Intended for high school and college students studying ancient Greece and Rome as part of a larger world history curriculum, this book's coverage of key wars and battles; important leaders, armies, organizations, and weapons; and other aspects of conflict will enable readers to better understand the complex role warfare played in ancient Western civilization.

Alfred North Whitehead has never gone out of print, but for a time he was decidedly out of fashion in the English-speaking world. In a splendid work that serves as both introduction and erudite commentary, Isabelle Stengersâe"one of todayâe(tm)s leading philosophers of scienceâe"goes straight to the beating heart of Whiteheadâe(tm)s thought. The product of thirty yearsâe(tm) engagement with the mathematician-philosopherâe(tm)s entire canon, this volume establishes Whitehead as a daring thinker on par with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Reading (...) the texts in broadly chronological order while highlighting major works, Stengers deftly unpacks Whiteheadâe(tm)s often complicated language, explaining the seismic shifts in his thinking and showing how he called into question all that philosophers had considered settled after Descartes and Kant. She demonstrates that the implications of Whiteheadâe(tm)s philosophical theories and specialized knowledge of the various sciences come yoked with his innovative, revisionist take on God. Whiteheadâe(tm)s God exists within a specific epistemological realm created by a radically complex and often highly mathematical language. âeoeTo think with Whitehead today,âe Stengers writes, âeoemeans to sign on in advance to an adventure that will leave none of the terms we normally use as they were.âe. (shrink)

Spence develops and applies a normative model based on rationalist and virtue ethics as well as stoic philosophy to assess the impact of technology on wellbeing. Through developing this model, Spence offers a novel and important examination of the benefit of technology to our society as a whole.

Professor J. B. Schneewind's recent excellent volume Mill's Ethical Writings has drawn attention to the necessity of studying Mill's notes to chapter XXIII of his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind for a clear understanding of his theory of the moral sentiments. There are notes, however, by J. S. Mill to other chapters of that work, which should not be forgotten, because they elucidate the associationist theory of motivation which is obscurely appealed to in chapter IV of (...) Utilitarianism. Critics of Mill from F. H. Bradley onwards have made erroneous statements about the psychology that underlies Mill's justification of the principle of utility. But if Mill was going to support his ethics with a psychological theory, he should have expressed that theory at length and unambiguously in his ethical treatise. In what follows, it is pointed out where critics have been unfair to Mill through their apparent ignorance of his notes to the Analysis and of his conception of sympathy; but it is also shown that there is a puzzling inconsistency between the notes and a key passage in Utilitarianism, chapter IV. Finally, the theory of habitual volition, which is expressed at the close of that chapter, is examined. Critics have paid little attention to this theory, but it entails a serious modification of psychological hedonism, and Mill obviously attributed great importance to it. (shrink)

After years of the welfare state, the rise of technology, combined with neoliberal governmental apparatuses, has established a new society of the precarious. In this new way of the world, productivity is not just connected to labor in the traditional sense of work hours, but more totally, to the formation of the self: work becomes performative and affective, and personal identities seep more and more into working ones. This new mode of being has another side, however: it can lead to (...) new forms of self-organization, resistance and exodus. In it we see the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious. (shrink)

In this article we take further the debate on the ethics of competitive intelligence gathering, which until now has been very limited. Drawing on empirical research from a mobile telephone company in the United Kingdom, we present the case that while mystery shopping is not the worst activity in which an organization might be involved, it is basically unethical. Mystery shopping involves deception and the obtaining of competitive information under false pretences. Common arguments are that ‘everyone is doing it’ and (...) that the information is in the public domain. Neither of these points convincingly justifies the requirement for an employer to ask an employee to lie and deceive others on behalf of the company. The use of students and those in low power positions in the organization is a further concern. (shrink)

Phrase re-ordering is a well-known obstacle to robust machine translation for language pairs with significantly different word orderings. For Arabic-English, two languages that usually differ in the ordering of subject and verb, the subject and its modifiers must be accurately moved to produce a grammatical translation. This operation requires more than base phrase chunking and often defies current phrase-based statistical decoders. We present a conditional random field sequence classi- fier that detects the full scope of Arabic noun phrase subjects in (...) verb-initial clauses at the Fβ=1 61.3% level, a 5.0% absolute improvement over a statistical parser baseline. We suggest methods for integrating the classifier output with a statistical decoder and present preliminary machine translation results. (shrink)

Dans cet essai qui privilégie la joie d'une pensée insoumise plutôt que la dénonciation, Isabelle Stengers prend le relais d'Alfred North Whitehead lorsque, diagnostiquant le "déclin de la civilisation moderne", celui-ci assigna à la philosophie la tâche de "souder le sens commun avec l'imagination". Face aux prétentions à déterminer ce que nous avons le droit de savoir, elle cherche à donner force à ce que nous savons. Face aux oppositions doctrinales prédatrices qui démembrent le sens commun, elle affirme la philosophie (...) comme puissance de problématisation. Prolongeant et renouvelant les ressources proposées par Whitehead, elle fait exister tant la possibilité d'une science "civilisée" que celle, politique, de dispositifs susceptibles d'habiliter les "gens du commun" à faire valoir les questions qui les concernent. Au déclin de la civilisation a aujourd'hui succédé la débâcle : "Nous entendons déjà les grincements et les craquements sourds marquant la rupture des plaques de glace, démantibulant le sol que nous avions défini comme assuré." II s'agit désormais d'apprendre à vivre dans un monde devenu lui-même intrinsèquement problématique. D'autres voix, et notamment celles, contemporaines, de Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, David Abram ou Anna Tsing, viendront dès lors s'associer à celle de Whitehead dans l'exploration des manières de "faire commun" que demande notre époque. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to the CommentariesSean A. SpenceIn “Free Will in the Light of Neuropsychiatry,” I have attempted to present an argument from the perspective of materialist neuroscience, pushing the latter to its logical conclusion: that if the human nervous system is consistent in its properties, then the only place for “free will” is in the non-conscious processes which underpin conscious awareness. This argument I have based on two supports: the (...) “spatial” and the “temporal” (Spence, 1995).I have contended that the sense of freedom may be lost from certain actions, thereby implying that “freedom” is a sensory process distinct from action. This might be conceptualized as having a distinct functional distribution within the nervous system (a spatial distinction). I have also argued that conscious awareness of events occurs at a finite delay, the period of “neuronal adequacy,” after those events themselves. The point here is that neurochemical events giving rise to phenomenology are likely to require a period of time (no matter how short) for their genesis. The process is “on line” before we perceive it (a temporal distinction). Thus the “freedom to act,” a motor process, is necessarily non-conscious at the point of initiation.I am grateful to Frith, Libet and Stephens for their comments. In the most part our disagreements are likely to be those of emphasis, perhaps compounded by my uses of the term “free will.”I have no major disagreement with Frith’s comments. I would, however, emphasize that it is likely that the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential, does tell us something regarding intended actions. It is, for example, absent prior to the involuntary movements seen in Tourette’s syndrome (Obeso et al. 1982), and reduced in akinetic patients with Parkinson’s disease (Dick et al. 1989) or medial frontal lobe lesions (Deecke et al. 1987). The latter groups have difficulty initiating intended, internally generated, actions.With regard to the suspicion of dualism in my diagrams, the point is well taken, but I am attempting to describe a functional distinction, the precise coordinates of which remain obscure. It may well be that “consciousness” occupies no fixed location but is an activity temporarily co-extant with that association cortex (or cortices) subserving the sensory modality (or modalities) experienced phenomenologically (see Bottini et al. 1995).I have based much of my “temporal” argument on Libet’s work, and I am grateful for his response. Nevertheless, I am still of the opinion that there is a central inconsistency with his argument that conscious control exerts a veto on acts which is somehow free of material constraints. [Indeed he states that he has “no quarrel with the view that even a fully voluntary act is initiated unconsciously (non-consciously)”.] Whereas I can [End Page 99] not prove that this power of veto does not evade neurochemical processes, or that it somehow acts instantaneously and independently, with no origin in unconscious processing, I can say that I have restricted myself to arguing within a materialist perspective, with the aim of “pushing it” to its extreme. The free will which Libet retains in consciousness is one which is unique, and unconstrained by materialism. It is dualism in disguise!Stephens implies that there is a non-argument regarding consciousness acting as an initiator of events. The suggestion is that no one would argue this. Yet this is Libet’s argument. It cannot be disproved, but it is clearly (internally) inconsistent with Libet’s own impressive body of work.As for the role of consciousness in action, I have, I think, invoked a position similar to that adopted by Stephens; that consciousness is more a sensory state, allowing awareness of actions, and their consequences, and perhaps thereby facilitating the function of non-conscious initiators. It is clearly necessary for the performance of the “higher” acts which we equate with human nature, but it is not sufficient. (Indeed many of the most creative insights have “emerged” into consciousness [see Boden, 1992].) The man with a paralyzed arm may wish for his arm to move but to no avail. Over time function may slowly reappear. But if his lesion is such that he is unaware of his impairment (anosognosia), then his prognosis may... (shrink)

Un spectre hante l'Université française : celui de la déconstruction. Créé par Jacques Derrida à la fin des années 1960, ce concept est devenu, dans l'esprit des réactionnaires de tout poil, le mot-valise désignant tout ce qu'ils haïssent dans la pensée, lorsque celle-ci cherche à émanciper davantage qu'à ordonner. Dégénérescence de la culture, mépris pour les grandes œuvres, délire interprétatif, amphigouri linguistique, danger politique, confusion sexuelle, licence morale : à en croire les ennemis de la déconstruction, tout ce qui va' (...) mal dans le monde lui est imputable. Que signifie la fixation frénétique d'une frange d'intellectuels sur tout ce qui peut ressembler à une pensée différente, inventive et fondamentalement démocratique? Que cela signifie-t-il, si ce n'est la volonté de policer la pensée et ses institutions, pour mieux, ensuite, policer les corps? Telle est l'interrogation qui a présidé au colloque "Qui a peur de la déconstruction?", qui s'est tenu à l'École normale supérieure et à la Sorbonne en janvier 2023. En voici les actes."--Cover page 4. (shrink)

Comment penser l'effort aujourd'hui? Le thème peut sembler à la fois banal et faussement suranné. Banal, d'une part, parce que l'effort est, pour paraphraser Descartes, "la chose du monde la mieux partagée". Depuis toujours, nous sommes enjoints à "faire des efforts", dans des domaines très variés de l'existence, pour apprendre à marcher ou faire du vélo, à l'école, dans nos relations avec autrui puis, plus tard, pour mener à bien des études et une vie professionnelle, trouver le bonheur dans notre (...) vie privée et surmonter les "coups durs" qui sont le lot de chacun. Banal aussi, parce que, tel un marronnier des propos de comptoir, le thème est dans l'actualité, lorsqu'il s'agit de déplorer le "manque d'efforts" des "jeunes générations" ou la perte du "goût de l'effort", à l'école notamment. Ainsi, l'effort serait requis partout, et pourtant perdu, omniprésent dans les discours et si difficile à définir, si difficile à saisir aussi dans les actes. De quoi parle-t-on, de l'effort physique, démonstratif, ou de l'effort intellectuel, intériorisé, impalpable, mais dont les neurosciences visent à montrer la teneur somatique? (shrink)

Stengers recovers the idea of 'common sense' as a meeting place-a commons-where opposed ideas of science and humanistic inquiry can engage one another and help to move society forward. Her reconciliation of science and philosophy is especially urgent today-when climate disaster looms all around us, when the values of what we thought of as civilization and modernity are discredited, and when expertise of any kind is under attack.

In den Mittelpunkt der Schrift stellt Nicolaus Cusanus die Figur eines Laien (idiota), der – als Gegenpol zum universitär ausgebildeten Philosophen – den einfachen Ungebildeten und damit die wahre Weisheit repräsentiert, die dem Geist des Menschen und seinen Potentialen entspricht. Statt auf Bücherwissen und Autoritäten setzt er auf das eigene Philosophieren, das immer neu nach der Wahrheit fragt. Der Laie verkörpert die cusanische Philosophie in besonderem Maße: Fundamentale anthropologische, erkenntnistheoretische und metaphysische Bestimmungen des Cusanus finden sich hier in einer Gestalt (...) vereint. Aus dem Wissen heraus, dass menschliches Erkennen immer nur mutmaßend sein kann, geht es um das rechte kritische Verhältnis zu den eigenen Erkenntnismöglichkeiten. An der Figur des Laien macht Cusanus deutlich, dass dies keineswegs in einen erkenntnistheoretischen Skeptizismus führt, der die Möglichkeit sicheren Wissens von vornherein für nicht erreichbar und infolgedessen alle Erkenntnisbemühungen für überflüssig hält, sondern dass darin das unendliche und dynamische Potential des Menschen zum Ausdruck kommt, sich unermüdlich an die Wahrheit anzunähern. In der Geschichte der Erkenntnistheorie vor Kant spielt "Der Laie über den Geist" somit eine fundamentale Rolle. (shrink)

People’s awareness of tactile stimuli has been investigated in far less detail than their awareness of stimuli in other sensory modalities. In an attempt to fill this gap, we provide an overview of studies that are pertinent to the topic of tactile consciousness. We discuss the results of research that has investigated phenomena such as “change blindness”, phantom limb sensations, and numerosity judgments in tactile perception, together with the results obtained from the study of patients affected by deficits that can (...) adversely affect tactile perception such as neglect, extinction, and numbsense. The similarities as well as some of the important differences that have emerged when visual and tactile conscious information processing have been compared using similar experimental procedures are highlighted. We suggest that conscious information processing in the tactile modality cannot be separated completely from the more general processing of spatial information in the brain. Finally, the importance of considering tactile consciousness within the larger framework of multisensory information processing is also discussed. (shrink)

This editorial to the special issue addresses the often overlooked question of the ethical nature of social enterprises. The emerging social entrepreneurship literature has previously been dominated by enthusiasts who fail to critique the social enterprise, focusing instead on its distinction from economic entrepreneurship and potential in solving social problems. In this respect, we have found through the work presented herein that the relation between social entrepreneurship and ethics needs to be problematized. Further, we find that a range of conceptual (...) lenses and methodological approaches is valuable as the social entrepreneurship field matures. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive presentation of the Pratyabhij philosophy (elaborated in the 10th and 11th centuries by Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta) by showing how its main concepts arose from the confrontation of aiva religious dogmas ...

Providing a compelling scholarly statement about the interrelation and pliability of values in the life sciences, medicine and health care, this volume aims to aid our understanding of the roles of power, knowledge production and economic action in the heavily scientised and economised areas of life science and medicine.

This book details how quantification can serve both as evidence and as an instrument of government, whether when dealing with statistics on employment, occupational health and economic governance, or when developing public management or target-driven policies. In the process, it presents a thought-provoking homage to Alain Desrosières, who pioneered ways to study large numbers and the politics underlying them. It opens with a summary of Desrosières's contributions to the field in which several generations of researchers detail how this statistician and (...) historian profoundly influenced them. This tribute, based on personal testimonies, bears witness to the vitality of the school of thought and analytical framework Desrosières initiated. Next, a collection of essays explores the statistical argument in the neoliberal era, examining issues such as counting the homeless in Europe, measuring the performance of public services, and quantifying the effects of public action on the unemployed in France. The third part details the uses of quantification. It reveals that although statistics are frequently used to the advantage of those in power, they can also play a vital role in challenging and resisting both the conventions underlying the measurements as well as the measurements themselves.Featuring the work of economists, historians, political scientists, sociologists, and statisticians, this title provides readers with a thoughtful look at an influential figure in the history of statistics. It also shows how statistics are used to direct public policy, the degree of conflict that is possible in their production, and the disputes that can develop around their uses. (shrink)

La critique s'est longuement intéressée à l'hétérogénéité comme une caractéristique de certaines formes d'expression littéraires ou artistiques, plus particulièrement dans une modernité vouée au composite. Privilégiant par le titre proposé le concept d'"hétérogène", les articles réunis dans cet ouvrage interrogent sa pertinence pour l'étude des littératures de langue française, en prenant en compte son articulation avec ce qui est supposé ou donné comme homogène. Le mot "hétérogène" est ainsi moins entendu en ce qu'il qualifie les différents éléments d'un ensemble aptes (...) à produire des formes hybrides qu'en ce qu'il donne à voir une relation dynamique avec ce que la langue et la société instituent comme homogène. Ainsi, les approches proposées dans cet ouvrage permettent de rendre compte de la façon dont le texte littéraire participe d'une pensée critique qui met en question les discours dominants, tant au niveau des représentations sociales que des formes esthétiques, et qui interroge de ce fait nos propres outils d'analyse. (shrink)

Following on from ecological theories of perception, such as the one proposed by [Gibson, J. J. . The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin] this paper reviews the literature on the multisensory interactions underlying the perception of flavor in order to determine the extent to which it is really appropriate to consider flavor perception as a distinct perceptual system. We propose that the multisensory perception of flavor may be indicative of the fact that the taxonomy currently used to (...) define our senses is simply not appropriate. According to the view outlined here, the act of eating allows the different qualities of foodstuffs to be combined into unified percepts; and flavor can be used as a term to describe the combination of tastes, smells, trigeminal, and tactile sensations as well as the visual and auditory cues, that we perceive when tasting food. (shrink)

Is consciousness multisensory? Obviously it is multisensory in certain ways. Human beings typically possess the capacity to have experiences in at least the five familiar sensory modalities, and quite possibly in a number of other less commonly recognised modalities as well. But there are other respects in which it is far from obvious that consciousness is multisensory. This chapter is concerned with one such respect. Οur concern here is with whether consciousness contains experiences associated with distinct modalities at the same (...) time. We will describe those who endorse a positive answer to this question as endorsing a multisensory view (MSV) of the structure of consciousness, and those who endorse a negative answer to this question as having a unisensory view (USV) of the structure of consciousness. (shrink)

Les derniers travaux de Michel Foucault peuvent être appréhendés comme une nouvelle grille de lecture pour l'analyse des pratiques d'écriture personnelle dont peut se saisir la théorie littéraire. Dans ses cours au Collège de France sur les pratiques de soi antiques, Michel Foucault ébauche une généalogie de l'écriture de soi : celle-ci ne vise pas à découvrir ce qui est "intus et in cute" comme l'annonçait Rousseau en exergue des Confessions, mais à élaborer un sujet éthique par l'ascèse, par l'exercice (...) de l'écriture. La pratique de l'écriture personnelle, dès lors qu'elle renonce au psychologique, à une "histoire de la personnalité" (Philippe Lejeune) et s'ouvre à une altérité, devient une "pratique de liberté" (Michel Foucault). Face à une épreuve existentielle (le deuil, la maladie), face aux agressions de l'histoire, face à un contexte sociopolitique répressif, le récit de soi en tant que pratique éthique de subjectivation offre un cheminement vers une émancipation que la littérature peut aussi aider à interpréter. Le récit de soi requiert dès lors une lecture éthique et convoque, nécessairement, pour son analyse, la littérature et la philosophie. (shrink)

Should emotions play a role in our decisions, even if they are "just feelings" and not necessarily "imbued with reason" or cognitively penetrated? The author shows that such basic feelings as aversion and attraction can be important normative guides by disrupting engrained habits and beliefs, enabling us to reconsider our ways, which is important due to the ever-changing nature of ethical demands on us. Therefore, these feelings should guide our decisions, even if they are not cognitive. This book fi lls (...) a gap in the philosophy of emotions, ethics, and virtue epistemology. (shrink)

Habermas est un des philosophes contemporains vivants les plus célèbres. Cet héritier de l'Ecole de Francfort a participé aux grandes controverses du XXe siècle, celle opposant Adorno à Popper, mais aussi à la querelle des historiens allemands. L'oeuvre abondante d'Habermas croise morale, sociologie, politique et épistémologie. Isabelle Aubert en découvre la profonde unité dans l'intersubjectivité, cette notion que l'on trouve chez Fichte et Husserl mais qu'Habermas s'est efforcé de détourner. Il ne s'agit pas d'éliminer toute forme de subjectivité mais de (...) déplacer la perspective sur le social en mettant au centre une notion qui appréhende la réalité de sujets situés et en relation. Ce modèle alternatif d'intelligibilité s'effectue sur le mode de la participation au dialogue, de l'échange de paroles et non selon le mode de l'observation entre un pôle de représentation et un environnement extérieur. Ainsi naît une nouvelle anthropologie sociale fonctionnelle, à l'écart du mouvement post-moderne. (shrink)

In Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, first published in French in 2006 and appearing here in English for the first time, Isabelle Stengers experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not as a block but through the way they diverge from each other. Drawing on thinkers ranging from Dewey to Deleuze, she develops what she calls an "ecology of practices" into a capacious and heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of cultural and political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers (...) first advocates for an approach to sciences that would emphasize the way each should be situated by the kind of relationship demanded by what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the disabling scientific/nonscientific binary-like the opposition between the neutrino and Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices stimulates instead an appetite for thinking reality not as an arbiter but as what we can relate with through the generation of diverging concerns and obligations. (shrink)

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, an important conceptual battleground for democratic theorists ought to be, it would seem, the capitalist firm. We are now painfully aware that the typical model of government in so-called investor-owned companies remains profoundly oligarchic, hierarchical, and unequal. Renewing with the literature of the 1970s and 1980s on workplace democracy, a few political theorists have started to advocate democratic reforms of the workplace by relying on an analogy between firm and state. To (...) the extent that a firm is an organization comparable to the state, it too ought to be ruled along democratic lines. Our paper tests the robustness of the analogy between firm and state by considering six major objections to it: the objection from a difference in ends, the objection from shareholders’ property rights, the objection from worker’s consent, the objection from workers’ exit opportunities, the objection from workers’ expertise, and the objection from the fragility of firms. We find all of these objections wanting. While the paper does not ambition to settle the issue of workplace democracy at once, our goal is to pave the way for a more in-depth study of the ways in which firms and states can be compared and the possible implications this may have for our understanding of the nature of managerial authority and the governance of firms. (shrink)

This study explores how in science fiction’s novels myths are intimately linked to their ideological dimension and criticism. It begins with a mythocritical analysis that leads to a mythoanalysis in order to understand how those myths and the big issues of the accelerating technoscientific progress in the 20th and 21th centuries are linked. My approach is based on the restricted example of Dan Simmons’ science fiction novels: by studying the myths he rewrites, I will show that those myths are representing (...) how technoscience can have an influence on history, on the development of humanity and on the issue of ethics. (shrink)