The theory of nearly orthosymmetric ortholattices generalizes the theory of orthosymmetric ortholattices defined by one of the authors in a previous paper. In this theory, some equations allow one to distinguish complex Hilbertian lattices from real and quaternion ones.

--I. The life of Ramakrishna. -- II. The life of Vivekananda and the universal gospel.

In these three Indian biographies dating from the 1920s, Romain Rolland introduces the French reader to Gandhi's political struggle and to the spiritual careers of Ramakrishna and his disciple Vivekananda, while revealing the deep meaning of his attraction to Hindu India at this time of his life.

By the author of Life of Ramakrishna, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“Neural coding” is a popular metaphor in neuroscience, where objective properties of the world are communicated to the brain in the form of spikes. Here I argue that this metaphor is often inappropriate and misleading. First, when neurons are said to encode experimental parameters, the neural code depends on experimental details that are not carried by the coding variable. Thus, the representational power of neural codes is much more limited than generally implied. Second, neural codes carry information only by reference (...) to things with known meaning. In contrast, perceptual systems must build information from relations between sensory signals and actions, forming an internal model. Neural codes are inadequate for this purpose because they are unstructured and therefore unable to represent relations. Third, coding variables are observables tied to the temporality of experiments, whereas spikes are timed actions that mediate coupling in a distributed dynamical system. The coding metaphor tries to fit the dynamic, circular, and distributed causal structure of the brain into a linear chain of transformations between observables, but the two causal structures are incongruent. I conclude that the neural coding metaphor cannot provide a valid basis for theories of brain function, because it is incompatible with both the causal structure of the brain and the representational requirements of cognition. (shrink)

Inner speech has been shown to vary in form along several dimensions. Along condensation, condensed inner speech forms have been described, that are supposed to be deprived of acoustic, phonological and even syntactic qualities. Expanded forms, on the other extreme, display articulatory and auditory properties. Along dialogality, inner speech can be monologal, when we engage in internal soliloquy, or dialogal, when we recall past conversations or imagine future dialogues involving our own voice as well as that of others addressing us. (...) Along intentionality, it can be intentional (when we deliberately rehearse material in short-term memory) or it can arise unintentionally (during mind wandering). We introduce the ConDialInt model, a neurocognitive predictive control model of inner speech that accounts for its varieties along these three dimensions. ConDialInt spells out the condensation dimension by including inhibitory control at the conceptualization, formulation or articulatory planning stage. It accounts for dialogality, by assuming internal model adaptations and by speculating on neural processes underlying perspective switching. It explains the differences between intentional and spontaneous varieties in terms of monitoring. We present an fMRI study in which we probed varieties of inner speech along dialogality and intentionality, to examine the validity of the neuroanatomical correlates posited in ConDialInt. Condensation was also informally tackled. Our data support the hypothesis that expanded inner speech recruits speech production processes down to articulatory planning, resulting in a predicted signal, the inner voice, with auditory qualities. Along dialogality, covertly using an avatar’s voice resulted in the activation of right hemisphere homologues of the regions involved in internal own-voice soliloquy and in cerebellar deactivation, consistent with internal model adaptation. Switching from first-person to third-person perspective resulted in activations in precuneus and parietal lobules. Along intentionality, compared with intentional inner speech, mind wandering with inner speech episodes was associated with greater bilateral inferior frontal activation and decreased activation in left temporal regions. This is consistent with the reported subjective evanescence and presumably reflects condensation processes. Our results provide neuroanatomical evidence compatible with predictive control and in favor of the assumptions made in the ConDialInt model. (shrink)

The neural coding metaphor is so ubiquitous that we tend to forget its metaphorical nature. What do we mean when we assert that neurons encode and decode? What kind of causal and representational model of the brain does the metaphor entail? What lies beneath the neural coding metaphor, I argue, is a bureaucratic model of the brain.

Psychiatry is becoming a cognitive neuroscience. This new paradigm not only aims to give new ways for explaining mental diseases by naturalizing them, but also to have an influence on different levels of psychiatric norms. We tried here to verify whether a biological paradigm is able to fulfill this normative goal. We analyzed three main normative assumptions that is to say the will of giving psychiatry a valid nosology, a rigorous definition of what is a mental disease, and new tools (...) for destigmatizing mentally ill patients. Although these different kinds of normativity are very heterogeneous, we must conclude that, in all these cases, biological psychiatry is a failure, in part because of a lack of epistemological conceptualization. (shrink)

The role of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) in mate choice in humans is controversial. Nowadays, the availability of genetic variation data at genomic scales allows for a careful assessment of this question. In 2008, Chaix et al. reported evidence for MHC‐dependent mate choice among European American spouses from the HapMap 2 dataset. Recently, Derti et al. suggested that this observation was not robust. Furthermore, when Derti et al. applied similar analyses to the HapMap 3 European American samples, they did (...) not see a significant effect. Although some of the points raised by Derti et al. are relevant, we disagree with the reported absence of evidence for MHC‐dependent mate choice within the HapMap samples. More precisely, we show here that the MHC dissimilarity among HapMap 3 European American spouses is still extreme in comparison to the rest of the genome, even after multiple testing correction. This finding supports the hypothesis of MHC‐dependent mate choice in some human populations. (shrink)

This paper shows that low-level generalisations in argument structure constructions are crucial to understanding the concept of alternation: low-level generalisations inform and constrain more schematic generalisations and thus constructional meaning. On the basis of an analysis of the causative alternation in English, and more specifically of the theme, I show that each construction has its own schematic meaning. This analysis is conducted on a dataset composed of 11,554 instances of the intransitive non-causative construction and the transitive causative construction. The identification (...) of lower-level generalisations feeds into the idea that language acquisition is organic and abstractions are formed only gradually from exposure to input. So far, most of the literature on argument structure constructions has focused on the verb itself, and thus fails to capture these generalisations. I make up for this deficit through an in-depth analysis of the causative alternation. (shrink)

Avec l'extension du domaine du risque, consecutive aux avancees technologiques de tous ordres et a l'amplification des echanges a l'echelle planetaire, chacun porte desormais une responsabilite etendue, dans l'espace et le temps. Cette situation inedite, generatrice de nouveaux questionnements ethiques, met en lumiere un paradoxe: bien qu'essentielle dans un tel contexte, la notion de responsabilite semble avoir perdu de son sens et de sa clarte, comme dissimulee derriere la multiplicite de ses occurrences. Il devient ainsi decisif d'interroger a nouveau ce (...) concept: qu'est-ce que la responsabilite? Comment prendre une decision responsable face aux dilemmes moraux, juridiques, economiques, environnementaux, politiques, sociaux et societaux? Analysant a la fois les fondements philosophiques de la responsabilite et ses recentes metamorphoses, cet essai introduit autant a l'ethique appliquee, notamment dans le domaine des affaires et du management, qu'il suggere une nouvelle forme de sagesse pratique, singuliere et incarnee, centree sur l'exercice quotidien de vertus adaptees aux enjeux du monde contemporain. (shrink)

A weak and equivocal sign, raised to the rank of a central conceptual scheme in the philosophies of Levinas and Derrida, the notion of trace appears in an allusive but insistent way in Merleau-Ponty's writings devoted to speech and writing. Traces challenge the hegemonic omnipotence of the sign; they both conjure up the mundane contextuality of speech and the lacunar dimension of the expression of meaning, beyond any phenomenal presence and any presentive intuition. Through Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty examines the essential (...) character of writing in the constitution of corporeality, otherness, intersubjectivity, and historicity: graphic signs, thought of as traces and the “experience of an absent”, acquire a dimension of material ideality of a new kind, at the limits of phenomenology. (shrink)

To make the voice heard of those for whom the written word is not part of their cultural tradition is Romaine Moreton’s project as Aboriginal poetess and performer. We publish here two poems from her collection Post Me to the Prime Minister. Flowing by the beat of the bongo, originally written in English, manoeuvering between the written language of the colonisator and the music of the colonised, they forcefully express Romaine Moreton’s struggle : the combat of a people (...) for the right to represent itself and to be the author of its own existence. (shrink)

Essai général sur le philosophe et prosateur chinois Tchouang-Tseu dont l'oeuvre se situe à l'origine du taoïsme philosophique et religieux. Ses leçons métaphysiques, son ironie contre toute forme d'autorité s'épanouissent sous forme de dialogues, fables et historiettes que l'auteur interprète et commente pour en dégager les enjeux.

The stratum-specific treatment effect function is a random variable giving the average treatment effect (ATE) for a randomly drawn stratum of potential confounders a clinician may use to assign treatment. In addition to the ATE, the variance of the stratum-specific treatment effect function is fundamental in determining the heterogeneity of treatment effect values. We offer a non-parametric plug-in estimator, the targeted maximum likelihood estimator (TMLE) and the cross-validated TMLE (CV-TMLE), to simultaneously estimate both the average and variance of the stratum-specific (...) treatment effect function. The CV-TMLE is preferable because it guarantees asymptotic efficiency under two conditions without needing entropy conditions on the initial fits of the outcome model and treatment mechanism, as required by TMLE. Particularly, in circumstances where data adaptive fitting methods are very important to eliminate bias but hold no guarantee of satisfying the entropy condition, we show that the CV-TMLE sampling distributions maintain normality with a lower mean squared error than TMLE. In addition to verifying the theoretical properties of TMLE and CV-TMLE through simulations, we highlight some of the challenges in estimating the variance of the treatment effect, which lack double robustness and might be biased if the true variance is small and sample size insufficient. (shrink)

We show that the free pseudospace is a reduct of a 1-based theory. This answers a question of David M. Evans. The theory is superstable, but not ω-stable.

L’ouvrage de Rebecca Futo Kennedy sur les femmes étrangères à Athènes vient combler un vide historiographique. Si les études portant sur la place des femmes citoyennes dans l’Athènes classique sont, depuis plus d’une trentaine d’années, toujours plus nombreuses, celles consacrées aux femmes étrangères sont quasi absentes. L’intention de l’auteure est d’ouvrir un champ délaissé jusqu’ici, en soulignant les stéréotypes pouvant porter à la fois sur les femmes et sur les étranger(e)s. Elle souhai...

Focusing on the reception of Maine de Biran by Alexis Bertrand in his thesis, L’aperception du corps humain par la conscience (1880), I will demonstrate how the “corps propre” (one’s own body) becomes a key concept in order to re-orientate the French spiritualist movement. To do so, Bertrand’s neo-Biranism uses a new methodology with phenomenological issues. The image of the body, the primitive space or the engagement within the world becomes new research themes for spiritualism. His interpretation of Biran’s philosophy (...) leads him to criticize mechanistic epistemology, and especially the concept of reflex. In this context, Bertrand proposes an animist metaphysics, aiming to reconcile his Biranism with the advances of science. As a consequence, the history of the concept of one’s own body must take into account metaphysical perspectives and not only scientific and experimental researches. (shrink)

Transcranial alternating-current stimulation in the frequency range of 1–100 Hz has come to be used routinely in electroencephalogram studies of brain function through entrainment of neuronal oscillations. It turned out, however, to be highly non-trivial to remove the strong stimulation signal, including its harmonic and non-harmonic distortions, as well as various induced higher-order artifacts from the EEG data recorded during the stimulation. In this paper, we discuss some of the problems encountered and present methodological approaches aimed at overcoming them. To (...) illustrate the mechanisms of artifact induction and the proposed removal strategies, we use data obtained with the help of a schematic demonstrator setup as well as human-subject data. (shrink)

For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by (...) day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation. —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience1. (shrink)

Depuis près de cent cinquante ans, l’essai du mathématicien William Kingdon Clifford intitulé The Ethics of Belief est au centre de la plupart des discussions sur les rapports entre éthique et épistémologie, plus précisément sur les questions d’épistémologie et d’éthique de la croyance religieuse car, même si la croyance religieuse n’est jamais la cible exclusive de Clifford, le contexte de sa rédaction ainsi que la quasi-totalité des exemples pris par Clifford portent sur la religion. On opp...

La question de la justification pragmatiste de la vérité des croyances religieuses apparait chez James dès 1898 en tant que théorie alternative à la théorie roycéenne de l’absolu. Reprise en 1902 dans The Varieties of Religious Experience, cette justification pragmatiste échoue pourtant à rendre compte correctement de la possible vérité des croyances religieuses et, en dernière instance, à répondre aux arguments de Royce. James est bien conscient qu’il manque, à sa théorie pragmatiste basée sur les conséquences pratiques de la croyance (...) religieuse, une théorie métaphysique de la causalité surnaturelle des expériences religieuses. Mais ceci suppose de dépasser le naturalisme et le dualisme implicites des Variétés. Or, devant l’impasse du monisme des Essais d’empirisme radical, James sera amené à développer, dans A Pluralistic Universe, une théorie panthéiste qui accepte la possibilité logique de l’absolu, en acceptant à nouveau frais la thèse d’une composition de la conscience qu’il avait rejetée dans les Principles of Psychology. A ce titre, la position finale de James semble être assez proche de celle de Royce, à condition toutefois de montrer que celle-ci n’est pas une théorie de la nécessité de l’absolu, mais bien une théorie de sa possibilité. (shrink)

Many aspects of The Varieties of Religious Experience found their theoretical background in other books of James psychology or philosophy. In this article I try to connect his theory of imagination in The Principle of Psychology with his supernaturalism regarding religious experience. Both suppose a theory of the “feeling of reality” that explains how, under the working of imagination, abstract ideas or remote ideals can be perceived as real and lively, becoming motives for action, although they may not have anything (...) to do with sense experience. Although imagination is not mentioned in James’s doctrine of the will to believe, it is central in both understanding this doctrine as well as the overall vision of James psychology and philosophy of religion. Similarly, imagination is essential to grasp a better understanding of how ideas and ideals unite with reality in Dewey’s thoughts concerning religion. I find it useful, in order to have a better understanding of James position, to compare it with what Dewey has to say about it in A Common Faith. Contrasting their theories will show that James’s understanding of imagination can only be understood if rooted in a kind of realism about the ‘unseen universe’. (shrink)

Qu’est-ce que laisser une trace à la postérité? Comment les traces du passé, matérialisées dans l’écriture d’un récit, peuvent-elles s’apparenter à des œuvres et former un monde? Dans la Condition de l’homme moderne, Hannah Arendt cherche à penser la narrativité comme une condition de possibilité de l’Histoire : libérée de tout historicisme, l’historiographie, loin d’apparaître comme un savoir positif consignant les marques d’un passé disparu, a pour fonction de révéler phénoménologiquement le sens des actions historiques des êtres parlants dans des (...) œuvres prenant la forme d’un récit. Le problème husserlien de la transmission mondaine des idéalités du passé dans une écriture affranchie de la mémoire subjective se voit ainsi réinterprété à la lumière d’une analyse de l’action politique, reconfigurée dans une narration : c’est par la médiation d’un récit mettant en forme les traces du passé que les êtres humains peuvent accéder rétrospectivement à une histoire non passéiste. (shrink)

The following paper is intended to propose a new morphological analysis of the PIE name for ‘guest’. This word has been widely assumed to be linked to the PIE root *ghes ‘eat’, without explaining the oddity of this apparent o-grade agent-noun * ghós-ti- m. ‘table companion’. So far, no conclusive evidence can be found for a word built on the same pattern. Furthermore, it may seem quite difficult to give an account for the Lat. hospes m. meaning both ‘guest’ and (...) ‘host’, like the French word hôte. We argue here that this PIE *ghós-ti- is a back-formation made on an old collective stem *ghós-t-ō̯i f. ‘table, group of table companions’. This very form *ghós-t-ō̯i would eventually reflect an acrostatic stem *ghós-t- f. ‘common meal’. (shrink)