Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) est l'un des penseurs contemporains les plus lus parmi les théologiens, qui ont très tôt salué sa capacité à porter la philosophie au devant de la Bible et de la théologie. Des théologiens des Facultés de Heidelberg et de Strasbourg voudraient ici, pour la première fois, rendre compte de la réception théologique de l'oeuvre philosophique de Paul Ricoeur dans leurs champs respectifs : l'exégèse biblique (M. Oeming, G. Theißen), l'histoire du christianisme (A. Noblesse-Rocher), la théologie systématique (...) (F. Rognon, D. Frey), et la théologie pratique (F. Lienhard, J. Cottin). (shrink)

Foucault’s Introduction to a translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s essay ‘Dream and Existence’ was published in late 1954. The translation was credited to Jacqueline Verdeaux, with Foucault acknowledged for the notes. Yet Verdeaux herself indicates the intensely collaborative nature of their working process and the translation. In 1958, Victor von Weizsäcker’s Der Gestaltkreis was published in French as Le Cycle de la structure, translated by Foucault and Daniel Rocher. Foucault went on to translate and introduce Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology as (...) his secondary doctoral thesis. His engagement with Kant and Binswanger’s ideas has been discussed in the literature, but his role as translator has generally been neglected. His engagement with von Weizsäcker is almost never mentioned. This article critically discusses Foucault’s role in the Binswanger and von Weizsäcker translations, comparing the German originals with the French texts, and showing how this is a useful additional element to the story of the early Foucault. (shrink)

Jeffrey (1983) proposed a generalization of conditioning as a means of updating probability distributions when new evidence drives no event to certainty. His rule requires the stability of certain conditional probabilities through time. We tested this assumption (“invariance”) from the psychological point of view. In Experiment 1 participants offered probability estimates for events in Jeffrey’s candlelight example. Two further scenarios were investigated in Experiment 2, one in which invariance seems justified, the other in which it does not. Results were in (...) rough conformity to Jeffrey (1983)’s principle. (shrink)

Many of the problems that would be faced in setting up transnational institutions mirror problems that have already been addressed by appropriate institutional mechanisms in the establishment of the modern nation-state.

The authors examined how a perceiver’s identification of a target person’s actions covaries with attributions of mind to the target. The authors found in Study 1 that the attribution of intentionality and cognition to a target was associated with identifying the target’s action in terms of high-level effects rather than low-level details. In Study 2, both action identification and mind attribution were greater for a liked target, and in Study 3, they were reduced for a target suffering misfortune. In Study (...) 4, it was again found that action identification and mind attribution were greater for a liked target, but like that for the self or a liked other, positive actions were identified at higher levels than negative actions, with the reverse being true for disliked others. In Study 5, the authors found that instructing participants to adopt the target’s perspective did not affect mind attribution but did lead to higher level identifications of the.. (shrink)

. Between 1833 and 1835, Victor Cousin and F.W.J. Schelling engaged in an “amical but serious critique” of each other’s philosophies. I argue that, despite perceptions to the contrary, key to this exchange is a common vision of an atypical, speculative empiricism. That is, against the grain of most commentaries, I contend that there are significant similarities between Cousin’s and Schelling’s philosophies of the early 1830s—similarities that converge on the possibility of a post-Kantian speculative empiricism, which they respectively dub metaphysical (...) psychology or a priori empiricism. (shrink)

Este artículo se propone realizar un análisis histórico, filosófico y político de la concepción del comunismo de Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021). Con ese fin, se toma como referencia una serie de textos del autor, publicados entre 1986 y 2021, donde la cuestión del comunismo es abordada en relación con temáticas tales como el totalitarismo, la comunidad, lo común, la literatura, la democracia y la civilización capitalista. A lo largo del trabajo se indaga el desarrollo de su planteo hasta el momento en (...) que alcanza su forma más o menos definitiva, a mediados de la década del 2000, en el marco del debate sobre “la Idea del comunismo” (Alain Badiou). La interpretación de la posición que Nancy adopta en este debate de alcance internacional desemboca en los dos principales aportes del artículo. En primer lugar, la caracterización de una comprensión ontológica o existencial del comunismo que se diferencia radicalmente de otros posicionamientos actuales y que no registra antecedentes dentro de las tradiciones teóricas comunistas. En segundo lugar, la identificación de un umbral en el pensamiento de Nancy, y por extensión en el pensamiento contemporáneo, donde el sentido del “comunismo”, como la exigencia de otorgar un valor inestimable a cada existencia, se comunica con la búsqueda de otro “espíritu” para nuestro tiempo. (shrink)

The topic of my dissertation is satire. This seems to excite many people, and over the past four years I have heard many variations of a similar refrain: “Oh, wow. You’re studying satire? That’s very topical. You must have a lot of material to work with.” There is a way in which this is true, though I suspect in a way that diverges from the way that most of my interlocutors believed. I suspect that the material they imagined me to (...) be working with was the output of Donald Trump, first a candidate for and now holder of the office of President of the United States. That is not the material I find interesting. More interesting to me is their statement. It evinces a number of beliefs that I find interesting, chief among them that Trump makes the current period particularly apt for satire, as if a doddery and incompetent ruling class is somehow a recent phenomenon. And I suspect that underneath this belief in the aptness of satire is a belief in the power of satire. Satire is somehow how people are going to strike back at the vice-governed fools who rule us. Those beliefs are the material I want to work with. This is my interest in satire, then: not so much what it is about satire that makes it powerful, but what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful? And what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful when there is pretty powerful evidence that it is not? Unfortunately, here is where I run into the problem that in a very important way I do not have a lot of material to work with. There is not an awful lot on satire within the analytic tradition: outside of a few references to satire, analytic discussions of satire are limited to two short articles. Accordingly, I have taken the task of my dissertation to be to create an account of satire that helps to bring forward why satire is a thing that people can imagine to be powerful, that they can imagine to be politically effective. My dissertation will effectively have two halves, one where I build my account and one where I begin to apply it. The purpose of applying my account, which will comprise the final two chapters, will not be to show its implications so much as how it can be used. My goal will not so much be to give definitive answers about the nature of satire, but rather to give a demonstration of how my account facilitates engaging questions about the role of satire in social and political context. (shrink)

In _The Smile of Tragedy_, Daniel Ahern examines Nietzsche’s attitude toward what he called “the tragic age of the Greeks,” showing it to be the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of philosophy during the Socratic era but also for his overall critique of Western culture. Through an interpretation of “Dionysian pessimism,” Ahern clarifies the ways in which Nietzsche sees ethics and aesthetics as inseparable and how their theoretical separation is at the root of Western nihilism. (...) Ahern explains why Nietzsche, in creating this precursor to a new aesthetics, rejects Aristotle’s medicinal interpretation of tragic art and concentrates on Apollinian cruelty as a form of intoxication without which there can be no art. Ahern shows that Nietzsche saw the human body as the vessel through which virtue and art are possible, as the path to an interpretation of “selflessness,” as the means to determining an order of rank among human beings, and as the site where ethics and aesthetics coincide. (shrink)

This study deals with the ontological background reference of religious experience in general, and it aimed to demonstrate how our existential condition of finitude is imposed to understand the most varied forms of manifestations of religious phenomena that arise in the contemporary world. Thus, we will start from the distinction between a hermeneutic-phenomenological conception of the religious experience in its essence and the empirical approaches on its diverse concrete configurations. In the end, we will try to point out that the (...) possibilities of apprehension of religious phenomena in general lack an existential element that is essentially constitutive for us, namely, the condition of the precariousness of the finite being faced with the opening of meaning that exceeds it in its horizon of transcendence. As general contribution, this way of understanding must foreclose every claim to make absolute a background meaning that should remain open as the most radical condition of possibility for the religious phenomena. (shrink)

Acupuncture, herbs, and bodywork are fast becoming accepted as complements to standard healing methods. This riveting personal story of the unconventional education of an alternative healer provides extraordinary insight into how and why such methods work. Blending Chinese medicine, the martial arts, and Native American knowing, Daniel Santos challenges us to view the body and its healing in an exciting new way.

Daniel, Michael E Review(s) of: Australians and the Christian god: An historical study, by Hugh Jackson, (Preston: Mosaic Press, 2013), pp.209, $37.95.

J.P. Moreland’s (2009) so-called Argument from Consciousness (AC) for the existence of God is examined. One of its key premises, the contingency of the mind-body relation, is at odds with the possibility of mental causation. The AC may be rescued from this problem by adapting some of the lessons learned in chapter three concerning one of the Non-Reductive Physicalist solutions to the Supervenience Argument.

Individualists and externalists about language take themselves to be disagreeing about the basic subject matter of the study of language. Are linguistic facts are really facts about individuals, or really facts about language use in a community?The right answer to this question, I argue, is ‘Yes’. Both individualistic and social facts are crucial to a complete understanding of human language. The relationship between the theories inspired by these facts is analogous to the relationship between anatomy and ecology, or between micro- (...) and macro-economics: both types of facts are important objects of study in their own right, but we need a theory that accounts for the complex relationship between the two. I argue that modern extensions of the signaling-games approach of Lewis (1969) do just this, defusing the conflict while preserving the core positive insights of both sides of this debate.The upshot is that arguments for social externalism and the normativity of meaning pose no threat to individualist explanations and can be accountedfor within a naturalistic theory of language. A good externalist theory will make crucial reference to individualistic facts, but go further by examining language users’ interactions in a systematic way. (shrink)

In contrast to his Anglican writings and practice—where fasting played a prominent role—Newman as a Roman Catholic was practically silent about fasting. This essay suggests that there were many reasons for Newman’s silence on fasting as a Roman Catholic, such as his health, his Oratorian vocation, and the presence of an established communal practice of fasting in the Roman Catholic Church.

La comprensión del lenguaje desplegada en Ser y tiempo puede ser identificada como un trayecto que parte de la recepción crítica por parte de Heidegger de la tradición filosófica sobre el lenguaje, se desarrolla temáticamente en Ser y tiempo como ontología del habla y, finalmente, se proyecta, sobre la base establecida ya en la obra misma, como una propuesta de comprensión del lenguaje cuyo último horizonte es la topología del ser. Esta comprensión del lenguaje, así identificada y caracterizada, puede servir, (...) asimismo, como base apropiada para la discusión de la relación con otros enfoques respecto del lenguaje, sea en la comparación directa entre ellos, sea por vía del análisis temático de cuestiones desde distintas posiciones y orientaciones. (shrink)

An argument against the claim that moral realism cannot be sustained because moral beliefs, being affective-conative states, cannot themselves be true or false. In fact moral claims can fail both in terms of a failure of the standard it expresses to be realised by a given agent and also in terms of whatever it commends to be good or bad, right or wrong, in actual fact.

In early 1997, participants on the p4c-list, an email discussion list, reacted to an anecdote about Wittgenstein’s lectures at Cambridge by engaging in a three month long exchange on the nature of a Community of Inquiry. This article is a lightly edited transcript of that discussion and, as such, not only addresses many aspects of the substantive issue, but also provides an exemplar of at least one type of Community of Inquiry.

Prediction draws on both simulation and theory. I ask how simulation is defined, and what the roles of simulation and theory are, respectively. Simulation is flexible in structure and resources. Often simulation and theory are combined in prediction. The function of simulation consists of representing a situation that is relevantly like the target situation with regards to the feature predicted.

Prenant acte du fait que le XVIe siècle occidental est un moment fondateur de nouveaux savoirs et d'une nouvelle théorie du sujet, Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani a choisi de mettre en évidence en quoi la période a contribué à ouvrir le débat sur la “nature” et le rôle des femmes. Il ne s'agit pas ici de la condition des femmes réelles mais du foyer de discours qui se développe à leur sujet dans les milieux lettrés. Discours dans lesquels elle propose de distinguer (...) d'une part les interventio... (shrink)

The ArgumentEugenics is generally regarded as evil; but what was its sin? Racism, class bias, and violation of reproductive freedom, which tainted objectionable eugenic interventions, are not part of the core notion of eugenics. A number of candidates have been suggested as the wrong inherent in eugenics, ranging from statism to the impossibility of consensus on the ideal human being. It is most plausible to view eugenics as sharing moral dilemmas with much of public health, and the critical issues as (...) those of distributive justice. (shrink)

Some experiences change who we are in ways we cannot understand until we have that very experience. In this paper I argue that so-called “transformative experiences” can not only bring about new understanding, but can actually be brought out by the gain of understanding itself. Coming to understand something new can change you. I argue that not only is understanding acquisition potentially a kind of transformative experience; given some of the recent philosophy of the phenomenology of understanding, it is a (...) kind that is potentially rare in not being dependent on a particular subjective phenomenology. The goal of this paper threefold. First, I argue that coming to gain cognitive understanding of an academic subject matter can, under some circumstances, itself be a transformative experience. A second, subsidiary goal of this paper is to argue that such transformative understanding merits further study. Finally, I give a rough taxonomy of under what conditions we should expect understanding acquisition to be transformative. (shrink)

The paper reflects on recent developments towards authoritarianism and right-wing populism that have become apparent in a number of Western societies and aims at pinpointing possible cultural foundations for this trend. Using the example of the German PEGIDA movement and the wider milieu in which it is embedded, it identifies and describes a rapidly spreading culture of mistrust and discusses some of its political and epistemological implications. In a second step, the paper draws on Luc Boltanski?s theory of justification in (...) order to attain a better understanding of this political movement?s specificities. It is argued that it is a quasi-violent refusal of justification which is constitutive for the movement in question, thereby transcending the reach of Boltanski?s framework to some extent. In a third step, a closer look is taken at the epistemological paradox that results from the fact that a number of the PEGIDA movement?s crucial points of criticism are effectively shared by a larger part of the overall population, raising severe problems for the question of sociological critique. The paper utilizes ideas by Bruno Latour in order to illuminate this paradox further and examine its consequences. It closes with remarks on the possibility to?reassemble? trust and critique as crucial but contested - and, hence, precarious - foundations of modern society. nema. (shrink)