De la liaison de Charles VII et Agnès Sorel naissent quatre filles, dont trois atteignent l’âge adulte. L’une d’elles, Marie, épouse Olivier de Coëtivy, conseiller de Charles VII. Le couple et trois de leurs enfants ont laissé de nombreux manuscrits richement enluminés, témoins de leur bibliophilie mais aussi du regard porté sur la bâtardise de Marie de Valois par chaque membre de la famille. On découvre à travers les images de ces livres que l’identité bâtarde, dans les milieux de la (...) haute aristocratie et de la royauté, est davantage un honneur qu’un stigmate, comme cela a déjà été démontré, mais plus encore : elle peut faire l’objet d’une commémoration et d’une célébration au-delà de la génération bâtarde, comme c’est le cas dans la Légende dorée de Catherine de Coëtivy et de son mari, dont il sera amplement question. Cet article propose de prolonger la réflexion sur la bâtardise aristocratique selon deux perspectives peu traitées : celle du genre, à travers un exemple de bâtardise féminine et les dynamiques conjugales, et celle de la « mémoire bâtarde » aux générations ultérieures. (shrink)

« Réfléchir aux similarités entre des répertoires très éloignés dans le temps et l’espace permet parfois de repenser à nouveaux frais les oppositions catégorielles qui nous servent à appréhender les genres musicaux. C’est ce qu’avait fait Simha Arom dans un article sur les parentés inattendues entre polyphonies africaines et polyphonies médiévales. En décal(qu)ant ce rapprochement avec la musique techno née à Detroit dans les années 1980-1990, on propose de montrer que l’opposition entre musiques savantes, traditionnelles et populaires, opérante dans le (...) monde occidental depuis le début du xix e siècle, gagne à être enrichie par d’autres grilles d’analyse pour complexifier la cartographie des objets musicaux qui peuplent le monde de la musique aujourd’hui. ». (shrink)

This second of a two-part series of articles on applied semiotics and intercultural training provides a qualitative evaluation of the research initiative Tools for Cultural Development. The discussion will firstly centre on several theoretical and methodological challenges inherent to the qualitative research paradigm and then relate these shifting concerns to convergent findings in poststructuralist semiotics, especially with respect to phenomenology and pragmatics. Analysis of four focus group interviews in France and Australia will examine and evaluate the 2007 training experience in (...) light of the culture-specific contexts and stakeholder groups involved. Of particular concern will be the capacity of qualitative evaluative processes to account for the "local meanings" and "voices" within the trainee narratives so as to highlight their perceptions as to the use of semiotics for designing culturally significant practices in education and praxis. (shrink)

To most people outside the relevant laboratories and operating rooms, xenotransplants and artificial organ transplants are bizarre. While the bizarre scares many away and angers others, Lesley A. Sharp approached it and asked, What behooves medical research to take organs out of pigs and primates and design organs out of metal and plastic and use them to replace failing organs in humans? Sharp attended years of conferences, visited countless hospitals and laboratories, and interviewed engineers, scientists, and surgeons to explore the (...) choices and implicit values of decision‐makers in alternative transplantation. The Transplant Imaginary: Mechanical Hearts, Animal Parts, and Moral Thinking in Highly Experimental Science is a rich resource for philosophers who wish to expound on the morality of implanting nonhuman animal and mechanical organs into humans. The author's thorough ethnographic survey of xeno‐ and biomechanical transplant research leads well into two lines of questioning. First, how ethical is the pursuit of alternative transplant? Second, what is essential for transplant researchers to do their jobs ethically? (shrink)

[Under contract with CUP, in preparation] What is a mind? Is it possible for a computer or other machine to have a mind? And how would we know? Mental fictionalism offers a new approach to these timely questions. Its central idea is that mental states (thoughts, beliefs, desires) are useful fictions. When we talk about mental states, we should be seen as merely speaking “as if” humans (and perhaps other creatures or even artifacts) had such states, in order to make (...) sense of their behavior. -/- This book is unique in presenting and defending three versions of mental fictionalism in a single volume (prefix-semantical mental fictionalism, pretense mental fictionalism, and affective storyism). The authors are three of the world’s most prominent proponents (respectively) of each variety: T. Parent (Nazarbayev University), Adam Toon (University of Exeter), and Tamás Demeter (Corvinus University of Budapest). The book essentially pits these different varieties of mental fictionalism against each other, allowing the reader to size them up. In the process, fresh perspectives are offered on foundational matters in the philosophy of mind, such as the nature of mental states and folk psychology, as well as hot topics such as embodied cognition, animal cognition, consciousness, and AI. -/- UPDATE: The chapter on prefix-semantical mental fictionalism is available upon request; write to nontology "at" gmail. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 27-29.

The purpose of this article is to examine stakeholder identification and prioritization by managers using the power, legitimacy, and urgency framework of Mitchell et al. (Academy of Management Review 22, 853–886; 1997). We use a multi-method, comparative case study of two large-scale sporting event organizing committees, with a particular focus on interviews with managers at three hierarchical levels. We support the positive relationship between number of stakeholder attributes and perceived stakeholder salience. Managers’ hierarchical level and role have direct and moderating (...) effects on stakeholder identification and perceived salience. We also found that most stakeholders were definitive, dominant, or dormant types – the other five types were rare. Power has the most important effect on salience, followed by urgency and legitimacy. Based on our case study, we offer several ways to advance the theory of stakeholder identification and salience. (shrink)

Do you know who you are? If the question seems unclear, it might owe to the notion of ‘knowing-wh’ (knowing-who, knowing-what, knowing-when, etc.). Such knowledge contrasts with ‘knowing-that’, the more familiar topic of epistemologists. But these days, knowing-wh is receiving more attention than ever, and here we will survey three current debates on the nature of knowing-wh. These debates concern, respectively, (1) whether all knowing-wh is reducible to knowing-that (‘generalized intellectualism’), (2) whether all knowing-wh is relativized to a contrast proposition (...) (‘contrastivism about knowing-wh’), and (3) whether the context-sensitivity of knowing-wh is a semantic or purely pragmatic phenomenon (‘contextualism vs. invariantism about knowing-wh’). (shrink)

_Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind_ attempts to solve a grave problem about critical self-reflection. Psychological studies indicate not just that we are bad at detecting our own "ego-threatening" thoughts; they also suggest that we are ignorant of even our ordinary thoughts. However, self-reflection presupposes an ability to know one’s own thoughts. So if ignorance is the norm, why attempt self-reflection? While admitting the psychological data, this book argues that we are infallible in a limited range of self-discerning judgments—that in some (...) cases, these judgments are self-fulfilling or self-verifying. Even so, infallibility does not imply indubitability, and the author does not wish to provide a "foundation" for empirical knowledge. The point is rather to explain how self-reflection as a rational activity is possible. The book will be of interest to scholars working on the issue of self-reflection across a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

[For a planned Festschrift on William Lycan, edited by Mitch Green and Jan Michel.] Lycan (2022) sums up his (2019) _On Evidence in Philosophy_ as a “dolorous” book. This is primarily because the book claims that the field is infected with non-rational socio-psychological forces (fashion, bias, etc.) and that there is a persistent lack of consensus on philosophical questions. In this paper, I primarily rebut Lycan's second reason for dolorousness. For one, if we attend carefully to his text, his metaphilosophical (...) despair seems to die a death of 1000 qualifications. For another, several of the most important qualifications to such pessimism have been omitted. In attending to these, we shall see that philosophy has much to be proud of. I also offer an explanation for why many optimistic signs for philosophical progress tend to escape our notice. (shrink)

Here I explore the prospects for fictionalism about the mental, modeled after fictionalism about possible worlds. Mental fictionalism holds that the mental states posited by folk psychology do not exist, yet that some sentences of folk psychological discourse are true. This is accomplished by construing truths of folk psychology as “truths according to the mentalistic fiction.” After formulating the view, I identify five ways that the view appears self-refuting. Moreover, I argue that this cannot be fixed by semantic ascent or (...) by a kind of primitivism. Even so, I also show that the “self-refutation” charges are subtly question-begging. Nevertheless, the reply reveals that a mental fictionalist ought to be a kind of quietist. (shrink)

Over 115 000 people are waiting for life-saving organ transplants, of whom a small fraction will receive transplants and many others will die while waiting. Existing efforts to expand the number of available organs, including increasing the number of registered donors and procuring organs in uncontrolled environments, are crucial but unlikely to address the shortage in the near future and will not improve donor/recipient compatibility or organ quality. If successful, organ bioengineering can solve the shortage and improve functional outcomes. Studying (...) manufactured organs in animal models has produced valuable data, but is not sufficient to understand viability in humans. Before risking manufactured organ experimentation in living humans, study of bioengineered organs in recently deceased humans would facilitate evaluation of the function of engineered tissues and the complex interactions between the host and the transplanted tissue. Although such studies do not pose risk to human subjects, they pose unique ethical challenges concerning the previous wishes of the deceased, rights of surviving family members, effective operation and fair distribution of medical services, and public transparency. This article investigates the ethical, legal and social considerations in performing engineered organ research on the recently deceased. (shrink)

Entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A summary of the literature on whether externalism about thought content precludes non-empirical knowledge of one's own thoughts.

This paper examines the logic of conditional obligation, which originates from the works of Hansson, Lewis, and others. Some weakened forms of transitivity of the betterness relation are studied. These are quasi-transitivity, Suzumura consistency, acyclicity and the interval order condition. The first three do not change the logic. The axiomatic system is the same whether or not they are introduced. This holds true under a rule of interpretation in terms of maximality and strong maximality. The interval order condition gives rise (...) to a new axiom. Depending on the rule of interpretation, this one changes. With the rule of maximality, one obtains the principle known as disjunctive rationality. With the rule of strong maximality, one obtains the Spohn axiom (also known as the principle of rational monotony, or Lewis’ axiom CV). A completeness theorem further substantiates these observations. For interval order, this yields the finite model property and decidability of the calculus. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s rule-following argument suggests that linguistic understanding does not consist in knowing interpretations, whereas Kripkenstein’s version suggests that meaning cannot be metaphysically fixed by interpretations. In the present paper, rule-following considerations are used to suggest that certain ontological questions cannot be answered by interpretations. Specifically, if the aim is to specify the ontology of a language, an interpretation cannot answer what object an expression of L denotes, if the interpretations are themselves L-expressions. Briefly, that’s because the ontology of such interpretations (...) would naturally be in question as much as the expressions they interpret. So in order to settle the question of ontology, the interpretations themselves would need to be interpreted, and thus a regress. I conclude that knowing the answer to what ontology underlies L cannot be a matter of knowing interpretations. The paper ends with a quietist conclusion; the slogan is that empirical science is ontology enough, or rather, it is about all the ontology one should expect. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists generally hold that, in light of the empirical data, a subject lacks infallible access to her own mental states. However, while subjects certainly are fallible in some ways, I show that the data fails to discredit that a subject has infallible access to her own occurrent thoughts and judgments. This is argued, first, by revisiting the empirical studies, and carefully scrutinizing what is shown exactly. Second, I argue that if the data were interpreted to rule out all (...) such infallibility, the relevant psychological studies would be self-effacing. For they adopt a methodology where a subject is simply presumed to know her own second-order thoughts and judgments--as if she were infallible about them. After all, what she expresses as her second-order judgment is trusted as accurate without independent evidence — even though such judgments often misrepresent the subject’s first-order states. The upshot is that such studies do not discredit all infallibility hypotheses regarding self-attributions of occurrent states. (shrink)

The main contribution of this paper is a completeness result for an axiomatization of Hansson [13]'s deontic system DSDL2, whose semantics involves a non-necessarily transitive betterness relation. Reference is made to a deductive system put forth by Åqvist [2, 3].