En tant qu’acteur important dans la gouvernance rurale, les organisations économiques collectives jouent un rôle primordial dans le processus d’urbanisation rurale et constituent un point de vue important pour comprendre l’évolution des relations entre zones urbaines et zones rurales en Chine. En même temps, ces organisations constituent le noyau de la communauté locale, qui représente les individus sur la base d’une même appartenance ethnique, par proximité locale ou par proximité de valeurs communes, voire par proximité économique. Ainsi, les individus (...) partagent une forme de cohésion solidaire, fondée affectivement. Toutefois, au fur et à mesure du développement économique et social, le système, la notion et la nature de l’économique s’évoluent et les valeurs des individus changent, tandis que ces organisations s’adaptent mal au changement économique et social, ce qui provoque la controverse de la société chinoise rurale au cours de la modernisation de la Chine. S’appuyant sur une recherche de terrain et l’analyse des données du village de Liede à Guangzhou, cet article porte sur le processus d’intégration urbaine-rurale du village urbain et explore l’intégration du village urbain dans la ville à travers l’organisation économique collective de Liede, notamment Liede Economic Development Co., Ltd. Dans ce processus, il existe des contradictions entre le rôle du village et le rôle des organisations économiques collectives. Les organisations collectives ont des fonctions économiques, mais elles assument toujours aussi des coûts importants concernant des fonctions publiques telles que la sécurité sociale. On verra que la réforme de la « séparation politique et économique » après la période de l’économie planifiée des années 1980 n’a pas eu d’effet au niveau local. L’évolution du rôle des organisations économiques reflète la mutation de l’économie chinoise, c’est-à-dire, le passage de l’économie communiste à l’économie de marché. Toutefois, l’engagement solidaire existe toujours dans l’économie collective et celle-ci essaie de limiter la cupidité et soutenir l’intérêt commun au lieu de le marginaliser, ce qui constitue un caractère spécifique de l’économie collective en Chine. Classification JEL : A23, B25, H32. (shrink)

La réflexion philosophique sur la non-existence est une thématique qui a été abordée au commencement même de la philosophie et qui suscite, depuis la publication en 1905 de « On Denoting » par Russell, les plus vifs débats en philosophie analytique. Cependant, le débat féroce sur la sémantique des noms propres et des descriptions définies qui surgirent suite à la publication du « On Referring » par Strawson en 1950 n’engagea pas d’étude systématique de la sémantique des fictions. En fait, (...) le développement systématique d’un lien qui articule approches logiques, philosophiques et littéraires de la fiction devait attendre les travaux de John Woods publiés en 1974 dans son livre The Logic of Fiction : A Philosophical Sounding of Deviant Logic. Un des enjeux les plus excitants du livre de Woods se situe au niveau de l’interaction entre les points de vue internalistes ou interne-à-l’histoire (principalement pragmatiques) et les points de vue externalistes ou externe-à-la-fiction (principalement sémantiques). Sur ce point, Woods fut le premier à formuler une sémantique pour l’opérateur de fiction à lire comme « selon l’histoire… » en relation à la notion logique de portée, ce qui permettait l’étude de l’internalisme et de l’externalisme. Suite au livre de Woods, loin de s’essouffler, les débats trouvaient une nouvelle impulsion. Le fait pertinent pour notre article est que la tradition phénoménologique également, l’étude de la fiction a joué un rôle central. En effet, l’une des problématiques les plus sujettes à controverses dans l’intentionnalité est celle de l’indépendance à l’existence, c’est-à-dire le fait que les actes intentionnels n’ont pas besoin d’être forcément dirigés vers un objet existant. Influencée par les travaux de Roman Ingarden (1893-1970), l’un des plus importants disciples de Husserl, Amie L. Thomasson développe le concept phénoménologique de dépendance ontologique en vue d’expliquer les processus de références inter- et transfictionnels – dans le contexte de l’interprétation littéraire par exemple. L’enjeu essentiel de cet article est de proposer une reconstruction multimodale bi-dimensionnelle de la théorie des personnages fictionnels de Ingarden-Thomasson. Cette théorie qui entend prendre au sérieux le fait que les fictions sont des créations montre la voie pour une articulation entre les approches internalistes et externalistes. Nous motivons certains changements quant à l’approche artéfactuelle - incluant une sémantique appropriée pour l’opérateur de fictionalité qui, nous l’espérons, éveillera l’intérêt des théoriciens de la littérature. L’article est à d’autres égards un panorama de la façon dont différents concepts d’intentionnalité pourraient fonder différentes sémantiques formelles pour la fictionalité. Nous proposerons enfin un cadre dialogique qui est une extension modale d’un certain système de preuve développé par Matthieu Fontaine et Juan Redmond. Le cadre dialogique développe la contrepartie inférentielle de la sémantique bi-dimensionnelle introduite par Shahid Rahman et Tero Tulenheimo dans un article récent. (shrink)

Si la constatation d'une ressemblance exacte entre l'«Éphèbe agenouillé» de Samos et les personnages de l'Olpè Chigi impose d'y reconnaître une œuvre corinthienne, le type du visage semble à première vue isolé dans le contexte protocorinthien. C'est pour tenter d'en reconstituer la genèse que l'on réexamine ici l'ensemble des représentations du visage dans la peinture et la plastique corinthiennes du vne siècle : après une phase d'expérimentation se constitue progressivement, dès le second quart du siècle, un type de profil anguleux (...) et vertical qui restera longtemps la structure de référence. Et c'est la synthèse, sans doute réalisée d'abord au niveau de la grande peinture dont les miniatures de l'olpè, comme l'avait vu Payne, impliquent l'existence, de cette structure avec un type syrophénicien qui permet d'expliquer le visage original de l'éphèbe d'ivoire. A partir du Corinthien Ancien la coexistence du visage protocorinthien avec des types orientaux devient d'ailleurs de plus en plus fréquente, et conduit à la création de types mixtes, où la structure traditionnelle est fortement orientalisée. Celle-ci n'en traversera pas moins presque intacte toute la première moitié du vie siècle : l'analyse des documents du Corinthien Moyen et Récent montre qu'elle se maintient au moins jusqu'à la fin de la peinture de vases à sujets figurés, sous la forme d'un visage au dessin assoupli, mais strictement fidèle à la structure ancienne. L'une des têtes chryséléphantines de Delphes en fournit un magnifique exemple : l'attribution de cette statue à un atelier corinthien s'impose, et conduit accessoirement à remettre en question l'hypothèse trop vite admise d'une triade, les deux autres statues étant vraisemblablement samiennes. Les reliefs miniaturistes en ivoire également trouvés dans la favissa de Delphes s'intègrent d'ailleurs eux-mêmes, aussi bien par la typologie des visages que par le répertoire iconographique, dans la plus ancienne tradition corinthienne. L'attribution souvent proposée d'une partie d'entre eux à la Laconie s'avère sans fondements solides, et cette constatation conduit à reprendre la question si controversée des origines du Cratère de Vix. Comme l'ont soutenu Gjedesen et Vokotopoulou, le cratère est bien sans doute une œuvre purement corinthienne, mais rien n'interdit de le situer, avec Jucker et Rolley, dans le troisième quart du vr siècle : il y attesterait simplement de l'étonnante stabilité des structures formelles qui caractérise le style corinthien, et qui en rend l'histoire à la fois si difficile et si exemplaire. (shrink)

Cet article interroge l’espace thérapeutique mouvant expérimenté dans une téléconsultation avec un couple. Il décrit les frontières polytopiques d’une séance online. Désormais, l’espace thérapeutique réunit trois lieux qui se superposent : chez le thérapeute, chez le patient et l’interface de rencontre, la plateforme numérique. L’auteure constate l’émergence d’une illusion partagée entre le thérapeute et son patient, favorisée par la superposition de deux mondes : virtuel et réel, dans l’écran et hors de l’écran. Le passage à une thérapie conjugale à distance (...) déplace les symptômes sur l’aspect territorial du cadre, tout en permettant de déployer un nouveau processus thérapeutique. Puisque les patients font entrer le regard du thérapeute dans leur habitat intérieur, la question du privé et de l’intime se pose : qu’est-ce qui est dévoilé? Le couple peut jouer avec la création de la mise en scène jusqu’à la « profanation rituelle », la transgression du cadre. L’article apporte une illustration clinique d’une « séance à l’envers ». (shrink)

L'adoption d'une technologie innovante ne s'explique pas simplement par l'adéquation d'une offre à une demande. À partir de l'analyse de la trajectoire de la technologie RFID est posée l'hypothèse qu'il n'existe pas d'innovation réussie sans co-construction de connaissances partagées par l'ensemble des acteurs intéressés au sein d'un espace public. Travailler sur l'innovation nécessite donc de parcourir cette chaîne qui transforme l'information en connaissances par un processus complexe de communication.The adoption of innovative technology can not be explained simply by the (...) adequacy of an offer to a request. From the analysis of the trajectory of the RFID is raised the hypothesis that there is no successful innovation without co-construction of knowledge shared by all stakeholders in a public space. Work on innovation therefore requires the channel through which transforms information into knowledge through a complex process of communication. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

Les analyses des parcours de vie s’intéressent surtout au repérage des régularités du cycle de vie ou, tout au plus, aux écarts aux modèles types, en termes de retard des événements ou d’allongement des transitions sur les calendriers scolaires, professionnels, résidentiels ou familiaux. Les études empiriques suggèrent pourtant la présence de dynamiques non linéaires évoquant la possibilité que les parcours comportent des « bifurcations » où tout peut être remis en question, pouvant entraîner des changements durables de situation. Ce phénomène (...) est plus souvent interprété en référence à la capacité des individus de faire leurs propres choix qu’en fonction de l’influence possible des cadres institutionnels. L’étude de parcours scolaires et professionnels de jeunes Québécois dans les années 1990 constitue la base de cette réflexion sur la place des bifurcations dans les parcours de vie qui met l’accent sur le rôle des dispositifs institutionnels dans la création d’une flexibilité des structures, sur les phénomènes d’appropriation par les individus des opportunités offertes par cette flexibilité et sur le mouvement des réversibilités et irréversibilités construites à travers ce processus. L’analyse suggère que les individus peuvent s’engager dans des actions en évaluant les possibilités offertes par les institutions qui encadrent la vie sociale, qu’ils sont capables de percevoir les irréversibilités associées aux choix offerts et ainsi, de les prévenir, les exploiter ou s’y adapter. La croissance du nombre de personnes adoptant les mêmes comportements dans une situation donnée accroît ainsi la possibilité que ce choix se transforme en une convention sociale et que les bifurcations s’institutionnalisent.Life course analyses are mainly interested in identifying regularities in the life cycle or, at most, in deviations from typical patterns in terms of a postponing of events or of transitions within educational, career, residential or family trajectories. However, empirical studies point to the existence of non-linear dynamics and suggest the possibility that life paths may also include « bifurcations », where everything is placed in question, and that may lead to lasting changes in situations. This phenomenon is more often interpreted in reference to the individual’s capacity to make personal choices rather than in terms of the potential influence of institutional frameworks. This study is based on an analysis of the educational and career trajectories of Québec youth during the 1990s : it looks at the role of bifurcations in the life course, in emphasizing how institutional arrangements may help to create a flexibility of structures, and explores the phenomena of individuals seizing the opportunities offered by this flexibility. The study suggests that individuals may undertake actions after evaluating the opportunities presented by social institutions, and that they are able to grasp the irreversibility of certain choices and anticipate them, use them to their advantage or adjust their actions accordingly. An increase in the number of persons adopting the same behaviours in a given situation thus also increases the possibility that such a choice may evolve into a social convention and that these bifurcations may become institutionalized. (shrink)

Despite increasing popularity of co-creation approaches across various types of co-creation (e.g., value co-creation) and research fields, systematic and effective theory-building of co-creation research is generally lacking. We explored co-creation literature underpinned by explicit theory, taking a hybrid approach by combining a narrative literature review of studies in various research fields and a systematic literature review of studies in the field of public health. Subsequently, we identified common dimensions applied to the co-creation process across various types of co-creation and research (...) fields, in performing an inductive thematic analysis. Across the total 27 articles included as part of the narrative and systematic review, we identified 5 dimensions related to the co-creation process applied across 9 research fields: (1) Multi-stakeholder collaborative action; (2) Process of co-learning towards innovation; (3) Contextual knowledge production; (4) Generating meaning; and, (5) Open, trustful and inclusive dialogue. The findings offer renewed insight into the common dimensions of the co-creation process, with underpinning explicit theories across various types of co-creation and research fields. A clear and consistent definition of co-creation was often lacking, especially in the field of public health. We strongly emphasise the need for research to adopt a multi-dimensional approach to the co-creation process—as well as to work towards developing a common language around co-creation, which involves operationalising these identified five dimensions. (shrink)

L’article se propose de présenter la conception de la lecture défendue par Roman Ingarden. Elle est comprise comme un processus complexe entre un lecteur et une œuvre littéraire, au cours duquel le lecteur porte la responsabilité de faire exister le sens du texte, soit d’en actualiser la vérité. Cette conception trouve des prolongements et des affinités aussi bien chez Jean-Paul Sartre que chez Hans-Georg Gadamer. Tous les trois s’accordent sur le fait qu’il y a une rectitude de la lecture (...) qui trouve ses normes et ses règles dans l’œuvre mais suppose un lecteur scrupuleux et généreux, qualifié pour s’efforcer d’éviter le relativisme et le nihilisme. La lecture ainsi prise au sérieux s’avère une expérience cognitive et esthétique au service des valeurs. Elle se caractérise comme une expérience de création et de découverte au terme de laquelle la vérité est toujours l’apparition de « la chose même ». (shrink)

Ce numéro spécial de La Deleuziana est né d’une indignation à l’encontre de notre situation politique actuelle dans laquelle notre responsabilité d’êtres vivants partageant une planète commune est en proie à un manque cruel de soin à l’égard des autres. La notion de désir comme puissance de vie et force de création à la source de toute invention possible ainsi que de renouvellement de l’ordre établi s’est vite imposée à nous comme une nécessité théorique et pratique. Pourtant, le désir est (...) ce qui aujourd’hui semble aller le moins de soi. Tantôt confisqué par une société de consommation à outrance, relayée par des slogans vulgaires et le jeu des rencontres en ligne, tantôt dévoré par un état généralisé de dépression et d’anxiété qui dégénère dans la passivité voire l’indifférence, le désir prend de plus en plus la forme des personnages beckettiens épuisés. Saisi par l’évidence de sa palpable inefficacité tant théorique que pratique, ce numéro se donne pour objectif de réinvestir la question du désir afin de renouveler la question du vivre ensemble. L’intention initiale était d’analyser l’évolution des pratiques théoriques sur le désir en philosophie contemporaine et en psychanalyse avec une attention particulière portée aux transformations subjectives collectives opérées par les nouvelles technologies numériques. Il s’agissait d’ouvrir la voie à une compréhension du désir qui ne soit plus conçu comme une image (le désir d’être et ses structures d’identifications), ni comme un objet (le désir d’avoir et ses structures d’objectification), mais comme un milieu (le désir et ses dynamiques de relation). En effet, à la suite de Deleuze, nous posons que le désir est intransitif : il ne s’agit pas du désir de quelque chose (génitif objectif), ni du désir de quelqu’un (génitif subjectif). Le désir est un processus qui possède une existence empirique autonome et se réalise dans des entités concrètes. Ce sont ces entités qui bouleversent les milieux du désir. La question devient de savoir ce que serait un milieu désiré, désirant et désirable afin de comprendre ce qui peuple nos modalités d'être au monde. (shrink)

Biologie de synthèse, nanotechnologies, liste sans fin de nouveaux gadgets électroniques, de nouveaux artefacts robotiques... La course permanente à l'innovation irresponsable impose au corps social de se soumettre aux développements de multiples nouveautés technologiques. Appauvrissement des ressources, accroissement de la pollution, surveillance toujours plus méticuleuse des Etats et des individus, solitude au travail, en sont le résultat. Surmonter ces problèmes exige de revenir sur l'idée de nature, en prenant conscience qu'il n'y a pas une nature en soi, à notre service, (...) dans laquelle nous pourrions puiser sans fin, mais que l'idée que nous nous faisons d'elle s'est constituée progressivement depuis la fin du XVIe siècle. C'est cette fabrique de l'idée de nature à l'époque moderne et de ses conséquences qui fait l'objet de ce livre. Pourquoi avons-nous abandonné notre existence et notre responsabilité pour la fascination du détour technologique? Résolument à contre-courant, l'auteur rend possible une critique et un dépassement de l'emprise " inéluctable " de l'innovation, de l'économie libérale utilitariste et de la technique sur notre avenir. (shrink)

La Convention sur les droits des personnes handicapées (ONU, 2006) a déclaré que la participation à la vie sociale est un droit fondamental de l’homme, soulignant l’importance de repenser le concept d’accessibilité dans les espaces culturels. Les sites du patrimoine culturel, ainsi que les musées et les galeries, expriment un intérêt majeur pour l’adoption de stratégies visant à améliorer l’accessibilité et la participation de tous. Nous avons utilisé un paradigme de recherche inclusive, impliquant activement un groupe d’individus souffrant de handicaps (...) intellectuels (DI) dans le but d’étudier les perceptions et les idées des participants sur les obstacles/facilitateurs de l’accessibilité des connaissances. Une attention particulière a été accordée à la lisibilité et à la compréhension des ressources textuelles existantes dans un site du patrimoine culturel. L’inclusion de personnes souffrant d’une DI comme informateurs tout au long du processus de recherche a permis non seulement d’évaluer leur point de vue, mais aussi de réaliser un questionnaire en utilisant des critères faciles à lire. Les principales variables évaluées par le biais du questionnaire sont les suivantes: (a) Perception et interaction physique avec les ressources de contenu, (b) Langage et symboles, (c) Compréhension du contenu, (d) Engagement avec les connaissances. Nous soutenons que le questionnaire proposé peut être utile pour informer le processus de création et de transformation des environnements d’apprentissage en adoptant un dialogue centré sur le public. Renforcer la contribution de la pédagogie spéciale dans ce domaine de recherche innovant signifie améliorer notre compréhension des besoins des personnes et de la complexité des résultats potentiels, dans une perspective d’inclusion. (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but (...) instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. -/- Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

L'ordre infra-humain connaît-il un déroulement historique ? A cette question il faut répondre par la négative, du moins si l'infra-humain est considéré en soi, indépendamment de sa relation à l'humain. Seul l'homme peut donner un sens aux processus de la nature, qui, sans lui, ne possèdent aucune intelligibilité ni même ne peuvent exister. Pour élaborer cette thèse, il faut commencer par définir ce qu'est l'histoire en tant qu'enchaînement de faits. Un fait a nécessairement un certain caractère « événementiel » (...) et surgit toujours d'une manière imprévue, inattendue. Pour l'intelligence subsistante qui, elle, n'a rien d' « événementiel », un pareil fait n'existe pas, tandis qu'au contraire pour une intelligence qui est à elle-même un événement, les faits existent et même lui opposent une irréductible résistance. La connaissance de l'histoire est intrinsèquement liée à une intelligence qui est ellemême, dans une certaine mesure, historique dans son mode de connaître. Une histoire de la nature s'articule nécessairement à une histoire de l'homme. Et plus une connaissance passe à l'absolu, moins il subsiste d'histoire authentique. La place de l'homme dans l'univers est par là indiquée. Comme centre et terme de perfection de l'univers matériel, l'homme est le seul vrai porteur d'histoire ; il est le sujet pour qui tout le reste est objet. Mais un objet qui n'est pas objet pour un sujet, perd son objectivité. L'auteur note ici les points de divergences entre sa conception et celle concernant l'histoire chez Hegel comme aussi celle concernant l'historicité chez Heidegger et Jaspers. L'expression « centre de l'univers » est précisée à la lumière de ces mises-au-point. En conclusion, la thèse défendue est confrontée à ce que dit de la « finis creationis » la théodicée scolastique. La fin de la création est la gloire formelle extrinsèque de Dieu. Si donc il n'y avait pas de pensée dans la sphère matérielle, en d'autres mots si l'homme n'existait pas, il ne pourrait être question que de gloire objective, qui même perdrait son objectivité, puisque le sujet corrélatif serait inexistant. Ceci ne signifie évidemment pas qu'il a toujours fallu des hommes sur terre, ni non plus que l'homme doit avoir une omniscience exhaustive. L'intellect humain est moins encore à considérer comme un point d'appui nécessaire à la pensée divine pour prendre conscience de soi. (shrink)

Steeve Bélanger,Frédérique Bonenfant | : Le concept d’« innovation religieuse » est rarement, mais surtout particulièrement mal défini dans la recherche actuelle. De plus, il est souvent associé aux nouveaux mouvements religieux qui ont émergé à l’époque contemporaine, ce qui limite indéniablement son utilisation comme outil et catégorie d’analyse des phénomènes de changement, de nouveauté, de transformation et de mutation religieux d’hier comme d’aujourd’hui. Afin de la distinguer d’une nouveauté, d’une mode ou d’une tendance religieuse passagère, nous proposons de considérer (...) que l’innovation religieuse consiste en un processus collectif qui, par volonté et/ou par désir de changement face à une situation considérée comme ne répondant pas ou plus aux besoins ou aux aspirations actuelles, introduit une nouveauté religieuse et qui conduit, par négociation ou par imposition au moyen d’un réseau de communication, à un changement socioreligieux significatif, effectif et durable des pratiques et/ou du système de significations. Cette proposition de définition, qui se veut ouverte et englobante, permet de considérer que toute nouveauté introduite dans le domaine religieux peut se transformer en innovation religieuse à condition de traverser les quatre phases qui caractérisent, selon nous, les processus d’innovation religieuse, soit celle de proposition d’une nouveauté, celle de diffusion de la nouveauté, celle d’appropriation de la nouveauté puis celle d’adoption de la nouveauté par changement des pratiques et/ou du système de significations. | : The concept of “religious innovation” is seldom, but most of all very badly defined in current research. Furthermore, it is often associated to new religious movements that have emerged in the contemporary period. This undeniably limits its use as a tool and a category of analysis of the phenomena of religious change, novelty, transformation and mutation yesterday as today. With a view to distinguish it from a novelty, a fashion or a passing religious tendency, we propose to consider that religious innovation consists in a collective process which, either willingly or through a desire for change in the face of a situation deemed not or no longer to answer to actual needs or aspirations, introduces a religious novelty, and which leads, through negotiation or imposition by means of a network of communication, to a socio-religious change, significant, effective and durable, of practices and/or of the system of meanings. This proposed definition, intended as it is to be open and inclusive, allows one to consider that every novelty introduced into the religious domain may be transformed into a religious innovation provided it passes through the four phases characterizing, according to us, the processes of religious innovation, namely that of a proposition of novelty, that of a diffusion of the novelty, that of an appropriation of the novelty and that of an adoption of the novelty through a change of practices and/or of the system of meanings. (shrink)

L'analyse d'une cinétique de croissance y est conduite à partir du modèle logistique généralisé de Richards-Nelder. On distingue 2 types de processus dits mono- et multi-logistique. Dans le cas mono-logistique, le phénomène est correctement décrit par une seule fonction logistique. La cinétique de croissance est alors caractérisée par lea propriétés de chacune des phases G 1 à G 4, délimitées par les points singuliers Γmax, V max et Γmin. On appelle structure de croissance la contribution relative de ces différentes (...) phases à l'expression de la croissance totale. Cette distribution temporelle de l'activité de croissance est une représentation discrétisée de la trajectoire y 0 → y max. On appelle processus multi-logistique toute cinétique de croissance correspondant à une somme de 2 ou plusieurs logistiques généralisées. II existe alors un plus grand nombre de points singuliers et donc un plus grand nombre de phases G i que dans le cas monologistique. La structure de croissance définit avec précision la cinetique du phénomène, ainsi que l'importance relative des différentes composantes logistiques au cours du temps. Une application en est donnée avec le grandissement des cellules pleuridiophores de l'Algue Antithamnion plumula. L'allongement de ces cellules est toujours de type bi-logistique. Les caractéristiques de la structure de croissance permettent une discrimination nette du sporophyte et des gametophytes mâle et femelle. Tandis que la composante 1 est pen différente, la composante 2 varie fortement selon la ploïdie du thalle. En revanche, il y a pen de différences entre les deux gamétophytes. Cette notion de structure de croissance est ainsi susceptible d'apporter des résultats originaux. Audelà de cet example, cette approche est proposée comme une méthode de caractérisation simple mais précise de toute cinétique de croissance basée sur lea variations temporelles de l'activité de croissance [couple ]. (shrink)

La 4e de couverture indique : "Cet ouvrage est écrit à quatre mains et porte sur la relation entre création artistique et sciences de la cognition. L'ouvrage propose deux approches de l'expérience esthétique. Une approche en troisième personne mobilisant des modèles propres aux systèmes dits auto-organisateurs issus de la biologie dédiée à la réception des œuvres d'art et une approche en première personne rendant compte par auto-analyse d'une pratique artistique vécue qui s'appuie également sur de tels systèmes, systèmes eux-mêmes liés (...) aux concepts d'émergence et de complexité". (shrink)

Entering the challenging and promising knowledge era, it is clear that enterprises should leverage knowledge management activities in improving innovation performance to maintain competitive advantages. This study sheds light on the improvement path of innovation ambidexterity from the perspectives of knowledge redundancy and typical leadership style. It is noted that we determined the research theme through quantitative analysis and conducted qualitative analysis through 209 questionnaire data collected from respondents in different regions and industries in China. The empirical results indicated that (...) knowledge redundancy significantly improves exploratory and exploitative innovation, and transactional leadership negatively moderates the above relationships. This study is of managerial implications to encourage employees to fully master and apply the existing knowledge to strengthen their innovation abilities in value creation. We also contribute to the theories pertaining to knowledge management, innovation, and ambidexterity by providing a deeper understanding of the influencing mechanism of knowledge redundancy in innovation ambidexterity while elaborating on the indirect effects of transactional leadership. (shrink)

Cet article aborde l'innovation sociale en insistant sur son processus délibératif, participatif et persuasif de mise en oeuvre. Plus spécifiquement, il tente de montrer le processus de formation et le rôle des réseaux d'acteurs lorsque vient le temps de diffuser un modèle innovateur et de le transférer vers d'autres milieux utilisateurs. Ce phénomène est illustré à travers des exemples d'innovations sociales québécoises qui permettent de mieux comprendre l'importance des liens pour créer de nouveaux arrangements sociaux efficaces.This article discusses (...) social innovation by emphasizing its deliberative process, persuasive and participatory implementation. More specifically, it attempts to show the process of formation and the role of networks of actors when it comes to disseminating an innovative model and transfer to other user communities. This is illustrated through examples of social innovations Quebec to better understand the importance of relationships to create new social arrangements effective. (shrink)

Les aspirations libertaires-communautaires des mouvements étudiants de la fin des années 1960 ont rencontré un terrain politique institutionnel plus incitatif à leur application en RFA qu’en France, notamment sous forme d’entreprises dites alternatives. Celles.ci, beaucoup plus nombreuses en RFA, vont concourir à l’émergence d’un milieu contre-culturel ancré au quotidien des villes ouest-allemandes ; lequel milieu va à son tour contribuer à l’apparition et l’extension bien au-delà des seules villes d’un mouvement social contestataire : celui des « Initiatives de Citoyens ». (...) Ce mouvement, inédit en France, fournira dans la décennie 1970 une force d’appoint primordiale au mouvement écologiste ouest-allemand, et catalysera la mutation ou la création d’organisations qui joueront un rôle important dans la production et la diffusion d’idées écologistes ; de telle sorte que le mouvement écologiste tel qu’il s’est déployé en RFA y a rencontré un meilleur écho que celui qui s’est formé en France.The libertarian-communitarian aspirations of the students’ movements by the end of the 1960s met with a more open political context to their application in West Germany than in France : many more alternative enterprises were created at that time. This will contribute to the emergence of counterculture circles in West German cities. These circles will in turn bring about a social movement unknown in France : « the Initiatives of Citizens ». In the 1970s, this movement will considerably strengthen the West German ecology movement and will catalyse the mutation or birth of organizations which will play a great part in the emergence and spreading of environment ideas. So that the ecology movement, such as it spread in West Germany, was better received there than in France. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to study the structure of interest groups and their role in the EEC decision making process. The paper consists of two parts ; the first deals with the historical pattern of emergence of these groups, white the second part concentrates on the their contemporary participation in the EEC decision making process.In the first part six empirical topics are developed :1. the creation of interest groups at the Community on regional level;2. the chronological study of (...) these groups and their activities ;3. their geographical distribution across the Community's member states ;4. the functional areas covered and interests represented by these groups at the EEC level ;5. the role of national interest groups and their representation in the interest groups operating at the Community level;6. the distribution of leadership posts in regional interest groups by nationality.A s for the second part, it is in turn divided into two sections. The first discusses the participation of interest groups in the EEC decision making process; whereas, the second section deals with the recent trends in the EEC decision making process. (shrink)

Cet article étudie l’apparente convergence qui s’opère, depuis quelques années, entre l’ approche en termes de Systèmes Nationaux d’Innovation et la théorie évolutionniste du changement technologique. Ce processus s’appuie sur une conception spécifique du processus d’innovation lui-même. Dans ce contexte, l’innovation est un processus cognitif, qui s’exprime à plusieurs niveaux – local, national, sectoriel et international – et dans de nombreuses dimensions – technologique, organisationnelle et institutionnelle. Cette approche attribue un rôle central aux acteurs publics et aux (...) institutions mais révèle, dans le même temps, les difficultés intrinsèques à toute tentative de synthèse entre des théories souvent hétérogènes.This paper examines the apparent convergence between the National Systems of Innovation approach and evolutionary theories of technological change. This convergence is organized around a complex and specific conception of the innovation process itself In this context, innovation is a cognitive, a multilevel – i.e. local, national, sectorial and international –, a historical and multidimensional – i.e. technological, organizational and institutional – process. This conception gives a central place to public actors and institutions but shows the strong difficulty inherent to the elaboration of a coherent evolutionary theory of economic change. In effect, it seems difficult to articulates heterogeneous concepts within a global framework. (shrink)

Up until the present day, Confucianism has been a major factor in the normative discourses of East Asia. At first glance, it has sided with the preservation of the old and against innovation, according to Confucius’s self-declaration that he “only transmits and creates nothing new.” This also describes the historical role that Confucianism in distinction to other philosophies has actually played over long stretches of time. Nevertheless, Confucian ethics contains structural features, figures of thought and ideas which point beyond mere (...) traditionalism. They reflect the deep crisis of tradition against the background of which Confucianism came into existence and which has left its mark on it. They could set free a dynamic that made it possible to distance oneself from the Confucian tradition within this tradition itself and open it up to something new, if not in terms of its creation then at least in terms of its acceptance and support. This potential also intrinsically relates to the possibility of a “modern” Confucianism. The following three short essays do not claim to give a comprehensive account of the outlined problematique. It is only intended to throw a light upon some of the corresponding thought formations that developed in ancient China and explore by a few examples the extent to which the said potential has actually been realized in later Confucian discourse in Korea and Japan, assuming that border crossing might be among the factors to unleash it. (shrink)

À travers l'étude du processus de conception des messages publicitaires, l'article met en lumière la pertinence de la psychologie sociale pour étudier la production de la communication médiatique. Une enquête qualitative montre que, pour créer un message, les concepteurs font dialoguer en mémoire de travail des «voix intra-psychiques» incarnant six acteurs de la production publicitaire. En analysant les représentations mobilisées, nous montrons que le processus de création, itératif, articule des procédures de raisonnement inductives, déductives, analogiques ainsi que des (...) traitements heuristiques et automatiques. La création fait également appel à l'imagerie mentale activée en même temps que se réalisent des actes sensori-moteurs de production graphique manuelle. Le processus se termine par une phase òu le publicitaire rationalise a posteriori ses choix esthético-sémiotiques, notamment au regard des critères d'acceptation de l'annonceur.Drawing on the study of the process involved in the creation of advertising messages, the article focuses on the relevance of social psychology in analyzing the production of media communication. A qualitative investigation shows that in order to create a message, the copywriters engage in a dialogue in their working memory using "intra-psychic voices", representing in this case, six key participants with an influence on the process of advertising production. Through the analysis of involved representations we establish that the process of creation, which is iterative, structures reasoning procedures which are inductive, deductive and analogical as well as automatic and heuristic. The creative process also calls on mental imagery which is activated at the same time as sensory motor acts of manual graphic production. The process finishes with a phase in which the copywriter rationalizes, with hindsight, his aesthetic and semiotic choices, bearing in mind the advertiser's requirements. (shrink)

Cet article examine la question de l'innovation comme l'expression de pratiques et de discours se mettant en scène au sein d'un jeu d'acteurs dans le contexte particulier des industries musicales. Nous nous attachons à montrer que les possibilités liées à la numérisation des contenus et des outils permettent la diffusion d'innovations « ascendantes» et de pratiques subvertissant certains fondamentaux. Néanmoins, ces développements liés au numérique participent de processus de légitimation et de valorisation de certains objets musicaux, via des tentatives (...) de réappropriation et de redistribution de la valeur des objets, qui perpétuent des logiques anciennes.This article examines the issue of innovation as an expression of practices and discourses starring in a set of actors in the particular context of the music industry. We strive to show the possibilities related to the digitization of content and tools allow the diffusion of innovations 'upstream' and subverting some basic practices. Nevertheless, these developments related to digital part of the legitimation process and recovery of certain musical objects, through attempts to reappropriate and redistribution of the value of objects that perpetuate old logic. (shrink)

Jean-Philippe Perreault | : Au point de départ de cette réflexion sur l’innovation religieuse, deux considérations : d’une part, il existe nécessairement de la nouveauté et de la créativité religieuses dans la mesure où les religions évoluent, s’adaptent et demeurent vivantes ; d’autre part, la jeunesse est elle-même pensée et construite comme source de nouveauté et de progrès. L’innovation religieuse se trouve conséquemment au centre du thème de recherche « jeunes et religions ». Sous forme de « notes de recherche (...) », l’intention ici est d’identifier quelques repères permettant une problématisation de la question de l’innovation religieuse dans l’étude du rapport des jeunes aux religions. Pour ce faire, nous interrogerons les conditions d’une telle innovation, tant sur le plan empirique qu’épistémologique : de quelle innovation est-il question, qui innove et innove en regard de quoi? Quelle épreuve épistémologique devrions-nous faire subir aux principaux concepts pour nous assurer de leur opérationnalité, de leur fécondité et de leur scientificité pour nos travaux? | : At the starting point of this reflection on religious innovation, there are two considerations : on the one hand, there is necessarily novelty and religious creativity insofar as religions evolve, adapt and remain alive ; on the other hand, youth is itself thought and constructed as a source of novelty and progress. Therefore, religious innovation is at the center of the research theme “youth and religions”. In the form of “research notes”, the intention here is to identify a few benchmarks that allow a problematization of religious innovation question in the study of relationship between young people and religions. To do so, we will question the conditions for such an innovation, both empirically and epistemologically : what innovation is in question, who innovates and innovates compared to what? What epistemological test should the main concepts undergo to ensure their operationality, their fertility and their scientificity for our work? (shrink)

Le Tableau naturel des rapports qui existent entre Dieu, l'homme et l'univers est un ouvrage fondamental pour ceux qui cherchent à comprendre les mystères de la Création. Pour Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, l'homme porte en lui-même la clé de tous les mystères. Se connaître soi-même est donc la condition primordiale pour accéder à la Connaissance. Les textes sacrés nous enseignent que l'histoire de l'humanité est liée à un drame en trois actes. Le premier est celui de l'âge d'or ; le deuxième (...) celui d'une chute douloureuse dans la matière ; le troisième, qui reste à venir, sera marqué par une rédemption, une réintégration dans le Divin. L'auteur de ce livre s'efforce de percer le sens ésotérique de ces trois étapes. Il montre aussi que l'impasse dans laquelle se trouve l'homme résulte de la confusion qui règne dans ses pensées. S'il nourrissait sa volonté à la chaleur de l'Amour divin, il accéderait à la régénération d'une manière naturelle, et l'humanité trouverait la Connaissance menant à la Paix Profonde. (shrink)

Dominic LaRochelle | : Les religions ne constituent pas des monolithes immuables et inchangés dans le temps. Elles évoluent au fil de l’histoire humaine, changent au gré des transformations culturelles et sociales des communautés dans lesquelles elles s’implantent, négocient avec les instances séculières et religieuses leur pertinence et leur droit d’exister ; bref, elles innovent constamment pour s’assurer une place dans un monde lui aussi en constant changement. Cet article propose deux outils pour analyser les innovations au sein des traditions (...) religieuses : les théories de la réception, inspirées des travaux de Hans Robert Jauss, et l’invention des traditions, inspirée du célèbre ouvrage d’Eric J. Hobsbawm et Terence O. Ranger. L’intérêt de l’utilisation de ces outils en histoire est qu’ils permettent, entre autres choses, de dépasser les oppositions classiques tradition/modernité et authenticité/innovation en analysant les religions du point de vue des ruptures et des transformations à l’intérieur de celles-ci. Ces outils seront appliqués à un cas particulier, celui de la réception et de la réinvention du taoïsme dans les sociétés occidentales au XXe siècle. Cette tradition religieuse chinoise vieille de plusieurs siècles a en effet été réinventée en Occident et transformée en une tradition spirituelle universelle répondant aux attentes des Occidentaux en matière de spiritualité contemporaine. | : Religions are not immutable monoliths that remain unchanged over time. They evolve over the course of human history ; changing according to the cultural and social transformations of the communities in which they are established and negotiating with secular and religious authorities for their relevance and right to exist. In short, they continually innovate to secure a place in a constantly changing world. This article proposes two tools to analyze innovations within religious traditions : reception theories, inspired by the works of Hans Robert Jauss, and the invention of tradition, inspired by the celebrated work of Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger. The interest of using these tools in a historical approach is that they allow us, among other things, to overcome the traditional oppositions of tradition vs. modernity and authenticity vs. innovation by analyzing religions from a rupture and transformation point of view. These tools will be applied to a particular case, namely the reception and reinvention of Taoism in Western societies in the twentieth Century. This centuries-old Chinese religious tradition has been reinvented in the West and transformed into a universal spiritual tradition that meets the expectations of Westerners for contemporary spirituality. (shrink)

Cette réflexion s’articule en trois mouvements. Le premier aborde la question de l’évolution de la précarité comme objet d’expérience. Le deuxième tente de montrer l’évolution des processus de base auxquels se livrent les jeunes en situation de précarité lorsqu’ils veulent manifester leur sentiment d’existence et les opérations au moyen desquelles ils parviennent à construire ce qu’ils appellent une « petite vie ». Enfin, dans le troisième mouvement, se pose la question de l’originalité des relations symboliques qu’ils expriment, étant entendu (...) que cette réflexion se fonde sur l’expérience vécue d’une catégorie de jeunes dont les dispositifs situationnels de précarité portent à penser, au moins a priori, qu’ils se laisseraient plus facilement mener par les déterminations qui pèsent sur leur vie, qu’ils ne s’en écarteraient.This project is composed of three interrelated elements. The first deals with the problem of precariousness as a fact of experience. The second attempts to describe the evolution of the basic processes to which young people have recourse in a situation of precariousness when they wish to express their sense of existence, as well as the processes that allow them to succeed in constructing what they call a « day-to-day existence ». Thirdly and finally, we address the issue of the original aspect of symbolic relations expressed by young people. It is understood that the project situates itself upon the life experiences of a category of young people whose situational mechanisms of precariousness lead us to believe, at least a priori, that these young people would more easily let themselves be driven by social determinants that weigh them down than they would be to step away from them. (shrink)

This article aims to uncover the processes of developing sustainable business models in innovation ecosystems. Innovation ecosystems with sustainability goals often consist of cross-sector partners and need to manage three tensions: the tension of value creation versus value capture, the tension of mutual value versus individual value, and the tension of gaining value versus losing value. The fact that these tensions affect all actors differently makes the process of developing a sustainable business model challenging. Based on a study of four (...) sustainably innovative cross-sector collaborations, we propose that innovation ecosystems that develop a sustainable business model engage in a process of valuing value in which they search for a result that satisfies all actors. We find two different patterns of valuing value: collective orchestration and continuous search. We describe these patterns and the conditions that give rise to them. The identification of the two patterns opens up a research agenda that can shed further light on the conditions that need to be in place in order for an innovation ecosystem to develop effective sustainable business models. For practice, our findings show how cross-sector actors in innovation ecosystems may collaborate when developing a business model around emerging sustainability-oriented innovations. (shrink)

After decades of absence, the federal legalization of hemp in the U.S. positions the crop as an innovative, plant-based input for conventional products. Through an application of the diffusion of innovations theory, this study responds to identified research needs made by hemp stakeholders and the existing literature by modeling the influence of innovation characteristics on propensity to use hemp products among Vermont consumers. Findings reveal that attributes associated with relative advantage and trialability significantly influence propensity to use at least one (...) type of hemp product, as well as use multiple types of hemp products. This highlights particularly salient points for hemp stakeholders engaged in the marketing and communication of hemp products. Findings contribute to informed strategy creation for producers, institutions, and other stakeholders operating in this nascent industry, where data and research continue to be limited. (shrink)

La politique des pôles de compétitivité a pour objet l'accroissement et l'accélération de la production d'innovations par la dynamisation des entreprises et des territoires sur lesquels ils sont installés. À l'intérieur de ces pôles, le rôle des entreprises, en particulier des grands groupes industriels, est crucial. Or, ces groupes ont déjà largement internationalisé leur recherche-développement par la création de réseaux globalisés. Que deviennent alors les territoires qui risquent de voir ainsi échapper leur capacité d'innovation? Nous verrons comment un pôle de (...) compétitivité, en facilitant et multipliant les effets de proximité dans la région même, en captant les capacités d'innovation des firmes et des laboratoires participants, peut contribuer à l'ancrage des réseaux globalisés dans le territoire régional, renforçant par là même son attractivité. Les pôles de compétitivité pourraient se révéler à la fois moteur de l'innovation et outil d'aménagement du territoire.Policy clusters is to increase and accelerate the innovation output by boosting businesses and territories in which they are installed. Within these clusters, the role of companies, especially large industrial groups, is crucial. However, these groups have largely internationalized their research and development through the creation of global networks. What becomes of the territories that may see their escape and innovation? We will see how a cluster, facilitating and multiplying proximity effects in the same region, capturing the innovative capacity of firms and participating laboratories can contribute to the anchoring of global networks in the regional territory, strengthening hence its attractiveness. The clusters may be both drive innovation and planning tool. (shrink)

This paper traces back the sources of our present legal system and of market economy to Medieval Europe which itself benefited from Hellenistic and Roman legal culture and commercial practices. Roman provinces placed Rome in the wider Greek cultural and commercial world. If Aristotle was already transcending the narrow polis-based conceptions of his predecessors, after him Hellenistic Civilization saw the emergence of a new school of philosophy: Stoicism. The legal thought in the Latin West will hence be characterized by Cicero’s (...) writings and its Stoic sources. The Roman legal system was similar to the later northern European customary law and the English common law; Roman law was evolutionary and customary. The rise of Western individualism, whether it dates back to St. Augustine in the fifth century, or to the two Papal Revolutions of Gregory I (establishing the nuclear family as the core of individualism) and of Gregory VII, also played a crucial role in shaping the western legal tradition. The paper describes the main forces that led to this second (Gregorian) revolution. Monasticism is one of them. Benedictine monasticism plaid a leading role in the Peace of God Movement. Hence collective oath-taking by groups in the name of peace was essential in the founding of cities and in the formation of guilds. Europe’s economic resurgence in the Eleventh Century was on the basis of the creation of the rule of law by the Peace of God movement. This movement also allowed for Europe’s agricultural economy to progress. Indeed, the European Middle Ages is one of the major periods of technological innovation in the history of the world. The Gregorian Revolution itself was supported and financed by the Commercial Revolution: Italian bankers sustained Papal reformers against the Emperors. The independence of the Italian cities and provinces reveals one of the most important consequences of the Gregorian Revolution: the polycentricism of Western Europe. This Revolution also witnessed the first large number of political pamphlets in European history; the Gregorian clergy emphasizing a compact theory of government. Soon after, the order of Cistercians was founded (1098) and underwent spectacular growth during the next two centuries. The Cistercians accepted no rents or labor services from feudal donors but would take only full possession of land to do with it as they wished.These monasteries were the most economically effective units that had ever existed in Europe, and perhaps in the world, before that time. Finally, the Magna Carta (1215) that will be so influential on modern political thought can be seen as a direct consequence of the Gregorian Revolution. (shrink)

This paper brings about a conversation between Schumpeterian and Polanyian perspectives on markets and their central role in the capitalist economy. For Schumpeter, markets were critical to the process of selftransformation of economic activity, but in his vision, markets as such were largely taken for granted. Markets enabled the introduction of new processes and products equally as well as rendering economic activities obsolete, with the entrepreneur and firm as agents of change, generating new combinations of activities and driven by the (...) creative power of knowledge. Innovation and markets are jointly the engines of endogenous growth. For Karl Polanyi, by contrast, although markets were the central feature of the capitalist economy from the beginning of the nineteenth century, his main interest is the constant impulse for markets as institutions to expand into every aspect of social life and the countermovement of regulation to restrain what he sees as their essentially destructive nature. His focus is therefore on markets as instituted economic processes, driven by the double movement of regulation and de-regulation. He scarcely considers innovation in production or consumption, concentrating on institutions of exchange and distribution. The paper explores the two perspectives in order to ask the question that their confrontation raises: What is the relation between intra-market endogenous change and marketframework institutional change? To test out each perspective, a schematic “long-duration” empirical account of the United Kingdom food distribution markets is subjected to a Schumpeterian and Polanyian reading, and each is exposed for complementary deficits. A broader explanatory framework is sketched that proposes analysis of innovation in market institutions--especially processes exchange and distribution-- in combination with innovation in production and consumption. It is suggested that to explore the constant change of capitalist economies, these four economic domains each involve different orders of innovation and transformation that have complex feedbacks and interactions with each other. Rather than according primacy to one or other order of change, we require a complex causal account embracing multiple instituted economic processes.Cet article discute de la vision des marchés et de leur rôle central dans l’économie capitaliste selon Schumpeter et Polanyi. Pour Schumpeter, les marchés sont essentiels au processus d’auto transformation de l’activité économique, mais dans son approche il présuppose l’existence des marchés. Les marchés permettent l’introduction de nouveaux processus et produits et rendent en même temps les activités économiques obsolètes. Les marchés, avec l’entrepreneur et la firme comme agents du changement, créent de nouvelles combinaisons d’activités et sont dynamisés par le pouvoir créatif de la connaissance. L’innovation et les marchés sont conjointement les moteurs de la croissance endogène. Chez Karl Polanyi, en revanche, bien que les marchés soient un élément central de l’économie capitaliste dès le début du 19ème siècle, l’attention se porte sur le mouvement permament des marchés-institutions à s’étendre à tous les domaines de la vie sociale ainsi que sur le contre-mouvement de la régulation à limiter ce que Polanyi considère comme la nature destructrice des marchés. Son interêt se porte ainsi aux marchés comme des processus économiques établis, conduits par un double mouvement de régulation et de dérégulation. Il ne considère que rarement l’innovation de production ou de consommation, et se concentre sur les institutions de l’échange et de la distribution.L’article explore les deux visions afin de sinterroger sur ce que la confrontation des approches soulève comme question: Quelle est la relation entre les changements endogènes intra marché et les changements institutionnels de la structure de marché? Pour tester chacune des visions, un compte-rendu empirique sur longue période de la distribution alimentaire au Royaume-Uni est soumis à une lecture Schumpeterienne et Polanyienne.Un cadre explicatif plus large est esquissé et suggère une analyse de l’innovation des institutions de marché - particulièrement des processus d’échange et de distribution - conjointement à l’innovation de production et de consommation. Il est suggéré que pour analyser le changement permanent des économies capitalistes, il faut considérer les ordres d’innovation et de transformation de ces quatres domaines économiques qui connaissent des “effets de retour” ainsi des interactions. Au lieu d’accorder la primauté à un des ordres de changement, il est nécessaire de rendre compte d’une causalité complexe qui prend en compte des processus économiques multiples. (shrink)

Dans son chapitre, Ignace Haaz analyse la pratique littéraire depuis son poste d’observation d’éditeur. Traditionnellement, la publication scientifique est le fruit d’un processus rigoureux de recherche, de vérification et de validation par les pairs. Cependant, avec la capacité de l’IA à générer de manière autonome des textes cohérents et détaillés, il devient plus difficile de distinguer les travaux véritablement innovants de ceux qui ne sont que des répliques ou des compilations automatisées de travaux existants. Comment garantir que l’utilisation de (...) l’IA ne conduira pas à une érosion de la rigueur linguistique ? Pour l’auteur de ce chapitre, une automatisation de la production scientifique poserait des questions cruciales sur l’authenticité et l’originalité du contenu d’un manuscrit. (shrink)

This paper introduces a novel method for the creation of ideas for disruptive innovations. It provides an application of innovation management techniques to specifics of disruptive technologies, which stand behind the Industry 4.0 changes that are taking place at present. Centered around the Ordo ab Chao technique, the paper presents how contemporary disruptive technologies can attain reflections in the complex creative process that has to lead to disruptive ideas and innovations. Quite some innovative thinking techniques already exist. However, they fail (...) to place emphasis on creation of ideas that are tied to emerging disruptive technologies so as to further deploy them in a focused, yet innovative manner. Hence, this paper presents an effective technique that facilitates creation of disruptive ideas with a focused potential for real-life implementations. Practical application of the method related to challenges in higher education processes amid the COVID-19 pandemic is also demonstrated. Based on the understanding of existing disruptive technologies, the technique is used for the adaptation and improvements of distance-learning processes to further add value for students and our society in general. In brief, the Ordo ab Chao technique is a promising tool for systematic development of disruptive solutions, representing a creative synergy between cutting-edge technologies and innovation management approaches. (shrink)

Cet article propose d’examiner la manière dont les pratiques médicales informelles utilisant les cellules humaines ont été réunies en une technologie intégrée sur deux décennies. Dans ce processus, les débats de la bioéthique constituent un dispositif d’épreuves permettant d’unifier ces pratiques disparates sous le label commun de « thérapie cellulaire ». En établissant des articulations possibles entre la production matérielle d’un savoir médical et ses inscriptions institutionnelles, le travail de requalification bioéthique s’effectue suivant trois registres. Tout d’abord, les controverses (...) bioéthiques assignent un label médical à des technologies qui n’existent alors que sous la forme de projet articulé à des pratiques de laboratoire . Ensuite, elles définissent des entités du vivant en objet technique, par exemple en dissociant les cellules souches de l’embryon. Enfin, elles introduisent des catégories distinctes de pratiques à partir d’une même technique. En ce sens, la bioéthique constitue un standard politique, inextricable de l’action publique en matière de biotechnologies. Suivre la construction sociale des objets biologiques conduit à établir un modèle de standardisation des innovations biomédicales et à promouvoir une sociologie pragmatique basée sur la genèse des standards.This article focuses on how informal medical practices using human cells had been joined together in the shape of integrated technology for two decades. The debates of bioethics are part of this constant process ; they intervene as a test plan enabling to qualify these disparate practices to which they relate by the name of cell therapies. By establishing possible links between the material production of medical knowledge and its institutional inscriptions, the work of bioethics re-qualification is carried out according to three levels. First, bioethics controversies assign a medical label to technologies which do not exist except in the form of projects articulated through laboratory practices . Second, they define entities of the living as technical object, for example, by dissociating the stem cells from an embryo. Lastly, they introduce distinct categories of practices coming from the same technical roots. In this sense, bioethics constitutes a political standard, inextricable from public action in biotechnologies. Tracking the social construction of biological objects leads to establish a standardization pattern of biomedical innovations and to promote a pragmatics sociology based on the standards genesis. (shrink)

Résumé Le concept de pratique instituante devrait permettre d’explorer de nouvelles voies de la critique institutionnelle. Cette démarche s’appuie d’une part sur le lien qui existe entre les réflexions de Félix Guattari contre la structuralisation et la fermeture de (dans) l’institution, et les thèses de l’anarchiste individualiste Max Stirner, auteur en 1844 de L’Unique et sa propriété, que l’on peut considérer comme un concurrent de Marx et un critique de l’institution aussi radical que précoce. D’autre part, nous établissons un rapport (...) entre la généalogie conceptuelle de la pratique instituante et le concept de pouvoir constituant tel que l’a particulièrement bien développé Antonio Negri. La modalité de l’institution, et en particulier la participation au processus institutionnel, détermine la formation du pouvoir constituant. Cette problématique issue de réflexions sur la théorie constitutionnelle s’applique aussi à l’analyse de certaines pratiques artistiques qui ont traité du problème de l’institution : la théorie brechtienne du théâtre didactique, la création des situations dans la pratique de l’Internationale situationniste, et enfin le processus permanent des pratiques instituantes de Park Fiction, un projet hambourgeois mêlant l’art et la politique, qui depuis une dizaine d’années n’a cessé de déclencher de nouvelles vagues de production collective de désir. (shrink)

Par sa conceptualisation des normes, Michel Foucault renouvelle profondément la philosophie théorique et pratique de la culture, par rapport aux principaux postulats qui la commandent depuis le XVIIIe siècle. On a pu montrer qu’il ouvrait celle-ci sur une pensée de la production immanente des normes. Il s’agit ici de mettre cette hypothèse à l’épreuve d’une compréhension vitaliste de la positivité des normes, qui assigne celle-ci à une puissance créatrice de nouvelles possibilités d’existence, de nouvelles allures de vie. Comment articuler la (...) perspective d’un processus immanent de production à celle de la création et de la nouveauté ? On s’oriente alors vers un naturalisme vitaliste, capable de conférer aux « possibilités d’existence » leur teneur ontologique, leur effectivité pratique, et leur primat axiologique et épistémologique. C’est dans ce contexte que l’on tente d’évaluer chez Gilles Deleuze un certain nombre de déplacements terminologiques et conceptuels par rapport à Foucault : du possible au potentiel, de la stratégie au problématique, de la généalogie à la géologie, de l’histoire aux devenirs. (shrink)

I offer an analysis of the concept of scientific innovation. When research is innovated, highly novel and useful elements of investigation begin to spread through a scientific community, resulting from a process which is neither due to blind chance nor to necessity, but to a minimal use of rationality. This, however, leads to tension between two claims: (1) scientific innovation can be explained rationally; (2) no existing account of rationality explains scientific innovation. There are good reasons to maintain (1) and (...) (2), but it is difficult for both claims to be accepted simultaneously by a rational subject. In particular, I argue that neither standard nor bounded theories of rationality can deliver a satisfactory explanation of scientific innovations. (shrink)

Today universities are increasingly seen as motors of innovation: they not only need to provide trained manpower and publications to society, but also new products, new processes and new services that create firms, jobs, and economic growth. This function of universities is controversial, and a huge and still expanding literature has tried to understand it. The approach of this paper is integrative; it uses the existing literature to answer a number of straightforward questions about the creation of innovations with university (...) knowledge production: how does this happen, to what extent, and if it is desirable. In this way this article grounds the issue. Creating innovation with university knowledge production is relevant, justified and important but this has not been, is not and will not become the core function of universities. The existing literature, in other words, overestimates the importance of university knowledge production - in general, and for innovation in particular. (shrink)

To formally understand cyclicity in innovation and to tie to Schumpeter’s idea about waves of creative destruction, we elaborate upon Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) hypothesis that science evolves through a succession of paradigm life cycles by noting that entrepreneurs recognize the profitability of new scientific theories through a delay. The delay from innovation to entrepreneurship may be due to technological inertia, the time taken in recognizing the applications of basic research, or related to how quickly technological change evolves over time and (...) its returns are realized. In our model, a profit-maximizing entrepreneur uses the latest scientific knowledge to create innovative technologies, which generates cycles between science and innovation. The necessary conditions for the existence of cycles are that human capital employed in science creation and high valued innovations is high, and the interest rate is low. The findings also tie to the notion about the variability of innovation over the business cycle and can provide useful inputs into the formulation of more effective technology policies. (shrink)

L’Agence universitaire de la Francophonie est un réseau mondial au service de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche. Ce texte résume son histoire depuis sa création en 1961 en s’arrêtant sur les différentes phases de son évolution. D’un réseau purement coopératif durant trente ans, l’Agence est devenu un opérateur de la Francophonie institutionnelle implanté sur les cinq continents et réputé pour sa capacité d’innovation. Celle-ci s’illustre notamment par la création d’une cinquantaine de Campus numériques francophones animant une communauté de plusieurs (...) milliers d’acteurs agissant dans la recherche sur les TICE et en tant que concepteurs de nouvelles formes de transmission des savoirs.The French-speaking universities agency is a global network serving the higher education and research. This text summarizes its history since its inception in 1961, stopping at different stages of its evolution. From a purely cooperative network for 30 years, the Agency has become an operator of the institutional “Francophonie” located on five continents and with a reputation for innovation. This is illustrated in particular by setting up francophone dig- ital campuses leading a community of thousands of players involved in research on ICT and as developers of new forms of knowledge transmission. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Allegory and the Spaces of LoveOscar Martín (bio)Writing about Spanish sentimental fiction from 1450 to 1550 is not an easy task, as we are discussing a genre with a difficult theoretical configuration. The investigation of sentimental fiction, however, has been sorting out the classifications that applied to a hodgepodge of works previously labeled as “sentimental novel” (“novela sentimental”). This label, once attached uncritically to a bunch of heterogeneous texts (...) that shared such intangibles as “loving focus” or “prevalence of psychological description over narratives,” has been applied more consistently nowaday, thanks in part to the scholarly efforts started in the 1980s like those of Martínez Jiménez and Muñoz Marquina (1982), and Martínez Latre (1989).1 Using some of these research efforts, Alan Deyermond has codified the genre accurately:Brevity; focus on psychological interest over external action; a tragic vision of love; autobiography (first-person narration or a narrator as a character) and the insertion of letters or poems (or, often, both) into the narration.[77]2Within this scholarly categorization, Regula Rohland de Langbehn has been pivotal in offering—first in 1986, and more recently in 1999—a threefold scheme in the development of the genre she labels as “sentimental novel”: a first group chronologically of the genre would be represented by Siervo libre de amor and Sátira de felice e infelice vida, both works marked by the influence of cancionero poetry—specially in the allegorical structuring and in the characterization of love, and by other subjects being limited to an abstract and general analysis of emotions. Both works also present a debate over the moral value of love. A second group would gravitate around Triste deleytacion and the works of Diego de San Pedro and Juan de Flores, works that show a wider range of topics and the impact of a broader generic textuality like cancionero poetry and such chivalric novels as Tirant. Finally, she distinguishes a third group whose main characteristic is the imprint of Celestina’s influence on both the narrative surface and its thematic approach. In the same vein, Vicenta Blay Manzanera has taken up this threefold scheme, dividing the genre into “the creation of the paradigm” (“la creación del paradigma”) the climactic stage, and the downfall and disarticulation of the narrative sentimental system” (“la fase climática” and “el tercero la fase de declive o desintegración del paradigma”) [“La conciencia genérica” 221]. [End Page 132]Just as Rohland de Langbehn’s works had at least settled down the arguments about the existence of a sentimental novelistic genre, however, medieval Hispanic scholarship has been shaken by an entrenched debate over not only the identification of this genre (novel or fiction) but whether the genre even existed at all. It was Antonio Cortijo Ocaña who, while editing a critical cluster in La Corónica on sentimental fiction, opened the door to some scholars such as Weissberger who voiced their skepticism over the generic nature of sentimental prose, a skepticism already present in an innovative volume published by Gwara and Gerli in 1997. This skeptical position was also supported by Cortijo Ocaña himself, who in 2001 published a monumental work in which, although using the generic term as a departure point, he ended up suggesting the difficulty of defining it, therefore jettisoning it. This position in turn was contested by Rohland de Langbehn, who in 2002 defended the validity of both the existence of a genre and its name novela sentimental, a position that has sparked a new round of replies in a La Corónica forum in 2003.In this debate, I would join today’s minority position on the existence of a sentimental genre, because, as I explained in my 2001 review of Rohland de Langbehn’s book and as I find convincingly argued in her 2002 contribution, there are internal traits within sentimental fictional texts that do not appear together in other sentimental generic texts [139]. In addition, once we take into account the obvious intertextuality of those sentimental texts, as Blay Manzanera has shown [“La conciencia genérica”], and the overutilization of central motifs in the configuration of love’s debate, we... (shrink)

Dans l’Epître aux Méditations, Descartes affirme que toute l’utilité de sa philosophie réside dans la « solidité » des preuves de l’existence de Dieu qu’elle propose. C’est par un effort de détachement de l’esprit des sens et par un retour sur soi, sur des raisons tout « intérieures », que ces démonstrations s’élaborent et acquièrent évidence et certitude. Cette méthode n’est-elle pas la reprise, en philosophie moderne, de l’itinéraire augustinien de l’âme vers Dieu?

Resumen El uso del término imaginación remite a un cierto tipo de actividad mental que en su formulación más básica refiere a la capacidad humana para crear imágenes en ausencia de lo representado, es decir, para representarnos objetos o estados de cosas que están ausentes, y a la capacidad para crear imágenes a partir de otras que ya se poseen. Esta formulación permite dar cuenta de una amplia gama de experiencias humanas que van desde la creación artística y la innovación (...) técnica hasta la anticipación de posibles escenarios en los que intervenir. En particular voy a centrarme en un uso específico de la imaginación que denominaré imaginación práctica y que consiste principalmente en la anticipación contrafáctica de posibles estados de cosas resultantes de nuestras acciones. A partir de esto sostendré la existencia de una relación interna entre imaginación práctica y racionalidad práctica, en virtud de la cual la primera oficia de posibilitadora de la segunda. Para ello relevaré cuatro formas de ejercicio de la racionalidad práctica que han sido tematizadas a lo largo de la historia de la filosofía: la ética, la moral, la política y la legal.The use of the term imagination refers to a certain type of mental activity that in its most basic formulation refers to the human capacity to create images in the absence of what is represented, that is, to represent objects or states of things that are absent, and the ability to create images from others that are already possessed by the agent. This formulation allows to account for a wide range of human experiences ranging from artistic creation and technical innovation to the anticipation of possible scenarios in which to intervene. In particular, I will focus on a specific use of the imagination that I will call practical imagination and that consists mainly in the counterfactual anticipation of possible states of affairs resulting from our actions. From this perspective I will sustain the existence of an internal relation between practical imagination and practical rationality, by virtue of which the first enables the second. To do this, I will highlight four types of practical rationality that have been thematized throughout the history of philosophy: ethical, moral, political and legal rationality. (shrink)

Partir à la rencontre d'artisans ou observer des plasticiens contemporains à l'oeuvre ; enquêter au sein d'écoles d'art, interviewer des compositeurs et auteurs ; se plonger dans les partitions du XVIIème siècle, étudier les fonds d'archives «rock» de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France ; ou encore écumer les rayonnages «rap» d'une discothèque : comment les chercheurs en sciences sociales peuvent-ils appréhender la création artistique?

Apart from the scientific unknowns and technological barriers that complicate the development of medical neuroimaging applications, various relevant actors might have different ideas on what is considered advancement or progress in this field. We address the challenge of identifying societal actors and their different points of view concerning neuroimaging technologies in an early phase of neuroimaging development. To this end, we conducted 16 semistructured interviews with societal actors, including governmental policy makers, health professionals, and patient representatives, in the Netherlands. We (...) show how the contextual aspects of applications and underlying features of the ideal health system determine the desirability. Neuroimaging developments are perceived as innovations that will optimize the current health system or as opportunities to change existing structures and practices of the current health system more radically. Insights into and understanding of these visions show incongruence between visions regarding desirable medical neuroimaging use and potential conflicting visions regarding the embedding of neuroimaging applications. We conclude that it is possible to prospectively identify incongruent visions and analyze when these visions will most likely come into conflict with each other. Such an analysis might provide a reflective space, beyond personal and political interest, suitable as a starting point for joint reflection and mutual learning in order to manage medical neuroimaging innovations towards more responsible applications. (shrink)

I have been working on meta-philosophy for quite some time and was pleasantly surprised to encounter, mid-May 2017, someone who shares this commitment (apart from his many other interests and specializations) for very similar reasons as my own. He is Dr Desh Ray Sirswal from India and one of his numerous websites, blogs, journals, etc is - http://drsirswal.webs.com/ I let him speak for himself. “My objective is to achieve an intellectual detachment from all philosophical systems, and not to solve specific (...) philosophical problems but to become sensitively aware of what it is when we philosophize.” Copyright© Desh Raj Sirswal . I commence by dealing with the teaching of philosophy, because the contents of what is being taught at under-graduate level is for most people who are slightly informed about the subject what philosophy is about. This usually consists of the history of Ideas of Western Philosophy. Although an increasing number of faculties now broaden the scope to the ‘philosophies’ of Asia, the Far East and the Middle East. This international broadening of what is being included in curricula of or as philosophy is another index that Western Philosophy is in need of subject-matter as its traditional subject-matter have all but died out. Apart from the History of Philosophical ideas, the subject often is presented in terms of so-called branches, for example metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic, and so on. A number of authors suggest that both ways of teaching the discipline is very selective because of the departments adherence to some form of either ‘analytical’ or ‘continental’ philosophy. Apart from the traditional lecture-style the teaching of philosophy is dealt with by means of some variation on the Oxbridge ‘tutorial’-style. Tutorials are often acclaimed as being an amazing, to be highly regarded innovation. Some studies and research of it however revealed that is not at all very comprehensive but is restricted to a number of items concerning reasoning, argumentation and critical re-viewing and thinking. This approach forms part of the attempt by contemporary research universities to teach aspects of ‘research’. This brings us to my next section on methods of doing philosophy. I suggest that the doing of philosophy resembles certain aspects and contexts of some of the steps and stages of doing theorizing. This is the rationale for including the next section on theorizing, its steps, stages and other aspects such as the use of metaphors, imaginary experiments, heuristic devices, etc. The next section deals with the changing nature of traditional philosophy as it lost most of its subject-matter to other disciplines that have been socio-culturally differentiated. And the search for new philosophical subject-matter such as Experimental Philosophy or XPhi, the involvement of philosophers in inter-disciplinary studies, especially the latest fad of cognitive studies or sciences and of course the fabrication of philosophies of all areas of human behaviour and kinds of socio-cultural activities for example sport, the arts, sciences, cognition, sex, violence, gender, race, religion, etc etc. I then turn to the question about how, where and why one could perhaps do philosophy against the background of the above. In this investigation I make explicit some of the self-imposed limits of the discourse. Some of these restrictions have been created because of the absolute institutionalization of the discipline as just another subject of universities. This institutionalization of course requires that those involved in the discipline of institutionalized philosophy must be professionals. This absolute requirement lays down the condition that to be a philosopher one must be a professional and an academic. The conditions of institutionalization and professionalization have far reaching consequences for the philosophical discourse, its subject-matter, methods, principles, values, aims, purposes and norms. One of these is the need to publish and to publish often especially in peer-reviewed journals and in their required, institutionalized format. Because of these institutionalized restrictions of what philosophy is, what it must be like, what it may be like and what it may not be like I explore the lack of self-cognition of academically institutionalized philosophy and the associated absence of critical, meta-cognition and self-awareness of professional philosophers. I question the values of doing that type of philosophy, philosophy-on-demand and because of demand and suggest that it is preferable to engage with the more original, creative-thinking philosophers’ work. All of the above are of course intersubjectively determined and this is why I finally explore the nature and operation of different forms of intersubjectivity, for example of common sense, everyday existence, that of the different sciences, the arts, etc and the roles or functions of these things in the creation or constitution of alternative discourses, their realities, life-worlds or perspectives on ‘the world, reality, and existence’. This is the phantom, the ghost of the deceased discourse of philosophy that I chased, encountered and describe. -/- . (shrink)