Thèse. Sciences sociales. Sciences politiques. 1991.

Locke and Leibniz deny that there are any such beings as ‘monsters’ (anomalies, natural curiosities, wonders, and marvels), for two very different reasons. For Locke, monsters are not ‘natural kinds’: the word ‘monster’ does not individuate any specific class of beings ‘out there’ in the natural world. Monsters depend on our subjective viewpoint. For Leibniz, there are no monsters because we are all parts of the Great Chain of Being. Everything that happens, happens for a reason, including a monstrous birth. (...) But what about materialism? Well, beginning with the anatomical interest into ‘monstrous births’ in the French Académie des Sciences in the first three decades of the eighteenth century, there is a shift away from ‘imaginationist’ claims such as those of Malebranche, that if a woman gives birth to a monstrous child it is a consequence of something she imagined. Anatomists such as Lemery and Winslow try to formulate a strictly mechanical explanation for such events, rejecting moral and metaphysical explanations. Picking up on this work, materialist thinkers like Diderot are compelled to reject the very idea of monsters. We are all material beings produced according to the same mechanisms or laws, some of us are more ‘successful’ products than others, i.e. some live longer than others. In his late Eléments de physiologie he says “L’homme est un effet commun, le monstre un effet rare.” Ultimately he arrives at a materialist version of Leibniz’s position: there are no monsters, we are all monsters in each other’s eyes, at one time or another. This conclusion is a pregnant one in light of twentieth century interest in the problem of ‘the normal and the pathological’ (Canguilhem), and the broader question of how materialism relates to the biological world. (shrink)

De profonds déséquilibres environnementaux et sociaux caractérisent en négatif le bilan de la culture humaine en ce début de XXe siècle. La transformation radicale des sociétés sur des bases de justice sociale apparaît comme la condition pour que le genre humain poursuive son processus de libération et soit enfin fidèle à la démarche éthique qui le singularise. Pourtant, les révolutions du siècle passé, qui ont tenté de construire un nouveau monde, ont toutes échoué. La plupart d'entre elles ont étouffé la (...) liberté et bafoué les principes humanistes. De fait, les adversaires de l'exploitation de l'homme par l'homme sont actuellement affaiblis et désorientés. Ils ont bien du mal à s'opposer aux offensives des classes dirigeantes qui partout dans le monde appliquent des politiques libérales antisociales. Comment galvaniser les résistances? Est-il possible de refonder l'idéal émancipateur? Quelles devraient être les caractéristiques essentielles d'une société véritablement émancipatrice? Quel cheminement peut nous y conduire? (shrink)

In his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and a natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of 'genetic' information, described living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence.” Now, Maupertuis was a Leibnizian of sorts; his molecules possessed higher-level, 'mental' properties, recalling La Mettrie's statement in L'Homme-Machine, that Leibnizians have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the (...) soul.” But Maupertuis also debated this issue with Diderot, who critiqued this theory in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these can only be 'organizational', i.e., properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism. (shrink)

Dans un premier article sur le rapport à établir entre les problématiques sartrienne et marxiste é la lumière de la Critique de la Raison Dialectique, nous avions tenté de circonscrire projet spécifique de Sartre face au Savoir marxiste.Nous aimerions poursuivre aujourd'hui notre réflexion par une analyse de quelques thèmes majeurs nous permettant de voir dans quelle mesure et dans quel sens ces deux problématiques se recoupent ou non. A cet effet, nous distinguerons: I) le problème du matérialisme et de la (...) dialectique, 2) la conception de l'homme, 3) la perspective de base, 4) le concept de classe. (shrink)

Le sage antique, par E. Bréhier.--L'idéal chrétien, par H. Delacroix.--L'honnête homme, par D. Parodi.--Le citoyen moderne, par C. Bouglé.

Lexical Semantics for Terminology: An introduction explores the interconnections between lexical semantics and terminology. More specifically, it shows how principles borrowed from lexico-semantic frameworks and methodologies derived from them can help understand terms and describe them in resources. It also explains how lexical analysis complements perspectives entirely focused on knowledge. Issues such as term identification, meaning, polysemy, relations between terms, and equivalence are discussed thoroughly and illustrated with various examples taken from different fields of knowledge. This book is intended for (...) readers who are interested in words and need to handle specialized terms as part of their activities, i.e. terminologists, translators, lexicographers, corpus linguists. A background in terminology or lexical semantics is not required since all notions are defined and explained. This book should complement other textbooks on terminology that do not focus on lexical semantics per se. (shrink)

Memory, funerals, and the communion of the saints: growing old and practices of remembering / M. Therese Lysaught -- God bends over backward to accommodate humankind...while the Civil Rights Acts and the Americans with Disabilities Act require [only] minimum effort / Mary Jo Iozzio -- Radical solidarity: migration as challenge ofr contemporary Christian ethics / Kristin E. Heyer -- Catholic lesbian feminist theology / Mary E. Hunt -- Theology of whose body? Sexual conplementarity, intersex conditions, and La Virgen de Guadalupe (...) / Katie M. Grimes -- Social conscience and politics in the United States of America: reflections / Mary Jo Bane -- Pope Francis, women, and the church for the poor / Lisa A. Fullam -- Floodwaters and the ticking clock: the systematic oppression and stigmatization of poor, single mothers in American and Christian theological responses / Julie A. Mavity Maddalena --What causes inequity? / Dean Baker -- Engaging the U.S. Bishops' pastoral on crime and criminal justice: from atomism to community justice / Robert DeFina and Lance Hannon -- Reconstructing the moral claim of racially unjust mass incarceration / Alison Benders -- The systemic erasure of the Black/dark-skinned body in Catholic ethics / Bryan Massingale -- Anti-blackness and white supremacy in the making of American Catholicism / M. Shawn Copeland -- White privilege / Charles E. Curran -- The Black Lives Matter Movement: justice and health equity / Michael P. Jaycox -- Mujerista theology: a challenge to traditional theology / Ada María Isasi-Díaz -- Faith of our mothers; Catholic womanist God-talk / Diana L. Hayes. (shrink)

"Like Foucault and Levinas before him, though in very different ways, Scott makes an oblique incision into phenomenology... [it is] the kind of book to which people dazed by the specters of nihilism will be referred by those in the know." —David Wood "... refreshing and original." —Edward S. Casey In The Lives of Things, Charles E. Scott reconsiders our relationships with ordinary, everyday things and our capacity to engage them in their particularity. He takes up the Greek notion (...) of phusis, or physicality, as a way to point out limitations in refined and commonplace views of nature and the body as well as a device to highlight the often overlooked lives of things that people encounter. Scott explores questions of unity, purpose, coherence, universality, and experiences of wonder and astonishment in connection with scientific fact and knowledge. He develops these themes with lightness and wit, ultimately articulating a new interpretation of the appearances of things that are beyond the reach of language and thought. (shrink)

Professeur à l'Université Columbia de New-York pendant 20 ans, puis à celle de Brown (Providence), Charles Larmore a développé dans son ouvrage Les pratiques du moi (2004) une réflexion sur la subjectivité qui a profondément marqué l'histoire de la philosophie analytique. Il est l'une des voix les plus originales et les plus radicales de la théorie morale contemporaine, et propose ici la synthèse de son itinéraire intellectuel."--Page 4 of cover.

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

A certain reading of Descartes, which we refer to as ‘the embodied Descartes’, is emerging from recent scholarship on L’Homme, in keeping with the interpretive trend which emphasizes Descartes’s identity as a natural philosopher. This reading complicates our understanding of Descartes’s philosophical project: far from strictly separating human minds from bodies, the embodied Descartes keeps them tightly integrated, while animal bodies behave in ways quite distinct from those of other pieces of extended substance. Here, we identify three categories of embodiment (...) in contemporary readings of Descartes’s physiology: bodily health and function, embodied reflex and memory, and embodied cognition. All present more or less strong versions of the embodied Descartes. Together, they constitute a compelling reading of a Cartesian natural philosophy that, if not expressly antidualist, is an awfully long way from the canonical picture. (shrink)

Après l’histoire de la folie et celle de la prison, Foucault a abordé l’histoire de la sexualité. Nous retracerons d’abord les trois moments de cette histoire: l’antiquité gréco-romaine, le christianisme et la société bourgeoise. Nous insisterons ensuite sur ce qui caractérise, en Occident, notre époque, à savoir l’extension de « l’aveu » dans tous les domaines investis par les sciences humaines. Ce qui nous amènera à mettre l’accent sur l’enjeu philosophique d’une telle histoire, à savoir la question de la vérité.