How can we articulate the intimate demand of the spiritual life and the struggle for solidarity? These two issues have often been treated separately; in _Simone Weil: Attention to the Real_, however, Robert Chenavier explores the work of Simone Weil and demonstrates how she brought them together in a single movement of thought. "Our time has a unique mission, calling for the creation of a civilization based on the spirituality of work," she wrote near the end of her short life. (...) Her experience as a militant and the call of the divine nurtured in her writing an intense and unwavering defense of this new civilization, backed by her personal sense of intellectual, moral, and political responsibility. Originally published in French in 2009, _Simone Weil: __Attention to the Real_ leads the reader through her earliest writing as a perceptive social critic to her work on spirituality and materialism, and finally to her extraordinary concept of decreation, produced before her death at the age of thirty-four. "To an exceptional degree," Chenavier says, "the life of Simone Weil, her personality, her commitment, and her reflection form one single whole." Chenavier argues that Weil's vocation took on a very original form in the history of philosophical thought. He is especially concerned with Weil's philosophical writings on the concept of work, which remain relevant today, and which provide an important key to her thinking throughout her life. Bernard Doering's superb translation brings to English readers Chenavier's succinct account of Simone Weil's life and an illuminating introduction to her philosophical thought. "Bernard Doering has crafted a very fine translation of Robert Chenavier's comprehensive but brief introduction to Simone Weil's philosophical project. It provides an excellent English introduction to the social philosophy of Simone Weil, with due attention to her understanding of the importance of work in learning to attend to the real. Doering's translation will be of interest to both a religious and secular readership, both inside and outside the academy." —_Lawrence Schmidt, University of Toronto_. (shrink)

In this article I will discuss some systematic issues of Arthur Danto's philosophy of art and art history from a Hegelian perspective. Belonging to "Absolute Spirit," art can be called a "spiritual kind." Since spiritual kinds are reflective and self-determining, they are not susceptible to philosophical definition. Nevertheless, elements of essentialism can be maintained when describing art's historicity and conceptual structure. To this end, "art" can be interpreted as a two-tier concept: in inherently reflecting its concept, it projects its own (...) conditions into the past, co-opting "prehistorical" artworks as predecessors and classical examples. Hegel's view of art as conceptually structured in itself can have disenfranchising or reenfranchising consequences: either reducing art to minor philosophy, or acknowledging its privileged access to its own essence. After Danto's detachment of the philosophy of art from aesthetics, Hegel would himself be deprived of the possibility to "define" art by intuition . Even if the spirit consists of essential kinds, philosophy is not in a privileged position to establish the essence of art and thus the difference between art and philosophy. Rather, philosophy must acknowledge art as a neighbor and as partner in a dialogue. (shrink)

Reflexivity does not presuppose linguistic articulation or even propositional content. If it did, art could not be called reflexive. Reflexivity can be found in the self-contact of the living, in mental reflection or in symbolic self-reference. Art is a medium which claims these different modes of reflexivity and intertwines them. Aesthetic reflexivity as such has been established by Kant and his epigones, following the model of transcendetal reflection. Thus it could be specified as the reflexive structure of aesthetic judgement, or (...) as an emphasis on a work’s being created, or as a reference to perception itself in the process of perceiving, or as a way of reflecting concepts. Aesthetic reflexivity can only be detached from the model of transcendental reflection, if it is seen as oriented towards the interaction among the three modes of reflection mentioned above, leaving aside the difference, interplay or competition between perception and conceptual capacities. (shrink)

The power of fathers over their children – especially over their daughters – is a central theme of Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’. Novella V,7 situates the ‘patria potestas’ in a tension-filled position between honour and law, vigilante justice and public prosecution. The legitimation of cruelty and violence by invoking the ‘patria potestas’ is questioned through the confrontation with poetic justice.

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) type 1 is a genetic neuromuscular disease in children that leads to degeneration of spinal cord motor neurons. This sometimes results in severe muscular paralysis requiring mechanical ventilation to sustain the child’s life. The onset of SMA type 1, the most severe form of the disease, is during the first year of life. These children become severely paralysed, but retain their intellectual capacity. Ethical concerns arise when mechanical ventilation becomes necessary for survival. When professionals assess the (...) resulting life for the child and family, they sometimes fear it will result in unreasonably excessive care. The aim of this article is to present an analysis of ethical arguments that could support or oppose the provision of invasive ventilation in this population. This examination is particularly relevant as France is one of the few countries performing tracheotomies and mechanical ventilation for this condition. (shrink)

This paper deals with some structural properties of the sequent calculus and describes strong symmetries between cut-free derivations and derivations, which do not make use of identity axioms. Both of them are discussed from a semantic and syntactic point of view. Identity axioms and cuts are closely related to the treatment of negation in the sequent calculus, so the results of this article explain some nice symmetries of negation.

The author presents Simone Weil’s theory that force, an inherent part of the human condition, generates and regenerates its own existence. She examines three essays by Weil: ‘The Iliad or a Poem of Force’, ‘Reflections on War’, and ‘The Power of Words’. Doering situates the essays historically: their publication in French journals, as World War Two was looming, and again in the mid-1940s when translations of the essays appeared in Dwight Macdonald’s New York journal: politics. She applies to modern times (...) Weil’s conviction that the escalation of war preparations on grounds of national security inexorably undermines the belief in the supreme value of the individual. Major issues include the hyping of war as an act of interior politics, fear as a means of social control, freedom of thought in a permanent war economy, Dorothy Day on violence, the media in a democracy and the Greek concept of nemesis. (shrink)

Fish stocks, as common pool resources, are more and more managed by giving fishermen exclusive access rights as Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQ). These have been widely discussed, with focus on social, economic and ecological issues. While equity aspects have been of great concern, there is very limited analysis about how to assess issues of equity and fair distribution when introducing ITQs. This paper applies an existing framework for assessing equity in resource use systems to tradable quota systems in fisheries. The (...) framework defines the perspectives of distributive fairness, the stakeholders who are bound by fair practice rules, and instruments of fairness, and identifies metrics to assess equity in practice. We assess if the framework provides practical guidance for evaluating whether a given ITQ system operates under an equitable framework programme. (shrink)

This paper aims to determine whether we can locate temporal passage in a non-dynamical (block universe) world. In particular, we seek to determine both whether temporal passage can be located somewhere in our world if it is non-dynamical, and also to home in on where in such a world temporal passage can be located, if it can be located anywhere. We investigate this question by seeking to determine, across three experiments, whether the folk concept of temporal passage can be satisfied (...) in our world if it is non-dynamical, and, if it can, what sort of thing in our world satisfies that concept. In particular, we focus on the question of whether that concept (if satisfied) is satisfied by something mind-dependent or something mind-independent. In other words, we ask, is temporal passage something that is at least partially in the mind, or is it entirely external to the mind? We find, contrary to what is often assumed by dynamists and non-dynamists alike, that the folk concept of temporal passage is satisfied in our world conditional on it being non-dynamical, and that the concept is satisfied by something mind-independent. This provides further ammunition for recent deflationary accounts of temporal passage that attempt to locate passage somewhere in our non-dynamical world. (shrink)

Depending on different positions in the debate on scientific realism, there are various accounts of the phenomena of physics. For scientific realists like Bogen and Woodward, phenomena are matters of fact in nature, i.e., the effects explained and predicted by physical theories. For empiricists like van Fraassen, the phenomena of physics are the appearances observed or perceived by sensory experience. Constructivists, however, regard the phenomena of physics as artificial structures generated by experimental and mathematical methods. My paper investigates the historical (...) background of these different meanings of phenomenon in the traditions of physics and philosophy. In particular, I discuss Newton’s account of the phenomena and Bohr’s view of quantum phenomena, their relation to the philosophical discussion, and to data and evidence in current particle physics and quantum optics. (shrink)

This is the first day of our confinement here in Paris, which soon will feel a bit like house arrest. So, to help cheer you up, in these times of doom and gloom, I have decided to bring the museum to you in the form of a virtual exhibition thrice weekly. I have picked 25 photos from a work in progress I started years ago. The photos are portraits of visitors or guards in museums. It's candid photography, capturing life on (...) the run, a moment in time. I hope you will find many other ways to - Résidence numérique - Brigitte Cavanagh. (shrink)

Does incommensurability threaten the realist’s claim that physical magnitudes express properties of natural kinds? Some clarification comes from measurement theory and scientific practice. The standard (empiricist) theory of measurement is metaphysically neutral. But its representational operational and axiomatic aspects give rise to several kinds of a one-sided metaphysics. In scientific practice. the scales of physical quantities (e.g. the mass or length scale) are indeed constructed from measuring methods which have incompatible axiomatic foundations. They cover concepts which belong to incomensurable theories. (...) I argue, however, that the construction of such scales conmmits us to a modest version of scientific realism. (shrink)

Grace de Laguna was a philosopher working in the first part of the twentieth century on analytic and speculative philosophy, as well as on the psychology and philosophy of language, especially the social function of language. Joel Katzav’s lead essay focuses mainly on the former part of her work, while my commentary focuses mostly on the latter. Katzav shows how her work played a role in the development of analytic philosophy, I try to show how her work played a role (...) in the development of pragmatic linguistics, whose development overlapped with some aspects of analytic philosophy. I situate it in the context of an emerging ‘pragmatic Weltanschauung’ that was embraced by many working in linguistics, philology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology and what would later be called linguistic pragmatics. (shrink)

This article discusses how Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology may serve as the lens and theoretical frame in a qualitative research study of the lived experience of patients, their families, and nurses during critical illness in the intensive care unit. Merleau-Ponty's unique existential concepts of corporeality, spatiality, temporality, and relationality provide a useful foundation and serve as a unifying philosophy of science in understanding this nursing phenomenon that is grounded in philosophical beliefs about humans, and the holistic nature of professional nursing that (...) is not amenable to experimental investigative research methods. The research sheds light on the patients, families, and nurses’ embodied temporal, spatial, and relational horizons, and reveals a new conception of critical illness that will provide caregivers with knowledge about effective humanistic, and more holistic care, that opens new ways for coping amongst patients and their families, as well as caregiving possibilities for the nurses. Findings from this qualitative inquiry can help contribute knowledge about family engagement that would impact the provision of care in the intensive care unit, thus improving patient, family, and organizational outcomes. (shrink)

Explores the intersection between the philosophy of Simone Weil from Paris, France, and the fiction of Flannery O'Connor from the Southern state of Georgia, USA.

L'élargissement des pratiques professionnelles d'information dépasse le cadre étroit que beaucoup assignent à la documentation. L'approche informationnelle requiert de convoquer les sciences de gestion et la sociologie du travail. L'auteur s'interroge sur la démarche spécifique des sciences de l'information, en proposant une « approche par le document » et une approche « système d'information ».The information environment and its professional practices enlarge the restricted definition of an information spécialist. The gradual change in multifaceted information sciences needs to be acknowledged as (...) these science may make a significant contribution by way of a “document approach” and and "information system” approach. (shrink)

On 14 July 2021, the western states of Germany, Rheinland Palatinate and North-Rhein-Westphalia experienced major flash floods and about two hundred people died. This article explores how those affected and journalists they spoke to created meaning from the mayhem of an unprecedented disaster and how social representations of flooding emerged in which language, politics and values were intimately intertwined. Combining thematic analysis with elements of social representations theory, and analysing a sample of articles from a national news magazine, we show (...) how social representations of the floods were shaped by the objectification of the floods through metonymy (mud and debris) and the anchoring of the floods through personification and metaphors (natural and mechanical forces), thus adding a new dimension to the existing body of work on flood and metaphors. We claim that the immediate focus on the extreme force of the 2021 floods, on the one hand, and the weakness of political response, on the other, may entrench feelings of helplessness and divert attention away from more systematic and long-term engagement with flood dangers in the context of climate change, including extreme weather events. (shrink)

Crime and gentrification are among the most hotly-contested urban issues in American cities. In Us versus Them, Jan Doering examines both, showing how residents, activists, and politicians clashed over these issues and especially over how race factored into both. The book draws on extensive fieldwork to produce a comprehensive and vivid portrait of community conflict in two racially-diverse Chicago neighborhoods. In doing so, it provides new insights into how residents use the criminal justice system to fight crime but advance gentrification (...) in the process. (shrink)

This volume offers a broad, philosophical discussion on mechanical explanations. Coverage ranges from historical approaches and general questions to physics and higher-level sciences . The contributors also consider the topics of complexity, emergence, and reduction. Mechanistic explanations detail how certain properties of a whole stem from the causal activities of its parts. This kind of explanation is in particular employed in explanatory models of the behavior of complex systems. Often used in biology and neuroscience, mechanistic explanation models have been often (...) overlooked in the philosophy of physics. The authors correct this surprising neglect. They trace these models back to their origins in physics. The papers present a comprehensive historical, methodological, and problem-oriented investigation. The contributors also investigate the conditions for using models of mechanistic explanations in physics. The last papers make the bridge from physics to economics, the theory of complex systems and computer science . This book will appeal to graduate students and researchers with an interest in the philosophy of science, scientific explanation, complex systems, models of explanation in physics higher level sciences, and causal mechanisms in science. (shrink)

After the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights were adopted in 2011, an international treaty has been being negotiated since 2014. The two instruments reveal similarities and also conflicts regarding the adequate organization of the global economy based on human rights. The focus in this article will be on the processes leading to these instruments, because they themselves mirror different understandings of governance in the field of business and human rights as well as the struggle over the power (...) of definition and legitimacy. The UNGPs were developed on the basis of global multi-stakeholder consultations, underlining legitimacy through broad inclusion. There are varying judgements as to the success of this approach. The process towards the treaty follows the traditional path of negotiations at UN level. These negotiations reveal a struggle for recognition of the legitimacy of the process itself. Both procedures have shortcomings with regard to legitimacy and show the need for a revision concerning the inclusion of stakeholders. The complementarity of a soft and hard law instrument may enhance the creation of a level playing field in the global economy, thereby strengthening human rights. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to elaborate the many literary allusions that Simone Weil used in her ultimate work: L' Enracinement, translated as The Need for Roots, to achieve her goal of encouraging her fellow countrymen to create a new postwar society. Understanding how she used the riches of the French and Western Literary Cannon, less easily grasped by those not educated in the French Education system, enriches the understanding of Weil's purpose and skill in writing on many levels, (...) simultaneously for different target audiences. Underlying her stress on the need for truth and honesty about a county's past and present, with discernable respect for every person, is her foundational belief in the spiritual destiny of every human being. Examining her literary allusions in detail to show her clever subversion of traditionally accepted interpretations brings a new dimension to Simone Weil studies, while underlining the relevance of this essay to contemporary dilemmas. (shrink)

It is widely believed by historians of linguistics that the 19th-century was largely devoted to historical and comparative studies, with the main emphasis on the discovery of soundlaws. Syntax is typically portrayed as a mere sideline of these studies, while semantics is seldom even mentioned. If it comes into view at all, it is usually assumed to have been confined to diachronic lexical semantics and the construction of some (mostly ill-conceived) typologies of semantic change. This book aims to destroy some (...) of these prejudices and to show that in Europe semantics was an important, although controversial, area at that time. Synchronic mechanisms of semantic change were discovered and increasing attention was paid to the context of the sentence, to the speech situation and the users of the language. From being a semantics of transformations', a child of the biological-geological paradigm of historical linguistics with its close links to etymology and lexicography, the field matured into a semantics of comprehension and communication, set within a general linguistics and closely related to the emerging fields of psychology and sociology. (shrink)

This article explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which proposed a close link between the body and the mind as the basis for metaphor, debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the figurative. This philosophy of metaphor developed at the intersection between a reflection on language and thought and a reflection on the nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul (...) and others laid the foundations for this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber, Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in its turn in various ways the linguistic study of metaphor and the psychology of metaphor as elaborated, for instance, by a lesser-known American scholar, Gertrude Buck. All these thinkers contributed to a philosophy and psychology of the metaphoric according to which metaphors are not only nice, but necessary for the structure and growth of human thought and language. Obvious parallels between this 19th-century philosophy of metaphor and the 20th-century theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and his followers are examined throughout. (shrink)

One of the first Swiss performance artists, Manon has fashioned a career for herself out of the identities of others. Whether exploring the limits of gender or the beauty of decay, Manon—through her personas, installations, and performance pieces—continually foregrounds the instability of place and self. Her most recent project, She Was Once MISS RIMINI, is one of her most brutal and touching. Here, she literally depicts imagined futures for an aging beauty queen. Each exquisite image in this pictorial essay teases (...) out the possible paths Miss Rimini—an alter-ego for Manon who “happened” upon a beauty pageant in the early 1970s and walked away with the crown—could have taken. A small-town diva? A hypersensitive viola player? Perhaps even a psychiatric patient? She Was Once MISS RIMINI is a trenchant meditation on the art, or artifice, of growing older. Costume, lipstick, lighting, attitude—all aspects of self-presentation are in concert here with quiet critiques of social and economic systems that limit the options of older women. Accompanied by an enlightening introduction by art theorist Brigitte Ulmer, She Was Once MISS RIMINI is the first and only documentation of Miss Rimini and one of the first books in English on Manon. (shrink)

Brigitte Bourgeois and Philippe Jockey Gold and Marble: the Gilded Hellenistic Sculptures of Delos p. 331-349 The investigation we are conducting on the polychromy of the Hellenistic sculptures of Delos has enabled us to add to the corpus of gilded marble works and to refine the typology. A visual examination of the sculptures through a video-microscope, combined with an analysis of the remains isolated by this means under X-fluorescence, has revealed the existence of three large types of gold leaf (...) gilding on marble at Delos in around 100 BC: totally gilded statues, works on which the gilding forms only an added colouring to the general polychromy, and works that we propose to call "chrysochromes", which present a singularity not hitherto recognised of a very bright polychromy on the clothed parts associated with gold on the nude parts. Among the number of important results of this enquiry may be counted the revelation of the overall gilding on the Delian copy in the National Museum at Athens of the Polyclitus Diadumenus, carved and gilded in imitation of a gilt bronze or even a gold statue. Such a use of gold leaf gilding on the Delos marbles calls in any case for a reconsideration of the question of the reception in antiquity of such works, as well as of such a success of gold at Delos and no doubt elsewhere in the Greek world in the same period. (shrink)

Contrairement à ce que l’on entend généralement par mécénat - la commande d’images, peintes ou sculptées, passée entre deux individus vivants – on propose ici d’en élargir les termes pour y englober une autre modalité de la circulation des biens culturels : l’héritage, particulièrement significatif pour les femmes, qui disposaient souvent d’un important patrimoine artistique sans en avoir été les commanditaires. En examinant la manière dont Blanche de Navarre († 1398), épouse de Philippe VI de Valois et reine douairière pendant (...) près d’un demi-siècle, disposa de ses objets les plus précieux, joyaux et livres, dans un testament exceptionnel par son détail, l’accent est mis sur l’acte de tester comme un moment créateur, sinon d’objets, du moins de faits sociaux. Car, par la distribution savante de ses objets, Blanche construisit, pour ses successeurs, une mémoire, solidifiée dans des choses, des liens unissant les membres épars, vivants ou morts, de sa parenté. (shrink)

Abstract:The literary critic and NRF editor Jean Paulhan devised a way of thinking about fluctuating historical and psychological attitudes toward language, organizing them into a dialectic of "Rhetoric" and "Terror." In this article, I focus on Paulhan and Sartre's response to the interwar crisis of Terror and explore Rhetoric and Terror as a heuristic in the intellectual history of France.

Le travail avec les familles ayant une histoire en lien avec la migration nécessite une réflexion et une écoute adaptées. Dans ce contexte a été pensé un dispositif thérapeutique au sein d’un centre médico-psychopédagogique pour accueillir et prendre en compte l’origine culturelle ainsi que la situation transculturelle de ces familles. Cet article relate l’expérience clinique d’une mère et de son enfant autour de contes issus de la tradition orale du Maghreb dans le cadre d’un atelier rassemblant des dyades mères-enfants. Le (...) dispositif a pu restaurer le lien symbolique et dyadique, activer une autorisation à apprendre. La remobilisation des représentations culturelles au travers du conte a joué un rôle essentiel dans la renarcissisation à un niveau individuel pour une (re)construction identitaire. (shrink)