Mi ensayo trata de mostrar que es insostenible la ficción de Rorty de una civilización avanzada científicamente cuyos habitantes no sintieran el dolor como una vivencia sufrida en primera persona y que únicamente lo captaran como una excitación objetiva de su sistema nervioso. Entre otras dudas relativas a que esa captación objetiva y exacta se hallaría en indefinida reconstrucción teórica y a que ella no puede ser la experiencia primera del dolor ni siquiera en esa otra galaxia, aduzco que tener (...) un estado fisiológico no equivale por principio a captarlo y que captar determinados rasgos objetivos no puede equivaler por principio a sufrir, a padecer. Concluyo señalando que Rorty, en su empeño por impugnar las representaciones mentales, pierde de vista cómo la experiencia del dolor manifiesta sobre todo la condición originaria del cuerpo vivido.My paper tries to show that Rorty’s fiction of a scientifically developed civilization whose inhabitants should not feel pain as a first-person experience, but would grasp it rather as an objective state of their nervous system, is unsustainable from a phenomenological point of view. I point out several doubts concerning the facts that such an objective apprehension would be in an indefinite process of theoretical reconstruction, and that even in that other galaxy it could not be valid as the original pain situation. But then I focus on the principles that to have a physiological state cannot be equiva-lent to grasping it, and second that to grasp several objective features cannot be equivalent to suffering or to undergoing pain. I conclude by suggesting that Rorty’s eagerness to discard mental representations made him neglect the lived body as implied in everyday experience: the body, not the mind, comes to the fore in the experience of pain. (shrink)

C'est au croisement des personnalités et des événements que se structure progressivement une culture stratégique. Qu'en est-il de celle de la France, nation bâtie "à coups d'épée"? Quelles expériences l'ont forgée, quelles philosophies la sous-tendent? Telles sont les questions fondamentales auxquelles répond cet ouvrage. Car la stratégie militaire française constitue un objet d'étude à la fois bien et mal connu. Connu puisqu'inscrit dans une histoire intimement liée à la construction d'une identité nationale et internationale dont on constate aujourd'hui encore (...) sur les champs de guerre toute la vivacité. Mal connu cependant lorsqu'il s'agit d'en examiner les fondements idéels et culturels. Cette méconnaissance est liée à la complexité même de toute stratégie. Loin d'être un simple art des moyens, elle produit des concepts, doctrines ou représentations de la guerre qui résultent d'expériences militaires spécifiques mais qui trouvent leurs racines dans des conditions philosophiques à l'oeuvre dans la construction de toute stratégie. La stratégie militaire française constitue un fascinant terrain d'étude : cette indispensable histoire philosophique de la pensée stratégique française — du XVIIIème siècle à nos jours — en est le reflet. Ce premier tome traite de la stratégie continentale. Un second tome à paraître traitera de la stratégie africaine. (shrink)

The sense of agency – the subjective feeling of being in control of our own actions – is one central aspect of the phenomenology of action. Computational models provided important contributions toward unveiling the mechanisms underlying the sense of agency in individual action. In particular, the sense of agency is believed to be related to the match between the actual and predicted consequences of our own actions (comparator model). In the study of joint action, models are even more necessary to (...) understand the mechanisms underlying the development of coordination strategies and how the subjective experiences of control emerge during the interaction. In a joint action, we not only need to predict the consequences of our own actions; we also need to predict the actions and intentions of our partner, and to integrate these predictions to infer their joint consequences. Understanding our partner and developing mutually satisfactory coordination strategies are key components of joint action and in the development of the sense of joint agency. Here we discuss a computational architecture which addresses the sense of agency during intentional, real-time joint action. We first reformulate previous accounts of the sense of agency in probabilistic terms, as the combination of prior beliefs about the action goals and constraints, and the likelihood of the predicted movement outcomes. To look at the sense of joint agency, we extend classical computational motor control concepts - optimal estimation and optimal control. Regarding estimation, we argue that in joint action the players not only need to predict the consequences of their own actions, but also need to predict partner’s actions and intentions (a ‘partner model’) and to integrate these predictions to infer their joint consequences. As regards action selection, we use differential game theory – in which actions develop in continuous space and time - to formulate the problem of establishing a stable form of coordination and as a natural extension of optimal control to joint action. The resulting model posits two concurrent observer-controller loops, accounting for ‘joint’ and ‘self’ action control. The two observers quantify the likelihoods of being in control alone or jointly. Combined with prior beliefs, they provide weighing signals which are used to modulate the ‘joint’ and ‘self’ motor commands. We argue that these signals can be interpreted as the subjective sense of joint and self agency. We demonstrate the model predictions by simulating a sensorimotor interactive task where two players are mechanically coupled and are instructed to perform planar movements to reach a shared final target by crossing two differently located intermediate targets. In particular, we explore the relation between self and joint agency and the information available to each player about their partner. The proposed model provides a coherent picture of the inter-relation of prediction, control, and the sense of agency in a broader range of joint actions. (shrink)

The terms Jacobin and Jacobinism in political discourse never exclusively refer to the members of the French revolutionary club, or to the often contradictory and changing ideas that were debated there. They have been used over time to designate, often in a derogatory way, some political figures and intellectual currents that sometimes bear only a vague relationship to French revolutionary thought. The political events that marked Switzerland in the years 1847-1848 offer a perfect illustration of the way such terms were (...) constituted as political categories and transposed in the Swiss context as remote echoes of the French Revolution. Still today, the events of the years 1847-1848 are often analysed by scholars or by the public using such categories. This tendency fuels a historiography often tainted with ideological preconceptions. Now, this historiography takes up again, sometimes without hindsight, the terms used by the staunchest contemporary opponents to a Helvetic federal construction who did not hesitate to draw a parallel with the bloodiest episodes of the French Revolution, of which the Jacobins were supposed to be the main protagonists. The use of the terms Jacobin and Jacobinism therefore pertains to a mechanistic and repetitive conception of history and serves to disqualify political actors and currents that stand poles apart from the French revolutionary ideals. (shrink)

The conclusions drawn by Benjamin Libet from his work with collegues on the timing of somatosensorial conscious experiences has met with a lot of praise and criticism. In this issue we find three examples of the latter. Here I attempt to place the divide between the two opponent camps in a broader perspective by analyzing the question of the relation between physical timing, neural timing, and experiential timing. The nervous system does a sophisticated job of recombining and recoding messages from (...) the sensorial surfaces and if these processes are slighted in a theory, it might become necessary to postulate weird operations, including subjective back-referral. Neuroscientifically inspired theories are of necessity still based on guesses, extrapolations, and philosophically dubious manners of speech. They often assume some neural correlate of consciousness as a part of the nervous system that transforms neural activity in reportable experiences. The majority of neuroscientists appear to assume that the NCC can compare and bind activity patterns only if they arrive simultaneously at the NCC. This leads to a search for synchrony or to theories in terms of the compensation of differences in neural delays . This is the main dimension of the Libet discussion. Examples from vision research, such as “temporal-binding-by-synchrony” and the “flash-lag” effect, are then used to illustrate these reasoning patterns in more detail. Alternatively one could assume symbolic representations of time and space that are not coded in their own dimension . Unless such tags are multiplexed with the quality message , one gets a binding problem for tags. One of the hidden aspects of the discussion between Libet and opponents appears to be the following. Is the NCC smarter than the rest of the nervous system, so that it can solve the problems of local sign and timing on its own, or are these pieces of information coded symbolically early on in the system? A supersmart NCC appears to be the assumption of Libet's camp . The wish to distribute the smartness evenly across all stages of processing in the nervous system appears to motivate the opponents. I argue that there are reasons to side with the latter group. (shrink)

This dissertation critically examines the writings of Max Stirner, especially his masterpiece The Ego and Its Own, as a discourse of resistance against modern forms of domination and, in particular, against the modern political State. I begin by examining Stirner's inversion of the Hegelian concept of the State, from the “actualization of freedom”to an instance of domination. The State appears, to Stirner as to Hegel, as the guardian of order and cohesion in modern societies. While both recognize the genesis of (...) sovereign power as violent, Hegel sustains that, with the progress of civilization, force is eradicated from the public order and private interests and common interest are reconciled. Stirner, on the contrary, insists that force is the other face of right, as the hidden pillar of the norm, which only reveals itself in moments of crisis. Stirner’s focus on the extreme case, largely anticipated and devalued by Hegel as unilateral and equivocal, seems to be anchored on the conviction that conflict is ineradicable, that between my own will and the (political, social) representation of that will there is always a gap, which cannot be filled by any collective arrangement. From this follows that, if conflict is scarcely manifest in modern societies, it is not because it was truly solved, but because it is effectively masked, due to the dissymmetry of power and the internalization of authority. The “unique one” appears, in this environment of great suspicion, as the one who cannot be represented, who surpasses every representation, threatening the authority of every representative. Accordingly, the “unique one” reclaims his own power, without allowing the satisfaction of his will to be mediated by obedience to collective institutions, affirming himself instead as sovereign over himself. Stirner suggests that the self-affirmation of the “unique one” inevitably leads to confrontation with the external powers that organize his existence. Stirner, nonetheless, chooses to think this confrontation in terms of a “revolt”, of a reflexive and individual act by which the individual emerges from the situation in which he finds himself, rather than as a “revolution”, a political or social act directed towards the systemic transformation of the status quo. Even if we admit the validity of the Stirnerian critique of the legitimizing discourses of modernity, the problem remains if this critique can be sustained on the “unique one”, “a thoughtless word”, an openly self-contradictory and self-destructive name, subject or principle (?). The possibility of founding a discourse of resistance on the egoism of Max Stirner seems to depend upon the answer that we choose to give to two intimately connected questions: what remains after the destructive vortex of the “unique one” that may sustain the resistance against a state that Max Stirner deems oppressive? Can this resistance be realized in the revolt of a unique one without the recognition of another one with whom to build the conditions of freedom? (shrink)

In order to think and talk about time, people often use the ego- or time-moving representation. In the ego-moving representation, the self travels through a temporal landscape, leaving past events behind and approaching future events; in the time-moving representation, the self is stationary and temporal events pass by. Several studies contest to the psychological ramifications of these two representations by, inter alia, demonstrating a link between them and event valence. These studies have, however, been limited to English speakers, even though (...) language has been found to affect time representation. The present study therefore replicated Margolies and Crawford’s experiment on event valence and time representation amongst speakers of Dutch. Unlike Margolies and Crawford, we do not find that positive valence leads to the endorsement of an ego-moving statement. Future studies will need to determine the ways through which language might moderate the relation between event valence and time representation. (shrink)

The objective of this article is twofold. First, a methodological issue is addressed. It is pointed out that even if philosophers of mathematics have been recently more and more concerned with the practice of mathematics, there is still a need for a sharp definition of what the targets of a philosophy of mathematical practice should be. Three possible objects of inquiry are put forward: (1) the collective dimension of the practice of mathematics; (2) the cognitives capacities requested to the practitioners; (...) and (3) the specific forms of representation and notation shared and selected by the practitioners. Moreover, it is claimed that a broadening of the notion of ‘permissible action’ as introduced by Larvor (2012) with respect to mathematical arguments, allows for a consideration of all these three elements simultaneously. Second, a case from topology – the proof of Alexander’s theorem – is presented to illustrate a concrete analysis of a mathematical practice and to exemplify the proposed method. It is discussed that the attention to the three elements of the practice identified above brings to the emergence of philosophically relevant features in the practice of topology: the need for a revision in the definition of criteria of validity, the interest in tracking the operations that are performed on the notation, and the constant and fruitful back-and-forth from one representation to another in dealing with mathematical content. Finally, some suggestions for further research are given in the conclusions. (shrink)

Our ability for scientific reasoning is a byproduct of cognitive faculties that evolved in response to problems related to survival and reproduction. Does this observation increase the epistemic standing of science, or should we treat scientific knowledge with suspicion? The conclusions one draws from applying evolutionary theory to scientific beliefs depend to an important extent on the validity of evolutionary arguments (EAs) or evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs). In this paper we show through an analytical model that cultural transmission of scientific (...) knowledge can lead toward representations that are more truth-approximating or more efficient at solving science-related problems under a broad range of circumstances, even under conditions where human cognitive faculties would be further off the mark than they actually are. (shrink)

In this work we attempt to confront the orthodox widespread claim, present in the philosophical and foundational debates about Quantum Mechanics (QM), that ‘superpositions are never actually observed in the lab’. In order to do so, we begin by providing a critical analysis of the famous measurement problem which, we will argue, was originated as a consequence of the strict application of the empirical-positivist requirements to subsume the quantum formalism under their specific understanding of a physical ‘theory’. In particular, the (...) ad hoc introduction of the projection postulate (or measurement rule) can be understood as the necessity of imposing a naive empiricist standpoint which presupposes that observations are self evident givens of “common sense” experience independent of metaphysical (or conceptual) presuppositions yet necessarily represented in binary terms. We then turn our attention to two “non-collapse” interpretations of QM—namely, modal and many worlds—which even though deny that the “collapse” is a real physical process retain anyhow the projection rule as a necessary axiom of the theory itself. In contraposition, following Einstein’s claim that “it is only the theory which decides what can be observed”, we propose a return to the realist representational understanding of physical theories in which ‘observation’ is not a “self evident” given of experience but something that can be only understood in the context of a theoretical (formal-conceptual) scheme. It is from this standpoint that we discuss a new non-classical conceptual representation which allows us to understand quantum phenomena in an intuitive (anschaulicht) manner. Leaving behind the projection postulate, we discuss the general physical conditions for measuring and observing quantum superpositions in the lab. (shrink)

A powerful idea put forward in the recent philosophy of science literature is that scientific models are best understood as instruments, tools or, more generally, artifacts. This idea has thus far been developed in combination with the more traditional representational approach: accordingly, current artifactualist accounts treat models as representational tools. But artifactualism and representationalism are independent views, and adopting one does not require acceptance of the other. This paper argues that a leaner version of artifactualism, free of representationalist assumptions, is (...) both desirable and viable. Taking seriously the idea that models are artifacts can help us philosophically to make sense of how and why scientific modeling works even without reference to representation. (shrink)

With the collapse of the bipolar system of global rivalry that dominated world politics after the Second World War, and in an age that is seeing the return of "ethnic cleansing" and "identity politics," the question of violence, in all of its multiple ramifications, imposes itself with renewed urgency. Rather than concentrating on the socioeconomic or political backgrounds of these historical changes, the contributors to this volume rethink the _concept_ of violence, both in itself and in relation to the formation (...) and transformation of identities, whether individual or collective, political or cultural, religious or secular. In particular, they subject the notion of self-determination to stringent scrutiny: is it to be understood as a value that excludes violence, in principle if not always in practice? Or is its relation to violence more complex and, perhaps, more sinister? Reconsideration of the concepts, the practice, and even the critique of violence requires an exploration of the implications and limitations of the more familiar interpretations of the terms that have dominated in the history of Western thought. To this end, the nineteen contributors address the concept of violence from a variety of perspectives in relation to different forms of cultural representation, and not in Western culture alone; in literature and the arts, as well as in society and politics; in philosophical discourse, psychoanalytic theory, and so-called juridical ideology, as well as in colonial and post-colonial practices and power relations. The contributors are Giorgio Agamben, Ali Behdad, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Michael Dillon, Peter Fenves, Stathis Gourgouris, Werner Hamacher, Beatrice Hanssen, Anselm Haverkamp, Marian Hobson, Peggy Kamuf, M. B. Pranger, Susan M. Shell, Peter van der Veer, Hent de Vries, Cornelia Vismann, and Samuel Weber. (shrink)

The standard representation of the Central Dogma (CD) of Molecular Biology conspicuously ignores metabolism. However, both the metabolites and the biochemical fluxes behind any biological phenomenon are encrypted in the DNA sequence. Metabolism constrains and even changes the information flow when the DNA‐encoded instructions conflict with the homeostasis of the biochemical network. Inspection of adaptive virulence programs and emergence of xenobiotic‐biodegradation pathways in environmental bacteria suggest that their main evolutionary drive is the expansion of their metabolic networks towards new chemical (...) landscapes rather than perpetuation and spreading of their DNA sequences. Faulty enzymatic reactions on suboptimal substrates often produce reactive oxygen species (ROS), a process that fosters DNA diversification and ultimately couples catabolism of the new chemicals to growth. All this calls for a revision of the CD in which metabolism (rather than DNA) has the leading role. (shrink)

Semantic noise, the effect ensuing from the denotative and thus functional variability exhibited by different terms in different contexts, is a common concern in natural language processing (NLP). While unarguably problematic in specific applications (e.g., certain translation tasks), the main argument of this paper is that failing to observe this linguistic matter of fact as a generative effect rather than as an obstacle, leads to actual obstacles in instances where language model outputs are presented as neutral. Given that a common (...) and long-standing challenge in NLP is the interpretation of ambiguous – i.e., semantically noisy – cases, this article focuses on an exemplar ambiguity-resolution task in NLP: the problem of anaphora in Winograd schemas. The main question considered is: to what extent is the standard approach to disambiguation in NLP subject to a stagnant “image of language”? And, can a transdisciplinary, dynamic approach combining linguistics and philosophy elucidate new perspectives on these possible conceptual shortcomings? In order to answer these questions we explore the term and concept of noise, particularly in its presentation as semantic noise. Owing to its definitional plurality, and sometimes even desirable unspecificity, the term noise is thus used as proof of concept for semantic generativity being an inherent characteristic in linguistic representation, and its concept is used to interrogate assumptions admitted in the resolution of Winograd schemas. The argument is speculative and theoretical in method, and the result is an analysis which provides an account of the fundamentally dialogical and necessarily open-ended effects of semantic noise in natural language. (shrink)

The brain represents the body in different ways for different purposes. Several concepts and even more numerous labels have historically been proposed to define these representations in operational terms. Recent evidence of embodiment of external objects has added complexity to an already quite intricate picture. In particular, because of their perceptual and motor effects, both rubber hands and tools can be conceived as embodied, that is, represented in the brain as if they were parts of one's own body. But are (...) there any limits to what we can embody? What constraints lay upon embodiment? And are they similar both for motor embodiment and for perceptual embodiment? Here, we consider the implications emerging from the different, and up-to-now relatively separate research domains of tool use and rubber hand illusion for understanding the rules of embodiment. In particular, we compare what the embodiment of tools and prostheses may or may not have in common. We conclude that in both cases, although for different reasons and with different constraints, embodiment is only partial. (shrink)

In the last 20 years the institution of the museum has gone through a period of redefining its role and its functions in society, its forms of representation, its authority in discourses on the past and its objects. The stated aim of many of the ‘memory museums’ which were established during this period is to invite reflection on the aestheticization of memory and on the fact that the exhibition is seen as a narrative which is challenging conventional codes of perception. (...) By granting a voice to what has been left out of the dominant discourses of history and of everyday experience, they try to integrate diversified and sometimes even incompatible narratives – a mode of representation that has so far been the domain of art and specifically literature. This contribution argues that it is not only between the museum and the memorial that distinctions between different memory media are getting blurred: examples such as Libeskind's Jewish Museum, which wants to be read as a text, and W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz, which he described as an alternative Holocaust museum, indicate that aspects of intermediality gain importance in the contemporary memorial landscape. (shrink)

Despite the unquestionable importance of technological progress in twenty-first-century society, the decision by many political leaders worldwide to treat natural sciences as an almost exclusive priority betrays a terrible misconception of the complexity of the contemporary world. As the Renaissance cannot be reduced to Copernicus’s or Galileo’s brilliant contributions, or Enlightenment to the works of such giants as Newton and Cavendish, contemporary society will hardly be remembered as just a series of amazing software and gadget updates. There are three categories (...) of questions today that only humanities are prone to answer. The first one, exploring the relations between subject and object mediated by the meaning of “property”, ultimately concerns the discussion between legality and legitimacy. Not long ago, teenagers were still being sued by the giants of the Entertainment Industry for downloading songs, and the practice of mash-ups or remixing even now arouses huge polemics. The second one, focused on the self-representations of the subject, concerns the changing meanings (and representations) of identity and cultural borders in a globalizing world. Finally, the inter-subjective interactions are the centre of the political tensions between democracy and demagogy, two opposed categories that have often been presented as hardly distinguishable from each other. (shrink)

Philosophy professor, humorist, and identical twin Helena de Bres takes the curious, wondrous, ludicrous experience of being a twin as a lens through which to reconsider our place in the world and how we relate to others. Which one are you? Are you the same? Can you read each other's minds? Identical twins get the weirdest existential questions from strangers, also from loved ones, in fact, even from themselves. For twins fascinate all of us... including twins. For Helena de Bres, (...) this fascination was never far from philosophy's most unnerving unknowns. What makes someone themselves rather than someone else? What does perfect love look like? Can we really act freely? Drawing from her relationship with her own twin Julia, and accompanied by Julia's line drawings, Helena uses twinhood to rethink the limits of personhood, consciousness, love, freedom, even justice. With her inimitably candid, goofy, brilliant voice, she explores the long tradition of twin representations in art, myth, and popular culture; their "freakish" history; their peculiar social standing; and what it's really like to be one of two. With hope and humor, she argues that our reactions to twins reveal our broader desires and fears about selfhood, fate, and human connection, and that reflecting on twinhood can help each of us-twin and singleton alike-to recognize our own multiplicity, and approach life with greater curiosity, imagination, and courage. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 3-9 [Access article in PDF] The Suspended Substantive On Animals and Men in Giorgio Agamben's The Open Leland de la Durantaye Giorgio Agamben. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. [O] Trans. of L'aperto: L'uomo e l'animale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002. [A] With a title as enigmatic as The Open, the reader might well wonder, "the open what?" Is the title's (...) adjective to stand alone? Does it need no substantive to support it? This unfamiliar title is not what one might first guess—it is not an awkward translation from the work's original title. No substantive follows in the original, and none is meant to. The idea that gives Agamben's book its title is that of an openness which is unconditioned—and perhaps unconditional, an openness which is unspecified—and perhaps unspecifiable.If the answer to the question "the open what?" can be answered with no substantive, might we ask in what this opening occurs? Between what more substantive things has an indefinable space been opened? The first answer to the question can be found in the work's subtitle—Man and Animal. The open space in question is that which separates and distinguishes man from animal. Philosophers, anthropologists, social scientists, zoologists, chemists, taxonomists—and many others—have had no small difficulty in agreeing upon the matter.Philosophers have traditionally had a low opinion of animals [cf. de Fontenay]. Descartes had especially little respect for the minds of animals and influentially classified them as automata mechanica. As Agamben notes, the great naturalist and taxonomist Linnaeus responded to this assertion with the laconic rejoinder: "Descartes obviously never saw an ape" [cf. O 23/A 30; translation modified]. Philosophers have been more eager than taxonomists to put distance between themselves and the animals—and for this reason have been particularly interested in studying what separates man from animal. The last great philosophical attempt in this regard is that of Martin Heidegger. Despite his preference for the primordial, his openness to the woods and the wilderness, his opinion of animals' faculties was not much higher than that of Descartes. In his view, animals live in an environment in which they are receptive to various stimuli, but where they have nothing approximating what we call a "world"—animals are, as he claims, "poor in world" (weltarm)—or even "without world" (weltlos). They live in such intense and incessant proximity to their environment and its stimuli that they do not see the existential forest for the environmental trees. They can never take a step away from the immediacy of their perception and for this reason cannot be said to possess a "world" in the sense that man, in Heidegger's view, does.As mentioned above, the title The Open is, for all its strangeness, not the result of [End Page 3] an awkward translation from Agamben's Italian. Its strangeness stems, nevertheless, in large part from a translation. Or, to be more precise, from two translations. The first of these is from the German. The German in question is a special one—that of the profoundly idiosyncratic technical vocabulary that Heidegger fashioned for his philosophical purposes. For Heidegger, "the open" is something literally fundamental which lay at the heart of his thought. "The open" is the space revealed to us in the moment when the world we live in, which because of our many tasks and travails we tend to take no distance from (like animals with their stimuli), opens out onto something larger. This moment of distancing ourselves from our everyday concern with means and ends, with stimuli and response, is what gives us not just an environment, but a "world." "The open" is what we find ourselves in when the bustle and haste of our environment recedes and we see that environment in all its strangeness and immensity—as a "world," greater and less graspable than our restricted and finite representations. This experience of "the open" is, for Heidegger, what makes us human, and... (shrink)

This article is part of a research project guided by a methodology for the production of images by children from 2 to 6 years old, developed in the Zona da Mata, in Rondônia. Children's filmic and photographic image productions inspired this inquiry, and suggest a novel way of thinking about children, childhood and research. Based on the questions, What can children's image productions tell us in a survey carried out in periods of social isolation? and What do children’s representations tell (...) us about their lives beyond school? we trace the thematic pathways taken in their production of photographic images and short videos, following our subjects as they engender themselves through the production of images and through their verbal commentaries on those images. What can a child do with a camera in her/his hands? Observing the patterns of their image-making allowed us to enter temporalities and spatialities that suggest other ways of being in the world, particularly in a time of pandemic. What these young children communicate to us through their images and video footage is the power of experience, of traces, remnants and scraps, revealing a capacity for astonishment at things that may go unnoticed by adults. They invite us to experience other ways of seeing and relating to the world, creating other senses and sensations for research, or even for life itself. (shrink)

Products of particlelike representations of the homogeneous Lorentz group are used to construct the degrees of spin angular momentum of a composite system of protons and neutrons. If a canonical labeling system is adopted for each state, a shell structure emerges. Furthermore the use of the Dirac ring ensures that the spin is characterized by half-angles in accord with the neutron-rotation experiment. It is possible to construct a Clebsch-Gordan decomposition to reduce a state of complex angular momentum into simpler states (...) which can be identified with α and β particles, multipole operators, etc. Finally, ground-state energy levels are calculated for all the even-even nuclei by using a differentiable manifold that is spin-graded and gauge-invariant by construction. It is shown that this manifold is Grassmann. (shrink)

Upon her release, Mary gains new knowledge aligned with B-type materialism and property dualism, even though she already possesses knowledge of all the facts and truths related to color and color vision during her time in captivity. I argue that this “cognitive progress” can only be accounted for by the acquisition of a new nonconceptual representation of the color red upon her release. Independently of any concepts, this acquisition already enables her to discriminate all sorts of shades of color within (...) her environment. However, the existence of nonconceptual representations, by itself, is not enough to specify the type of knowledge Mary acquired, obviously. We must add two additional conditions. Firstly, the acquisition of these nonconceptual representations must enrich Mary’s preexisting physical concept of red. Assuming that concepts are mental files, the enrichment takes the form of housing information in analog format, like pictures of the color red. Secondly, by utilizing these enhanced concepts by analog information, Mary can achieve an introspective propositional knowledge. She learns the truth of the crucial proposition: she learns what it is like to experience red. (shrink)

According to Gurwitsch, the body is at least at the margin of consciousness. If all components of the field of consciousness were experienced as equally salient, we would indeed not be able to think and behave appropriately. Though the body may become the focus of our conscious field when we are introspectively aware of it, it remains most of the time only at the background of consciousness. However, we may wonder if bodily states do really need to be conscious, even (...) at the margin, or cannot be simply non-conscious. Action control requires permanent proprioceptive and visual feedback about the state and the position of our body parts. Experimental data show that action monitoring operates at a nonconscious level and we may similarly suggest that we have a continuous unconscious access to bodily information. In this chapter, I thus intend to describe the various levels of body representations with the help of Gurwitsch's distinction. I will investigate the properties and the function of each of these levels. (shrink)

With the advent of the cloud computing model allowing a shared access to massive computing facilities, a surging demand emerges for the protection of the intellectual property tied to the programs executed on these uncontrolled systems. If novel paradigm as confidential computing aims at protecting the data manipulated during the execution, obfuscating techniques (in particular at the source code level) remain a popular solution to conceal the purpose of a program or its logic without altering its functionality, thus preventing reverse-engineering (...) on the program even with the help of computing resources. The many advantages of code obfuscation, together with its low cost, makes it a popular technique. This paper proposes a novel methodology for source code obfuscation that can be used together with other traditional obfuscation techniques, making the code more robust against reverse engineering attacks. Three program complexity metrics are used to define three different single-objective combinatorial optimization versions of the problem, which are solved and analysed. Additionally, three multi-objective problems are defined, those considering each of the selected metrics together with the program execution time, in order to avoid strong obfuscations penalizing the performance. The goal of the defined problems is to find sequences of LLVM optimizations that lead to highly obfuscated versions of the original code. These transformations are applied to the back-end pseudo-assembly code (i.e., LLVM Intermediate Representation), thus avoiding any further optimizations by the compiler. Classical genetic algorithms (GAs) are used to solve the studied problems, namely a basic cellular GA for the single-objective problems and the popular NSGA-II for the multi-objective ones. The promising results show the potential of the proposed technique. (shrink)

In his latest book, Descola analyzes more than 150 graphic works from all over the world, among which are animal statuettes of the Koryaks, a people of the Kamchatka region of Russia. Those figurines always represent animals lying in wait, ready to jump or already running. Such representations, the anthropologist argues, incline us to pay attention to what motivates and what troubles the animals: “All those animals that we see undertaking an action manifestly intentional or properly responding to unexpected events (...) cannot but impose on the observers of their image the idea that they are moved by aims, that they have an interiority just like humans.” This type of animal figuration is especially common in peoples that in Descola's previous book, Beyond Nature and Culture, he referred to as “animist.”In that book, published in 2005, he described the animist ontology and three other modes of paying attention to continuities and differences between humans and animals: naturalism, analogism, and totemism. At the time, he focused exclusively on the description of those ontologies, as opposed to any study of their evolution. He begins his study of the genesis of ontologies in Les formes du visible by suggesting that each type of graphic work induces a different way of paying attention to psychological and physical continuities and differences. For instance, in contrast to a Koryak statuette, an anatomical plate (to use a simple example not covered in the book) depicts only the body of a dead and dissected specimen. By referring simultaneously to an anatomical description of the human body and to that of another mammal, we tend to see how similar our bodies are. Whereas the animist ontology emphasizes the psychological continuity of humans and animals, the naturalist ontology insists instead on their physical continuity. By producing and using repeatedly some kinds of graphic works, each society comes to favor one or another ontology, one or another way of paying attention to the world. (Descola never says so in these words, but what he seems to mean by ontologies are modes of attention).Descola's questions in this new book are engaging: What do images make us pay attention to? What modes of attention do images stimulate? Each case study selected by the author is, moreover, fascinating in itself: an Amerindian mask, an Aboriginal painting on a piece of bark, a sixteenth-century Mongolian drawing of an elephant. The answers offered for the questions asked are unfortunately always already canvassed by the theory of the four ontologies. In previous work, Descola built that theory based on discursive and ethnographic material; sometimes we are left with the impression that images (as opposed to spoken words) do not make any significant difference, since they did not motivate him to modify in any way his theory in his new book.In addition, Descola's framework brings him to focus only on a particular aspect of what images induce in our modes of attention: in his thinking, ontologies are defined solely by the way we notice (or do not notice) differences and continuities between beings on two levels, physical and psychological, which respectively he terms the exteriority and the interiority of beings. By combining these two pairs of opposing features (continuity/difference, interiority/exteriority), he constitutes his four ontologies. But depictions can produce more fine-grained ontologies by making us pay attention to, say, the separation or the blending of bodies, the stability or fluidity of souls, the equality or inequality of power between beings. Moment by moment, while reading Descola, we find ourselves tied to his four ontologies and indeed find it almost impossible to imagine ontologies other than the four he has set out. In a structuralist vein, he even presents that number as a necessary, logical, and cognitive limit to the construction of ontologies. Nevertheless, by opening the analysis of the modes of attention to more than just the double pair of features picked out by the anthropologist, we could well unearth more diversified ontologies, induced by images (and by other cultural and technical particulars). We could detect, in other words, more than four modes of paying attention to our environment and to our companion beings. (shrink)

My title, of course, is an exaggeration. The world no more became mathematical in the seventeenth century than it became ironic in the nineteenth. Either it was mathematical all along, and seventeenth-century philosophers discovered it was, or, if it wasn’t, it could not have been made so by a few books. What became mathematical was physics, and whether that has any bearing on the furniture of the universe is one topic of this paper. Garber says, and I agree, that for (...) Descartes bodies are the things of geometry made real ( Ref). That is a claim about the world: what God created, and what we know in physics, is nothing other than res extensa and its modes. Others, including Marion, hold that in modern science, here represented at its origins by Descartes, representation displaces beings: the knower no longer confronts Being or beings but rather a system of signs, a “code” as Marion calls it, to which the knower stands in the relation of subject to object. The Meditations, or perhaps even the Regulæ, are the first step toward the transcendental idealism of Kant. Most of this paper will be devoted to a more concrete question. Physics in the seventeenth century increasingly became a matter of applying mathematical knowledge to the solution of physical problems. The “mixed sciences” of astronomy, optics, and music, sciences then distinct from physics, became models of understanding for all of natural philosophy. My interest here is in one aspect of that development: how particular physical situations are transformed into mathematical. I will look at the work of Descartes and Isaac Beeckman, contrasting their visions of “physico-mathematics”. (shrink)

Portrait painting is one of the most direct sources of study because of its challenge to temporal limits, since at first instance no effort is required to decode the image. This immediate connection between the observer and the painting itself is even more evident when studying baroque representations. The portraits in the painting Las meninas are an eloquent testimony of that willingness to begin a dialogue created in the past and continued in the present with a back drop acting as (...) a mirror and a chamber of wonders. The silent dialogue gives voice and prominence to the girls and jesters from a perspective that we define today as metapictorial. (shrink)

Magritte et les philosophes, written by a Belgian semiotician, puts in dialogue some paintings by René Magritte with some thoughts of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Foucault, and, in a chapter on La condition humaine, even Plato. Painted in 1933, La condition humaine represents a garden as seen from a salon, but in the room there is already a painting on an easel that represents the same garden. Because the second-order painting (the painting in the painting) is placed in front (...) of the window, we cannot see the full garden of the first-order painting. In it we see only the bottom of a hill and a part of a hedge, but in the second-order painting we see, in perfect continuity, the rest of the hill and the hedge. Thus we are inclined to think that the second-order painting covers exactly the reality it reproduces from the first-order painting and that, if we removed the second-order painting, we would see the same garden with a tree in the middle—a tree that for the moment we see only in the second-order painting.Therefore, some perceive in La condition humaine (and also in a similar painting, La belle captive) a parable of the transparency of painting. Opposing this position, Badir claims instead that “the pictures that are represented [that is, the second-order pictures] seem transparent; they give the sensation of transparency,... but their nature is totally different, and the painted landscapes in the [second-order] painting cannot make the representation [of the first-order painting] disappear.” We cannot superpose the painting over the reality to see whether the strokes of the painting cover exactly the lines of reality, since, if we do so, the painting gets between us and the garden. Still, we as observers cannot help but think that the second-order painting reproduces the reality behind it. But from where does that irresistible intuition come? Not from the resemblance between the picture and what it represents (since we know nothing about what is hidden by the picture), but from the continuity of the brushstrokes in the second-order painting and the lines of reality in the first-order picture.As in Plato's cave, in Magritte's room we have access to a semblance of reality, but in contrast to Plato, who regarded those shadows as pale imitations, Magritte offers us what may be a method of connecting semblance to reality less invidiously. The relation between the second-order picture and the first-order picture, between painting and reality, is not primarily a relation of analogy, since the analogy between the two orders is insinuated by other, nonanalogical relations—those of continuity and proximity between the brushstrokes of the painting and the lines of the garden. Even if Gilles Deleuze is not mentioned in Badir's book, this option seems to me to capture the gist of his critique of Platonism. When we are inclined to see a relation of analogy, Deleuze, like Magritte, wants us to pay attention to other, more diverse and more creative relations: nonanalogical relations that in some cases induce the sensation of resemblance.The title of Badir's book is Magritte and Philosophers, but it could just as well have been Magritte as Philosopher, because the classical philosophers he deals with play only a minor role as possible interlocutors for the painter. Magritte's thinking, as developed in his artwork, constitutes the main subject of this study. We learn while reading this book that painting can be a powerful tool for developing complex concepts and not merely percepts. Its argument may indeed be a critique of Deleuze's too-categorical distinction between the percepts proper to art and the concepts developed by philosophers. (shrink)

Understanding natural phenomena is an important aim of science. Since the turn of the millennium the notion of scientific understanding has been a hot topic of debate in the philosophy of science. A bone of contention in this debate is the role of truth and representational accuracy in scientific understanding. So-called factivists and non-factivists disagree about the extent to which the theories and models that are used to achieve understanding must be true or accurate. In this paper we address this (...) issue by examining a case from the practice of synthetic chemistry. We investigate how understanding is obtained in this field by means of an in-depth analysis of the famous synthesis of periplanone B by W. Clark Still. It turns out that highly idealized models—that are representationally inaccurate and sometimes even inconsistent—and qualitative concepts are essential for understanding the synthetic pathway and accordingly for achieving the synthesis. We compare the results of our case study to various factivist and non-factivist accounts of how idealizations may contribute to scientific understanding and conclude that non-factivism offers a more plausible interpretation of the practice of synthetic chemistry. Moreover, our case study supports a central thesis of the non-factivist theory of scientific understanding developed by De Regt, namely that scientific understanding requires intelligibility rather than representational accuracy, and that idealization is one way to enhance intelligibility. (shrink)

Étienne Pouliot | Résumé : On convient aisément que tout témoignage peut renvoyer à une expérience, passée ou du moins présupposée, ou encore qu’il peut véhiculer en quelque sorte un message. Il ne se réduit pas pour autant à n’être qu’une fenêtre sur autre chose, voire sur lui-même. En vérité, parce qu’il est avant tout parole, le témoignage constitue toujours et se constitue précisément en un certain ratage de l’expérience là représentée, du message là livré, du vécu là offert. Un (...) examen de certaines conditions épistémologiques de cet enjeu de la représentation au coeur du témoignage, en écho à la philosophie de Paul Ricoeur mais pour en signaler le point aveugle, permet d’élucider que cet enjeu y est second — ce qui ne signifie en rien : secondaire — par rapport à un enjeu herméneutique bien plus originaire, bien plus radical et fondamental que la représentation elle-même : celui de la parole. Au travers du témoignage, une parole atteste autant qu’elle efface. |: We all agree that witnessing may refer back to experience — to something from the past or at least to something that is presupposed — or that it may be the vehicle for some message. This does not mean that witnessing is merely a window onto something else, or onto itself. Indeed, because it is first and foremost “word”, it always stands as a reminder of its inability to represent what it purports to represent and as a failure to deliver the message it intends to deliver. This examination of some of the epistemological underpinnings of representation — which echoes the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur even as it points to a blind spot in his position — intends to show that the issue of representation comes second in witnessing and that a far more radical and fundamental issue — a hermeneutical one — also comes into play here. Thus witnessing, and more precisely the word that is witnessing, both attests to and obliterates itself. (shrink)

What type of conceptual information about an object do we get at a brief glance? In two experiments, we investigated the nature of conceptual tokening—the moment at which conceptual information about an object is accessed. Using a masked picture-word congruency task with dichoptic presentations at “brief” (50−60 ms) and “long” (190−200 ms) durations, participants judged the relation between a picture (e.g., a banana) and a word representing one of four property types about the object: superordinate (fruit), basic level (banana), a (...) high-salient (yellow), or low-salient feature (peel). In Experiment 1, stimuli were presented in black-and-white; in Experiment 2, they were presented in red and blue, with participants wearing red-blue anaglyph glasses. This manipulation allowed for the independent projection of stimuli to the left- and right-hemisphere visual areas, aiming to probe the early effects of these projections in conceptual tokening. Results showed that superordinate and basic-level properties elicited faster and more accurate responses than high- and low-salient features at both presentation times. This advantage persisted even when the objects were divided into categories (e.g., animals, vegetables, vehicles, tools), and when objects contained high-salient visual features. However, contrasts between categories show that animals, fruits, and vegetables tend to be categorized at the superordinate level, while vehicles tend to be categorized at the basic level. Also, for a restricted class of objects, high-salient features representing diagnostic color information (yellow for the picture of a banana) facilitated congruency judgments to the same extent as that of superordinate and basic-level labels. We suggest that early access to object concepts yields superordinate and basic-level information, with features only yielding effects at a later stage of processing, unless they represent diagnostic color information. We discuss these results advancing a unified theory of conceptual representation, integrating key postulates of atomism and feature-based theories. (shrink)

I argue for a new reading of Pyrrhonian beliefs inspired by representationalism (the content view) in recent philosophy of mind. I shall argue that there are two senses of acceptance or “acquiescence in something” (eudokein tini pragmati) rather than two senses of belief (doxa). For this reason, we can maintain along with Sextus that the Pyrrhonian skeptic behaves intentionally and can live his life in society adoxastôs without any proper beliefs whatsoever. However, the skeptical sense of acceptance is not the (...) mere avowal of a feeling or a mere report or register of the way things appear to me. I want to suggest the following reading. Acceptance without belief is an anti-predicative passive and involuntary acceptance of content by means of an indicator function (pathos or phainomenon) in virtue of the past regular connection between the representational content and the indicator function. The pathos (as a present state of mind) or the phainomenon “means” (that is, indicates) passively and involuntarily a content in virtue of its regular connection with this content through time. For example, the Pyrrhonian’s acceptance of the content of the sentence “there is fire” is based on the fact that he here and now perceives smoke and that pathos passively and involuntarily means (represents) the content that there is fire. There is no judgment involved at all: even when the skeptic suspends his judgment (epochê) about whether there is fire, his pathos makes him involuntarily accept that there is fire. That is what Sextus, following the Stoic tradition, calls “commemorative signs” (hupomnêstikon) in opposition to the so-called “indicative signs” (endeiktikon), namely the “internal assertion” of the content as a belief (as a propositional attitude). As I do not believe that any reasonable reading of the skeptical acceptance may be defended only by means of philological analysis and by the research of the huge doxography, my arguments deliberately mix historical evidence with reasons of a systematic nature. In this way, the defense of my alternative reading is abductive, namely as the inference to the best explanation. (shrink)

La critique que Rousseau fait de la représentation politique n’a eu aucun succès chez ceux-là mêmes qui ont pourtant retenu ses concepts majeurs, tels ceux de souveraineté populaire et de volonté générale. La thèse ici défendue est que la volonté générale ne peut, ni en théorie ni en pratique, être représentée sans être totalement dénaturée. Resituée dans la problématique qui lui a donné son sens, et qui mobilise aussi bien Hobbes que Pufendorf, le rejet rousseauiste de la représentation (...) apparaît comme corrélatif de la réduction de la souveraineté à un pur vouloir, déchargé des diverses formes du pouvoir. La volonté générale épurée se manifeste alors comme inaltérable et irréductiblement réelle. À l’inverse, il faudra toute une entreprise de déréalisation de la volonté générale pour que les révolutionnaires d’abord, les publicistes ensuite, justifient le principe de la représentation.— Rousseau’s dismissal of the principle of representation failed to convince even those who heartily adopted his main concepts, such as popular sovereignty or general will. In this paper, I claim that there is no way to adapt the general will to the principle of representation, either theoretically or practically, unless one alters completely its very concept. Seen in the problematic context that gives it its real significance, and which involves Hobbes as well as Pufendorf, Rousseau’s disapproval of representation appears as being related to the reduction of sovereignty to a mere will, deprived of power. The pure general will cannot but be unalterable and irreducibly real. French revolutionaries and publicists would have to undertake an extensive derealization of the general will to make it compatible with representation. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against the phenomenal concept strategy (henceforth PCS) and in favor of what Chalmers has called type-A materialism ([2006], [2010] p. 111). On her release, Mary makes no cognitive discovery at all, not even a thin, non-possibility-eliminating discovery, as Tye has recently claimed [2012]. When she is imprisoned, Mary already knows everything that is to be known about the phenomenal character of her experiences. What Mary acquires is a new non-cognitive and nonconceptual representation.

C’est selon la perspective de l’image comme représentation que nous examinons et mettons en parallèle les œuvres de Marcel Duchamp et de Francis Bacon. Duchamp s’extirpe de l’univers de la peinture, émancipe l’art de son champ exclusivement pictural, « rétinien ». Bacon emprunte une voie intermédiaire : celle de la « forme sensible », de la « Figure », c’est-à-dire du « figural ». Qu’il s’agisse de la déformation avec Bacon ou de la transformation avec Duchamp, la représentation (...) n’est telle que parce qu’elle témoigne d’un quelque chose, irreprésentable ou imprésentable, qui l’excède : l’événement de la Figure se nomme ainsi dé-figure et trans-figure. (shrink)

From the semiotics of theatrical representation to cultural anthropology or why theater (resists)? In this paper I propose an epistemological approach to the field of theatre semiotics from the beginning of the 20th century to our days. Firstly, I point out two different periods that have influenced theatre semiotics. The first one centres on reflections and studies by the Prague School of Structuralism. More precisely, I address Jan Mukařovsky’s essays about art and society as well as Jindrich Honzl’s contributions to (...) the study of sign and system in theatre. The second period presented here is that of theatre semiotics in the early 70s and late 80s in France.My goal here is to expose the main reasons that led theatre semiotics to a deadlock in the early 90s. Theatre semiotic research has been rich and fruitful in the beginning of last century. However, in our days it is generally deemed unadvisable to describe theatre representation in terms of sign and system.Although theatre semiotics used to be presented in French university classes, it is no longer possible to do so.Even though general semiotics has progressed by denying the importance of structure and by refusing to search for the minimal sign and its code, theatre semiotics has remained faithful to old communicational semiotics research.Throughout my contribution, I would like to examine the kind of semiotic field best fit to approaching an artistic domain such as theatre. In other words, I would like to show that Western theatre, granted it can be seen as a semiotic object, is first and foremost an artistic and cultural one.In order to do so, I propose a theoretical and methodological framework based on a specific semiotic model: the “indicial semiology” proposed by Anne-Marie Houdebine. Inspired by Juri Lotman’s essays about culture and art, I will try to set “indicial semiology” in the general field of a cultural anthropology. (shrink)

Il s’agit dans cet article d’analyser le travail de désingularisation relative de l’événement que Ricœur opère par couplage avec le récit dans Temps et récit au début des années 1980, puis la reprise de la question de la singularité et de l’unicité de l’événement dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli dans le cadre théorique recomposé de la représentation historienne mise à l’épreuve de “l’événement aux limites” qu’est la Shoah. Dans Temps et récit Ricœur entend dépasser, par l’entrecroisement entre histoire et (...) fiction appliqué à des événements fondateurs d’identité collective comme la Shoah, l’aporie épistémologique de la dichotomie entre une histoire qui dissout l’événement dans l’explication et une attitude purement émotionnelle face aux événements à intensité éthique considérable. Cette narrativisation de l’événement se heurte cependant à la puissance traumatique de l’extra-textuel radical de l’événement-Shoah qui constitue ainsi un défi pour la représentation historienne du passé. C’est cette question que Ricœur reprend dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, mais cette fois-ci cet examen a été largement reconfiguré par la dialectique de la mémoire et de l’histoire contribuant à la représentation du passé. Tout en distinguant l’incomparabilité absolue au plan moral de la Shoah et l’incomparabilité relative sur le plan historiographique, Ricœur maintient que l’enchevêtrement entre jugement historiographique et jugement moral est inévitable, ouvrant ainsi sur la grande question de la responsabilité sociale, politique et éthique de l’historien. (shrink)

La philosophie contemporaine connaît une demi-douzaine de théories de la causalité. À l'époque de Kant et de Hume leur nombre a été moindre, à l'avenir on peut s'attendre à ce que leur nombre continue d'augmenter. Parmi les affirmations faites par ces théories sur la nature de la causalité, certaines sont compatibles entre elles, mais beaucoup ne le sont pas. Par conséquent, ou bien quelques-unes de ces théories sont fausses, ou bien elles ne portent pas sur le même objet. Dans ce (...) dernier cas, il y aurait plusieurs genres de causalité : différentes théories diraient quelque chose de correct à propos de différents genres de causalité. Dans cette situation, il apparaît judicieux de commencer par poser deux questions méta-théoriques : quelle est la tâche d'une théorie de la causalité, et quelles sont les données dont une telle théorie doit tenir compte ? Dans une portion considérable de la littérature philosophique sur la causalité, on cherche en vain une réponse claire à la question de savoir si le but de la théorie est l'explication du concept de causalité sous-jacent à notre pratique effective de jugement, ou au contraire sa révision. Cela va souvent de pair avec l'absence d'une justification du fait que la relation que la théorie se propose de définir peut bien être appelée relation causale. Certaines théories de la causalité hautement élaborées sur le plan technique, comme par exemple certaines variantes probabilistes de la théorie de la régularité où les théories plus récentes du transfert, donnent parfois l'impression que c'est la physique qui détient le monopole de définition en ce qui concerne la nature de la relation causale. Un représentant de la théorie du transfert affirme avec un pathos scientiste inébranlable „que la science physique a découvert la nature de la relation causale dans un large ensemble de cas“. Mais comment les sciences de la nature pourraient-elles découvrir quelque chose de ce genre ? La clarification de l'essence de la relation causale est une tâche philosophique par excellence qui relève plus particulièrement de la métaphysique. Le fait qu'il soit souvent nécessaire, au cours d'une recherche métaphysique, de faire appel à des connaissances scientifiques, ne change rien à l'affaire. Il s'agit d'une tache de métaphysique descriptive, que Strawson a caractérisée comme l'entreprise qui consiste à dégager les traits les plus généraux de la structure effective de notre pensée sur le monde. L'idiome causal est profondément ancré dans les langues naturelles ; et le concept de causalité que nous possédons effectivement se reflète dans notre pratique de jugements causaux. Cela ne signifie pas qu’il soit possible d'extraire directement de cette pratique un concept cohérent de causalité. Notre pratique de jugement possède de nombreux aspects et n'est pas dépourvue d'éléments douteux. Pour des besoins philosophiques, notre pratique effective de jugement a besoin d'une certaine discipline ; c'est en ce sens que je parle de la pratique éclairée de jugement causal. Je considère que c'est notre pratique éclairée de jugement causal qui fournit les données dont la théorie de la causalité doit tenir compte ; et la tâche primordiale d'une telle théorie consiste à indiquer les conditions de vérité de cas non controversés d'énoncés causaux singuliers. [...] . (shrink)

In [7] the authors of this paper argued in favor of the possibility to consider a Paraconsistent Approach to Quantum Superpositions. We claimed that, even though most interpretations of quantum mechanics attempt to escape contradictions, there are many hints -coming from present technical and experimental developments in QM- that indicate it could be worth while to engage in a research of this kind. Recently, Arenhart and Krause have raised several arguments against the PAQS [1, 2, 3]. In [11, 12] it (...) was argued that their reasoning presupposes a metaphysical stance according to which the physical representation of reality must be exclusively considered in terms of the equation: Actuality = Reality. However, from a different metaphysical standpoint their problems disappear. It was also argued that, if we accept the idea that quantum superpositions exist in a potential realm, it makes perfect sense to develop QM in terms of a paraconsistent approach and claim that quantum superpositions are contradictory, contextual existents. Following these ideas, and taking as a standpoint an interpretation in terms of the physical notions of power and potentia put forward in [10, 12, 15], we present a paraconsistent formalization of quantum superpositions that attempts to capture the main features of QM. (shrink)

O presente trabalho versa sobre a constituição da noção de memória na teoria freudiana. Para tanto, utilizamos, de modo primordial, as elaborações desenvolvidas no Projeto para uma psicologia científica. Objetivamos ressaltar que Freud subverte a problemática acerca do conceito de memória, concedendo a essa ideia um caráter criativo que se diferencia da simples representação de um objeto contido na realidade material. Em Freud, a memória excede o que se compreende comumente como evocação, ou seja, a lembrança não se restringe à (...) retomada de uma percepção. Se a memória é considerada como sendo o próprio psiquismo, é a sua relação com a pulsão e, posteriormente, com a noção de a posteriori que possibilita a efetivação de uma memória própria à Psicanálise. Desse modo, explicitamos que a memória em Freud é tanto um imperativo da pulsão quanto o desdobramento dos efeitos de uma temporalidade psíquica. Mesmo que parta de uma construção teórica estritamente associada às ciências naturais, um exame mais detido a respeito das formulações desse período nos ajuda a compreender a maneira como ele arquiteta uma teoria que, pelo menos a princípio, tinha como objetivo último esclarecer a problemática concernente à noção de memória.The present work deals with the constitution of the notion of memory in Freudian theory, primarily making use of the elaboration developed in the Project for a scientific psychology. We aim to point out that Freud subverts the problem of the concept of memory, giving this idea a creative character that differs from the mere representation of an object contained in material reality. In Freud, memory goes beyond what is commonly understood as evocation, i.e., memory is not restricted to a recovery of perception. If memory is considered to be the psyche itself, it is its relationship with drive and later with the notion of Nachträglich that enables the realization of memory appropriate to psychoanalysis itself. Thus, we make it explicit that memory in Freud is both an imperative of drive and of the unfolding of the effects of a psychic temporality. Even though Freud departs from a strictly theoretical construction associated with the natural sciences, a closer examination of his formulations from this period helps us understand how he constructs a theory that, at least at first, had the ultimate goal of clarifying issues regarding the notion of memory. (shrink)

Cet article prétend expliquer l'invisibilité relative du conflit armé colombien par rapport à d'autres situations de crise internationale. Au lieu de présupposer que le problème repose sur une faible médiatisation des événements rapportés à la Colombie, il se penche sur les tentatives de mise en sens des événements effectuées par les journalistes au moment de leur médiatisation. L'argument central est que l'opacité du « problème colombien » sur la scène internationale est surtout liée à la difficulté de parvenir (...) à élaborer un récit capable de rendre intelligible ce qui se passe en Colombie.This article tries to explain the relative invisibility of the Colombian armed conflict in relation to other international crisis situations. Instead assume that the problem lies in a low media coverage of events reported to the British, it focuses on the attempts of making sense of the events conducted by journalists at media coverage. The central argument is that the opacity of the "Colombian problem" on the international scene is mainly due to the difficulty of reaching to develop a story that can make sense of what is happening in Colombia. (shrink)

Le monde se révèle à l'homme, comme matière, temps et esprit. L'on sait à présent que considérés dans l'espace et le temps, la terre est d'une extrême petitesse et l'homme un être éphémère. Une conception du monde qui prendrait l'homme pour centre et partirait de lui ne donnerait donc aucune garantie de probabilité. Pourtant elle est assez générale, accoutumés comme nous sommes à juger d'après les perceptions grossières des sens, qui trop souvent nous induisent en erreur. Selon les physiciens, la (...) formule mathématique réunissant les coördonnées du temps et de l'espace, serait la plus conforme à la représentation du monde matériel. Nous avançons ici l'hypothèse que le monde matériel répond effectivement à cette conception, et qu'il est donc un monde plongé dans un repos éternel, dans lequel nous voyageons, pour ainsi dire, avec notre temps. Grâce à cette hypothèse, la causalité, le miracle, la prévoyance de l'avenir, s'expliquent plausiblement. Manifestement le troisième principe, l'esprit, est à la fois en interaction avec la matière et indépendante d'elle. Cette action réciproque suppose une parenté partielle entre l'esprit et la matière. C'est pourquoi nous proposons une seconde hypothèse: l'esprit est une "facies" de la matière qui reste en dehors de la rigidité du monde considéré comme espace et temps. On a toujours considéré ces éléments spirituels comme étant des êtres spirituels, mais leur aspect anthropomorphique nous empêche de croire à leur existence réelle. Si nous identifions la partie spirituelle du corps humain avec l'homme spirituel, le problème du libre arbitre s'explique avec clarté. Seul le procès spirituel du libre arbitre est vraiment libre, mais la volonté ne peut réaliser aucun changement dans la substance purement matérielle. La conception d'une àme se logeant dans le corps matériel comme dans une maison, et qui par ses actions détermine sa demeure future ne s'accorde pas avec l'hypothèse du monde matériel-et-temporel-en-repos. Suivant nos conceptions humaines, nous avons imaginé des êtres spirituels animés d'une volonté libre. Mais alors il faut supposer une unité spirituelle supérieure, qui considère et qui décide. Or, cette conception étant anthropomorphique il est admissible qu'elle soit la véritable figuration du monde. La solution de ce problème pourrait être trouvée par une troisième hypothèse" selon laquelle il existerait un monde supérieur, dans lequel le monde-du-temps-et-de-l'espace fusionne avec un temps supérieur, auquel le nom de "temps spirituel" serait approprié. Seul, ce monde supérieur plongé dans un repos éternel peut nous expliquer d'une façon convaincante l'univers. Un monde d'une essence et d'une invariabilité éternelles, dans lequel le temps, capable d'agir pas des voies infiniment variées, introduit des événements innombrables, les processus spirituels étant effectués par le temps spirituel, les événements matériels par ce que nous sommes habitués à appeler "le temps". (shrink)

Dans À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust est, en réalité, à la recherche de son identité, de son moi profond et véritable. Pour ce faire, il s'isole du présent dans le but de se retrouver dans le passé. Cependant, la « résurrection du passé », qui doit lui apporter le salut éperdument recherché, n'est pas le produit de la mémoire volontaire. Cette forme de mémoire, fonction de l'évocation objective et « quasi-dépersonnalisée », n'a pas, au dire de Proust, le (...) don de nous représenter le passé dans sa plénitude totale. Dès lors, elle ne saurait le conduire au moi profond, dont elle ne pourrait lui donner qu'une image factice et tronquée. En revanche, la mémoire authentique, selon Proust, est la mémoire involontaire, qui est liée à l'actualité de notre vie par la plus mystérieuse des intimités. Et même, à l'en croire, cette mémoire aurait une fonction méta- physique précise, qui serait de nous révéler notre moi profond, de faire émerger, à la surface de la monotonie de notre présent, notre « essence ». C'est que, pour Proust, le souvenir involontaire n'est pas, en réalité, quelque chose qu'on a, mais bien quelque chose qu'on est. Son rôle n'est pas seulement de fixer des événements écoulés, mais de nous exprimer nous-même, d'affirmer, par delà la multiplicité de nos moi changeants et superficiels, l'identité et la permanence d'un moi authentique et profond.In Remembrance of Things Past , Proust is actually searching for his own identity, his innermost, true self. In order to do this, he isolates himself from the present, with the aim of finding himself in the past. However, the "resurrection of the past", which ought to bring him the salvation so desperately sought, is not the product of voluntary memory. This form of memory, function of the ob- jective, "quasi-depersonalized" evocation, does not have the capability of presenting the past to us again in its totality. Consequently, it could not lead him to the innermost self, of which it could give him only a factitious and truncated image. On the other hand, the authentic memory is the involuntary memory, which is linked to the reality of our life by the most mysterious connections. This memory, according to Proust, would even have a precise metaphysical function, which would be to reveal to us our innermost self, to make our "essence" emerge at the surface of the monotony of our present. This means that the involuntary remembrance is not, in reality, something that one has, but rather something that one is. Its role is not only to set events in time, but to explain ourself to us, to affirm, over and above the multiplicity of our changing and superficial selves, the identity and permanence of an au- thentic, innermost self. (shrink)

Les modes de transmission entre les générations sont structurés par les liens de filiation. Or, ceux-ci peuvent se trouver dérégulés sous la pression de traumatismes, là où règnent les secrets de famille, l’incestualité, la logique narcissique de la filiation au détriment d’une expérience instituée. La filiation peut également se trouver perturbée lorsque le sujet est confronté à des évènements symbolicides, tels la révélation d’un handicap ou un traumatisme génocidaire chez les parents. Dans tous ces cas de figure, ces personnes se (...) sentent assujetties à un passé et ne peuvent se le représenter. Aussi, est-il nécessaire de soutenir une démarche d’appropriation de la figure de filiation traumatique, sans anticiper sur tel ou tel dispositif thérapeutique. La présence, l’attitude du thérapeute et surtout sa capacité à faire résonner ses propres affects contre-transféren-tiels permettent au patient de réactualiser le passé, en suscitant une mobilisation de ses fantasmes. (shrink)

Loin d’être une entité anhistorique, l’homosexualité masculine se caractérise par les différentes formes de subjectivation auxquelles elle a donné lieu. Ainsi, la décennie 1970 voit s’opposer trois modes rivaux de subjectivité homosexuelle : l’homophile, représenté en France par l’association Arcadie, fondée par André Baudry (1922-2018) et éditrice d’un périodique paru de 1954 à 1982 ; le gay, émergeant dans le sillage des événements de Stonewall à New York (1969), et donnant naissance à un Front Gay de Libération ; l’homosexualité (...) révolutionnaire telle qu’elle prend forme après 1968 dans l’éphémère Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire (FHAR) dont les positions sont présentées ici principalement à travers les thèses de Guy Hocquenghem (1946-1988). Loin de représenter un simple clivage intergénérationnel, ces oppositions représentent avant tout différentes conceptions sociales et politiques de l’homosexualité, différentes manières de penser la communauté, mais aussi des modes de subjectivité dans lesquels la vie homosexuelle peut s’incarner dans la période antérieure à l’épidémie de sida. (shrink)

While studies on wine tasting are abundant, particularly in sensory marketing, few analyses focus on the wine glass as a specific object. This object has been examined from various perspectives, including alcohol consumption (Banwell 1999), social practices (Lo Monaco et al. 2009), and even more intriguingly, the influence of the glass on the perception of wine aroma (Cliff 2001, Delwiche & Pelchat 2002). The purpose of this article, however, is to to analyze the linguistic and communicational object of the "wine (...) glass" in its discursive contexts, particularly within the digital space, in order to understand the representations associated with it and how the object is staged from a discursive perspective. (shrink)

C’est dans le cadre du soutien à la parentalité auprès de familles qui « bénéficient » d’une mesure éducative et/ou de placement que nous avons été amenés à mettre en place un dispositif de prise en charge un peu particulier pour ce qui concerne essentiellement les familles monoparentales. Ce dispositif s’attache à prendre en compte les besoins tant de la mère que des enfants et a nécessité de travailler à partir de cadres séparés mais intégrés dans une dynamique d’ensemble. C’est (...) à partir de deux cadres d’élaboration que la symptomatologie familiale pourra être appréhendée : les entretiens individuels avec la mère suivi du cadre des entretiens familiaux à visée thérapeutique qui réunit mère et enfants. L’emploi du génogramme classique au sein du premier dispositif associé à l’emploi du génogramme libre dans le second cadre (qui met plus particulièrement en relief ce qui pour chaque participant fait famille ou empêche de faire famille) vont conjointement permettre de donner un éclairage sur ce qui va se donner à voir de la transmission transgénérationnelle et qui se présente sous la forme de points qui insistent et qui résistent, points traumatiques qui font symptôme. Points traumatiques qui se signalent par des blancs, des absences de représentation, des ratures qui sont autant de marques d’oubli ou de volonté d’oublier, d’effacer ce qui reste en souffrance, en mal d’être dit ou représenté. Au travers de ce dispositif, il est possible d’appréhender le symptôme dans sa structure composite et qui participe de l’individuel et du collectif. Charge aux thérapeutes de travailler à l’intégration des événements traumatiques, au « remaillage familial », pour que ce qui s’apparente à la fatalité ou à la prédétermination en tant que répétition transgénérationnelle à l’œuvre, ouvre de possibles vrais choix de vie. (shrink)

Le théâtre dans l'oeuvre et la pensée de Foucault, ce n'est ni une simple métaphore pour caractériser des événements de sens ou des ruptures pratiques, ni un concept esthétisant qui dédoublerait l'idée de vérité pour la vider de ses prétentions épistémologiques, ni un réservoir d'exemples colorés pour illustrer des expériences historiques. Le théâtre, c'est un opérateur philosophique, une manière de penser autrement. Cet ouvrage montre à quel point, au fil des récits de Foucault, la vérité trouve dans l'histoire l'élément (...) moins de sa réalisation que de sa mise en scène et, partant, de son indéfinie fragmentation : pluralité des voix, dramatiques des prises de parole, résistances et rébellions des corps, spectacles du pouvoir, tragique des vérités impossibles. Si le chemin que trace la vérité dans la vie des hommes relève à ce point de la représentation, du drame ou de la farce, c'est qu'elle n'est pas le reflet calme des choses. La vérité, c'est un trouble critique dans l'expérience de soi, c'est une performance politique. S'appuyant non seulement sur ses ouvrages publiés mais aussi sur un ensemble d'inédits, ce livre déploie le theatrum philosophicum de Foucault, et, plus largement, de la pensée contemporaine. (shrink)

Le monde se révèle à l'homme, comme matière, temps et esprit. L'on sait à présent que considérés dans l'espace et le temps, la terre est d'une extrême petitesse et l'homme un être éphémère. Une conception du monde qui prendrait l'homme pour centre et partirait de lui ne donnerait donc aucune garantie de probabilité. Pourtant elle est assez générale, accoutumés comme nous sommes à juger d'après les perceptions grossières des sens, qui trop souvent nous induisent en erreur. Selon les physiciens, la (...) formule mathématique réunissant les coördonnées du temps et de l'espace, serait la plus conforme à la représentation du monde matériel. Nous avançons ici l'hypothèse que le monde matériel répond effectivement à cette conception, et qu'il est donc un monde plongé dans un repos éternel, dans lequel nous voyageons, pour ainsi dire, avec notre temps. Grâce à cette hypothèse, la causalité, le miracle, la prévoyance de l'avenir, s'expliquent plausiblement. Manifestement le troisième principe, l'esprit, est à la fois en interaction avec la matière et indépendante d'elle (p.e. la télépathie). Cette action réciproque suppose une parenté partielle entre l'esprit et la matière. C'est pourquoi nous proposons une seconde hypothèse: l'esprit est une "facies" de la matière qui reste en dehors de la rigidité du monde considéré comme espace et temps. On a toujours considéré ces éléments spirituels comme étant des êtres spirituels, mais leur aspect anthropomorphique nous empêche de croire à leur existence réelle. Si nous identifions la partie spirituelle du corps humain avec l'homme spirituel, le problème du libre arbitre s'explique avec clarté. Seul le procès spirituel du libre arbitre est vraiment libre, mais la volonté ne peut réaliser aucun changement dans la substance purement matérielle. La conception d'une àme se logeant dans le corps matériel comme dans une maison, et qui par ses actions détermine sa demeure future ne s'accorde pas avec l'hypothèse du monde matériel-et-temporel-en-repos. Suivant nos conceptions humaines, nous avons imaginé des êtres spirituels animés d'une volonté libre. Mais alors il faut supposer une unité spirituelle supérieure, qui considère et qui décide. Or, cette conception étant anthropomorphique il est admissible qu'elle soit la véritable figuration du monde. La solution de ce problème pourrait être trouvée par une troisième hypothèse" selon laquelle il existerait un monde supérieur, dans lequel le monde-du-temps-et-de-l'espace fusionne avec un temps supérieur, auquel le nom de "temps spirituel" serait approprié. Seul, ce monde supérieur plongé dans un repos éternel peut nous expliquer d'une façon convaincante l'univers. Un monde d'une essence et d'une invariabilité éternelles, dans lequel le temps, capable d'agir pas des voies infiniment variées, introduit des événements innombrables, les processus spirituels étant effectués par le temps spirituel, les événements matériels par ce que nous sommes habitués à appeler "le temps". (shrink)

On peut distinguer trois cas de correspondances différentes entre les « scénarios schématiques » et le domaine narratif folklorico-littéraire : 1. La narration constitue la projection de la « dramaturgie de la vie » (une telle projection n’est évidemment ni directe ni complète) ;2. La structure de l’univers des personnages et la structure événementielle du narratif influencent la formation des « scénarios de la vie », en conditionnant l’apparence morphologico-compositionnelle de l’un et de l’autre ;3. La coincidence de la « (...) dramaturgie de la vie » et de la « dramaturgie de la narration»s’explique par le fait qu’elles ont des sources communes ; ces sources pourraient être les modèles mentaux de la tradition, qui dictent à un homme des « règles de comportement » d’une part, et qui s’incarnent dans la narration folklorico-littéraire d’autre part. Le « scénario schématique » possède une structure événementielle, situationnelle et actantielle. À cette structure correspond un certain niveau d’interprétation qui souvent la lie directement à la conscience religieuse et mythologique ; une telle conscience — compte tenu du fait qu’une conceptualisation globale de tous les aspects de la vie humaine caractérise le mythe — englobe, par sa nature même, les « blocs interprétatifs » pertinents pour pratiquement tous les précédents événementiels. Le « scénario schématique » est donc lié au domaine des croyances et concepts actuels, lié aussi aux systèmes de valeurs et normes éthiques, etc. ; il est possible de reconstituer nombre de ces croyances, concepts, valeurs et normes à l’aide de l’histoire vécue qui nous occupe. D’ordinaire, ces interprétations ne représentent pas le fond neutre des événements, mais un élément actif et dynamique qui agit directement sur le développement de ces événements. (shrink)