Philon d'Alexandrie, un philosophe juif contemporain de Jésus et de saint Paul et le principal témoin de la théologie de la Diaspora, éclaire les multiples visages de sa foi religieuse à l'aide de la philosophie grecque, au cours de ses abondants commentaires sur la Loi de Moïse. Il est très proche du monde de pensée de saint Paul, de l'Épître aux Hébreux et de saint Jean, c'est-à-dire du milieu où s'est développé le christianisme. L'auteur, Jean Laporte, élève de l'Institut (...) catholique de Paris et professeur à l'université Notre-Dame d'Indiana (USA), s'est fixé pour but d'étudier la doctrine eucharistique de Philon sous ses différents aspects : les termes et images qui l'expriment, son lien intime avec le culte du temple, les problèmes cosmologiques, anthropologiques et spirituels liés à l'œuvre de la création et de la restauration de l'homme. Le travail révèle la richesse de l'Eucharistie philonienne et contribue indirectement à éclairer les bases de l'Eucharistie chrétienne. (shrink)

Le. Jansénisme. Convient-il, dans une Histoire des Religions, de consacrer un chapitre au « jansénisme » ? On pourrait se le demander. Car tous ceux qui ont coutume d'être appelés « Jansénistes » s'accordent à répudier ce nom de « secte ...

Les noms sous-spécifiés, qui peuvent apparaitre dans une construction spécificationnelle, de la forme Leur ambition a été d’innover, sont par ailleurs souvent des prédicats régissant des arguments, dans une phrase élémentaire de la forme Ils ont eu l’ambition d’innover, où Nss est le prédicat accompagné d’un verbe support et de ses arguments N0 et N1. Nous avons étudié des noms entrant à la fois dans les deux constructions et avec le même sens, et trouvé trois cas de figure. Avec des (...) noms tels que ambition, et ont presque le même sens. Dans d’autres entrées, telles que souvenir et preuve, les deux constructions ne sont pas équivalentes : l’attribut phrastique de est absent de, tandis que l’argument N1 de peut apparaitre comme complément de nom du Nss sujet dans, et spécifie souvent le thème du propos contenu dans l’attribut phrastique de. Enfin, d’autres noms tels que embarras ne sont pas des Nss typiques car l’attribut phrastique de y joue un rôle causal ; il n’a pas le même contenu que N1. Ainsi, dans les types souvenir/preuve et embarras, est à analyser comme une combinaison de plusieurs phrases élémentaires. (shrink)

La philosophie cartésienne, en dépit des efforts souvent tentés pour l'exposer suivant une dialectique unilinéaire, n'est point à strictement parler, un système. On la nommerait assez bien, un pluralisme, en ce sens que son contenu ne se laisse ni dériver d'un seul principe ni enfermer dans une seule formule. Pluralisme cohérent, faudrait-il ajouter : non seulement parce que les oppositions qui s'y révèlent ne sont pas (quoi qu'on en ait dit) de formelles contradictions, mais surtout parce que chacun des termes (...) opposés n'y a été admis qu'en vertu d'une même attitude d'esprit, la docilité à l'évidence. Se plier en toutes choses à ce qu'on voit ; l'enregistrer comme on le voit, à quelque ordre qu'il appartienne, sans y rien mêler de sa sensibilité propre : voilà l'attitude cartésienne, telle qu'elle se manifeste dans la théorie de la méthode, comme aussi dans le Cogito et dans les démarches qui en procèdent. C'est l'attitude empirique, au sens premier et authentique du mot : ceux-là seuls répugnent à en convenir que des associations invétérées conduisent toujours à confondre empirique et sensualiste. En sorte que, si nous voulons à toute force caractériser la philosophie de Descartes par un nom, le nom qui lui siérait le mieux serait, tout paradoxe à part, celui d'empirisme - empirisme radical et intégral. (shrink)

Le texte est consacré aux temporalités sociales des cuisiniers qui s’articulent autour de deux régimes horaires principaux : la « coupure » et la continuité. Il montre que la synchronisation des repas, du déjeuner et du dîner, sur des horaires concentrés sur la pause méridienne et en fin de journée, scinde les activités professionnelles en deux temps. Cependant, la réduction du temps de travail, les pressions économiques et sanitaires et les formes de rationalisation dans la restauration ont incité les professionnels (...) à repenser les organisations. Ce qui a renforcé le régime de la continuité. Le texte étudie aussi les facteurs qui favorisent l’adaptation d’un des modèles temporels et la question des disponibilités des salariés selon le régime horaire. Il étudie les arrangements qui se construisent autour de trois objets de négociation (coupure, repos, horaires atypiques) et dont les résultats dépendent des biographies des cuisiniers, des contextes d’action et des systèmes de valeurs professionnelles. (shrink)

Ce livre offre un parcours en compagnie d'ecrivains, philosophes et poetes, parmi les plus marquants de la deuxieme moitie du XXe siecle. Son point de depart est une question qui porte sur l'essence meme de la litterature: que signifie aimer avec passion une oeuvre et l'homme qui est derriere?... Comment vit-on avec? Et qu'y trouve-t-on pour vivre avec soi meme, apprendre a vivre ainsi? Il s'agit donc d'un livre ecrit a la premiere personne par un auteur qui aura eu la (...) chance de croiser le chemin de quelques grandes figures de la pensee francaise contemporaine: Edmond Jabes, Jacques Derrida et Andre du Bouchet, Maurice Blanchot de facon plus lointaine. On y trouvera pourtant une volonte clairement pedagogique. Didier Cahen reprend et etudie les enonces multiples de ces createurs de la postmodernite sur l'articulation de la pensee et de la litterature ou sur l'espace commun de la philosophie et de la poesie. Dans la foulee, il aborde des questions plus ouvertes, qui touchent a l'intuition de l'autre, au non-savoir qu'explore la face cachee de la litterature. Comme le demontrent les oeuvres singulieres de Roger Laporte et de Marcel Cohen, ecrire c'est mettre sa vie en jeu, se fier a ce qui vient, suivre l'ordre de l'Autre... en se jouant de l'etre. Indiscipline au coeur des disciplines, cet exercice de la litterature traverse ainsi les genres, engage son ecriture au-dela des lignes du livre, delivre le message qui se lit a livre ouvert. (shrink)

Large-scale book-length treatises on natural kinds are rather few compared to the amount of discussion on the subject and not since Brian Ellis’ Scientific Essentialism perhaps has anyone attempted to build a philosophical “world view” around a theory of natural kinds. Most discussion about natural kinds of the last decade has restricted itself to specific issues, such as the species debate or chemical kinds, or, as in the case of LaPorte (2009), the semantic practices surrounding kind concepts and conceptual (...) change. In this respect, Magnus’ Scientific Enquiry and Natural Kinds: From Planets to Mallards has a worthy ambition, not least for displaying how rich and informative natural kind discussion can be despite its recent characterization as a philosophical dead end (see Hacking 2007). This holds even more so because Magnus attempts this within the context of a highly naturalistic account of natural kinds, rather than a metaphysically driven approach already predisposed to metaphysic .. (shrink)

Talk of “essences” has, since Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, gained significant currency in contemporary philosophy. It is no longer unfashionable to talk about the essence of this or that (natural) kind, and as such we now find a variety of brands of essentialism on the market including B.D. Ellis’s scientific essentialism, David Oderberg’s real Essentialism, Alexander Bird’s dispositional essentialism, and the contemporary essentialism of Kripke and Putnam. -/- Almost all these brands of essentialism share a particular gloss on Locke’s (...) famous objection to Aristotle that natural kinds are demarcated by nominal essences not real essences. Thus Oderberg claims that ‘Empiricists take [real] essences to be paradigmatically unobservable’ and that this ‘objection goes back at least to John Locke’ (Oderberg 2007: 21). Bird, presenting his dispositional essentialism, defines a notion of “being” as ‘the reverse of Locke’s definition of essence’ which he takes to be ‘the being of any thing, whereby it is what it is’ (Bird 2007: 100). Joseph LaPorte, discussing nominal and real essences, claims that ‘Kripke and Putnam seem to affirm something more substantive: that biological kinds have “real essences” in Locke’s terminology’ (LaPorte 2004: 49). Even avowed anti-essentialists such as John Dupré sanction the standard criticism of Locke that his scepticism about the knowability of real essences was ‘premature’, and claim that ‘genuine natural kinds provide the extensions of many terms of natural language, where these natural kinds are determined by true Lockean real essences’ (Dupré 1993: 22). -/- All of these essentialisms (even Dupré’s anti-essentialism) are wrong about Locke. Oderberg is wrong to claim that Locke thought that real essences were paradigmatically unobservable; Bird is wrong to think that Locke’s notion of essence is the being of anything whereby it is what it is; LaPorte is wrong to think that Kripke and Putnam are talking about Lockean real essences (although so are Kripke and Putnam); and Dupré is wrong to think that genuine natural kinds (if by genuine he means objective or mind-independent) are determined but true Lockean real essences . -/- The mistake stems from a standard, but ultimately incorrect, interpretation of Locke’s discussion of essences in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . This mistaken interpretation (Lowe 1995, 2006, Von Leyden 1973, Wiggins 1974) takes Locke to mean, by “real essence”, the Aristotelian notion i.e. ‘the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is’ (Essay III.iii.15), and interprets his objection as epistemological: we cannot come to know what real essences are, and therefore they cannot figure in our classifications of things into kinds. -/- This paper will present and defend the following two claims: i) that Locke’s notion of “real essence” is not the Aristotelian notion, and ii) that Locke’s objection to the Aristotelian notion was not merely epistemological. The first claim can be defended by presenting and applying Vienne’s (1993) terminological revision. Vienne argues that Locke did not introduce a dichotomy between real and nominal essence, but a trichotomy between real essence, nominal essence and real constitution. This terminological revision will be employed to highlight where ambiguous uses of the phrase “real essence” have caused some serious misunderstandings of Locke’s philosophy. The second claim (steering Locke around what is the classic objection to his thesis) can be defended by presenting a novel way of splitting up Locke’s objections to the Aristotelian notion of essence. The analysis will show that Locke’s anti-essentialism is still in good shape, and of contemporary significance. (shrink)

In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...) rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I raise a difficulty for Joseph LaPorte's account of chemical kind terms. LaPorte has argued against Putnam that H₂O content is neither necessary nor sufficient to fix the reference of the kind term 'water' and that we did not discover that water is H₂O. To this purpose, he revisits Putnam's Twin Earth story with the fictional scenario of Deuterium Earth, whose ocean consists of 'dwater', to conclude that we did not discover that deuterium oxide is (...) (a kind of) water (usually called 'heavy water'). Instead, according to LaPorte, by including deuterium oxide in the extension of the term 'water', we simply refined our vague use of the term 'water'. But we could have decided to exclude deuterium oxide from the extension of the term 'water'. Let us call this the thesis of semantic stipulation. I raise two problems for LaPorte's Deuterium Earth story. First, I show that 'dwater' (i.e. deuterium oxide not as a kind of water) does not have the same scientific credibility of 'heavy water' (i.e. deuterium oxide as a kind of water). Second, I argue that for the thesis of semantic stipulation to go through one would need to show that 'dwater' is semantically on a par with 'heavy water'. Namely, one would need to show that 'dwater' is a projectible kind term, capable of supporting inductive inferences. But, in fact, it is not, because the term is vulnerable to an unwelcome Goodmanian scenario, unless one surreptitiously reintroduces some Putnamian assumptions about D₂O content being necessary and sufficient to fix the reference of the term. (shrink)

In "Digital Doppelgängers and Lifespan Extension: What Matters?", Iglesias et al. argue that “some of the aims or ostensible goods of person-span expansion could plausibly be fulfilled in part by creating a digital doppelgänger”. Since person-extension aims are deeply heterogeneous, however, no single type of doppelgänger system is likely to suffice to meet all such needs. We propose a partial typology of doppelgängers—the family heirloom, the research archive, the public legacy, the project surrogate—and suggest appropriate training methods, design features and (...) governing norms for each. Finally, we reflect on the implications of concurrent yet heterogeneous doubles for questions of personal identity. (shrink)

Identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for individuating and classifying diseases is a matter of great importance in the fields of law, ethics, epidemiology, and of course, medicine. In this paper, I first propose a means of achieving this goal, ensuring that no two distinct disease-types could correctly be ascribed to the same disease-token. I then posit a metaphysical ontology of diseases—that is, I give an account of what a disease is. This is essential to providing the most effective means (...) of interfering with disease processes. Following existing work in the philosophy of medicine and epidemiology (primarily Christopher Boorse; Caroline Whitbeck; Alexander Broadbent), philosophy of biology (Joseph LaPorte; D.L. Hull), conditional analyses of causation (J.L. Mackie; David Lewis), and recent literature on dispositional essentialism (Stephen Mumford and Rani Anjum; Alexander Bird), I endorse a dispositional conception of disease. Following discussion of various conceptions of disease-identity, their relations to the clinical and pathological effects of the diseases in question, and how diseases are treated, I conclude (i) that diseases should be individuated by their causes, and (ii) that diseases are causal processes best seen as simultaneously acting sequences of mutually manifesting dispositions. (shrink)

Deceptive displays of emotion can be used to manipulate another person’s beliefs, desires and emotions. This is an important but often neglected function of imaginative pretence. Pretending to be angry or aggrieved is a powerful strategy to gain emotional leverage. But subjects who deploy such tactics expose themselves to the peculiar hazard of losing track of the fact they are pretending. Such manipulators risk losing grip on their all-things-considered emotional take in a way that undermines their own goals and harms (...) relationships. (shrink)

This article examines the methodological significance of Foucault’s relationship to transcendental philosophy. While Foucault presents his work as a historicist transformation of Kant’s critical project, some commentators question whether he succeeds in eradicating the transcendental dimension of critique. In this way, they raise doubts over whether he can sustain his methodological commitment to radical historicism. In response, I argue that Foucault can reflexively account for his use of transcendental motifs while remaining faithful to his historicist methodology. More specifically, I show (...) how the concept of sedimentation can give coherence to the supposedly paradoxical notion of the historical a priori. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Foucault’s ostensibly transcendental assumptions about power and subjectivity are best understood as contingent features of his analytical framework rather than earnest metaphysical claims. (shrink)

According to the resemblance account of ‘what it's like’ and similar constructions, a sentence such as ‘there is something it's like to have a toothache’ means ‘there is something having a toothache resembles’. This account has proved controversial in the literature; some writers endorse it, many reject it. We show that this conflict is illusory. Drawing on the semantics of intensional transitive verbs, we show that there are two versions of the resemblance account, depending on whether ‘resembles’ is construed notionally (...) or relationally. While well-known criticisms of the resemblance account undermine its relational version, they do not touch its notional version. On the contrary, the notional version is equivalent to various accounts usually interpreted as rivals to resemblance. We end by noting that this resolution of the controversy (a) explains why ‘like’, which is a comparative, appears in a construction that concerns the properties of events and (b) removes any pressure to suppose that ‘like’ is ambiguous between a comparative and a non-comparative sense. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a defence of aesthetic education in terms of aesthetic experience, claiming that aesthetic experience and art appreciation is a vital component of a flourishing life. Given schools have an important role to play in helping prepare young people for their adult lives, it is crucial they should consider how best to equip students with the means to achieve a flourishing life. It is on these grounds I defend arts education as compulsory across the curriculum. In (...) order to adopt this position, I firstly critically engage with two competing defences of including the arts on the curriculum on the basis of firstly, the role art has to play in supporting self-expression, and secondly, a defence of the arts in relation to their role in supporting moral improvement. After explaining why these arguments fail to do the work required to defend aesthetic education as thoroughly as is needed, I turn to the defence based on aesthetic experience because it allows for a defence of the arts to be made on the basis of art’s distinctive value. (shrink)

Contributed papers on concept of False and Indivisibles (Philosophy) in Hindu philosophy presented at Seminar organized by Department of Advaita Vedanta, Rāṣṭrīyasaṃskr̥tavidyāpīṭham, Tirupati from December 31, 2005 to January 01, 2006).

In BioEssays, vol. I. no. 5, p. 227, P. A. Lawrence discussed the selector gene hypothesis and its implications for development. In the following article, D. Gubb presents an alternative view of the genetic control of development.

This is a transcription of Jean d’Ormesson’s speech at UNESCO at the 50th anniversary celebrations of Diogenes in 2003. He describes the journal’s origins, inspirations and editors, and the unique place it occupies in the promotion of international, interdisciplinary scholarship.

This paper attacks two contrary views. One denies that nature has joints, taking the properties we call natural to be merely artefacts of our theories. The other accepts real natural properties but takes their naturalness to come by degrees. I argue that both are wrong: natural properties are real, and their naturalness no more comes by degrees than does the naturalness of the things that have them.1.

This article describes the digital critical edition of the works and letters of Nietzsche published by Nietzsche Source compared with the different versions of the Colli/Montinari critical edition.

RÉSUMÉLes qualia n'existent pas. La différence phénoménologique entre voir et imaginer, c'est que les propositions auxquelles l'expérient commence à croire dans le premier cas sont uniquement considérées dans le second. Nous pouvons savoir «quel effet cela fait d’être une chauve-souris» en sachant que leur faculté d’écholocation les informe non-inférentiellement des formes, grandeurs, et distances directionnelles des surfaces à proximité. Toutefois, les termes désignant les qualités secondes (comme les couleurs) sont les noms des propriétés-types qu'ils désignent, et dérivent causalement d'un «baptême» (...) verbal; les expérients ne peuvent donc connaître le caractère des expériences de couleur sans étudier la physiologie du cerveau. (shrink)

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare and research introduces sophisticated diagnostic and treatment capabilities but also raises significant ethical challenges from development to deployment and evaluation, requiring comprehensive ethical training and interdisciplinary collaboration to ensure the responsible use of AI technologies. The “CONNECT with AI”- Collaborative Opportunity to Navigate and Negotiate Ethical Challenges and Trials with Artificial Intelligence) workshop was a three-day event, engaging multi-institutional interdisciplinary and interprofessional participants (both industry professionals and academicians) from diverse fields such as (...) Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, Engineering, Law, and Allied Health Sciences from India. There was equal distribution of participants from diverse fields. A mixed-method approach utilizing pre- and post-workshop assessments, confidence level surveys and thematic analyses of small group discussions and open-ended questions to evaluate the impact of the workshop on participants’ ethical understanding and decision-making skills regarding AI. Post-workshop evaluations indicated a significant improvement in both theoretical knowledge and practical application of AI ethics, with assessment scores rising markedly from pre-workshop levels (p < 0.0001). Confidence in handling ethical dilemmas related to AI saw substantial increases across all domains, particularly in ensuring patient privacy and data security (p < 0.0001). Qualitative feedback highlighted diverse perceptions and sector-specific concerns about AI, emphasizing the importance of customized ethical guidelines and the integration of AI into healthcare practices. The workshop effectively enhanced participants’ competence and confidence in addressing AI-related ethical issues, demonstrating the critical role of interprofessional education in fostering an ethical AI implementation framework. Continuous, interdisciplinary and interprofessional training is essential to navigate the evolving ethical landscape of AI in healthcare, ensuring safe, effective, and responsible technology use. (shrink)