The phenomenon of globalization, which is well known in the economy, can nowadays be observed also in the area of science. It is based on the fact that more and more scientific disciplines are applying the same explanatory principle, namely the theory of evolution. Therefore, every development, including that of man, according to the pattern of genetic reproduction, takes place on the basis of natural selection. With psychological properties, mental abilities and social behaviours, which are eloquently referred to as “memes”, (...) it is as with genes: only those that are better, stronger, more capable of surviving will survive after accidental changes and only they will be passed on. In short, reproduction regulates and controls human behaviour. Such a way of thinking and explanation can be found today in many publications on sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Even if they present many new details, they pay tribute to the old human desire to explain everything in a simple way, according to the same scheme. The same expectation towards science was expressed by E. Haeckel in the 19th century and J. Monod in the 20th century. However, when these two biologists explained man as a whole based on the theory of evolution, they admitted that they referred to philosophy, to which contemporary representatives of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology cannot or do not want to confess. (shrink)

A survey of democratic institutions and republics reveals the aristocratic origins of democracy.

Conscious perception, like the sight of a coffee cup, seems to involve the brain identifying a stimulus. But conscious input activates more brain regions than are needed to identify coffee cups and faces. It spreads beyond sensory cortex to frontoparietal association areas, which do not serve stimulus identification as such. What is the role of those regions? Parietal cortex support the ‘first person perspective’ on the visual world, unconsciously framing the visual object stream. Some prefrontal areas select and interpret conscious (...) events for executive control. Such functions can be viewed as properties of the subject, rather than the object, of experience – the ‘observing self’ that appears to be needed to maintain the conscious state. (shrink)

Current thinking and research on consciousness and the brain.

Sustainability is typically viewed as consisting of three forces, economic, social, and ecological, in tension with one another. In this paper, we address the dangers posed to societal sustainability. The concern being addressed is the very survival of societies where the rights of individuals, personal and collective freedoms, an independent judiciary and media, and democracy, despite its messiness, are highly valued. We argue that, as a result of various technological innovations, a range of dysfunctional impacts are threatening social and political (...) stability. For instance, robotics and automation are replacing human labor and decision-making in a range of industries; search engines, monetized through advertising, have access to, and track, our interests and preferences; social media, in connecting us to one another often know more about us than we ourselves do, enabling them to profit in ways which may not coincide with our well-being; online retailers have not only acquired the ability to track and predict our buying choices, but also they can squeeze vendors based on their outsize bargaining power; and, in general, virtual technologies have changed both the way we think and our sense of self. With the rising deployment of the Internet of Things, and developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, the threats to individual freedoms and rights, societal cohesion and harmony, employment and economic well-being, and trust in democracy are being ratcheted up. This paper lauds the benefits and addresses the harm wrought by the high tech giants in Information and Communication Technologies. The search for rapidly growing revenues drives firms to accelerate product innovation without fully investigating the entire gamut of their impacts. As greater wealth accrues to the leaders of tech firms, inequalities within firms and societies are widening, creating social tensions and political ferment. We explore the ethical nature of the challenge employing a simple utilitarian calculus, complemented by approaches rooted in rights, justice, and the common good. Various options to address the challenges posed by ICTs are considered and evaluated. We argue that regulation may do little more than slow down the damage to society, particularly since societal values and political preferences vary internationally. Firms need to establish ethical standards, imbuing the upholders of these standards with sufficient authority, while creating a culture of morality. User involvement and activism, and shareholders’ concerns for the sustainability of societies on whose continued prosperity they depend, are imperative to humanity’s ability to decide the future direction of technology. (shrink)

For some decades, the concept of human dignity has been widely discussed in bioethical literature. Some authors think that this concept is central to questions of respect for human beings, whereas others are very critical of it. It should be noted that, in these debates, dignity is one component of a long-lasting and widespread conceptual construct used to support a stance on the ethical question of the moral status of an action or being. This construct has been used from Modernity (...) onward to condemn slavery and torture as violations of human dignity. In spelling it out, we can come to a better understanding of what “dignity” means and become aware that there exists a quite useful place for this notion in our ethical thought, albeit a modest one. (shrink)

« Je me joignis à Hegel sans nulle difficulté, ayant coutume d'être hégélien avant lui » : Alain retrouve, admiratif, en Hegel, l'exemplaire réunion méthodologique du concept et de l'expérience, et — quant au contenu, surtout de la philosophie de l'esprit — l'application non moins exemplaire du grand principe selon lequel l'inférieur porte et règle le supérieur, qui l'éclairé et l'explique. — A tel point que, en récusant la politique de Hegel, Alain va s'employer à sauver de lui-même un hégélianisme (...) auquel il a été et reste un incomparable éveilleur. « Sehr unbedenklich schloss ich mich an Hegel darum an, weil ich sonst vor Hegel hegelisch war » : höchst bewundernd findet Alain bei Hegel die musterhafte methodologische Vereinigung des Begriffs mit der Erfahrung, und — rücksichtlich des Inhaltes, vornehmlich der Geistesphilosophie — die ebenso musterhafte Anwendung des grossen Grundsatzes, nach welchem das Untere das Obere trägt und regelt, aber durch dasselbe erläutert und erklärt wird, wieder. — So sehr, dass Alain — indem er die Hegeische Staatstheorie ablehnt — sich darum bemüht, solch einen Hegelianismus von sich selbst zu retten, zu dessen Studium er unvergleichbarerweise noch heute den Sinn erweckt. (shrink)

This important, rigorous, and thoughtful study surveyed U.S. bioethicists (Pierson et al. 2024). One concern is that the respondents are not representative of many bioethicists who carry out clinic...

These three books consider the nature and evolutionary context of the individual and collective behavior of modern humans. Moffett’s The Human Swarm and Christakis’ Blue­print focus on the “big picture.” What, if anything, is distinctive about the ways groups of modern humans behave? What do modern human societies have in common that distin­guishes them from aggregations of non-human organisms? Wrangham’s The Goodness Par­adox focuses more narrowly on aggression, and the enigma that modern humans seem to be individually relatively docile, but (...) collectively capable of planning and executing highly aggressive activities. I was intrigued and educated by all three books. (shrink)

In this essay, I will not challenge these observations, which I consider well-founded. Rather, I will claim that the works of Heidegger and of another careful student of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, even if they have not provided an adequate politics, have substantially renovated the problem of politics. They have done so in two ways. First, they have destroyed, in Heidegger’s sense, the metaphysical base which has dominated political thought since Plato. Second, they have provided insights into and clues pointing toward elements (...) which any defensible politics must embody. In so doing they show a way to retrieve and renovate what is sound in the political thought which developed under the sway of metaphysics. (shrink)

LE "COSMOS" ET LE "LOGOS" : LA QUESTION DE LA LIBERTE. LE "SALUT" : FOI, TRANSCENDANCE ET BONHEUR VERITABLE. LES MODELES HUMAINS D'OUVERTURE A L'AU-DELA ASSIGNES A L'ACTION. "L'HUMANISME": LES HUMANITES, LES HOMMES ET LA PERSONNE. LES "LUMIERES" : LE PROGRES DES SAVOIRS ET LA RAISON UNIVERSELLE. LE "PROGRES" : TRANSFORMATION, DEVELOPPEMENT OU IDEAL MORAL?. "L'HISTOIRE PHILOSOPHIQUE" : AMELIORATION OU DECLIN.?. LE PARADOXE DU RELATIVISME.

L’article propose d’abord une version simplifiée d’une ontologie universelle, conçue comme un cadre général de description du monde matériel et mental. Il examine les notions d’entité, de propriété, de relation et de temporalité et leurs développements conjoints en termes de rapport entre les parties et le tout ou encore d’émergence d’une entité nouvelle. Il illustre ensuite les principes précédents en ce qui concerne la science économique, dont les entités de base sont les agents, les biens et les institutions. Il insiste (...) sur le couplage que cette dernière réalise entre leurs propriétés physiques ou psychologiques et le raisonnement qu’elle propose en termes d’équilibre et plus récemment d’apprentissage. Classification JEL : A12. (shrink)

Selon les stoïciens, il y a en tout être vivant une impulsion vitale, un élan de la nature qui le porte à persévérer dans son être. En la plupart des êtres, cette inclination naturelle est fatale, aveugle et inconsciente. Chez l'homme, au contraire, cette tendance initiale s'élève peu à peu à la conscience et se transforme ainsi en désir. Il semble bien que l'ρμ stoïcienne présente quelque analogie avec le conatus spinoziste. Spinoza, en effet, affirme que chaque chose s'efforce de (...) persévérer dans son être : « Unaquaeque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur». Cet effort, quand il se rapporte à 1'homme considéré comme formé d'une âme et d'un corps, est appelé appétit. Quant au désir, il n'est autre chose que l'appétit avec conscience de lui-même : «Il n'y a nulle différence entre l'Appétit et le Désir, sinon que le Désir se rapporte généralement aux hommes, en tant qu'ils ont conscience de leurs appétits ». A ce niveau, il existe done une étrange ressemblance entre le désir selon les Stoïciens et le désir selon Spinoza, puisque tous deux ont une racine commune, à savoir la tendance de l'être à persévérer dans son être : le désir est cette tendance elle-même, telle qu'elle se manifeste chez l'être raisonnable, conscient de ses appétits. (shrink)

L’ornement n’existe pas en soi, il est ontologiquement dépendant d’une réalité (artistique ou non) antérieure à lui – mais de nombreux ornements sont détachables de leur support. La secondarité de l’ornement explique sa propension à pulluler. L’ornement entretient ainsi avec l’œuvre ornée un rapport ambigu : il tend à l’affaiblir (par sa prolifération) non moins qu’à la construire (par le liant ou l’éclat qu’il lui donne). En musique et dans l’art oratoire notamment, l’ornement est essentiel. Dans tous les cas, l’ornement (...) vise à présenter l’œuvre ; dans certains cas même, l’ornement vaut pour lui-même, comme pure jubilation de la vie et « manifestation de soi » sans destinataire. (shrink)

J’appelle « présentation esthétique » le fait, pour un artiste, de présenter certaines conditions ou certains moyens de son art dans les formes même de son art, de manière sensible (« esthétique ») et non pas discursive. Dans certaines œuvres, le musicien présente esthétiquement certains instruments de musique : l’instrument n’est plus seulement au service de la musique, il est mis en avant pour lui-même. La musique devient alors l’instrument de son instrument. J’analyse de ce point de vue les Six (...) Concerts à plusieurs instruments de Jean-Sébastien Bach et la série des seize Sequenze de Luciano Berio. Mais la distinction entre « utiliser » simplement un instrument et le « présenter » n’est pas simple. Il est difficile d’utiliser un instrument sans le présenter au moins tendanciellement, et impossible de le présenter sans l’utiliser. L’attention esthétique de l’auditeur a aussi sa part dans ce processus. (shrink)

A cursory review of the philosophy of sport readily reveals that it is dominated by Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophical milieux, in the departments of philosophy and kinesiology, the centers of bioethics, and the faculties of health around the world. In France, however, with the exception of a few researchers working in the philosophy or sport, and within an analytical paradigm, the development of the subject has gone almost unnoticed. By contrast, the discipline of history of sport clearly moved away from philosophy (...) in France with the establishment of a separate field of study based on the Anglo-Saxon model from the work pioneer of Pierre Arnaud developed by Thierry Terret and other sports historians. Nevertheless, in French universities, faculties of philosophy have not been open to research in the philosophy of the body. The philosophy of sport is not taught as such in French Universities even if our generation pursues ways opened by Jacques Ulmann, Bernard Jeu, Bernard Guillemain, Michel Bernard, Jean-Michel Berthelot, Gilbert Andrieu, Bertrand During, André Rauch, Marie-Hélène Brousse, Françoise Labridy, and Georges Vigarello, among others, through their reflections on the philosophy of the body. This article discusses the influence of some of these authors, and especially of Georges Gusdorf, Michel Foucault, and Georges Snyders on the nature and prospects for the philosophy of sport in France. (shrink)

Medical ethics should show how an adequate description of morality is helpful in dealing with the problems that arise in the context of medical care. However none of the standard moral theories provide such a description. Further, all of these theories assume that there must be a unique correct answer to every moral question, though this answer may be that it is indifferent which of the proposed solutions one picks. The failure to recognize that there are unresolvable moral disagreements leads (...) many philosophers to think that their moral theories will enable them to determine which policies ought to be adopted. However, the correct role for moral theories is more limited: to rule out morally unacceptable policies. Moral theories almost never can settle disputes about which of two well supported health care policies ought to be adopted. (shrink)

In the Birth of Tragedy Friedrich Nietzsche hails Wagner and especially his opera Tristan and Isolde as the harbinger of a Dionysian rebirth in German music. It is notorious, however, that in later works such as The Case of Wagner and Contra Wagner Nietzsche turned against Wagner as an arch-ascetic whose late opera Parsifal represents a reversion to Christianity and its life denying spirit. This paper argues that Nietzsche's polemic is on the whole a distorted picture of Wagner and of (...) Parisfal especially. Nonetheless, it concedes that however wayward some of Nietzsche's specific criticisms might be, there is a genuine criticism contained in his polemic. Nietzsche is correct to sense a liberal Christian humanism at work in Parisfal that is, from his standpoint, unacceptable. (shrink)