Apres avoir ecrit Vivre selon Pythagore", Jamblique compose peu apres, vers la fin du Ille siecle de notre ere, un Protreptique, c'est-a-dire une exhortation a la philosophie, dont on trouve ici la premiere traduction integrale en francais. Cette initiation a l'acte de philosopher s'acheve au terme d'une ascension progressive figuree par une echelle, par un expose de la symbolique pythagoricienne. Jamblique avait eu, avec des visees differentes, d'illustres devanciers qu'il cite volontiers, comme Platon et Aristote (dont le Protreptique peut etre (...) reconstitue a l'aide des citations qu'en fait Jamblique ). L'exegese que propose Jamblique des Vers d'Or et des sentences pythagoriciennes a fait de son Protreptique une source de toute premiere importance pour qui desire connaitre et comprendre le pythagorisme. (shrink)

Depuis la Renaissance, ce texte a influence profondement la tradition spirituelle neoplatonicienne et l'esoterisme occidental, ainsi que la symbolique maconnique. Beaucoup y ont trouve la revelation de ce qui est habituellement cache aux hommes. Fondee sur le texte grec le plus sur, collationne sur les manuscrits anciens, notre traduction a ete soigneusement revue pour etre a la fois d'une totale exactitude et accessible au lecteur contemporain.

This is the one and only book by the pioneer of the identity theory of mind. The collection focuses on Place's philosophy of mind and his contributions to neighboring issues in metaphysics and epistemology. It includes an autobiographical essay as well as a recent paper on the function and neural location of consciousness.

This is the one and only book by the pioneer of the identity theory of mind. The collection focuses on Place's philosophy of mind and his contributions to neighboring issues in metaphysics and epistemology. It includes an autobiographical essay as well as a recent paper on the function and neural location of consciousness.

v. 1. Le petit Hippias. Le grand Hippias. Ion. Protagoras. L'apologie de Socrate. Criton. Alcibiade. Charmide. Lachès. Lysis. Euthyphron. Gorgias. Ménexéne. Ménon. Euthydème. Cratyle. Le banquet. Phédon. La République.

This article analyses Ukraine’s language policies from 2002 to 2022 within a framework of liberalism, while avoiding making normative judgements or recommendations, updating the discussion raised in Kymlicka and Opalski’s Can Liberal Pluralism be Exported? The analysis takes into consideration Ukraine’s present and historic position, including the challenge that postcolonial nation building can pose for achieving liberalism and linguistic justice. The paper focuses on three main areas of language policy: education, businesses and media, and assesses if they can be described (...) as liberal orthodox, pluralist or illiberal. The article begins by defining liberalism and illiberalism, discussing the context of Ukraine’s linguistic diversity and postcolonial context, before outlining the language situation until EuroMaidan. Then, the main issue of language policy in the areas of education, business and media is analysed, before considering whether Ukrainian language laws might be considered liberal or illiberal. Finally, potential future trajectories are outlined. (shrink)

It is argued that conceptual analysis as practiced by the philosophers of ordinary language, is an empirical procedure that relies on a version of Garfinkel's ethnomethodological experiment. The ethnomethodological experiment is presented as a procedure in which the existence and nature of a social norm is demonstrated by flouting the putative convention and observing what reaction that produces in the social group within which the convention is assumed to operate. Examples are given of the use of ethnomethodological experiments, both in (...) vivo and as a thought experiment, in order to demonstrate the existence of otherwise invisible conventions governing human social behavior. Comparable examples are cited from the writings of ordinary language philosophers of ethnomethodological thought experiments designed to demonstrate the existence of linguistic conventions. (shrink)

The writer's 1956 contention that "the thesis that consciousness is a process in the brain is... a reasonable scientific hypothesis" is contrasted with Davidson's a priori argument in 'Mental events' for the identity of propositional attitude tokens with some unspecified and imspecifiable brain state tokens. Davidson's argument is rejected primarily on the grounds that he has failed to establish his claim that there are and can be no psycho-physical bridge laws. The case forthe empirical nature of the issue between the (...) identity thesis and interactionism is re-stated in tiie light of an analysis of the causal relations involved. The same analysis is also used to demonstrate the incoherence of parallelism and epiphenomenalism as alternatives to interactionism. (shrink)

Atticus vecut au IIeme siecle, probablement a la fin du regne de Marc-Aurele. Contre les doctrines de son temps qui cherchait a fusionner les theories de Platon et d'Aristote, Atticus pronait un platonisme epure, loin de tout eclectisme. Cette position philosophique lui valut l'hostilite de ses contemporains, notamment d'Ammonius, et compromit sa reputation aupres de toute la tradition posterieure, si bien qu'aujourd'hui nous ne connaissons ses oeuvres que de maniere indirecte, par Eusebe de Cesaree pour la plus grande partie. Ainsi (...) n'avons-nous de ses ecrits qu'une vision partiale autant que partielle. Il semble avoir ecrit un Traite de l'ame, et des commentaires de grands textes de Platon, comme le Timee ou le Phedon. La presente edition regroupe l'ensemble des fragments attribues, a ce jour, au philosophe neo-platonicien, notamment le texte Contre ceux qui se flattent d'interpreter Platon par Aristote. Une riche notice introductive fait le point sur les connaissances relatives a l'auteur et a son oeuvre, et fournit toutes les informations necessaires a la bonne intelligence cette vaste nebuleuse du neoplatonisme. De judicieux paralleles sont dresses en particulier avec Ammonius. Des notes accompagnent la lecture et sont developpees, en fin de volume, par des notes complementaires. L'ouvrage est en outre enrichi d'un Index Verborum ab Eusebio, d'un Index Fontium ainsi que d'un Index auctorum ab attico laudatorum. (shrink)

Linguistic Behaviorism (Place, 1996) is an attempt to reclaim for the behaviorist perspective two disciplines, linguistics and linguistic philosophy, most of whose practitioners have been persuaded by Chomsky's (1959) Review of B. F. Skinner's (1957) "Verbal Behavior" that behaviorism has nothing useful to contribute to the study of language. It takes as axiomatic (a) that the functional unit of language is the sentence, and (b) that sentences are seldom repeated word-for-word, but are constructed anew on each occasion of (...) utterance out of units, words, phrases and turns of phrase, that are repeated. On this view, the problem of discriminating the true from the false arises from the use of novel declarative sentences (statements) to depict or, to use Skinner's term, "specify" contingencies the like of which the listener need never have encountered and to which he would otherwise have no access. In such cases the listener needs to distinguish among the sentences he receives from other speakers between those where the situation depicted/specified corresponds to that which actually exists at the time and place specified in the sentence and are, therefore, true, and those to which no actual situation corresponds and which are, therefore, false. (shrink)

Skinner has repeatedly asserted that he does not deny either the existence of private events or the possibility of studying them scientifically. But he has never explained how his position in this respect differs from that of the mentalist or provided a practical methodology for the investigation of private events within a radical behaviorist perspective. With respect to the first of these deficiencies, I argue that observation statements describing a public state of affairs in the common public environment of two (...) or more observers which those observers confirm as a correct description provide a far more objective and secure foundation for empirical knowledge than statements describing private events in the experience of a single individual. In the course of this argument, I also invoke Wittgenstein's (1953) demonstration — his 'private language argument' — of the incoherence of traditional subjective empiricism. Regarding the second deficiency, I argue that observation statements describing private events can serve as data for an objective study, provided that (a) the verbal behavior in which they consist and its context are objectively observed and recorded, and (b) an explanation is given of how this verbal behavior is generated by the events it reports. (shrink)

The writer's 1956 contention that "the thesis that consciousness is a process in the brain is... a reasonable scientific hypothesis" is contrasted with Davidson's a priori argument in 'Mental events' for the identity of propositional attitude tokens with some unspecified and imspecifiable brain state tokens. Davidson's argument is rejected primarily on the grounds that he has failed to establish his claim that there are and can be no psycho-physical bridge laws. The case forthe empirical nature of the issue between the (...) identity thesis and interactionism is re-stated in tiie light of an analysis of the causal relations involved. The same analysis is also used to demonstrate the incoherence of parallelism and epiphenomenalism as alternatives to interactionism. (shrink)

As interpreted here, Garfinkel's "ethnomethodological experiment" (1967) demonstrates the existence of a social convention by flouting it and observing the consternation and aversive consequences for the perpetrator which that provokes. I suggest that the hostility which behaviorism has provoked throughout its history is evidence that it flouts an important social convention, the convention that, whenever possible, human beings are treated as and must always give the appearance of being rational agents. For these purposes, a rational agent is someone whose behavior (...) is controlled by a logically consistent body of means-end beliefs ("rules" in Skinner's terminology) and complementing desires which between them provide a basis for predicting how the individual will behave and for suggesting what arguments will persuade the agent to modify his or her beliefs and the behavior based upon them. The behaviorist flouts this convention by suggesting that its fictional character makes it unsuitable for the purposes of scientific explanation of behavior. The hostility that this suggestion provokes is evidence of the importance attached by the verbal community both to preserving a consistent and rational connection between what is said and what is done and presenting it as part of the natural order of things. (shrink)

For the past three decades linguistic theory has been based on the assumption that sentences are interpreted and constructed by the brain by means of computational processes analogous to those of a serial-digital computer. The recent interest in devices based on the neural network or parallel distributed processor (PDP) principle raises the possibility ("eliminative connectionism") that such devices may ultimately replace the S-D computer as the model for the interpretation and generation of language by the brain. An analysis of the (...) differences between the two models suggests that the effect of such a development would be to steer linguistic theory towards a return to the empiricism and behaviorism which prevailed before it was driven by Chomsky towards nativism and mentalism. Linguists, however, will not be persuaded to return to such a theory unless and until it can deal with the phenomenon of novel sentence construction as effectively as its nativist/mentalist rival. (shrink)

A symbol is defined as a species of sign. The concept of a sign coincides with Skinner's (1938) concept of a discriminative stimulus. Symbols differ from other signs in five respects: (1) They are stimuli which the organism can both respond to and produce, either as a self-directed stimulus (as in thinking) or as a stimulus for another individual with a predictably similar response from the recipient in each case. (2) they act as discriminative stimuli for the same kind of (...) object for all members of the verbal community within which they function as a symbols; (3) they acquire their properties by virtue of arbitrary social convention rather than any natural and intrinsic connection between the sign and what it is a sign of; (4) competent members of the verbal community can both produce the appropriate symbol in response to a naturally occurring sign of the presence of the object or a sample of the kind of object which the symbol stands for and select the appropriate object when presented with the symbol; (5) they form stimulus equivalence classes of the kind demonstrated in the matching-to-sample task (Sidman, 1971; Sidman and Tailby, 1982) both with other symbols having the same meaning and, more important, with the naturally-occurring non-symbolic signs of the presence of the object or kind of object which the symbol stands for. (shrink)

Les deux auteures présentent une réflexion à plusieurs dimensions, composée d’analyses et de pratiques poétiques, sur la vocation et le travail de l’avocate pénaliste confrontée ici, d’une part, aux individuations extrêmes engendrées et révélées par les crimes sexuels et leurs sanctions, y compris capitales, et, d’autre part, aux déterminants globaux d’une culture collective du viol qui résiste et tend à perdurer, malgré les dénonciations et les démonstrations.

'Why did the window break when it was hit by the stone? Because the window is brittle and the stone is hard; hardness and brittleness are powers, dispositional properties or dispositions.' Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. This book is a record of the debate on the nature of dispositions between three distinguished philosophers - D. M. Armstrong, C. B. Martin and U. T. Place - who have been thinking about dispositions all their working lives. Their (...) distinctive accounts cover many of the issues surrounding dispositions such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation. Dispositions illuminates this central topic in analytic philosophy and at the same time highlights deeper concerns of metaphysics. (shrink)

In this volume philosophers from throughout the Asia-Pacific region discuss a wide range of topics related to the development of democratic values and ways of life. The papers explore ideas, values and practices related to democracy from the different perspectives of the great religious and philosophical traditions of Asia, as well as considering both philosophical issues and the place of philosophy in a democratic society. While the contributors represent different philosophical traditions, they are connected through a common concern (...) with humanity, a belief in the value of philosophical inquiry and scholarship and by a commitment to the value of philosophy education in building and sustaining democracy. (shrink)

An article about the place philosophy has in our lives. Lectured on youtube.

This book discusses the philosophy of place and the implications for understanding ourselves authentically. It sets out to investigate this by providing a review of the phenomenological and humanistic views of place as background reading for the chapters that follow. This contributed book offers unique chapters from international scholars on place in relation to individual philosophers such as Nietzsche, Sloterdijk, Foucault, as well as more broad areas of research including Ecology, Ontogenesis, Bioethics and Metaphysics. The book (...) then presents an integration of the arguments of the contributing authors to give a better and fresh insight to the relationship between place and self. This fusion of chapters amplifies each to show how they all have an important contribution to an expanded understanding of place and self. This combination of topics as well as each author's view of place makes this book an important contribution to the literature. The book is intended for philosophers but would also be of interest to a general audience. (shrink)

Staying for an answer : the untidy process of groping for truth -- The same, only different -- The unity of truth and the plurality of truths -- Coherence, consistency, cogency, congruity, cohesiveness, &c. : remain calm! don't go overboard! -- Not cynicism, but synechism : lessons from classical pragmatism -- Science, economics, "vision" -- The integrity of science : what it means, why it matters -- Scientific secrecy and "spin" : the sad, sleazy story of the trials of remune (...) -- Truth and justice, inquiry and advocacy, science and law -- Trial and error : the Supreme Court's philosophy of science -- An epistemologist among the epidemiologists -- Fallibilism and faith, naturalism and the supernatural, science and religion -- The ideal of intellectual integrity, in life and literature -- After my own heart : Dorothy Sayers's feminism -- Worthwhile lives -- Why I am not an oxymoron -- Formal philosophy? : a plea for pluralism. (shrink)

Gideon Rosen: Quine and the Revival of Metaphysics: Quine's critique of Carnap's positivism and Quine's alternative account of scientific and philosophical methodology set the stage for the revival of metaphysics in the 1970s and 80s. The key ingredients in this transition were (a) Quine's insistence that theory choice in the sciences is governed by holistic, pragmatic considerations, (b) his claim that the sciences nonetheless give us reason to believe in the items they posit, and (c) his insistence that theory choice (...) in philosophy is continuous with scientific theory choice in all respects. The chapter presents Quine's account of theory choice and highlights the respects in which post‐Quinean metaphysics owes its methodological self‐conception to Quine's work. (shrink)

A reflection on how to teach philosophy with the help of theatrical techniques and scenic interpretation tools, building an allegorical environment for the presentation of philosophical content. Considering Plato's explanation of the allegory of the cave, where he starts from 'appears' or 'imagines' and describes his narrative, in a complete way, in a theatrical approach to use the imagination of his listeners. And thus building a scene, a representation of what he wanted to teach his interlocutors. In addition to (...) reflecting on contemporary caves, built in the rooms of young people, who are isolated, attentive only to the images produced on cell phone and computer screens, without being sure about the veracity of the information received in these 'walls' of modern caves. Also following the approaches and paths of Deleuze and Foucault in their considerations on the constructions relevant to the study of philosophy and its learning, this article aims at this reflection as a contribution to the art of theatre, the 'teatron', the place for to see. And to see how this seeing is a metaphorical perspective, something that is also a philosophical question, both in the direct and in the metaphysical sense. In addition to being a matter of experience made possible by immersion in the world of ideas and imagination, in a reflective, pragmatic way and with a view to learning and teaching philosophy. (shrink)