Replete with madwomen, murderers, musicians, and mystics, "Lonely Woman" dramatically interweaves the lives of five women. It remains Takako Takahashi's most sustained and multifaceted fictional realization of her concept of "loneliness.".

Highlighting the social tensions that confront the liberal tradition, Pierre Manent draws a portrait of what we, citizens of modern liberal democracies, have become. For Manent, a discussion of liberalism encompasses the foundations of modern society, its secularism, its individualism, and its conception of rights. The frequent incapacity of the morally neutral, democratic state to further social causes, he argues, derives from the liberal stance that political life does not serve a higher purpose. Through quick-moving, highly synthetic essays, he (...) explores the development of liberal thinking in terms of a single theme: the decline of theological politics. The author traces the liberal stance to Machiavelli, who, in seeking to divorce everyday life from the pervasive influence of the Catholic church, separated politics from all notions of a cosmological order. What followed, as Manent demonstrates in his analyses of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Guizot, and Constant, was the evolving concept of an individual with no goals outside the confines of the self and a state with no purpose but to prevent individuals from dominating one another. Weighing both the positive and negative effects of such a political arrangement, Manent raises important questions about the fundamental political issues of the day, among them the possibility of individual rights being reconciled with the necessary demands of political organization, and the desirability of a government system neutral about religion but not about public morals. (shrink)

The mapping of numbers onto space is fundamental to measurement and to mathematics. Is this mapping a cultural invention or a universal intuition shared by all humans regardless of culture and education? We probed number-space mappings in the Mundurucu, an Amazonian indigene group with a reduced numerical lexicon and little or no formal education. At all ages, the Mundurucu mapped symbolic and nonsymbolic numbers onto a logarithmic scale, whereas Western adults used linear mapping with small or symbolic numbers and logarithmic (...) mapping when numbers were presented nonsymbolically under conditions that discouraged counting. This indicates that the mapping of numbers onto space is a universal intuition and that this initial intuition of number is logarithmic. The concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education. (shrink)

Criticisms and rejections of representationalism are increasingly popular in 4E cognitive science, and especially in radical enactivism. But by overfocusing our attention on the debate between radical enactivism and classical representationalism, we might miss the woods for the trees, in at least two respects: first, by neglecting the relevance of other theoretical alternatives about representationalism in cognitive science; and second by not seeing how much REC and classical representationalism are in agreement concerning basic and problematic issues dealing with mental content (...) and intentionality. In order to expand and exemplify these ideas, this paper presents two heterodox positions on intentionality and on the relations between content and representation. Special attention is paid to the way REC is rejecting these positions: I argue that this rejection reveals common assumptions with classical representationalism, but also undermines the coherence of REC’s conception of intentionality. (shrink)

Since the 1980s, society's wealthiest members have claimed an ever-expanding share of income and property. It has been a true counterrevolution, says Pierre Rosanvallon--the end of the age of growing equality launched by the American and French revolutions. And just as significant as the social and economic factors driving this contemporary inequality has been a loss of faith in the ideal of equality itself. An ambitious transatlantic history of the struggles that, for two centuries, put political and economic equality (...) at their heart, The Society of Equals calls for a new philosophy of social relations to reenergize egalitarian politics. For eighteenth-century revolutionaries, equality meant understanding human beings as fundamentally alike and then creating universal political and economic rights. Rosanvallon sees the roots of today's crisis in the period 1830-1900, when industrialized capitalism threatened to quash these aspirations. By the early twentieth century, progressive forces had begun to rectify some imbalances of the Gilded Age, and the modern welfare state gradually emerged from Depression-era reforms. But new economic shocks in the 1970s began a slide toward inequality that has only gained momentum in the decades since. There is no returning to the days of the redistributive welfare state, Rosanvallon says. Rather than resort to outdated notions of social solidarity, we must instead revitalize the idea of equality according to principles of singularity, reciprocity, and communality that more accurately reflect today's realities. (shrink)

An advanced introduction to the new philosophical anthropology and an understanding of the most contemporary developments in it.

What, if anything, is wrong with high executive compensation? Is the common “lay reaction” of indignation and moral outrage justified? In this paper, my main goal is to articulate in a more systematic and philosophical manner the egalitarian responses to these questions. In order to do so, I suggest that we take some insights from recent debates on two versions of egalitarianism: a distributive one, according to which no one should be worse off than others because of unfair distributions of (...) goods and resources, especially ones based on matters of luck or arbitrary factors, and a relational one, which maintains that egalitarian justice requires members of a society to relate to one another as equals. Drawing on recent attempts to highlight the tricky nature of managerial authority, I argue that high inequalities in pay are not simply a distributional matter but should also be analyzed through a relational lens. I also attempt to show that relational egalitarians are well-equipped to question the now dominant “incentives” view of CEO compensation. (shrink)

We study invariant types in NIP theories. Amongst other things: we prove a definable version of the [Formula: see text]-theorem in theories of small or medium directionality; we construct a canonical retraction from the space of [Formula: see text]-invariant types to that of [Formula: see text]-finitely satisfiable types; we show some amalgamation results for invariant types and list a number of open questions.

Drawing on various resources and requirements (as expressed by Dewey, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom), this paper proposes an externalist view of conceptual mental episodes that does not equate them, even partially, with vehicles of any sort, whether the vehicles be located in the environment or in the head. The social and pragmatic nature of the use of concepts and conceptual content makes it unnecessary and indeed impossible to locate the entities that realize conceptual mental episodes in non-personal or subpersonal contentful (...) entities (vehicles). Persons, who engage in social practices of deontic scorekeeping (Brandom), and who are thus able to produce appropriate inferential behaviour, enact conceptual mental episodes and the basis of their supervenience. (shrink)

Kant argued that Euclidean geometry is synthesized on the basis of an a priori intuition of space. This proposal inspired much behavioral research probing whether spatial navigation in humans and animals conforms to the predictions of Euclidean geometry. However, Euclidean geometry also includes concepts that transcend the perceptible, such as objects that are infinitely small or infinitely large, or statements of necessity and impossibility. We tested the hypothesis that certain aspects of nonperceptible Euclidian geometry map onto intuitions of space that (...) are present in all humans, even in the absence of formal mathematical education. Our tests probed intuitions of points, lines, and surfaces in participants from an indigene group in the Amazon, the Mundurucu, as well as adults and age-matched children controls from the United States and France and younger US children without education in geometry. The responses of Mundurucu adults and children converged with that of mathematically educated adults and children and revealed an intuitive understanding of essential properties of Euclidean geometry. For instance, on a surface described to them as perfectly planar, the Mundurucu's estimations of the internal angles of triangles added up to ∼180 degrees, and when asked explicitly, they stated that there exists one single parallel line to any given line through a given point. These intuitions were also partially in place in the group of younger US participants. We conclude that, during childhood, humans develop geometrical intuitions that spontaneously accord with the principles of Euclidean geometry, even in the absence of training in mathematics. (shrink)

Our main results are: (A) It is consistent relative to a large cardinal that holds but fails. (B) If holds and are two infinite cardinals such that and λ carries a good scale, then holds. (C) If are two cardinals such that κ is λ‐Shelah and, then there is no good scale for λ.

In order to account for how organisms can apprehend the contents of the external representations they manipulate in cognizing, the endorsement of representationalism fosters a situation of what I call cognitive overdetermination. I argue that this situation is problematic for the inclusion of these external representations in cognitive processing, as the hypothesis of extended cognition would like to have it. Since that situation arises from a commitment to representationalism (even minimal), it only affects the viability of representationalist versions of extended (...) cognition. (shrink)

Pierre Macherey est philosophe, professeur honoraire à l’université de Lille. Rattaché à l’UMR « Savoirs Textes Langage » du CNRS, il continue d’animer un blog « La philosophie au sens large » dont les travaux sont publiés sur le net ( https://philolarge.hypotheses.org/ ). Il a écrit de nombreux ouvrages, aussi bien en philosophie (sur Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Comte, Canguilhem, Foucault) qu’en littérature et sur la manière de philosopher avec la littérature ( Philosopher avec la littérature est la reprise de (...) sa thèse soutenue en 1991 ; mais il y a aussi, par exemple : Proust. Entre littérature et philosophie ; En lisant Jules Verne ). Son dernier ouvrage s’intitule À l’essai (Paris, Kimé, 2019). Sur l’utopie, il a notamment écrit : De l’utopie! (Le Havre, De l’incidence éditeur, 2011) ainsi que « Utopie et quotidien : les deux faces d’une même réalité? », article publié dans Peggy Avez, Louis Carré et Sébastien Laoureux (dir.), Utopie et quotidien. Autour de Pierre Macherey (Bruxelles, Presses de l’Université Saint Louis, 2016). (shrink)

As is often the case when scientific or engineering fields emerge, new concepts are forged or old ones are adapted. When this happens, various arguments rage over what ultimately turns out to be conceptual misunderstandings. At that critical time, there is a need for an explicit reflection on the meaning of the concepts that define the field. In this position paper, we aim to provide a reasoned framework in which to think about various issues in the field of distributed cognition. (...) We argue that both relevant concepts, distribution and cognition, must be understood as continuous. As it is used in the context of distributed cognition, the concept of distribution is essentially fuzzy, and we will link it to the notion of emergence of system-level properties. The concept of cognition must also be seen as fuzzy, but for a different reason: due to its origin as an anthropocentric concept, no one has a clear handle on its meaning in a distributed setting. As the proposed framework forms a space, we then explore its geography and visit famous landmarks. (shrink)

La quatrième des Considérations inactuelles de Friedrich Nietzsche est emblématique en ce qu'elle présente la notion d'événement de façon dialectique. Participant au premier festival de Bayreuth durant l'été 1876, c'est à la fois en tant que spectateur, historien et philosophe, que Friedrich Nietzsche interprète l'événement comme un « cas » ou un symptôme, et saisit la volonté de Richard Wagner dans sa « chute », où le spectacle et la décadence sont les valeurs de la culture européenne et de l'Allemagne (...) moderne. De plus, d’une volonté analogue, et d’abord impressionné par la hauteur du compositeur et la puissance de son œuvre totale, c’est à partir d’un « pathos de la distance » que le philosophe va « transvaluer » le cas Wagner après Bayreuth et le faire advenir comme le nouvel événement d’une histoire critique dans laquelle il se comprend lui-même. Alors, c’est comme un « grand » événement que nous interprétons Friedrich Nietzsche à Bayreuth décrit comme la synthèse d’un processus à la fois civilisationnel et culturel. (shrink)

La quatrième des Considérations inactuelles de Friedrich Nietzsche est emblématique en ce qu'elle présente la notion d'événement de façon dialectique. Participant au premier festival de Bayreuth durant l'été 1876, c'est à la fois en tant que spectateur, historien et philosophe, que Friedrich Nietzsche interprète l'événement comme un « cas » ou un symptôme, et saisit la volonté de Richard Wagner dans sa « chute », où le spectacle et la décadence sont les valeurs de la culture européenne et de l'Allemagne (...) moderne. De plus, d’une volonté analogue, et d’abord impressionné par la hauteur du compositeur et la puissance de son œuvre totale, c’est à partir d’un « pathos de la distance » que le philosophe va « transvaluer » le cas Wagner après Bayreuth et le faire advenir comme le nouvel événement d’une histoire critique dans laquelle il se comprend lui-même. Alors, c’est comme un « grand » événement que nous interprétons Friedrich Nietzsche à Bayreuth décrit comme la synthèse d’un processus à la fois civilisationnel et culturel. (shrink)

La quatrième des Considérations inactuelles de Friedrich Nietzsche (Richard Wagner à Bayreuth) est emblématique en ce qu'elle présente la notion d'événement de façon dialectique. Participant au premier festival de Bayreuth durant l'été 1876, c'est à la fois en tant que spectateur, historien et philosophe, que Friedrich Nietzsche interprète l'événement comme un « cas » (« Der Fall ») ou un symptôme (« Das Symptom »), et saisit la volonté de Richard Wagner dans sa « chute » (« Der Vorfall »), (...) où le spectacle et la décadence sont les valeurs de la culture européenne et de l'Allemagne moderne. De plus, d’une volonté analogue, et d’abord impressionné par la hauteur du compositeur et la puissance de son œuvre totale (Gesamtkunstwerk), c’est à partir d’un « pathos de la distance » que le philosophe va « transvaluer » le cas Wagner après Bayreuth et le faire advenir comme le nouvel événement d’une histoire critique dans laquelle il se comprend lui-même. Alors, c’est comme un « grand » événement que nous interprétons Friedrich Nietzsche à Bayreuth décrit comme la synthèse d’un processus à la fois civilisationnel et culturel. (shrink)

The welfare state has come under severe pressure internationally, partly for the well-known reasons of slowing economic growth and declining confidence in the public sector. According to the influential social theorist Pierre Rosanvallon, however, there is also a deeper and less familiar reason for the crisis of the welfare state. He shows here that a fundamental practical and philosophical justification for traditional welfare policies--that all citizens share equal risks--has been undermined by social and intellectual change. If we wish to (...) achieve the goals of social solidarity and civic equality for which the welfare state was founded, Rosanvallon argues, we must radically rethink social programs. Rosanvallon begins by tracing the history of the welfare state and its founding premise that risks, especially the risks of illness and unemployment, are equally distributed and unpredictable. He shows that this idea has become untenable because of economic diversification and advances in statistical and risk analysis. It is truer than ever before--and far more susceptible to analysis--that some individuals will face much greater risks than others because of their jobs and lifestyle choices. Rosanvallon argues that social policies must be more narrowly targeted. And he draws on evidence from around the world, in particular France and the United States, to show that such programs as unemployment insurance and workfare could better reflect individual needs by, for example, making more explicit use of contracts between the providers and receivers of benefits. His arguments have broad implications for welfare programs everywhere and for our understanding of citizenship in modern democracies and economies. "For more than two decades Pierre Rosanvallon has been analyzing the development and the crisis of the 'welfare state,' combining precise, specific knowledge with philosophical and historical depth in a way that is rare among social policy analysts.... [A] subtle and informed book."--From the foreword by Nathan Glazer. (shrink)

Before broaching our main subject, and exploring why, among all disorders of the mind, obsessive-compulsive disorders have a place apart, I would like to start from a dilemma that is well-known to historians interested in mental disorders. According to one approach, a mental illness X is considered as a bona fide or ‘genuine’ illness if, and only if, it originates from a disturbance of the brain. Its neurobiological form is in this case considered as invariant, whatever cultural veneer might give (...) it a different aspect in accord with historical and local settings. The assumption is that this veneer does not, properly speaking, have any deep grounding in reality... (shrink)

Emotions imply a revision of our beliefs inasmuch as they are triggered by a discrepancy between our expectancies and new situations. I will study the converse relation: how emotions, particularly recurrent emotions that reappear in similar situations in the long term, are incentives to revise not only our beliefs but also the order of priorities between their related desires. Understanding how affects can revise both beliefs—under their committing aspect—and the order of desires, implies seeing the dynamics of affects as interacting (...) with external dynamics and the order of priorities as a weak one. These philosophical considerations shed new light on the diversity of emotions, on their different temporalities, and on the paradox of emotional sharing. (shrink)

Frederick Griffith was an English bacteriologist at the Pathological Laboratory of the Ministry of Health in London who believed that progress in the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases would come only with more precise knowledge of the identity of the causative microorganisms. Over the years, Griffith developed and expanded a serological technique for identifying pathogenic microorganisms, which allowed the tracing of the sources of infectious disease outbreaks: slide agglutination. Yet Griffith is not remembered for his contributions to the biology (...) and epidemiology of infectious diseases so much as for discovering the phenomenon known as ‘transformation’. Griffith’s discovery, for many, was a pure case of serendipity whose biological relevance had also largely escaped him. In this paper, I argue that the key to understanding the significance of bacterial transformation – and the scientific legacy of Fred Griffith – rests not only on it initiating a cascade of events leading to molecular genetics but also on its implications for epidemiology based on the biology of host–parasite interactions. Looking at Griffith’s entire career, instead of focusing only on the transformation study, we can better appreciate the place of the latter within Griffith’s overall contributions. Presented in this way, Griffith’s experiment on bacterial transformation also ceases to appear as an anomaly, which in turn leads us to rethink some of the most prevalent historical conceptions about his work. (shrink)

The involvement of developing countries in international clinical trials is necessary for the development of appropriate medicines for local populations. However, the absence of appropriate structures for ethical review represents a barrier for certain countries. Currently there is very little information available on existing structures dedicated to ethics in western and central Africa. This article briefly describes historical milestones in the development of networks dedicated to capacity building in ethical review in these regions and outlines the major conclusions of two (...) workshops on this issue, which were held in September and October 2002 in Libreville, Gabon, and Paris, France. The workshops were the culmination of collaboration between the African Malaria Network Trust (AMANET) and the Pan African Bioethics Initiative (PABIN). They produced an update on ethics organizations with regard to mission, function, activities, members, and contact people, in eight countries within the regions discussed. As a result of the commitment of mandated delegates, a further prominent outcome followed these workshops: the creation of national structures, where none existed before, dedicated to the ethical review of clinical trials. (shrink)

Radical views on cognition are generally defined by a cluster of features including non-representationalism and vehicle-externalism. In this paper, I concentrate on the way radical views on cognition define themselves as revolutionary theories in cognitive science. These theories often use the Kuhnian concepts of “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” for describing their ambitions and the current situation in cognitive science. I examine whether the use of Kuhn’s theory of science is appropriate here. There might be good reasons to think that cognitive (...) science is in a situation of foundational crisis, but that does not entail that the classical paradigm is currently displaced to the benefit of a new paradigm. Larry Laudan’s theory of research traditions is more enlightening than Kuhn’s theory for describing the scope and ambitions of radical views on cognition, and their relations with an anti-intellectualist tradition in philosophy. (shrink)

In his early essay on transcendence of the ego, Sartre attempted to follow Husserl’s Logical Investigations and to draw the consequences of his phenomenological criticism of subjectivity. Both authors have emphasized the elusiveness of the self as a result of intentionality of consciousness. However, Sartre’s analysis of ego led him quite far from Husserl’s philosophical project, insofar as it was somehow already raising the question about the moral nature of the self, and was thus establishing the basis of the conception (...) of moral consciousness that has been displayed later in Being and Nothingness. This article stresses the importance of such a turn in Sartre’s philosophy, which reorients him from a strict description of consciousness toward a moral assessment of the structure of the self. (shrink)

We study normal ideals on Pκ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${P_{\kappa} }$$\end{document} that are defined in terms of games of uncountable length.

This paper discusses the epistemological and methodological bases of a scientific theory of meaning and proposes a detailed version of a formal theory of argumentation based on Anscombre and Ducrot's conception. Argumentation is shown to be a concept which is not exclusively pragmatic, as it is usually believed, but has an important semantic body. The bridge between the semantic and pragmatic aspects of argumentation consists in a set of gradual inference rules, called topoi, on which the argumentative movement is based. (...) The content of each topos is determined at the pragmatic level, while the constraints on the forms of the topoi attached to a sentence are determined at the semantic level. Applications and possible applications toartificial intelligence and to cognitive sciences are discussed. In particular, the gradual models used to account for argumentation are shown to be extremely promising for Knowledge management, a discipline which includes knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, transmission of knowledge (communication, interfaces, etc.), knowledge production (decision help, reasoning, etc.). A first formal model is presented and discussed: it is shown in details how it accounts for most of the argumentative features of sentences containing but, little and a little, and how it can be extended to describe sentences containing other argumentative connectives. However, this model is shown to be too simple and to violate the compositionality principle, which is shown, in the first section, to bean important methodological principle for any scientific theory. After a detailed analysis of the possible reasons for this violation, an improved model is proposed and its adequacy is discussed. (shrink)

Part of the contents: 0Happiness and Theôria in Books I and X of the Nicomachean Ethics / Eudaimonia and Theôria within the 0Nicomachean Ethics / The Meaning of Bios in Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics / Approximation and Acting for an 0Ultimate End / Eudaimonia, Theôria, and the Choiceworthiness of Practical Wisdom / Aristotle on the Choice of Lives: Two Concepts of Self-Sufficiency / Eudaimonia and Contemplation in Aristotle’s Ethics / Theôria and Praxis in Aristotle’s Ethics / The Private Moral Life (...) of Aristotle’s Philosopher: A Defense of a Non-Intellectualist Interpretation of Nicomachean Ethics / Theoretical Life, Practical Life, and Happiness in Aristotle / The Best Life according to Aristotle : A Reconsideration / Theos, Theôria, and Therapeia in Aristotle’s Ethical Endings / Contemplation and Service of the God: The Standard for External Goods in Eudemian Ethics / 0Aristotelian Immortality.0. (shrink)

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Ray and Cooper (2024) advocate for environmental law efforts, with a focus on the...