: it can generate genuine conditional presuppositions; and it yields more adequate results for some quantified examples. Several limitations of the theory—some of them quite severe—are also discussed. (shrink)

La relation de Foucault à Merleau-Ponty semble avant tout marquée par les critiques que le premier adresse au profil général de l’analyse phénoménologique dont le second peut apparaître au début des années soixante comme un représentant exemplaire. Nous montrons dans cet article que ces critiques concernent plus précisément la corrélation, établie « archéologiquement », entre les présupposés anthropologiques de la phénoménologie et le développement des sciences humaines. Il apparaît néanmoins qu’en contrepoint de ces critiques, une certaine équivocité définit de manière (...) persistante la relation de Foucault à Merleau-Ponty, notamment en ce qui concerne certaines analyses qu’ils consacrent au statut du corps. (shrink)

Although there are a few books available that give brief surveys of a variety of nonstandard logics, there is a growing need for a critical presentation providing both a greater depth and breadth of insight into these logics. This book assembles a wider and deeper view of the many potentially applicable logics. Three appendixes provide short tutorials on classical logic and modal logics, and give a brief introduction to the existing literature on the logical aspects of probability theory. These tutorials (...) and the bibliography included in the appendixes provide useful reference material for the reader. (shrink)

Fallibilists about looks deny that the relation of looking the same as is non-transitive. Regarding familiar examples of coloured patches suggesting that such a relation is non-transitive, they argue that, in fact, indiscriminable adjacent patches may well look different, despite their perceptual indiscriminability: it’s just that we cannot notice the relevant differences in the chromatic appearances of such patches. In this paper, I present an argument that fallibilism about looks requires commitment to an empirically false consequence. To succeed in deflecting (...) putative cases of non-transitivity, fallibilists would have to claim that there can’t be any perceptual limitations of any kind on human chromatic discrimination. But there are good reasons to think such limitations exist. (shrink)

Taking precautions to prevent harm. Whether principe de précaution, Vorsorgeprinzip, føre-var prinsippet, or försiktighetsprincip, etc., the precautionary principle embodies the idea that public and private interests should act to prevent harm. Furthermore, the precautionary principle suggests that action should be taken to limit, regulate, or prevent potentially dangerous undertakings even in the absence of absolute scientific proof. Such measures also naturally entail taking economic costs into account. With the environmental disasters of the 1980s, the precautionary principle established itself as an (...) operational concept. On the eve of the 1997 Climate Summit in Kyoto, precaution, as the precautionary principle is often referred to, has now become a key legal principle in environmental law, in general, and in current international climate negotiations, in particular, attempts to understand why. It examines in turn the natural affinity between the precautionary principle and climate change, reviews a series of issues which the principle raises, and discusses avenues which it opens paper, climate change fulfills the theoretical requirements set for the application of the precautionary principle. It comes as no surprise that the actual application of the precautionary principle in the context of climate change raises high political stakes. As a result, climate change science, in particular, and science, in general, is under the fire of politically-motivated scientific skeptics. Thus, by way of the counter-measures which must be put into effect, the precautionary principle calls for a greater sense of responsibility on the part of scientists and the public at large. Specifically, from scientists, it demands perseverance in rigor, excellence in communication, and committment to education. However, even if special efforts are made to implement the precautionary principle in the context of climate change, the success of climate change mitigation will constitute no test of the validity, the usefulness, or the efficiency of the precautionary principle. Indeed, the degree to which climate change mitigation succeeds only provides a measure of our kind's ability to manage responsibly the global commons which we inherited from our ancestors and which our generation enjoys, the global commons which we will pass on to today's children and to generations to come. (shrink)

Musical performance requires the ability to master a complex integration of highly specialized motor, cognitive and perceptual skills developed over years of practice. It often means also being able to deal with a large amount of pressure within dynamic environments. Consequently, many musicians suffer from health-related problems and have a large number of physical and psychological complaints. Research has shown that making music can present challenges for musicians’ wellbeing. Therefore, our research aims to evaluate and analyze the wellbeing of two (...) distinct groups of respondents, college music students compared with amateur musicians in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, this second group serving as our comparison group. This article presents the results of a sample of 126 musicians (mean age ± SD = 22.4 ± 4.5 years, 71 male). The wellbeing was assessed through the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF questionnaire evaluating two general measures, Quality of Life and General health, and four specific dimensions, Physical health, Psychological health, Social relationships and Environment. The respondents’ Quality of Life was high on each measure: median scores were higher than 4 for the first two measures and higher than 70 for the four specific dimensions. Among the dimensions, respondents had the highest mean score for Social relationships and Physical health (74.0 and 73.8, respectively) and, finally, on Psychological health (70.3). Our overview of musicians’ wellbeing in Western Switzerland underlines the importance of helping musicians to be aware of their health in order to take care of themselves. This research offers an important insight into musicians’ health and point out the importance of involving different actors (teachers, administrators or support staff) to promote their wellbeing and empower musicians. (shrink)

Conscious awareness comprises two distinct states, autonoetic and noetic awareness. Schizophrenia impairs autonoetic, but not noetic, awareness. We investigated the strategic regulation of relevant and irrelevant contents of conscious awareness in schizophrenia using a directed forgetting paradigm. Twenty-one patients with schizophrenia and 21 normal controls were presented with words and told to learn some of them and forget others. In a subsequent test, they were asked to recognize all the words they had seen previously and give remember, know or guess (...) responses according to whether they recognized words on the basis of autonoetic awareness, noetic awareness, or guessing. Overall, patients showed the same degree of a directed forgetting effect as normal subjects. However, whereas the effect was observed both for remember and know responses in normal subjects, it was observed for know, but not for remember, responses in patients. These results indicate that patients with schizophrenia exhibit an impaired strategic regulation of contents of autonetic awareness for relevant and irrelevant information. (shrink)

Today, one out of every six children suffers from some form of neurodevelopmental abnormality. The causes are mostly unknown. Some environmental chemicals are known to cause brain damage and many more are suspected of it, but few have been tested for such effects. Philippe Grandjean provides an authoritative and engaging analysis of how environmental hazards can damage brain development and what we can do about it. The brain's development is uniquely sensitive to toxic chemicals, and even small deficits may (...) negatively impact our academic achievements, economic success, risk of delinquency, and quality of life. Chemicals such as mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, and certain pesticides pose an insidious threat to the development of the next generation's brains. When chemicals in the environment affect the development of a child's brain, he or she is at risk for mental retardation, cerebral palsy, autism, ADHD, and a range of learning disabilities and other deficits that will remain for a lifetime.We can halt chemical brain drain and protect the next generation, however, and Grandjean tells us how. First, we need to control all of the 200 industrial chemicals that have already been proven to affect brain functions in adults, as their effects on the developing brain are likely even worse. We must also push for routine testing for brain toxicity, stricter regulation of chemical emissions, and more required disclosure on the part of industries who unleash hazardous chemicals into products and the environment. Decisions can still be made to protect the brains of future generations."In his crisply written, deeply documented book, Dr. Philippe Grandjean, renowned physician and public health specialist, describes the exquisite vulnerability of the developing human brain to toxic chemicals in the environment, a vulnerability that he ascribes to the brain's almost unimaginable complexity. Today, nearly one in 6 children is born with a neurodevelopmental disorder - a birth defect of the brain. One in 8 has attention deficit disorder. One in 68 is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. These rates are far higher than those of a generation ago, and, although they are less publicized, the problems are more prevalent than those caused by thalidomide in the 1960's. The increases are far too rapid to be genetic. They cannot be explained by better diagnosis. How then could they have come to be? Dr. Grandjean has a diagnosis -- the thousands of toxic chemicals that have been released to the environment in the past 40 years with no testing for toxicity. David P. Rall, former Director of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, once stated that 'If thalidomide had caused a ten-point loss of IQ rather than obvious birth defects of the limbs, it would probably still be on the market'. This is the core message of Dr. Grandjean's 'must read' book." - Philip J. Landrigan, Dean for Global Health, Ethel H. Wise Professor and Chairman and Director, Children's Environmental Health Center, Mount Sinai School of Medicine. (shrink)