Chaque fois que nous "donnons forme" à quelque chose, cette représentation nous figure, par signes, l'objet évoqué, mais nous confirme également qu'il ne s'agit que d'un simulacre. D'où le besoin, à chaque époque, de créer du vivant pour pallier cette déception : tel est le sens du mythe de Pygmalion. Ce livre s'organise donc autour de deux pôles : d'un côté la nécessité de figurer, et de figurer l'acte même de la perception (voir le chapitre "Un oeil immense artificiel") ; (...) de l'autre, l'impératif de dépasser le signe. Il s'agit d'un défi radical, qui concerne l'avenir même des arts. C'est la raison de ce titre, A vif, qui témoigne d'un "coup d'oeil" : un regard et une incision pratiquée à vif dans l'objet, un désir de définitif qui ne caresse plus la forme, mais qui pénètre, met à nu, éviscère dans les paroles et dans les actes. Dedans et derrière l'oeil, comme dans l'un des plus impassibles traités d'anatomie du Cinquecento. Aujourd'hui, est-il encore vif notre oeil qui cherche le vivant? N'est-il pas lui-même défiguré par l'informe qui s'est logé en nous? Où est la pupilla viva qui illumine le Paradis et qui, de Dante à Baudelaire, a animé, de longs siècles durant, tant de quête mentale? Il faut remonter à ces origines, parcourir les espaces séculaires et sidéraux dans lesquels le cosmos était ordre, beauté, compréhension ; où, justement, il était nécessaire de "captiver les yeux pour avoir l'âme". Cet essai se voudrait une parabole déployée au fil de l'ardente soif humaine d'"exorbiter", de brûler la distance du point de vue, pour accéder, maintenant et à jamais, au vivant. (shrink)

Rapid Automatized Naming is considered a universal marker of developmental dyslexia and could also be helpful to identify a reading deficit in minority-language children, in which it may be hard to disentangle whether the reading difficulties are due to a learning disorder or a lower proficiency in the language of instruction. We tested reading and rapid naming skills in monolingual Good Readers, monolingual Poor Readers, and MLC, by using our new version of RAN, the RAN-Shapes, in 127 primary school students. (...) In line with previous research, MLC showed, on average, lower reading performances as compared to mGR. However, the two groups performed similarly to the RAN-Shapes task. On the contrary, the mPR group underperformed both in the reading and the RAN tasks. Our findings suggest that reading difficulties and RAN performance can be dissociated in MLC; consequently, the performance at the RAN-Shapes may contribute to the identification of children at risk of a reading disorder without introducing any linguistic bias, when testing MLC. (shrink)

Excerpt from La Notion d'Espace Le probleme de l'espace que nous nous proposons de traiter forme une partie integrante de la cosmologie. Il a sa place tout indiquee dans cette etude cosmologique, intitulee: les causes constitutives du monde mineral. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format (...) whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

As the editors of the series, New Literary Theory, proclaim in the preface of the book, the purpose of the series is to make more room in literary theory for playful and accessible approaches to li...

Background:Psychiatric nurses are regularly confronted with the uses and effects of control interventions such as mechanical restraints. Although there are evident tensions in the literature regarding the use of mechanical restraints, very little research has focused on the lived and embodied experience of their use, whether from the patient’s perspective or the perspective of nursing staff responsible for their application.Research aims: to gain access to the bodily phenomenon of being placed in mechanical restraints; to give voice to the intimate experiential (...) understanding of this experience; and through phenomenological interpretation, to understand the subjective processes and meaning-making of this experience.Research design:For this research, we adopted a distinctly ethics-oriented application of the methodology known as interpretative phenomenological analysis, that is, the interpretive dimension of the research focused on ethical practice in mental healthcare – one that is informed by experiential accounts of the lived body.Participants and research context:A total of 40 in-depth semi-structured, nondirected interviews with both nurses and patients we conducted to meet the aims of this article. Participants were recruited from an inpatient psychiatric unit of a Canadian general hospital.Ethical considerations:The research received research ethics board clearance from both the hospital where the study took place and the University of Ottawa.Findings:The comparative analysis is presented under the following headings: context of care, meaning of quality of care, emotional reactions and nurse–patient relationship, meeting the needs and need for alternatives.Discussion/conclusions:The research findings are discussed in light of current literature and implications for practice. (shrink)

A critique of the prediction that technology will end humans' direct involvement in work. Contentions: a workless world is not without qualification desirable; it is not attainable by technology alone; the end sought does not in and by itself justify present job ending applications. Underlying these contentions: a claim that utopian visions with regard to work function as ideologies. Evidence for this claim derived from revisiting past non-industrial and industrial fantasies regarding a work-free utopia.

1. Husserl’s theory of primordial reduction proves to be notorious: it is essential to his analysis of alterity, yet the theory itself incurs various criticisms. On a popular reading, primordial re...

De Berlioz à Gérard Grisey, de Nietzsche à Jankélévitch, ce livre aborde différentes facettes de la création musicale d'un point de vue philosophique et tente de montrer que la musique sécrète un potentiel de transformation précieux à bien des égards: transformation du réel tel qu'il existe, transformation du monde sonore, transformation de l'écoute. Écrire de la musique, l'interpréter, l'écouter, l'apprécier constituent les différents chapitres de cet ouvrage. S'y insèrent des entretiens avec des acteurs de la scène contemporaine: les compositeurs Philippe (...) Leroux, Jean-Luc Hervé, Mauro Lanza, la chanteuse Donatienne Michel-Dansac, le violoncelliste Pierre Morlet et le percussionniste Jean Geoffroy; ces entretiens poursuivent la réflexion qui les précède et la rendent ainsi plus conrète. Au fil des pages, il apparaît qu'une oeuvre musicale, inscrite dans la durée, permet de s'émanciper de l'hégémonie d'une instantanéité et d'une ubiquité virtuelle propres à notre époque. Pour paraphraser Luigi Nono, réveiller l'oreille, c'est en somme réveiller l'homme"--Back cover. (shrink)

Si, depuis quelques dizaines d'années, la médecine de la reproduction s'est considérablement développée pour venir en aide aux couples confrontés à l'impossibilité de concevoir naturellement un enfant, c'est généralement avec l'objectif initial de favoriser une conception avec les gamètes du couple. Le développement successif de l' " Insémination Artificielle " et de la " Fécondation in Vitro " a néanmoins permis dans le même temps de faire émerger différentes possibilités alternatives de conception, en transgressant notamment le principe de la filiation (...) biologique. Un couple peut aujourd'hui concevoir un enfant avec d'autres gamètes que les siens et même envisager l'accueil d'un embryon conçu par un autre couple. Dans ces situations, la question de la conciliation des intérêts des différents acteurs se pose. En optant pour la règle de l'anonymat des dons qui prive l'enfant de toute information sur le donneur, certaines législations semblent considérer que ce principe allie au mieux ces intérêts. Pourtant non seulement la demande croissante de levée de l'anonymat formulée par les enfants issus de l'assistance médicale à la procréation fragilise ce choix de société mais certains pays ont devancé ce voeu en choisissant la transparence génétique. Cet ouvrage est le fruit de riches débats et réflexions échangés entre juristes, médecins, psychanalystes et sociologues, lors du premier Workshop du Réseau Universitaire International de Bioéthique. Adoptant une approche comparative, les articles rassemblés examinent la manière dont sont organisées, dans seize pays de cultures différentes, les pratiques et les conséquences d'un anonymat absolu, relatif, voire inexistant. En dépit d'une diversité de systèmes, un constat unanime ressort : la question de la levée de l'anonymat se pose partout avec acuité. La réponse, elle, réunit ou divise. Mais peut-il en être autrement sur un sujet qui touche aux perceptions sociales de l'identité de la personne, de la filiation ou de la " parentalité "? Créé en 2007, le Réseau Universitaire International de Bioéthique a pour objectif de promouvoir la recherche universitaire en rapprochant des chercheurs, de pays et, de cultures différents, spécialistes des questions liées aux pratiques biomédicales. Partant d'une approche croisée des différents systèmes juridiques, les travaux de ce réseau analysent les choix sociaux en matière biomédicale à travers les prismes de l'éthique, de l'anthropologie, la philosophie ou la sociologie. Ils veulent ainsi contribuer à la réflexion internationale sur la régulation des pratiques biomédicales et, incidemment, sur la conciliation entre les diversités culturelles et un certain universalisme, terreau d'une harmonisation du droit. Cette nouvelle collection sera donc un outil indispensable pour toute personne en quête d'une compréhension des enjeux sociaux de la bioéthique. (shrink)

What sorts of consideration can be normative reasons for action? If we systematize the wide variety of considerations that can be cited as normative reasons, do we find that there is a single kind of consideration that can always be a reason? Desire-based theorists think that the fact that you want something or would want it under certain evaluatively neutral conditions can always be your normative reason for action. Value-based theorists, by contrast, think that what plays that role are evaluative (...) facts (or the facts that subvene them) about what you want, such as the fact that having it would be good in some way. This paper argues that value-based theorists are wrong; if we try to find a single kind of consideration that can always be normative reason, we find that sometimes our reason is the fact that we want something and not any corresponding evaluative fact. (shrink)

The Desire-as-Belief thesis (DAB) states that any rational person desires a proposition exactly to the degree that she believes or expects the proposition to be good. Many people take David Lewis to have shown the thesis to be inconsistent with Bayesian decision theory. However, as we show, Lewis's argument was based on an Invariance condition that itself is inconsistent with the (standard formulation of the) version of Bayesian decision theory that he assumed in his arguments against DAB. The aim of (...) this paper is to explore what impact the rejection of Invariance has on the DAB thesis. Without assuming Invariance, we first refute all versions of DAB that entail that there are only two levels of goodness. We next consider two theses according to which rational desires are intimately connected to expectations of (multi-levelled) goodness, and show that these are consistent with Bayesian decision theory as long as we assume that the contents of 'value propositions' are not fixed. We explain why this conclusion is independently plausible, and show how to construct such propositions. (shrink)

The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais Paradox. In this paper we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world semantics for conditionals, and showing that preferences that are sensitive to counterfactual considerations can still be desirability maximising. We (...) end the paper by investigating the conditions necessary and sufficient for a desirability function to be an expected utility. It turns out that the additional conditions imply highly implausible epistemic principles. (shrink)

According to a desire-satisfaction theory of well-being, the satisfaction of one’s desires is what promotes one’s well-being. Against this, it is frequently objected that some desires are beyond the pale of well-being relevance, for example: the desire to count blades of grass, the desire to collect dryer lint and the desire to make handwritten copies of War and Peace, to name a few. I argue that the satisfaction of such desires – I call them “quirky” desires – does indeed contribute (...) to a desirer’s well-being, when (and only when) the desirer is able to provide what Anscombe calls a desirability characterization of the object of the desire. One successfully provides such a characterization when one is able to describe the object of desire in such a way as to make comprehensible to others what she sees as positive, worthy of pursuit, in that object. To make the case, I consider common desires such as the desires to take a walk on the beach, drink a beer or listen to music. I argue that, although the well-being relevance of such common desires normally is not questioned, their satisfactions contribute to well-being just in case the same condition is met. I then argue by analogy with common desires that quirky desires are also relevant to well-being just in case that condition is met. After sketching this solution to the problem of quirky desires, I show that this response is better than other responses that have been given by desire theorists. I then develop several aspects of this account in response to objections that can be raised against it. Among these (to name a few) are the objection that my account does not apply to the well-being of infants and other inarticulate persons; the objection that intrinsic desires, such as for pleasure, cannot be given desirability characterizations; and the objection that desirability characterizations must advert to pleasure or to objectively good properties of the object of desire, so that my account reduces either to hedonism or to an objective view of well-being. (shrink)

Ambivalence is most naturally characterized as a case of conflicting desires. In most cases, an agent’s intrinsic desires conflict contingently: there is some possible world in which both desires would be satisfied. This paper argues, though, that there are cases in which intrinsic desires necessarily conflict—i.e., the desires are not jointly satisfiable in any possible world. Desiring a challenge for its own sake is a paradigm case of such a desire. Ambivalence of this sort in an agent’s desires creates special (...) problems for the project of reducing all facts about an agent’s desires to facts about his or her preferences over options. If this reductive project fails, there is reason to suspect that the Decision Theory cannot give us a complete theory of Humean rationality. (shrink)

In this paper, we present two puzzles involving desire reports concerning series of events. What does a person want to happen in the first event – is it the event with the highest expected return, or the event that is the initial part of the best series? We show that existing approaches fail to resolve the puzzles around this question and develop a novel account of our own. Our semantics is built around three ideas. First, we propose that desire ascriptions (...) are evaluated relative to a contextually supplied set of propositions, or alternatives. The semantic value of an ascription ‘S wants p’ is determined by S's preference ordering over these alternatives. Second, we propose that desire reports carry a requirement to the effect that the prejacent of the ascription must be suitably related to the background set of alternatives. Finally, we suggest that desire reports carry a dominance condition concerning the subject's ranking of the alternatives. Overall, we argue that our theory provides us with an elegant resolution of our puzzles, and yields a promising approach to desire. (shrink)

The desire-satisfaction theory of well-being says, in its simplest form, that a person’s level of welfare is determined by the extent to which their desires are satisfied. A question faced by anyone attracted to such a view is, *Which desires*? This paper proposes a new answer to this question by characterizing a distinction among desires that isn’t much discussed in the well-being literature. This is the distinction between what a person wants in a merely behavioral sense, in that the person (...) is, for some reason or other, disposed to act so as to try to get it, and what a person wants in a more robust sense, the sense of being *genuinely attracted* to the thing. I try to make this distinction more clear, and I argue for its axiological relevance by putting it to work in solving four problem cases for desire satisfactionism. The theory defended holds that only desires in the latter, genuine-attraction sense are relevant to welfare. (shrink)

One version of the desire satisfaction theory of well-being (i.e., welfare, or what is good for one) holds that only the satisfaction of one's present desires for present states of affairs can affect one's well-being. So if I desire fame today and become famous tomorrow, my well-being is positively affected onlyif tomorrow, when I am famous, I still desire to be famous. Call this the present desire satisfaction theory of well-being. I argue, contrary to this theory, that the satisfaction of (...) past desires that are no longer held does indeed affect one's well-being. The satisfaction of past desires is good for one in that the present satisfaction of past desires positively affects one's past well-being. I argue for this view in stages, starting with the recognition that many of our desires are satisfied not at an instant but over an interval of time, and that it is during this interval of time that our well-being is positively affected. Once we get our foot in the door with some temporal thickness to desire satisfaction and the associated well-being, I argue, the door must open more widely to allow for greater temporal distance between present desire satisfaction and past well-being. I defend my thesis that present satisfaction of past desires increases one's past welfare against objections, including the claim that it involves backward causation and Velleman's claim that the view is highly counterintuitive whether or not it involves backward causation. I argue that some of the objections rely on hedonistic intuitions, intuitions that most desire satisfaction theories of welfare aim to correct. Once properly understood and applied, my counterintuitive and controversial thesis is really quite innocuous. (shrink)

Prologue: retrospective and prospective -- The ethics of enough -- Real and apparent goods -- Wrong desires: pleasure, money, fame, and power -- Right desires: the totum bonum and its constituents -- Fundamental errors in moral philosophy -- Necessary but not sufficient -- Epilogue: transcultural ethics.

Hedonism and the desire-satisfaction theory of welfare are typically seen as archrivals in the contest over identifying what makes one's life go best. It is surprising, then, that the most plausible form of hedonism just is the most plausible form of desire satisfactionism. How can a single theory of welfare be a version of both hedonism and desire satisfactionism? The answer lies in what pleasure is: pleasure is, in my view, the subjective satisfaction of desire. This thesis about pleasure is (...) clarified and defended only after we proceed through the dialectics that get us to the most plausible forms of hedonism and desire satisfactionism. (shrink)

Joining the debate over the roles of reason and appetite in the moral mind, In Praise of Desire takes the side of appetite. Acting for moral reasons, acting in a praiseworthy manner, and acting out of virtue are simply acting out of intrinsic desires for the right or the good.